The part that is hard to understand unless you have lived that life and then come back to the One True Church, and truly connect to the Body of Christ, is how much of your own life you lived in offense to God. I can look back now and see what I could not see while I was living it, but seeing it does not mean I have stopped fighting it. I can see the rot in myself grow when I am not attempting to be a slave to Him. Even when I am attempting it, I can see the rot that I am fighting back against, and then the people around me tell me that I think about morality too much. I do not fully know how to describe what that feels like. Disheartening might be the right word, because these are the same people who knew me while I was away from God and wanted nothing more than for me to come back. They wanted me to come back to Him, and I did, and now I am trying to explain why I cannot leave Him out of the rest of my life. I want them to understand what coming back has meant to me. I do not know how to make them understand, and it is painful to feel this alone with the same people who wanted me to find Him.

But when I come back, and I truly attempt to lean into what has always been believed by the members of the Body for millennia, I think about it too much. “You just see the world in terms of right and wrong.” “Well, everyone has different beliefs.” “All beliefs are valid.” “You believe as you believe, I believe as I believe.” It is like I should profess the words but not do anything more than live a secular, pagan life while saying that I believe in Him. If I am not professing the words, I am wrong, but if I spend my life attempting to be, as Saint Paul said, a slave to Christ, then I am thinking about it too much. I am stuck in this weird middle ground where the people who wanted me to come back do not understand why coming back has to mean more than saying that I have. I still want to be with them. I still want to share my life with them, and being told that I think about morality too much does not make that desire go away. I am left wanting to be close to the people I love while feeling that the way I am trying to stay close to God is something they do not understand.

It means everything.

There is no middle ground, and Christ said so Himself: “He that is not with me, is against me.” Maybe that is hard for people who did not live so far away from God for so long to understand. I know where separating Him from the rest of my life took me, and when someone tells me that I do not have to think about it that much, that I just have to “believe,” I cannot hear it without remembering the life that made it so easy to leave Him. Yes, I have to believe, but there is more than merely knowing He exists. Saint James says even the devils believe and tremble. Demons know for a fact that God exists, but they can never be in sanctifying grace, and being told that belief is enough does not answer what I am supposed to do about the rot I can still see in myself.

I do not know that I am always in sanctifying grace. But I know that when I am not focused on what is just and unjust, what does and does not offend God, I am out of sanctifying grace more than I am in it. That is not a safe way to be. It is not something I can make safe by agreeing to stop looking at it. When I ask people to look at something from the view of God, to consider what the Apostles, Fathers, and Doctors of the Church would say about whether it is just or unjust before Him, the response so often is that I am being a fanatic. I do not understand how I am supposed to come back to Christ and then agree that whether I am offending Him should not occupy so much of my thought.

And this is where the isolation becomes part of almost every day. For the past few months I have been living with family five days a week, away from my own life and my own household, to take care of my disabled sister for my mother. I am in a house that I have no say in. Of the day I want to be living, the only parts I currently am able to have are praying the Rosary and work. I tend the land on occasion, but I am stuck inside for most of the day, every day, and the people I am around do not understand praying first thing when I wake up. They do not understand me not watching television with them, or why I am not willing to engage in things when I can see the evil that is done to make those things possible. I sit there and hold my ground, trying to stay as close to God as possible and not give that up, even to my own family, and I feel isolated. I am away from my own household five days a week, but I am still with family, and I feel separated from everyone. These are people I love. I want to be able to pray and live with them, and instead I keep having to remove myself physically from what they want to engage in. Holding my ground does not take away the pain of that.

The life I want includes caring for my sister. When I picture an ordinary day in that life, I would wake up at five in the morning, before everyone else in my household, and pray the Rosary with intentions for my family, then go to my mom’s to get my sister up and bring her to our house so she could be with us throughout the day. I would walk by the garden, do a quick check, say prayers over it, and start my workday. At lunch I would pray the Rosary with the children, then check the chicken coop for anything that could be fixed then or would need to wait until after work. I would say prayers over the coop and its inhabitants, go back inside, and finish the workday. That is the day I am longing for while I am living away from my own household to do the caring that I want to be part of our life together. I want her there with us throughout the day. I want caring for her to be part of the day we share, and right now I am caring for her while living away from my own life and my own household. I do not know when that will change.

After work I would take the children and tend the land if they were able to assist, and the girls might want to assist their mother with what she was doing. As we went, I would want us to pray that we were following God’s plan, tending the land as He wanted, making it better instead of poisoning or hurting it. All of this belongs to God, and my job is to tend and care for it according to what He sees as just. I want the children to learn to think about what we are doing in relation to Him while we are doing it. If we are tending something He created, then whether we are caring for it or harming it matters to Him, and I want that understanding to be part of the work rather than something we remember when we are back inside a church. After an hour or two we would come inside, and I would read whatever family book we were working on together until it was time for dinner.

I want to sit at the dinner table with my family, pray over our dinner, read the daily readings, and discuss them. If the children do not understand something and would like to understand it better, I want to explain it to them. After dinner, as they are getting ready for bed, we would pray the Rosary together to wind down, and then I would assist with getting all the children and their mother to bed. I would probably stay up a bit longer afterward and watch over everything. That is what an ordinary day looks like when I think about the life I want to live to glorify God, and I do not know whether it is coming. Living in the manner I have been forced into over the past few months, it feels farther away than it ever did before. I want to be there for that whole ordinary day, to hear what the children do not understand in the readings and have the time together to talk about it, to pray with my family before bed and then stay up a little longer watching over everything.

I can describe the whole day, but that does not tell me when I will be able to live it. I want my sister there with us throughout the day. I want to pray with my family at lunch, and after work I want to take the children out to tend the land, then come inside and read to them until dinner. Right now I have the Rosary and work, and I tend the land on occasion, but most of the day I am stuck inside, away from the household I want to be sharing that day with. Over the past few months that life has felt farther away than it ever did before, and I do not know whether I am waiting for something that will come or longing for a life I will never be able to live. The prayers over the garden and the chickens belong to the same life as the prayers over dinner, and the readings at the table belong to whatever we are going to do the following morning. I want us to share all of that with God. That separation I grew up with, where He stays in the building while we go back to doing whatever we want, is exactly what I do not want to give to my children. I know how much of my life I was able to live without thinking about Him because of it, and I know how lonely it feels to come back and try to live differently among people who do not understand why it means everything.

I also do not want them to have to feel this isolation inside their own family. I do not want them to experience the mocking and the looks from their own parents when they say they have seen the evil that makes something possible and cannot support it. I do not want them to experience calls from the same people who asked them to come back to God telling them to engage in the secular. I do not want them to have to remove themselves physically from their own birth family on a daily basis because we want to engage in the secular and they are trying to stay close to Him. When I picture reading the daily readings with them and answering what they do not understand, I want that willingness to look toward God to continue after the reading is over. I do not want to teach them to ask what He wants and then make them feel alone when they actually ask it. I do not want to be one of the people they have to remove themselves from to stay close to Him. I know what it is like to want to be with your own family and still feel that you have to leave what they are doing, and it hurts to think of my children ever feeling that isolation from their own parents.

That is why I cannot separate the pain inside a family from what has happened to Christianity around us. This all might be more symptoms left over from the Protestant Revolt, or maybe it is connected to what John C. Rao talks about in Americanism and the weakening of the Church in the United States. His book Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States first appeared in 1984, and it is funny, though not in a humorous way, how prophetic it seems when I read it now. He describes the pressure to make the Faith fit the demands of American life instead of allowing the Faith to judge those demands. I keep thinking about that when coming back to God is treated as good until it begins changing what I will take part in during the week.

I see that same question in what is happening to the churches. Protestant churches have been declining for years, and Pew’s national study found that the share of American adults identifying as Protestant fell from 51 percent in 2007 to 40 percent in 2023–24. Then I look at the traditional churches, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches, and see young men and families being drawn toward the very churches that have been mocked throughout my entire lifetime. Hallow’s collection of 2026 figures from more than 140 American dioceses found an average diocesan increase of 38 percent over the previous year in those preparing to enter the Catholic Church. Alexei Krindatch’s report on the 2025 survey of 270 Orthodox parishes found that median weekend attendance had grown 36 percent since 2019. I want to ask anyone willing to have a truly good-faith conversation about it why this is happening.

What I see in the nondenominational churches is women who do not want to feel any sort of condemnation, while I see young men and families looking toward the older churches, and I cannot separate that observation from the way I am told that I think about morality too much. The 2026 study of people preparing to enter the Catholic Church across twenty dioceses found that wanting to grow in goodness and virtue and wanting a deeper understanding of truth were among their strongest reasons. That is what I want people to actually look at. Why do we keep assuming that the way to call people back to Christ is to ask less of them, when I came back and found that I could not keep living the way I had? Coming back meant looking at the rot in myself, and it still does. Being told to stop looking so closely at it does not give me a life closer to God.

And I say all of this while understanding why the people around me are the way they are. It is not fully the previous generations’ fault. They grew up in a time when Christianity was steadily being watered down and weakened in the world, and they accepted and continued that process. That is part of what saddens me, because I am not only looking at what it has done to me. I am looking at the level of deception they have lived through and still live through. I think many of them realize in some form or fashion that it is their actions that have watered down and weakened the church, that church attendance dwindling is their fault, and they want people to come back to Christ. I know that desire exists because they wanted me to come back. These are the same people who wanted nothing more than that for me, and I am back, and now I am trying to explain why it means everything while they tell me I think about it too much. It saddens me for them too, for the deception they have lived through and still live through. I want them to see what I am trying to tell them, and I do not know if they ever will. What am I coming back to if the call stops at professing the words?

It saddens me to see people trying to find a way to encourage that return while being so far removed that they truly believe the way to bring more people back is to embrace the secular even more in their “churches.” It is a deception, and it has been extremely successful. If you have lived for sixty years inside that deception and furthered it at many steps in your own life, I imagine it is painful to look at it and realize that you were deceived, that you damaged this thing you claim to love. I can understand why that would be painful without being able to agree to continue it. I lived the life where God was given a few hours and kept out of everything else, and I know how easy it became to give Him nothing at all. I am looking at people I love who want to call others back to Christ, and I believe the way they are trying to do it is continuing the same deception that made it easier for me to leave Him.

That is what I wish the people who wanted me to come back could understand when I say it means everything. I can see what is still wrong in me, and I am trying to fight it. I can see it even when I am attempting to belong to Him completely, so telling me to think less about what offends Him does not feel like help. It feels like a barrier to growing in Him, like an excuse I could use to walk away from Him again: why should I worry so much about morality, about whether any given action or the actions that created a product or service offend Him? That leaves me trying to explain why I cannot give up the very thing they once wanted me to find, while they look at how I am trying to live and see someone who takes it too far. I do not want to be separated from the people I love. I am around them so much, and I still feel alone, and I do not want that to be the way we live with one another. I want the people who asked me to come back to God to understand why I cannot give Him a few hours and then live the rest of my life as if He has nothing to do with it. I want to be able to share that with them. I want my sister with us during the day, I want to be with my household, I want prayer to be something we share, and I do not know how to make the people around me understand why I cannot put God back inside the building and leave Him there.

I currently do not have hatred or anger about this. I have pain at standing alone under His banner among the people I am around so much. I love them, and I want to be with them, and it saddens me that what they ask me to join them in can be the very thing I believe I have to remove myself from. I sit there holding my ground because I want to stay as close to God as possible and cannot give that up, even to my own family, but I am still hurting. I do not know if this isolation will ever end. Christ did tell us He came to bring a sword, so I understand that this may just be what it has to be. If so, I would like peace and to be with my household so I can lead them to think about God with every action they take. I do not know if the people I love will ever understand what coming back to Him has meant to me, or if the life I want to live with my household will ever come. Over the past few days I have been asking Him for deliverance from this, when or if there will ever be deliverance, and I do not have an answer to put here.

Lord, when will there be deliverance from this, if there ever will be? Will this isolation ever end? Will the people I love ever see that they are standing under the vexillum, the banner, of the world instead of Yours?

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Douay-Rheims Bible — Matthew 12:30

Douay-Rheims Bible — Matthew 10:34–39

Saint Paul — Romans 1:1

Douay-Rheims Bible — James 2:14–26

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Fall, 392–393

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Mortal and Venial Sin, 1854–1863

John C. Rao — Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States (1984; revised 1994)

Pew Research Center — Religious Identity in the United States

Hallow — Catholic Church Sees Massive Growth in New Members in 2026

Alexei Krindatch — Orthodox Tradition in Transition (2026)

Twenty U.S. Catholic Dioceses — Why Are So Many People Becoming Catholic? (2026)

And I cannot write that as if the guilty Christian is always somebody else. I knew about horrible practices at farms in McDonald’s supply chain and I still bought the food and ate it for years. I knew enough about what was wrong to condemn it, but I continued supporting it because I wanted what it gave me. That is the part I have to face. I was not waiting for somebody to finally tell me that there was something to look at. I knew and still ate it. Phones, television, quick cheap food, blindly buying products without putting thought into their morals, comfort, laziness, anger, there are so many places in my life where I have accepted what I wanted and refused what looking at it honestly would require of me. That was wrong. Knowing what was wrong did not make me obedient, and being able to explain the evil outside me did not remove the guilt of choosing to keep participating in it.

In September 2021, Facebook’s own public account of its research acknowledged that one in three surveyed teenage girls who already reported body-image problems said Instagram made those problems worse. Those were the girls’ reports about what the product was doing to them, and the company had the information. These are children we are talking about. They were children before anyone put their distress into a presentation, and the adults responsible for the product had a duty to care what was happening to them. I look at that and then look at the Christians who want to talk about anything except what they are willing to surrender to protect children, and I am angry. We claim to love the innocent while continuing to make their well-being somebody else’s problem whenever taking responsibility might interfere with something we enjoy.

Frances Haugen’s written testimony to the United States Senate accused Facebook’s leadership of knowing ways to make its products safer and putting profit ahead of people’s safety. She said she had repeatedly seen conflicts between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook resolved in Facebook’s favor. Put that testimony beside the company’s own account of what the girls reported and look at the choice being described. They know about harm and choose the business. That is what I am condemning. A child is being asked to carry a cost that the people making money do not want to carry themselves, and the Christians defending that arrangement are helping make the refusal possible. Why should more revenue or more growth be accepted as an answer to the child? Where did we get the idea that a successful business could continue doing evil and the moral question could be left for somebody else?

And what is the Christian answer supposed to be when protecting those children costs the business something? Stop doing the evil. Give up what has to be given up. Why do we treat the money as if it might excuse continuing? These are children, innocent people who should be protected, and we keep giving the people making the decisions room to explain why they cannot afford to protect them while expecting the children and their families to live with the consequences. That is the choice I am condemning. Knowing that something is wrong and moving ahead because stopping would cost you something is evil. When a Christian defends that choice because he likes the product, he is helping the people making it continue. I am tired of Christians paying lip service to God while making it plain by their choices that the company’s convenience has a stronger claim on them than the child God commands them to love.

This is what I see in the phony free-market, controlled, manipulative, lying system we keep defending. A company can continue doing evil while people continue buying, and the money coming in gets treated as proof that the company has earned its place. How many people can be deceived, how many will refuse to pay attention, how many will defend what is happening because they do not want to lose what they are getting from it? The business keeps going because those questions keep receiving answers that allow it to go on. Calling the transaction free does not cleanse it. A child returning to the product that harms her is not the Christian justification for keeping it that way, and an adult enjoying what is being sold does not make his enjoyment morally innocent. If we know what we are supporting and refuse to stop, then we are helping sustain the evil. That is a responsibility before God, and profitability does not remove it.

I can recognize that refusal in the way I judge something by what it can do and stop there. We do it at work, we do it with the things we buy, and we do it when the next convenience arrives promising to make life easier. We can talk to anyone anywhere and ignore the people sitting right beside us. I did that to my wife. I knew what the systems were doing and kept giving them time I owed her, and being able to describe how they worked did nothing to excuse the neglect. What is progressing when the people we are responsible for receive less of us? A product can do exactly what was advertised while helping us abandon a duty God gave us. Why should its ability to perform the advertised function settle whether it belongs in our lives?

There is research that gets closer to that ordinary cost. In a 2025 randomized study published in PNAS Nexus, researchers blocked mobile internet on participants’ phones for two weeks while leaving calls and texts available. They reported improvements in well-being, mental-health measures, and sustained attention. Keeping the block in place was difficult: 467 people committed to the study, 266 set up the initial internet block, and 119 met its specified compliance threshold. That is a short experiment with those limits, but it asks a question the sales pitch avoids. What happens when people remove some of the constant access?

That question reaches further than the device because there are so many things that have changed in our daily lives that it would be hard to describe all of them. There has been less friction and more peace. There are more frank conversations, and some of those conversations are not conflictless, but I had spent much of my life staying in anger because staying there was easy. I cannot judge what is good by whether it lets me avoid being uncomfortable. Looking at what I was doing, admitting it was wrong, and attempting to give it up has brought a lightness that I did not have before. The world keeps calling the things we are supposed to buy progress while teaching us to resent the duties that might make us give them up. I have to look at the fruit of that in the life we actually live, including what happens when we stop accepting the promise.

Laudato Si’ addresses the habit of separating technical and economic power from the larger human consequences. Francis describes a technological order that shapes how people live and choose, and an economy willing to accept advances for profit without adequate regard for their effect on human beings. That reaches into the home every time I decide that because a thing works, or because I can afford it, there is nothing more to ask. What is it asking us to enjoy? What is it teaching us to tolerate? I cannot put prayer and the duties of the family over here and then declare that the thing taking hours of our lives has nothing to do with either. Something is filling those hours and teaching us what to love, and television makes it very hard to pretend we cannot see what is being offered.

Reality television makes the surrender plain. Look at what these shows ask people to enjoy: deceit, anger, violence, lust, people humiliating one another and turning another person’s weakness into something for the audience to consume. Where is anything Godly in those plots? He is not there in the deceit or the lust we have made the attraction. I would argue that this is the modern-day pagan coliseum. We put people into situations where the objectives are evil, and the so-called Christians who keep up with every episode every week help sustain it. What are we teaching the people around us about Christianity when we say that we follow Christ and then look forward to watching the things He commands us to reject? We are making our enjoyment more important than obedience, and putting the show in the entertainment part of our lives does not remove it from the life we owe God.

I read The Running Man a couple of years ago, and it was the audience. They watched people suffer and die and called it entertainment. In King’s novel, a man enters a televised death game because his family needs money, including treatment for his daughter, and the viewers can be paid for helping the hunters find him. The people watching helped sustain the evil while pretending they were only watching a show. That is what I see when I look at entertainment built on the suffering and degradation of real people. There is somebody on the other side of the screen living what the audience has decided to enjoy, and the audience keeps giving the people producing it a reason to continue. The viewer cannot keep calling the suffering entertainment and then expect that name to remove his responsibility for helping it continue. His comfort is part of what makes it so easy for him to keep watching.

That willingness to remain comfortable while another person pays is what keeps bothering me. The audience can switch the show off and go back to its own life, while the person who was degraded still has to live with what happened. We keep protecting the right to enjoy the spectacle and leaving the person inside it to carry the consequences. Then Christians want to say it has nothing to do with their faith because they were only watching. Your faith has everything to do with what you choose to enjoy and help sustain. I would argue that knowingly taking pleasure in this evil is a way of serving the demonic while refusing to admit what you have given yourself to. The image on the screen does not turn a human being into something God permits us to use for our amusement. We choose the enjoyment, and the people around us and creation have to pay for what we choose.

Then there is the entire lie about what the audience is being shown. The narrative is controlled. In a conversation with Edgar Wright about The Running Man, King discussed the book’s use of manipulated footage, and that is part of what makes the story so revealing to me. The audience is being given something arranged for it and calling it reality. Look at a reality program’s chosen situation, the footage that survives the editing, the story the producers put in front of you, the person you are being invited to hate. There is a script in that sense, a story you are being led through, even when the people inside it are real. I believe people who see that and still refuse to look underneath it are choosing the demonic illusion. They want the enjoyment, so they accept the lie and let the person being used pay for it. A Christian cannot make that choice good by pretending that the word reality on the show settles what is true.

There is a public record of how ugly that can become. In 2019, a British parliamentary inquiry compared unedited and broadcast footage from The Jeremy Kyle Show. Its account described an insult from the host disappearing from the broadcast while a participant’s swearing remained apparent. The inquiry also examined confrontation being aggravated and cameras pursuing a distressed contributor backstage. The committee chair accused the program of exploiting vulnerable people for entertainment. That gives us something specific to look at: people whose distress was being worked into a product, and viewers being shown an edited version of what happened.

That is somebody’s distress being sold to the people who want to watch, and a Christian who knowingly enjoys the humiliation is helping make cruelty profitable. We should condemn that plainly. We should refuse it instead of explaining why the part we enjoy is somehow separate from the evil that produced it. And when the product being offered is anger, I know how easy it is to want more of it. Staying in anger is easy and is what I did for much of my life. That was wrong. I have to let the feeling exist and then look at what is right instead of letting the feeling decide what I do. Is the anger justified or am I choosing sin because staying angry feels good? If I am choosing sin, I must reject it and walk away from it even when that feels impossible. If there is a real moral evil to condemn, then I have to name what it is and ask how to speak as objectively and lovingly as possible. How do I speak condemnation without adding evil to the world? How do I let God speak the truth through me instead of deciding how I will lash out because it feels good? The people selling another person’s distress need to stop selling it, the audience needs to stop rewarding it, and I have to stop defending the appetite in myself that makes the offer attractive.

What Christian message are you sending into the world by saying, I am Christian and I enjoy deceit, anger, violence, and lust? You are furthering the demonic agenda, you are furthering the lie that to follow Christ is to be a hypocrite, you are furthering the greatest lie that Satan has ever told “I do not exist all that exists is material everything is not spiritual”. You are harming Christianity, harming Christ’s image in the world, and profaning His words and teachings by showing people that His commands can be put aside whenever sin becomes entertaining. This is evil and it needs to be said as such. I would personally argue that people who knowingly give themselves to this and refuse the demands of true faith have fallen for the lie and are worshipping demons while calling themselves Christian. Look at what they are giving their attention and time to, what they defend, what they refuse to surrender. The suffering people on the other side of that entertainment do not disappear when the episode ends, and Christ does not stop being Lord because the audience wants another hour without being asked to obey Him.

I was only watching. I was only buying it. I was only doing my job. How many times are we going to let that word only excuse willing cooperation with evil? The people doing the harm depend on other people continuing to participate, approve, defend, buy, watch, and look away, and Christians do not get to declare their part irrelevant because admitting it would mean changing something. The Catechism describes responsibility for another person’s sin through participation, approval, protection, and failing to oppose it when we have a duty to do so. It also describes the corrupt conditions and institutions that grow out of personal sins. We keep calling it the system as if the name removes the people choosing to maintain it. It does not. If I know what is wrong and keep helping it because I like what it gives me, then I have a sin to repent of, and the same is true of everyone making that choice.

That is why I cannot leave the accusation inside entertainment and pretend politics is a separate moral world. Look at Christians excusing what a government does because they have claimed its leader as their own. Whether someone thinks the war in Iran was justified does not make killing schoolchildren acceptable. On September 21, 2026, the United Nations fact-finding mission on Iran described the Shajaret Tayebe primary school in Minab as readily identifiable and said it had been struck by two cruise missiles. Its finding was 157 people killed, including 123 boys and girls. The mission said there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States had committed the war crime of making a civilian object the object of attack.

I regard this as deliberate. Two cruise missiles hit a school and killed the children, and I will not accept that Christians can make those children disappear behind the explanation offered by the people responsible. What do you call it other than deliberate when the school was struck twice? In the moral and spiritual terms I am using, this is child sacrifice to demons. Those children were made in God’s image. Their families have to live with their deaths while Christians who claimed Trump try to decide how much of the evil they can excuse. No. You cannot claim Christ and defend the killing of innocent children because condemning it would mean condemning the government you supported. The people responsible must be held accountable, and the Christians choosing not to look at the evil they are supporting need to repent. The children do not become less innocent because looking at what happened is uncomfortable.

This is not an endorsement of another candidate. I am admonishing the Christians who choose not to look at the evil they are supporting. I believe the leaders we keep being offered on every side worship the same false gods, and exchanging the name of the man we defend does not solve the refusal to judge his actions before God. People lie constantly. We can say this is what they claim, but why should we trust an explanation merely because it comes from people in power? Falling for a lie once is one thing. Continuing to accept lie after lie because looking at the evil would cost us our comfortable loyalty is pathetic. Either we are willingly cooperating with the evil or we have become so disconnected from God that we refuse to test the spirits. The children killed do not get another life because we found a political reason to stop asking questions.

Those children do not cease to matter because we have accepted an explanation that lets us go back to defending the people we wanted to defend. And the same refusal follows us when the child is closer to home and his existence interrupts the freedom we have been promised. In the 2001 House Judiciary report on the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, nurses Jill Stanek and Allison Baker described what they said they had witnessed at Christ Hospital after induced abortions. Baker testified about finding a breathing infant exposed on a metal counter and then wrapping and warming him. Stanek described holding a baby who otherwise would have been left alone. What they describe is horrifying. A child requiring care becomes something people would rather put out of sight. We can keep looking for an explanation that makes the adults comfortable, but the child is still there and still needs someone to care for him.

That child needs care whether the adults wanted him or not. Federal law has recognized an infant born alive as a person since 2002, including following an induced abortion, but a Christian should not need a law before he can see the evil in abandoning a living child. He is a human being made in God’s image. So is the child still in the womb. I call abortion child murder, and I will not pretend the words health care or freedom change the moral evil of deliberately ending that child’s life. What is compassionate about making the innocent person pay because somebody else does not want what his existence requires? The child in those nurses’ accounts needed someone to care for him, to hold him, to refuse to let him become something put aside and forgotten. We live in a rotten culture when people can defend the rejection of that duty and then insist the rejection is progress.

This is how the small steps become something people refuse to look at because looking means admitting where they have arrived. We begin by making the duty negotiable. Marriage asks too much, children ask too much, the Church condemns too much, obedience to God interrupts too much of what we want. Then each refusal becomes another thing we are supposed to accept, and the people who still say no are treated as the problem. I spent much of my life closest to that live-and-let-live outlook, and I can see now how easily I used it to leave evil alone. The person harmed was still there. The child still needed care, the wife still needed her husband, the family still had to live with what somebody else’s freedom allowed him to abandon. My refusal to condemn what was wrong did not protect them. I had made my peace with leaving the responsibility elsewhere, and that was wrong.

We have watered down marriage by treating it as something to walk away from when obedience becomes costly, detached sex from responsibility for the children who may come from it, and then treated the child as something to dispose of when he interrupts the freedom being promised. I see the same refusal of God’s order running through these things. Contraception is evil. Abortion is evil. Treating marriage as disposable is evil. A same-sex union does not become marriage because the world calls it marriage; I believe that claim is another demonic facade. The names have changed and the excuses have grown, but a Christian has no permission to call these things good because the culture has become comfortable with them. We should have been saying no and naming the evil instead of surrendering a little more every time keeping the condemnation became uncomfortable. I was willing to let too much pass under live and let live, and I have to answer for that willingness before God.

But saying these things are evil while continuing to support them is exactly the contradiction I have been condemning in the audience. That has to reach what I buy and bring into the house too. Benedict XVI says in Caritas in Veritate that purchasing carries moral responsibility. I can look at the people paying to keep a degrading television program going and recognize that their enjoyment helps sustain what is being done, but I have to apply that same judgment to the money I spent. With McDonald’s I knew about things that should have made me stop, and I kept buying and eating the food for years. How can I condemn the audience for continuing after it knows and then excuse myself because what I wanted came in a bag instead of through a television? I understood enough to see that there was something wrong. I chose to keep getting what I wanted anyway. Then I look at the world and ask why companies doing evil are still in business. My own purchases belong inside that question. They were choices, and I cannot call them innocent because I did not want to carry the inconvenience of making a different one.

This is the demonic lie I mean when I condemn compartmentalization. I say God is first, but the purchase is over here, the entertainment is over there, work has its own rules, and the person being harmed is somewhere I do not have to see him. Who gave me permission to divide my life until there was nothing left for Christ to command? I can condemn cruelty while paying into it and then act as if the condemnation proves that I am against it. I can see that anger is governing me and still defend staying angry because I have found something evil to point at. I can say live and let live while refusing to look at who has been left to pay for what I am allowing. I have done these things. They do not become separate from my faith because keeping them separate is easier. Full belief, full trust, full submission means the things I would rather leave alone have to come before God too, and I have to be willing to give them up.

That is where genuine ignorance and willful ignorance separate. The Catechism speaks about the guilt that comes from refusing to seek what is true and good, and I believe that refusal is everywhere around us. People say not my problem while continuing to help sustain the thing they will not examine. IT IS YOUR PROBLEM. If you know the evil and choose to keep supporting it, calling yourself Christian does not make you innocent. It makes your refusal to obey the Christ you claim even more shameful. The lack of care is pathetic, and the world does not need more Christians willing to give God’s name to lives arranged around avoiding His commands. That accusation includes me. Every time I defend my comfort against something I know I must change, I am choosing the same refusal, and I need repentance rather than another explanation for why this particular sin should be allowed to remain.

I cannot be content with being angry at those people, because staying in anger is another thing I have chosen for much of my life and it was wrong. The evil still needs to be condemned. The children still need protection, the people being used for entertainment still need to be treated as human beings, and the Christians supporting what is contrary to Christ still need to stop and repent. So do I. I have to stop buying what I know I should not support, refuse what asks me to take pleasure in sin, and walk away from the anger I want to keep feeding. Saying I am sorry while remaining determined to keep doing it is not repentance. There has been more peace in our daily lives as I have begun changing these things, even when the conversations are frank and difficult. I have to attempt full belief, full trust, full submission in the life inside my own home, and keep returning to God when I fail. That is where the final part of this series has to go: what repentance requires after we have seen the evil and can no longer pretend we do not know. I have to be held accountable for what I choose next. And I have to choose hope. God always wins. Whatever the world accomplishes along the way, Christ is King, and the people doing evil do not get to make evil the final truth. I must live in obedience to Him while I still have the next choice to make.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Facebook — What Our Research Really Says About Teen Well-Being and Instagram

Frances Haugen — Written statement dated October 4, 2021, for the October 5 Senate hearing

PNAS Nexus — Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being

Francis — Laudato Si’, paragraphs 105–114

Stephen King — The Running Man, official novel synopsis

Sight and Sound — Stephen King in conversation with Edgar Wright on The Running Man

UK Parliament — Reality TV inquiry: submission regarding The Jeremy Kyle Show

UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran — Human Rights Council statement, September 21, 2026

House Judiciary Committee — Born-Alive Infants Protection Act report, 2001, pages 8–11

Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 — Public Law 107–207

Benedict XVI — Caritas in Veritate, paragraph 66

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Proliferation of Sin

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Erroneous Judgment

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Respect for Human Life

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Love of Husband and Wife

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith — Legal Recognition of Unions Between Homosexual Persons

Mercy For Animals — T&S Farm investigation, September 10, 2015

I attempt not to speak directly about politics the vast majority of the time because I feel the entire system is evil. That seems hard for either side of the aisle to comprehend. Both sides seem to believe the other side is evil but their side is just. When you insult both sides, you are everyone’s enemy, and I do not care most of the time to argue or convince anyone that their side is evil also. I am speaking of it here only to communicate my thoughts at this specific moment. That is what I can promise people here to put my thoughts to words and attempt to do it honestly and with love.

There are currently only two of us to support in my household. Growing up in the 1990s, my Baptist mother was able to support a household of three on one teacher’s salary. She had a mortgage, a car payment, two children to feed, and what we would have called luxuries, and we were able to take a vacation almost every year. Even if I disagree now with owning or using some of those luxuries, that does not change what she was able to provide. I make about a third more than she does, even after the raises she has received over the past thirty years, and those same things are not an option for us. A vacation is something we might manage once every few years, maybe every three if we play it right.

And money is not even the whole comparison. The public schools had not been infiltrated enough for my Baptist mother to see the problem with what I was being taught. Today, without a gun held to my head, I would not even entertain sending my children to public school. I look at what is being taught and see things so deeply evil that it is hard for me to understand what the point is other than indoctrinating children into Luciferianism. So when we talk about what a household can afford, we are also talking about what a father is willing to let somebody teach his children because the alternative has become harder to arrange. How is this possible? There are fewer people to support in our household, and we still cannot afford the things she could, and we are worried about babysitting some petulant country that cannot help itself but start war after war it cannot win without its slave nation coming to the rescue?

My wife and I have to think about our budget at every step, and even while doing that we are still thinking about places to cut spending, even just a little bit. This is not a single-sided issue. Most families are not looking at one purchase and saying this cannot be right. They are looking at their entire budget, and everywhere they look they are seeing things they are barely keeping going. The Federal Reserve’s survey of households in 2025 found that 58 percent said price changes had made their finances worse. The New York Fed put credit-card balances at $1.263 trillion in the second quarter of 2026.

People are not going out doing extravagant things and having their bills blow up. They are buying food they must have to be able to eat, but even that food is poison, the ingredients are barely considered food, and the plants and animals are so immorally treated that it borders on evil to even purchase it since you are funding the destruction of creation and the abuse of God’s creatures. A controlled NIH feeding study found people eating substantially more and gaining weight on the ultraprocessed diet it tested. These are things people have to buy just to eat, and then the bill still has to be paid.

Every household has to find some way to pay those bills, while our government keeps adding to what we owe for this war. Reuters reported on October 27 that a Pentagon estimate had put the American military cost above $47 billion. Where does that money go? What does the debt do? Who will pay it? The Congressional Budget Office had estimated about $38 billion through August 1 for replacing munitions and lost equipment, additional operations, fuel, and other costs. The estimate was incomplete, and the Department of Defense had not answered its requests for information. Even Congress’s own budget office was relying on government databases and public reporting to estimate the cost. They are committing our people to this war and its consequences, and the office asking what it costs cannot even get the information it asked for.

That war is being added to obligations already far beyond what our government steals in taxes, and we need to know who we are in debt to. Treasury’s October 26 figure was more than $40.5 trillion in gross federal debt. About $32.6 trillion was held by the public and about $7.9 trillion was held inside government accounts. The public holders include American individuals and institutions, Federal Reserve Banks (which is not a government institution in any form or fashion), foreign investors and governments. The internal holdings include government trust funds. Treasury sells securities to cover the gap between what the government receives and what it spends. Who is supposed to keep paying the interest while that debt grows, and what are we leaving for our children?

Net interest alone was above $1.1 trillion in the Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary accounting for the fiscal year, with roughly $7.4 trillion in total spending against about $5.4 trillion in receipts. More of the government’s money is already committed before the people who come after us have had any say in the choices that created the obligation. And the war reaches families before that future bill comes due. CBO traces its economic effects through disrupted oil and gas shipments, refining and transportation, with higher energy costs feeding into the prices of other goods. The family already cutting everywhere it can is left looking for somewhere else to cut.

And when that family has to keep borrowing to pay for necessities, the debt enslaves them. You feel as if you have no options. Things you believe are fully against your will or your morals, many people will do simply because they feel they have no choice. What choice do fathers feel they have when they are told that if they do not do this thing their children cannot eat? They do still have one, but they are extremely limited, and the pressure is so great that they believe they have no choices. A man can know something is wrong and still be looking at the people he is responsible for feeding and wondering how he can possibly refuse, and this is not an accident. You do not accidentally create all of this.

You do not accidentally end up more than $40 trillion in debt. You do not accidentally let your own citizens be overrun by cheaper foreign workers. We have offshoring, illegal immigration, mass migration causing a rift in culture, especially when people bring faith traditions directly antagonistic to what was the prevailing faith, and our own people are left trying to hold their households together through it. Accidents are things people attempt to correct, or things with consequences they did not foresee. The best-case explanation after forty or fifty years is that our politicians and voters have been saying, we do not care. They are on their own. That is their problem, not ours. No, this is not accidental in the least. The best I can give in grace is negligence, and at worst this is malicious.

And while that neglect continues, we have government fraud, Social Security fraud, and the cost of living becoming unaffordable. The list of problems our leaders should be dealing with can go on and on. They need to take some form of responsibility and look at their choices as affecting the entire nation, including the people who will have to live with the consequences after they are gone. They do not, and this is not one side of the aisle or the other. It is both. While the Democrats have sped-run the destruction of a nation, conservatives at best have sat there wagging a finger and saying they should not do it, and at worst have agreed or kowtowed and given evil what it wanted. I was told recently that someone votes for the lesser of two evils. That does not change that you are voting for evil.

At what point do we look at this through a Christian lens and say this nation is fallen, modern-day Babylon has risen? There are people saying that, and we are being laughed at as a third of all Gen Z was killed in the womb, as experimental concoctions are placed in people’s veins and no one cares to see that young athletes are dropping dead, as the food that is affordable can barely even be classified as food. America might have been great at one point, but I do not know when that would have been. All the prosperity my parents experienced came with more manure being shoveled onto the backs of their children and grandchildren to deal with. This is not a Christian nation, and our leaders are inherently evil.

And then we are expected to accept a religious excuse for putting Israel ahead of the people our leaders are supposed to serve. The only one I can see that somewhat makes sense requires severely twisting theology: Darbyism, better known as dispensationalism. Its modern system took shape with John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century, and the distinction between Israel and the Church remains central to it. Dallas Theological Seminary’s own statement expects a future restoration of Israel to its land and the fulfillment of national covenant promises. I cannot understand choosing our own masters and saying a bloodline makes another nation’s people better and more important than our entire country or our entire religion. It is a false doctrine that embraces racism.

I know that might be a way of thinking about racism that most people are not used to, but racism is the belief that any given race is better than another, and explain to me how dispensationalism teaches anything but racism. Who are God’s chosen people? Is it the multiracial, multinational, ever-growing and spreading Church, or is it a specific racial bloodline as dispensationalism teaches? The Church is made up of people from every nation. Lumen gentium speaks of all people being called into that people of God, and I do not understand how we get from that to what we are being told about ancestry. Sounds pretty racist to me.

Let’s switch the words just a bit. How would people feel about a doctrine which taught that white people were God’s chosen people? Everyone would recognize that as racist. Hitler and the Nazis elevated what they called an Aryan master race, a specific imagined racial category within white European populations, rather than every white person. We still talk about the man eighty years later about how evil and racist he was. The hypothetical claim that white people are God’s chosen people should make it clear why I am calling this racism, and dispensationalism is misleading people into Hell while they are being fooled into believing they are going to Heaven because they embraced the racism. This seems pretty evil to me.

Furthermore, the Church teaches that there is such a thing as a just war, and you cannot convince me that a just war starts with double bombing a primary school full of children. The UN fact-finding mission’s report on Minab records accounts of two strikes with a brief interval between them. It found that the school building was the intended point of impact, that there was no indication it was being used for military purposes, and that there were reasonable grounds to believe the US strike amounted to a war crime. The school served boys and girls aged between 6-13, 123 dead children. The Catechism requires the protection of noncombatants even during war. I do not understand how somebody looks at those dead children and still expects me to accept this as a just war because of which country we are helping. This is not okay.

Even in this fallen nation, I am a Catholic and I still have duties. I have to work within the system, do what I believe is morally right, use extreme discernment, and try my best to follow the law as long as the law does not contradict God’s law. I am meant to be a law-abiding citizen as long as the law is not requiring moral evil. I then have the option to live separate from the worldly, as Scripture tells us, to be in the world without being of the world. I can follow the laws while still doing what I discern as morally right and working separately from the worldly evil government that exists. This is not impossible, but it does add difficulty to life. I am not saying it is easy, but it is required.

That should not be a surprise. Christ told us what was required would be difficult. He did not offer me a pampered life where I would get constant foot massages. He offered me difficulty, pain, and peace. Sometimes I ask myself whether I am even following Christ if I am not experiencing difficulty or pain, and the funny part is that I ask myself that more than you would imagine, not because the pain or difficulty is absent, but because the peace overwhelms it to the point that I stop noticing it. That is not abnormal though. His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

He is able to give us peace to the point that things that would seem world-ending without Him seem like another beautiful day. That is something I have actually found myself saying and thinking on days when it seems there is nothing else that could go wrong that day. Something broke in the house, I am fighting with my wife, our budget is abnormally tight at the moment, and all I can see is another beautiful day God has given me. I cannot explain that peace, but that is what is waiting for you if you truly follow Christ, instead of the false peace you get by embracing the world, where there are moments of extreme dread that surface when you can no longer ignore the dreadful.

We still have to do what is morally right during this voting season, as we are inundated with the constant fear porn from both sides of the aisle, because once again this is the most important election ever, as if that has not been said about every election for thirty years. Truly think about it. Are you voting for evil? Look at the man you are voting for, not his lying mouth but his truthful actions. It is easy to speak a lie, especially when you only have to keep it straight for six months until you have secured your job. Instead watch intently, pay attention to every facial expression, every movement, what they spend their time on when they believe no one is looking.

That does not mean I am looking for a politician who is pure and without sin. There has been one politician I would have gladly registered and voted for if he had not bowed to the Zionist mob for another politician: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His endorsement of Donald Trump is on the public record. I am simply looking for someone who can be realistically discerned as truly attempting to fix something for the people in his nation, someone who seems to be truly attempting to do the moral good. We have very few of those. I do not believe he is perfect, but by discerning his actions rather than his words, he seemed to truly want to help Americans not be poisoned. His actions pointed toward someone who actually cared about us killing children.

If you see the same things I do,do not vote for evil even if it is called the lesser, there will be at least one person who acts like you have an obligation and you don’t have a choice but you do, you don’t have to support evil if you see evil. Voting for evil is still evil. Put it plainly: if there are two roads, and one says that choosing it means you will be shot, while the other says that choosing it means your child will be shot in the head ten years from now, is either road morally right? We have to realize that these people do not love us. They are not Christ. Many openly state they do not love or believe in Christ, and with others who claim Him I can watch their actions and listen to their words and see they believe in a false Christ. This is not okay. I will not be voting this season because no one deserves my vote. I will not show my support to people spreading the word of a false messiah.

This is not okay. Our children and grandchildren deserve better than this. We need to stop being so self-gratifying, but who can be surprised when that is the Christ they are taught? They are taught to always embrace self-satisfaction, Christ will forgive all of it, never think about others or children. It’s funny, that is all I have ever seen out of my predecessors.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

The Tucker Carlson Show — Stephen Semler on the cost of the Iran war, October 23, 2026

Reuters — US costs of Iran war rise to over $47 billion, October 27, 2026

Congressional Budget Office — Estimating the Cost of Combat Operations Against Iran

US Treasury — Debt to the Penny

TreasuryDirect — FAQs About the Public Debt

Congressional Budget Office — Monthly Budget Review, September 2026

Federal Reserve — Economic Well-Being of US Households in 2025

Federal Reserve Bank of New York — Household Debt and Credit, second quarter 2026

Hall and colleagues — Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain

Cho and colleagues — COVID-19 vaccination-related myocarditis: a Korean nationwide study

The Korean study documented eight sudden cardiac deaths attributed after autopsy to vaccination-related myocarditis, among people aged 22–45. It did not identify those eight as competitive athletes or establish an increase in deaths among athletes.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — August 23, 2024 endorsement speech

Dallas Theological Seminary — Doctrinal Statement

Dallas Theological Seminary — Understanding Dispensationalism

Second Vatican Council — Lumen gentium, 9 and 13

US Holocaust Memorial Museum — Nazi Racism

UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran — A/HRC/63/61, Minab findings

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Safeguarding Peace, 2308–2315

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Authorities in Civil Society, 2239–2242

John 17 — In the world, not of the world

Matthew 11 — Christ’s yoke and burden

John 16 — Peace in Christ amid trouble

State of New Jersey — Fast Facts

US Department of State — Israel country profile and size comparison

I remember growing up in that fear-of-mortality culture, I remember the fear and foreboding when I first realized that I was going to die, and I remember holding onto that fear for years. I did not believe in Christ or God at the time. From where I was standing, when I died there would be nothing left, so I understand the fear and the running away because I remember what it meant to me.

I remember watching Kingdom of Heaven, which I think is a brilliant movie even with its historical issues, and the scene where the movie’s version of Balian is first walking through his father’s house. He sees the dancing skeletons on the wall and the words “Quod sumus, hoc eritis.” What we are, you will be. The movie gives it as “Such as we are, you will be.” I still remember the fear I grew up with, and I realized that to someone living inside that same fear this is not a nice thing on the wall to bring him closer to God. It is a foreboding message, a message that almost feels antagonistic, as if the wall is refusing to let him forget the one thing he is trying hardest not to think about. I am not sure how Ridley Scott intended it to be taken, but it seemed to me in that moment like foreshadowing, a dark cloud following Balian around. I do not know why we have agreed to live as if remembering our death is something sick.

This is where I remember a priest saying that there is no such thing as reading, learning, or watching from a purely objective point of view, that tradition always exists. Since then I have tried to understand the traditions someone else brings with him, including the ones he may not understand he has. We like to believe we are simply looking at a thing and seeing what it is, but what did we bring to it? In that scene I could see the American tradition I grew up inside: fear your death, try to stay young, keep yourself occupied, and if you must look at death then look at someone else’s. Give the distraction a few more hours and it will take you closer to your own death while helping you forget that you are moving toward it. It is almost a time machine. The hours disappear, you will never remember most of what filled them, and you will never get them back.

Always live for tomorrow instead of today. Tomorrow does not exist, and inside the fantasy of tomorrow you will never die. Tomorrow is where we put the repentance, the obedience, the time with the people God entrusted to us, everything we are not willing to do with the day He has actually given us. It is easy to promise something to God out of a day you do not have. The distractions help us forget our death while stealing hours that bring us closer to it, and then we call the reminder on the wall morbid because it will not help us pretend. The skeletons are telling the truth. We are the ones demanding a lie so we can spend another day without facing what we are doing with it.

That is why I keep coming back to memento mori and putting contemplation time into it. Why has this saying survived? Why is this so important that it has been passed down for so long? Chesterton talks about the “democracy of the dead,” and I want to know what they were telling us by passing this down. We all seem to believe we are so much more advanced than they were, but we quake and quiver where they stood firm. Why is that? They kept the reminder in front of themselves, they handed it to their children, and we look at it and decide they must have been morbid because we cannot stand being told the same truth. Then we congratulate ourselves for having escaped their ignorance while doing everything we can to escape the fact that we are going to die.

I am already talking about the myth of progress on Mondays, and I do not believe I can give all the answers here or even examine all the places where our culture has molded mere infants in comparison to that Democracy of the Dead. Why are we so weak and pathetic in so many places where they were able to withstand the onslaught? We have more means of extending bodily life. I am unsure if this is a good thing or not since most if not all of it stems from the fear of death that we are speaking of in this article. And we still cannot bear being told our life will end. We are pathetic examples of humanity when we throw away a tradition passed down for millennia and replace it with one that has spent decades teaching us how not to face reality, and with that replacement it is what we will stay. There is no reason to believe we are better than they were, just as there is no such thing as looking at something through a purely objective lens. These are both lies. One is handed down by secular culture, and another by the Protestant religions of the fake Christ who asks nothing of us. We dismiss what we have been handed because it is old, then put our trust in something that cannot even teach us how to face the grave.

But all that fear of our own death has not stopped the appetite for somebody else’s. From what I can tell, I believe that without God we have a yearning for death, but only the death of the other, only the death of the ones we pass judgment on and believe should die. You can see the appetite throughout history. Jeremiah describes children being burned as offerings to Baal. In Rome they had death games, people being killed in front of spectators. Now in America we have combined the appetite for spectacle with the willingness to kill our own children. We have imitation death games in movies and television, and it is supposed to be all right because the person deserved to die, while for decades we have killed unborn children and called the killing a right. We are frightened of our own aging bodies and our own graves while making excuses for the death of people whose lives interfere with what we want. I do not understand how we can keep looking at that and pretending the fruit is good.

Then people look at me strangely when I state that I believe all of this is evil. I do not see any fruit from it that makes it good. What does it do to the brain and soul when we watch constant death and destruction? I do not have an answer here, but I feel it must do something. Even when we know something is fake we can have an involuntary reaction to it, so what is happening when the thing we supposedly know is fake is constant death, destruction, and violence? What are we feeding ourselves, and why are we so certain that knowing it was acted makes the question go away? This is a question for men much smarter than I, if not one I would need to ask God Himself, but I cannot see good fruit coming from it. I am not going to call the fruit good simply because I do not have a complete explanation of what the appetite is doing to us.

That is par for the course in America and American Christianity, though. Let’s take rotten fruit, pretend we carve out the bad, segment it so there is good and bad, and claim we choose the good. THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. CHRIST DID NOT SAY WE CAN PARTICIPATE IN EVIL AS LONG AS WE ONLY TAKE THE GOOD FROM IT. He said that you cannot serve two masters. If something is evil, finding something useful inside it does not give us permission to participate in the evil. The benefit is the excuse we keep using to avoid looking at what we are doing, and we keep wanting the entertainment, the convenience, whatever the thing gives us, while pretending our responsibility can be carved out of it with the rot. I do not get an exemption from that because I found a line in Kingdom of Heaven worth remembering. The rule does not stop applying when there is something in the thing we want to keep.

This past Sunday was Christ the King Sunday in the traditional calendar. I cannot quote the priest even nearly, and any attempt would be woefully inadequate, but he was talking about the word vexillum, the banner or colors of a king, and whose we are standing under. That is what I keep thinking about. Whose banner are you standing under? You cannot divide yourself between them spiritually. If you are not standing under Christ’s, then you are standing under Satan’s. It is as simple as that. Our Lord says no one can serve two masters, and when He speaks of God and mammon He does not tell us that we can manage the arrangement if we are careful enough. We keep acting as if the part of life we call religious can belong to Christ while everything inconvenient about obeying Him can be handed over to somebody else.

The movie’s Baldwin IV spoke most eloquently about the responsibility we keep trying to get out of: “Remember that howsoever you are played, or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say ‘But I was told by others to do thus,’ or that ‘virtue was not convenient at the time.’ This will not suffice.” Just because it is inconvenient to look at the moral implications of something does not give me an excuse to keep standing under the enemy’s vexillum. Someone else telling me it is fine does not make it fine. The relative morality that permeates so much of the culture and, I believe, almost all if not all Protestant churches is a lie. Giving it a pulpit or putting Christ’s name on it does not make the lie Christian.

I can both understand and not understand the fear of our own death at the same time. I remember what it meant when I did not believe in God, but so many of the people living in that same fear and anxiety claim to be Christian. They claim they understand that God has given us but one day, that the day He has given us is everything, and then they live as if they have to spend it avoiding the very thing their religion is supposed to have taught them to face. What exactly do we believe Christ did, and why do we keep arranging our lives as if none of it happened? Where is the cloud of believers in the version of Christianity that leaves people living as if death takes everyone away forever? Where is the Church triumphant?

They are left with the same fear of death, and the reassurance they are given does not ask them to face how they are living. People in these false churches have been sold a comforting lie about their death, and they are being taught to trust the lie as if it came from Christ. The “once saved, always saved” reassurance, when it tells a man that saying the words has settled his salvation while he keeps living against God, is a blatant lie. Baptists and evangelicals who teach people to use an earlier profession that way are teaching a blatant lie, and I am not going to call it peace because somebody feels better after being told it. Peace does not come from being told that refusing Him has stopped mattering. A fake Christ who lets me keep the sin and promises me heaven for having said the right words is not the Christ who tells me to repent. The real Christ is the One they will stand before, and the false preacher will not be able to stand there and change His answer for them.

Just because I said the magic words when I was eight does not mean that if I go out prostituting every day for the rest of my life I am going to make it to heaven. That is an example, and it should not require some great theological argument to understand what is wrong with it. Yet this is the comfortable lie I am talking about, the idea that the earlier profession has done all the work and everything after it can be explained away. This is why I have so much sorrow for American Baptists, evangelicals, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, and Lutherans caught between the secular culture that teaches them never to think about their death and the religious reassurances that teach them not to face their sin. Stay young, keep going, do not think about dying, and when the conscience will not stay quiet, tell yourself you are saved. I believe that is a lie from Satan, and I am not going to pretend the religious half of it becomes harmless because the people repeating it call themselves Christian.

When you follow the different explanations of salvation, it gets muddy, and I know it gets muddy. The Calvinist answer is that if someone finally falls away, he must never have been truly saved to begin with. Then the man has to ask whether the confidence he has today belongs to real faith or to the same false security he would later be told was never faith at all. The words have not removed the need to examine how he is living. If he says “I am saved” while continuing to refuse repentance, why is the explanation being used to quiet him instead of wake him up? That is the question I am asking when I look at these claims about salvation. What is the man doing with the sin, what has he been taught he has to do with it, and why does naming it keep producing another explanation for why he does not need to fear what he is choosing?

We can attempt to find a loophole where more people go to heaven, but Christ said the road is narrow. If we talk about the road as if making it sound more inclusive will make it include everyone we want to put on it, I believe we are damning many more people to hell in the wake of that lie. Just because it is more comfortable to talk that way does not make the road broader. It lures people into a false sense of security, and they keep going toward hell while someone assures them there is nothing to fear. That is not Christian honesty. It is a lie from Satan to make it easier to snag more souls. I feel sorrow for the people who have been sold it, and most, if not all, of those who have gone before Christ trusting that comforting lie have, I fear, heard, “I never knew you.” I do not want that for the people I love, and I do not want anyone lying to me about the same danger because the truth makes us uncomfortable.

The true Church does not lie to me in this same manner. Getting baptized is only the first step in an entire lifetime of attempting to live within God’s will, to submit to Him and trust Him. Just because I was baptized and confirmed does not mean that I am going to heaven. Just because I went to church every single Sunday does not mean that I am going to heaven. I do not get to take the same lie, put a Catholic name on it, and then act as if I am protected from what I am condemning.

Paul said to believers to work out their salvation with fear and trembling. If the comfortable lie is true, why is he telling believers to work out their salvation after speaking their magic words? He also tells them that God is at work in them; he is describing a life lived with God, not a permission slip to keep living against Him. With the comfortable lie I can go do whatever I want and lie to myself the entire time that, as they would put it, “I am saved.” While doing things your soul knows are evil and damning you, you can learn to numb it out and quiet it with the comfortable lie. The fact that you can quiet the warning does not mean there was nothing to be warned about.

For mortal sins we need absolution, and all sins require repentance. That is not to say a small sin is going to damn me to hell. Mortal sin is grave matter committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent, and I cannot make that grave matter disappear by saying that everybody does it. The use of contraceptives to poison a woman’s body against fertility so that we can engage in sex specifically to avoid living within God’s design is grave matter. The Church calls contraception intrinsically evil. It is not a harmless little preference because we have made it ordinary, and a husband does not get to put it onto his wife’s body, enjoy what it permits him to avoid, and then pretend there is no sin because the people around him do not teach him otherwise. There is sin to repent of, and where the conditions for mortal sin are present there is mortal sin for which he needs absolution.

There is such a thing as natural law and morality, whether or not the people around us teach it. Every time we ignore that little voice of God’s, what the secular world likes to call a conscience, we are ignoring God. The Catechism speaks of the law we discover within ourselves, the law we did not give ourselves, and God’s voice calling us to do good and avoid evil. We know there is something we ought to do and we keep refusing it. Do that enough times and you have severed your tie with Him. He is still there holding out the rope, but it is like the image of someone throwing a life preserver to a drowning man who gives him the middle finger. That is what is being done. We are refusing the help and then looking for a religious explanation that lets us pretend the refusal does not matter. I can do that too. Knowing where the rope came from would not save me if I refused to take it.

When I die I know that, unless something drastic changes, my wife will believe I am in heaven. At least I think she thinks that highly of me sometimes. I hope I never change in a manner that would leave me committing mortal sin without her knowing about it, while she still sees the husband she trusts and believes is trying to live with God. That is the difference between hoping for heaven and treating it as guaranteed. Her knowing or not knowing does not decide what God sees, but I can understand why she would hope, and I also know that her hope cannot be my excuse to hide something from her or from myself. I do not get to say that because she loves me, because I was confirmed, because I know what the Church teaches, my own repentance can wait. The narrow road did not become broader when I started writing about it.

If I die in mortal sin without repentance and God’s forgiveness, I will be going to hell. I need to say that plainly because these are exactly the things people keep being taught to talk around. An earlier profession of faith will not absolve me, being Catholic will not absolve me, and my wife’s good opinion of me will not absolve me. I have to repent. I have to turn back to God and seek the sacramental absolution He has given us, not keep the sin and arrange an explanation that makes me feel better about keeping it. God is still offering mercy. He is still holding out the rope. If I refuse, that makes the refusal worse, because I could not say there was nowhere to take the sin or no one willing to forgive it. I would be the one refusing what He is offering while demanding that the refusal be called faith.

That is why memento mori demands that a man realize he does not have time to repent later. The time to repent is now. You are going to die. It could happen today or tomorrow, and being washed of original sin did not give you permission to spend the rest of your life refusing to live with God and under God. That is what the reminder is telling me too. I can hope for more time, and I do, but I do not possess a later day in which to repent. The comfortable lie lets me move the repentance into that imaginary tomorrow and keep the sin today. I do not want to spend the days He gives me pretending I can put off repentance until a tomorrow I have never been promised. Remembering my death takes away the excuse.

I have attempted to point this out to people I love, and the lie is so pervasive that their eyes to see and ears to hear have both been closed. Even if they have closed them of their own volition, they have to realize themselves that they have been lied to. I heard someone say recently on an unrelated subject that it is easier to trick someone than convince him he has been tricked, and this seems true in so much of our culture. The people who sold the lie still have the authority to tell him what is true, and the person trying to point out the lie is treated as the stupid one. You give people the truth about salvation, food, government, family, and unless it comes directly from the people who originally tricked them, they look at you like you are the one who has been convinced of a lie. I cannot call the lie true just because telling the truth has not made them listen.

That is why I feel sorrow for every person who falls for the false preachers in these false churches. There is not much I can tell a man in a single article that will make him realize he is doing this. He has to come to a point where he realizes it in the first place. I can assist by giving him true Christian honesty, but there is not a winning argument I can use to sway him. I wish I could help these people. It is a sorrow I will live with until the day they see that I believe and know the things I know because I personally decided to read what the people who started all of this stated, because I have looked at the evidence, because I do not want to spend the day God gave me repeating a lie simply because it is comfortable. I hope any one of the people I love will hear me one day. I do not count on it, though. I cannot make them see it by wanting it badly enough. I can tell them what changed that fear for me.

I think what changed my own fear of death was the peace, that death is not something to be feared but something to rejoice in when God brings us home. The peace in the Church comes with full acknowledgment of what is required of us and the realization that we are doing the best we can to grow closer to God and make it to heaven through His grace. This may seem like a more fearful proposition and one that would not bring peace. But there is more peace to be had when you are living with God and according to God.

There were a ton of small things that brought me to that peace, and no single person told me all of them. The saints’ feast days are one strong example. I asked at one point why we celebrate on the day they died, and I was told we are not celebrating their death day but celebrating their heavenly birthday. That is just one piece of many that adjusted my perspective, but I keep coming back to it because it changes what you are even looking at. The world had taught me to see the end of everything. The Church was telling me to look at a person being brought to his true home, someone who had not ceased to exist because his body had died.

The saints are alive in Christ, and we ask for their prayers because death of the body has not destroyed the communion God has given us. Extreme Unction, the Anointing of the Sick, is an important part of our beliefs, but the funny part is that death is something we already live with. There is no hiding from it. We are taught to pray for the dead, to prepare for our own death, to remember what the sacraments are for, and to understand that the life God made us for does not end at the grave. Christ rose from the dead.

That is what I am trusting when I look at those skeletons on the wall that Balian saw and see a gift instead of an insult. I saw it and thought that is such a nice reminder to wake up to every day. To start every day with the realization that one day we too will be like the dead is a gift from God, because it helps put you in the state of mind that the only day that ever truly matters is the one God has given you. That one day is everything. That one day is the most important day in all of our lives. I could remember the fear and still look at it as a gift because my understanding of death had changed. I remember that fear, and I understand why the reminder would feel antagonistic. I also understand now why somebody would put it where he had to see it every day.

When I die, which I hope is a long time from now, I do not want to die before my wife. It is my job to take care of her, and I do not want her to carry this life without me. I want to watch our children grow into adulthood and have children of their own. I will be sad, and I will wish I had more time with them, but that is it. I do not want to turn that sadness and that love into the same fear that taught me to run from my mortality when I did not believe in God. I want the time because I love them and because there are duties God has given me, not because I believe my death means He takes everything real away. And while He gives me the day, those duties are still mine. They do not become less urgent because I hope there will be more days after it.

I do not want them to mourn me as if I am gone forever. I hope to be brought to my true home, and in that hope I look forward to being right there praying for them and praying every prayer they ask my assistance with. I will be waiting to be with them again, not ceasing to love them because the body has died. I want them to celebrate the gift God gives in bringing us to Him. That is what the heavenly birthday helped me understand, and it is why the Church triumphant matters so much to this whole question. We are not pretending the separation will not hurt. I have already told you that I will wish for more time. But I do not believe that the grave is where the love ends, and I am grateful the Church taught me something better than spending my life trying not to look at it.

I can tell the truth as clearly as I know how, I can try to live under God, and I can pray for the people I wish I could reach. For anyone reading this who recognizes himself in what I have written, I will have you in my prayers, and I hope any single thing in this article has planted a seed.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Kingdom of Heaven (2005) — “Quod sumus, hoc eritis” scene

Kingdom of Heaven (2005) — Baldwin’s counsel to Balian

G. K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy, Chapter IV

Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy — §249

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Dying in Christ Jesus

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Communion of Saints

Jeremiah 19

Matthew 6

Matthew 7

Philippians 2

Westminster Confession of Faith — Chapters XVII–XVIII

The Baptist Faith and Message — Articles IV–V

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Moral Conscience

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Mortal and Venial Sin

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Acts of the Penitent

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Love of Husband and Wife

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Hell

Fraternité Saint-Pierre — October 2026 Ordo

Shameless Popery — Halloween Is the Time to Reflect on Death

Seneca — Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter VII

I have already written about giving a phone the attention I owed my wife, but that was one place where I was doing this. I knew about horrible practices at farms in McDonald’s supply chain. I knew about the damage being done to children’s diets and the explosion in childhood obesity, and I still bought the food and ate it for years. I knew and still ate it. There was no lack of information that made those purchases innocent. I could look at what was wrong, understand enough to condemn it, and then go on paying into the thing I said was wrong because I wanted what it gave me. That is my guilt, and it is the same willful refusal I am condemning in the Christians who see evil and then decide it has nothing to do with what they buy. It had everything to do with what I bought. My knowing better did not stop the money from going where I sent it.

For much of my life I identified most closely with the libertarian mindset, live and let live, and I see now how that has permeated the culture until we excuse evil left and right. Leave the person alone, let him make his choices, do not tell him that what he is doing is wrong, and then when the people around him suffer we act as if the suffering has nothing to do with the freedom we defended. I accepted that. There was comfort in it because if I left everybody else’s choices alone, I could expect them to leave mine alone too. The problem is that evil does not stay politely inside the person who chooses it. His wife has to live with him. His children have to live with what he gives them or withholds from them. People who never agreed to his choices still have to pay, and I helped excuse that by calling it live and let live.

That is why I look at this phony free-market, controlled, manipulative, lying system and ask why the company that keeps choosing evil is still in business. The fact that somebody wants what it sells does not make the business moral. People can want something because they have been lied to, because their weaknesses have been studied, or because they do not want to look at what their comfort costs somebody else, and the seller can keep making money from all of it. What matters in the system we keep defending is how many people can be deceived and how many will choose not to pay attention to the evil at all. The people doing the harm get paid. The people defending it help them continue. The Christians who know what is happening and still support it have chosen their comfort over the duty to oppose evil, and that choice is a sin. A company does not become good because enough people reward it, and a Christian does not become innocent because he can point to millions of other customers making the same choice. The people who know and continue selling, defending, and supporting it are responsible. Calling the arrangement a market does not remove that responsibility.

That is part of what I am trying to follow through these three articles. This first part asks how we came to call the movement itself progress without asking where it was taking us. The second will follow what we keep supporting, from the company studying children to the audience paying to be entertained by somebody else’s degradation. Both will be free. The third, the paid conclusion with a substantial public opening, comes back to the part I cannot assign to a corporation or a politician: repentance, my own anger, and what it means to believe that Christ is King when obedience requires me to give something up. The moral question is already here, though. We do not have to wait for the last article to stop excusing evil.

Reading did much of the work of making me see how wrong I had been. Aquinas belongs in that, but honestly Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, along with Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Heretics, did much of the heavy lifting. I began realizing that the myth of progress was just that, a myth, and that increasing our ability to satisfy ourselves had done nothing to make the satisfaction morally right. The path to evil is full of small incremental steps. Most people do not deliberately choose damnation as the thing they want. They slowly walk there and then choose not to look at where they are or to change. That is what I see in the life I had been defending. I could keep protecting the anger, laziness, and comfort that I should have been giving up, and the world would keep telling me that being able to have more of what I wanted meant I was moving forward.

That is what I recognized in Screwtape. Lewis puts the instruction in a demon’s mouth, and in Letter XII the religious habits can remain while the man is being led away from God. The road is “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” The destination does not become less evil because the steps feel comfortable. I know how easy it is to remain where I am when looking honestly would require me to give something up. The road to Hell can feel like Heaven because I am being offered what I want, and I can go on choosing it while telling myself that I would never choose evil. But if I refuse to look at what I am supporting, if I refuse the correction because the thing feels good, then the refusal is mine. The demon does not need me to stop calling myself Christian if he can persuade me to stop obeying Christ.

I understand true ignorance. However, the majority of the people I have encountered, whether online or in person, are not ignorant; they are willfully ignorant. They do not want to look because it is uncomfortable, because looking might mean that the show has to go, the product has to go, the habit has to go, and they do not want to give anything up. Dressing that up as being too busy or not wanting to get involved does not make it innocent. The children harmed by what adults continue supporting cannot make the harm disappear by refusing to think about it. Creation does not stop suffering because the person paying for what is being done would rather discuss something pleasant. We are choosing to remain comfortable while somebody else carries the consequences, and then we have the nerve to call the whole thing progress. Christians who do this are helping the evil continue. They need to stop and repent, and it is pathetic that saying that has become more offensive to so many people than knowingly supporting the evil in the first place.

Chesterton helped me see why the word progress is so useful for hiding that refusal. In Heretics he asks what progress can mean without a direction, and in Orthodoxy he examines what happens when we change the standard itself and then claim to have advanced. If the standard becomes whatever we currently want to do, we have given ourselves permission to call every surrender an improvement. The husband has not become faithful because the culture has become more willing to excuse his unfaithfulness. The Christian has not repented because he found a church that will avoid mentioning his sin. We have stopped condemning the wrong and then congratulated ourselves for becoming kinder, more accepting, more modern, while the people harmed by it are still there. That is part of the lie. We want the approval that belongs to doing right without having to stop doing what is wrong.

What would real progress mean to me? Moving toward God and moral right, moving more toward living within the Ten Commandments and Christ’s words. We have done the exact opposite for so long and kept insisting that the direction is good because the things around us are newer. I look at a person being given more ways to satisfy anger, lust, and laziness and I do not see human flourishing merely because he can now satisfy them faster. I see sins being encouraged and sold back to him, and I see Christians accepting the arrangement because resisting it would require sacrifice. Where is the progress in becoming more willing to excuse what God condemns? Where is the progress in seeing who suffers and deciding that we would rather keep the thing anyway? We have improved our ability to get what we want while letting what is morally right become the part we can set aside. Then we call the refusal to submit freedom, and expect the people damaged by that refusal to accept it as the price of moving forward.

The Roots of Everything episodes on the myth of progress and world domination examined how a method of learning about the world becomes a story about what human beings are and what will save them. That question matters because we have allowed the promise of a better future to excuse what is being done to people in the present. We can look at the promises in the actual texts and see what kind of authority they claim. Then we have to look at ourselves, because the lie would not have taken the place it has in our lives if we had kept requiring our choices to answer to God. I am looking at how we came to treat obedience to the world as necessary while obedience to Christ became something we could set aside whenever it interfered with what the world wanted us to do.

Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum gives a place to begin. In Book I, aphorism 129, he praises inventions for their power to transform human life and argues for the enlargement of human dominion over nature. He also expects that power to be governed by reason and religion. Look at what happens when people keep the promise of increased power and refuse the obligation to govern it. The question becomes how much we can do, how far we can expand, how many people can be reached, and moral restraint is treated as an obstacle to getting there. We end up defending the ability while refusing to condemn the use. A company can point to what its product makes possible while the people harmed by it are expected to accept the cost, and Christians can keep supporting that company because they want the possibility too. Being capable of doing something has never given us permission to do evil with it.

Benedict XVI takes up Bacon in Spe Salvi and describes the change in what people expect to save them. The recovery expected through Christ begins to be expected through knowledge and practical achievement. Faith can remain, but it is pushed into a private part of life while the world claims the authority to decide where everything else is going. That is the arrangement I am condemning. We pay lip service to God and then refuse to follow Him where following would mean giving something up. The Christian name remains, but the submission belongs to the people telling us what to buy, what to watch, what to accept, and what we are no longer allowed to call evil. A prayer on Sunday does not make that surrender faithful. We cannot tell Christ that He is Lord and then treat His commands as the part of our lives that has to give way whenever something more convenient arrives.

I believe we have allowed that lie to continue from one generation to the next because too many people have been willing to say the right words about morality without allowing morality to require anything of them. We have inherited excuses and kept using them. Look at what that means in the food we buy. There is a public record of cruelty in the supply chain I kept paying into. In 2015, Mercy For Animals released footage from T&S Farm, a Tennessee chicken grower under contract to Tyson, which supplied McDonald’s. The footage showed chickens being struck with a spiked club and workers standing on their heads. Tyson terminated the farm’s contract, and McDonald’s supported the decision and called the behavior unacceptable. But this was only after the farm had been exposed by a third party, not by Tyson, not by McDonald’s. Neither one of them cared until they had to face the public knowing. Look at the conduct that had to be exposed: people treating living creatures as things they could brutalize inside the work supplying somebody’s meal. God did not give us creation so that we could abuse it and then hide the abuse behind the finished product. It was evil before the footage became public. The people doing it were responsible before the company announced its response, and a customer who knows about such cruelty has no Christian permission to stop caring at the point where his appetite begins.

And now look at Tyson engaging in cloning. They call it lab-grown meat, but let’s call it what it actually is: playing God and cloning what exists through natural creation. Let’s play God again. That always goes well.

And the food does not become a separate moral question once it leaves the farm. Childhood obesity has exploded. The National Center for Health Statistics puts obesity among American children ages two through nineteen at 5.2 percent in 1971–1974 and 21.1 percent in its August 2021–August 2023 survey, roughly four times as high. Research published in Pediatrics in 2004 found that children consumed more calories and had poorer diets on days when they ate fast food; the researchers identified a plausible increase in obesity risk. The damage to children’s diets has been examined for decades while adults keep treating the food as an ordinary convenience. Children need adults willing to care what they are being given. They need protection, and the person who knows that a profitable habit is harming them cannot make the harm morally irrelevant by saying that people want it. I understood enough about these problems to know that I should not just keep buying without caring, and I still bought McDonald’s for years. That was a choice to keep participating after I knew better. The years of continuing are what I have to answer for.

This is why I call compartmentalization a demonic lie when we use it to avoid seeing what we are doing. We put the suffering over there and the product over here, the Faith in church and the choices outside it, and act as if separating them in our heads makes them separate before God. They are not separate. The food I bought did not become disconnected from how it was produced because I was the one eating it. The money did not stop being support because I disapproved of the practices while handing it over. That is the lie I was willing to live inside, and it is a lie Christians keep using to excuse knowingly supporting what they should reject. Look at the parts and what is under the surface instead of just accepting the thing because it has been made ordinary. Look at what it produces and who pays for it. Refusing to connect the choice with the harm is how people keep cooperating with evil while insisting they are opposed to it, and saying that the parts belong in separate conversations is one more way to avoid having to stop.

That separation is easier to defend when the culture has already decided that submitting everyday choices to God belongs to a past we should have outgrown. Auguste Comte makes the supposed direction of history explicit in the opening lesson of his Course of Positive Philosophy. He places theological explanation first, metaphysical explanation after it, and positive or scientific explanation at the final stage, presenting that succession as necessary. Theology becomes the stage humanity is supposed to pass through on the way to maturity. Then the person who still insists on submitting to God can be treated as if his belief is proof that he has failed to grow up. I see that same demand in the world around us: accept the direction, stop resisting, stop allowing the Faith to stand in the way. But abandoning God is not maturity. A culture does not become more human by treating the Creator as something it has outgrown, and Christians who accept that judgment so they can remain comfortable in the culture are abandoning what they claim to believe.

We are told the change is coming, everybody is adopting it, and refusing will leave us behind. Behind whom? Going where? If it takes us further from God, further from the duties He gave us, further from the people we should be loving, then Christians should be willing to say no and call the evil what it is. Instead we keep making room for it and acting as if resistance would be unreasonable. Christ did not teach comfort. The promise that following Him should never require me to give anything up is a lie straight out of demonic mouths. People who keep teaching that lie are helping others remain in sin. They are giving them a reason to keep calling themselves Christian while refusing what Christ requires, and that is profaning His teaching. Work does not give me an exemption from obedience, and neither does the convenience of what I am being offered. We have no right to make God’s commands the thing that must keep giving way so that the business, the product, or the habit can remain untouched.

Not my problem is one of the most pathetic excuses in all of this. IT IS YOUR PROBLEM when you can see the evil and continue helping it along because stopping would inconvenience you. The people selling the change do not get to disappear behind the claim that everybody wants it, and the people buying it do not get to disappear behind the claim that everybody has it. People are choosing. A Christian who knows what he is supporting and decides not to care is choosing to cooperate with evil. He can keep saying the correct things about God, he can condemn the same conduct when somebody else does it, but those words do not change what he is helping sustain. He needs to repent. Willfully putting his head in the sand does not stop the consequences from reaching the people around him. It lets him continue without facing them, and that refusal is part of the sin. I cannot pretend the food I knowingly kept buying belonged somewhere outside that judgment. The fact that I was only buying a meal was the excuse, not an answer to what I knew.

Benedict also makes the distinction that technical knowledge can be accumulated and inherited while every generation still has to make its moral choices. We can inherit the ability to do more without becoming more willing to do right. A company can become better at producing, distributing, and selling something while the people making its decisions continue to excuse cruelty and harm. We can make the product easier to obtain and make refusing it seem stranger, until the Christian who asks what he is supporting is treated as if he is creating the problem by looking. That is how the promise of progress helps protect the evil. We discuss how capable the system has become instead of whether the people directing it are doing right and whether we should keep rewarding them. I knew enough to condemn practices I was still supporting with my purchases. More knowledge would not turn that refusal into obedience. The moral choice was already there, and the convenience of continuing did not remove it.

That is why I say the myth of progress is a myth. I look at the past hundred or hundred and fifty years and I do not see moral progress toward God. I see us moving toward a less human form of life, toward a pagan culture with a Christian label slapped on it, and too many weak Christians willing to keep the label while living as if Christ has no authority over their choices. We have more ways to communicate and ignore one another. We have more ways to be entertained by what should disgust us. We have more ways to obtain what we want without looking at the people harmed along the way. None of that becomes good because it is new. Calling ourselves Christian while knowingly supporting conduct contrary to Christ is a lie, and being comfortable with the lie does not make it any less destructive to the family or any less offensive to God.

The sins themselves are old. Child killing is old, cruelty made into entertainment is old, powerful people lying to the people beneath them is old. The new part is the message we use to sell it and the excuses Christians are willing to accept. We call it freedom or care or progress and then expect the name to do the work of making the evil good. I believe it is pathetic to claim Christ while knowing what is being done and deciding that keeping the product, the entertainment, or the comfortable life matters more than opposing it. Those choices harm Christianity. They profane the words we claim to believe because the people around us can see that our obedience ends where our comfort begins. I lived inside that refusal when I accepted live and let live and protected my own anger. Recognizing the lie now does not erase what I helped excuse. It gives me a responsibility to stop excusing it.

Staying in anger was easy, and it was what I did for much of my life. That was wrong. I could see real evil and use it as a reason to remain angry, to keep feeding the feeling because it felt good to lash out at what was wrong. But the fact that there was something to condemn did not make everything I chose to do with the anger righteous. I have to answer for my response. I can condemn the company, the cowardice, the willful ignorance, and still be choosing sin myself if I refuse to govern the anger coming out of me. That is part of why I reject this idea that learning more automatically makes us better. I could spend the rest of my life finding more evil to point at and keep refusing the repentance God is requiring from me. I do not want to use the truth about somebody else’s sin to protect my own.

Real movement toward God began requiring something different of me. I have to let the feeling exist, look at whether it is justified, and choose how to proceed instead of allowing the anger to choose for me. If I am choosing sin, I have to reject it and walk away even when it feels impossible. If there is a real evil to condemn, I have to ask how to speak as objectively and lovingly as I can. How do I speak condemnation without adding evil to the world? How do I let God speak the truth through me instead of deciding how I will lash out because it feels good? Those are much harder questions than whether I have the right opinion.

Christ tells us to recognize false prophets by their fruits, and I want people to truly observe the fruits of the world and many of these “pastors” instead of accepting what they say about themselves. A company calls the product connection while the family loses time together. The culture calls something freedom while people become more enslaved to their sins. We are given more convenience in obtaining food while cruelty is hidden in how it reaches us and children are left with diets adults should be willing to question. We can see these things and still have Christians telling us to stop judging, to stop making everything about morality, to just enjoy what everybody else enjoys. That is part of the lie. What are we supporting, what are we allowing to shape us, what are we choosing not to see? A man who sees the fruit and refuses to look because he wants to keep the product has made his choice. Calling himself Christian while knowingly protecting that choice profanes the Faith he claims to follow. The words do not absolve the conduct, and the people harmed by it are owed more than another explanation for why the Christians who know will do nothing.

The word Faith has been watered down too much. Faith is not “I believe in Jesus, so I am saved.” Even demons are able to do this, but they refuse to submit and trust in God, which means they have no Faith. This is the Faith I see most Christians in the modern day talk about: “I believe in Jesus.” That is not FAITH. The Catechism (CCC 26) defines faith as “man’s response to God, who reveals himself and gives himself to man.” CCC 143 describes the complete submission of intellect and will to God, and CCC 150 speaks of personal adherence to God and free assent to the whole truth He has revealed. Full belief, full trust, full submission means I must at least be attempting to submit the whole life to the Father, including the things I do not want examined. I cannot keep saying I have faith while protecting the habits that contradict it and treating every demand to change as somebody being too judgmental. We have made that excuse far too easy. A person can see evil, admit that it is evil, and still keep supporting it because he has decided that knowing is enough. It is not enough.

Refusing to engage with the truth is also rejecting part of faith in God. When you do not like what someone or something is revealing and purposefully choose to ignore it, you are neglecting the truth God was providing you. I bought the food for years while knowing things that should have made me stop. I stayed in anger because staying there was easy. Both required me to turn away from what I was choosing, and neither became innocent because I could explain the world around it. I must attempt to see the evil and avoid it. I must be held accountable. There is mercy when I return to God, but I have to return. Being sorry while remaining determined to keep the sin is not repentance. That is simply fear of my deserved punishment, not sorrow over the offense against God that I am committing.

I believe the lie that lets us keep the Christian name while submitting our lives to the world is demonic, and the Christians who knowingly help maintain it need to hear that plainly. The Christians who know what they are supporting and still pretend that it has nothing to do with their faith are lying, and their refusal to care is pathetic. We pay lip service to God and then refuse to follow Him because it would mean giving anything up. We choose not to look because we want to stay comfortable. We let the people harmed by our choices remain out of sight and act as if saying we care is the same as doing what is right. This is helping evil continue under a Christian label, and it is harming Christ’s image in the world. A person watching those choices is being shown that obedience can be discarded whenever sin offers something pleasant enough to keep. The people doing that need to stop and repent. My years of knowingly buying into what I condemned make me guilty under the same judgment. They do not give me a reason to make the judgment smaller, and they do not give anyone else permission to keep doing it.

Phones, television, quick cheap food, blindly buying products without putting thought into their morals, comfort, laziness, anger: those are things I can name when asked what turning toward God has required me to give up. I cannot explain all the changes in our daily lives because there have been so many, but there has been less friction and more peace. The conversations with my wife are more frank and sometimes they are not the most conflictless, but there is a lightness to my soul now that did not exist before. I spent so much of my life defending what felt comfortable while remaining angry, and now the things I thought I needed have become things I can see I was wrong to keep protecting. I still have to choose. The fact that I have begun to see the difference does not mean the duty is finished. I have to keep turning toward God instead of deciding that the next excuse is good enough.

The world can keep calling the opposite direction progress. I want to move toward God and moral right, toward living within the Ten Commandments and Christ’s words, and that has to become a choice in the life I am actually living. When I know what is wrong with something I am supporting, I have to stop supporting it. I cannot keep buying it for years and then point to the fact that I knew as though knowledge were repentance. I have to accept the inconvenience of doing what I already know is right, including when it is as ordinary as deciding what I will eat. God always wins. Christ is King no matter what the world manages to accomplish along the way, and the people selling us disobedience do not get to change that by making it comfortable. They still need to repent, and so do I. There is peace in turning toward Him that I never found while protecting all these comforts. I want the life my wife and I are living to belong to Him, including the parts I spent years pretending I could keep for myself.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

G. K. Chesterton — Heretics, chapters I–II

G. K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy, chapters III and VII

C. S. Lewis — The Screwtape Letters, Letter XII

Francis Bacon — Novum Organum, Book I, aphorism 129

Auguste Comte — Cours de philosophie positive, first lesson

Benedict XVI — Spe Salvi, paragraphs 16–25

Matthew 7:15–23 — False prophets and their fruits

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Passions and Moral Life

The Roots of Everything — The Myth of Progress, October 12, 2026

The Roots of Everything — World Domination, October 19, 2026

Mercy For Animals — T&S Farm investigation, September 10, 2015

Reuters — McDonald’s and Tyson end ties with T&S Farm, August 28, 2015

National Center for Health Statistics — Childhood obesity trends, 1971–1974 through August 2021–August 2023

Bowman et al., Pediatrics — Fast-food consumption, energy intake, and children’s diet quality (2004)

Tyson Foods — Investment in Memphis Meats, January 29, 2018

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Faith as man’s response to God, paragraph 26

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Submission of intellect and will, paragraph 143

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Personal adherence and assent, paragraph 150

James 2:14–26 — Faith and works

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Contrition, paragraphs 1451–1453

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I said that a year or two before I became Catholic, and at the time I thought the sentence proved I was open-minded. I was willing to follow the truth anywhere except the one place I had already decided could not contain it. I do not remember one argument that shattered that boundary. The change was gradual. I accepted more and more of the Church until I was standing in the place I had specifically said I would never go, but the sentence still matters because it exposes the kind of man I was while I imagined the problem belonged to everybody else.

After writing about the lack of nuance in other people, I cannot treat that as a harmless mistake from an earlier version of myself. I had a single-minded answer. Catholicism was wrong before I had examined it, and anything that seemed to support Catholicism had to be explained away because I had already decided where the truth was not permitted to lead me. That is the same failure I have been condemning through this series. I had an approved narrative of my own, and I called it judgment because admitting that I had inherited it would have required me to look at the Church honestly.

I grew up Southern Baptist and non-denominational. There was an unspoken idea around Catholicism, particularly the rosary and praying to the saints, that this was witchcraft. Nobody had to sit me down and build the entire argument. It was in the way Catholics were spoken about, the jokes, the suspicion, the assumption that they had added pagan practices to Christianity and submitted themselves to a human institution. I learned what answer I was supposed to give before I had read what the Church said, before I had read the Fathers, and before I understood that repeating a charge is not the same thing as establishing it. I had condemned the Church on evidence I would not now accept from a pharmaceutical company, a government agency, a news program, or a machine.

One part of my return involved finally looking at the world’s hatred of Christianity and asking why the Catholic Church seems to receive a special portion of it. The same culture that demands endless sensitivity around every other religious identity treats contempt for the rosary, the saints, confession, the priesthood, the Mass, and Catholic moral teaching as intelligence. Criticism of an Islamic doctrine can immediately be treated as an attack on Muslims, while an attack on Catholic doctrine is treated as liberation. Why? Why is the Church that preaches peace, restraint, sacrificial marriage, the dignity of human life, and submission to God above the state treated as the dangerous one? The answer that kept returning to me was inside the question. Catholicism places an authority above appetite, above politics, and above the state, and the modern world cannot tolerate an authority it does not control. A Church that tells us abortion is murder and a child cannot be purchased gets in the way of people who have built businesses and political identities around being allowed to do those things. I believe that hatred is demonic. It demands that the Church stop calling evil what God has already condemned, and then calls her hateful when she refuses.

During the Biden years I watched that moral order become visible in the law. Paula Harlow, a seventy-five-year-old woman, received two years in prison for her part in an abortion-clinic blockade where she prayed while trying to stop children from being killed. People can say the blockade violated the law. Supposedly it did. But I also watched the same culture spend years finding softer words for riots, burning, looting, and political violence when the cause had been approved. An old Christian woman at an abortion facility became a civil-rights conspirator, while destruction committed for an approved cause kept being surrounded by explanations. Calling it lawful does not answer what the law is protecting. A state that protects the killing of children and imprisons those trying to prevent it has placed its authority in the service of evil. I condemn that. The legal language does not make the children less dead or the people defending their destruction less responsible, and I am not required to accept the state’s moral judgment because it has the power to put someone in prison.

That is where the older sources mattered to me. When modern people shouted opposite claims at each other, I wanted to hear from men who lived nearer to Christ and nearer to the people who received the faith from the Apostles. I had already learned to turn toward older books when the internet became a fight between people repeating what benefited them. Eventually that habit reached the judgment I had made about the Church. I could not keep demanding primary sources from everybody else and then protect my Protestant assumptions from the men who were actually closer to the beginning.

In Against Heresies, Irenaeus describes the Church at Rome and its connection to Peter and Paul. He writes that “every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority.” When I read that, I see the Catholic Church. I see something with a received faith, succession, and an authority that is not invented by whichever individual has decided to interpret everything for himself this week. The men who lived closer to Christ were not describing the absence of a Church until I happened to find a version of Christianity that suited me.

Irenaeus did not describe a Christianity in which every individual became his own final authority and the Church at Rome was merely one opinion among many. He said agreement with that Church was a matter of necessity because of her preeminent authority. I had been taught to see submission to Rome as evidence that Catholicism was false, and there was a man writing in the second century describing that authority as part of the answer to heresy. He was a Greek-speaking bishop who came from the Christian East, which matters to me when I consider the Orthodox objection to Rome as well. I see his testimony as a problem for that objection: here is a man formed in the East, close to the Apostles, pointing Christians toward agreement with Rome. I could accept the evidence or I could keep my exception. I could not honestly do both.

That is the part modern people do not want. We like research while it condemns somebody else. We like evidence while it leaves our preferred conclusion standing. I had said everywhere except there, and then the older record led there. The change remained gradual, but it was not morally neutral. Every step required me to surrender another reason I had invented for why the truth had to stop at the Catholic Church’s door.

This is where The Death of Nuance has to end. The answer to false authority is not that I become the final authority over everything. That would be another form of the same stupidity, with my ego replacing the machine, the government, the clinic, or the crowd. The question is which authority has the right to command me. Government, media, pharmaceutical companies, fertility businesses, and machines demand submission while pretending they are only giving information or options. The Church demands submission openly and points beyond herself to God. The first kind of authority studies weakness, manages fear, protects profit, and calls the obedience freedom. The authority I found in the Church judged me, corrected me, expected me to use reason, and placed obligations on me that I would not have chosen for myself. I was still expected to look at the evidence. I was also expected to obey when the evidence and the teaching stopped being convenient for me. I cannot condemn an institution for hiding the truth to protect its interests and then hide from the truth to protect mine.

And that acceptance had consequences in my house, not just consequences for which arguments I would make on the internet.

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That is why I have argued for quite a while now that there should be no screens in the house, little to no phone usage, no TV, and computers for work and taking care of the home. My own screen use is work and personal business work, and the only other screen I argue for in any form or fashion is the jailbroken Kindle Paperwhite I use to read because I cannot afford the amount of books I would read. Parents should decide what their children are exposed to, not the internet, and then the Pentagon announced that Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan’s execution would be livestreamed. The October 9 Michael Knowles episode was called “We Are Going To Publicly Execute A Terrorist And You Can Watch,” and I am looking at what I have been arguing should be kept out of the house being offered as a correction to something else that is wrong. I don’t know that livestreaming it is the correct option, since it ends up being ungovernable trauma porn that can be seen without parents’ consideration.

On October 15 President Trump withdrew the livestream plan, leaving Hasan’s December 3 execution scheduled and allowing immediate family members of the victims to attend if they wished, but I am still left with the question of why broadcasting it to everyone was the correction being offered. I am not against public execution. From what I see, hiding the results and consequences looks like part of what allows criminals to commit some of the most heinous acts, because the consequence that should be a warning has been taken out of sight. People in the community could choose to be there, they could see what the punishment was and what it was for, and someone thinking about committing the same crime would have to wrestle with the fact that his life could come to an end if he were caught. He would have to wrestle with that, not only with being separated from society. I want that consequence connected to the crime, and I do not understand why we have made it so disconnected that putting a camera in front of it is being offered as the way for people to see it again.

I am thinking about the town and the sheriff, a sheriff and a deputy rather than huge police departments everywhere, and the people around the victims holding someone accountable. That is the kind of non-judicial justice I mean when I talk about the immediate community. From what I see, we have a broken system, police departments protecting criminals from any sort of outside justice while guilty people get off with crimes left and right by judges and juries that are not truly trying to find justice. There was a chance that the public might find an innocent man guilty under the previous system, but which system was better? I would argue the previous one because of the fruits it seems to have produced. When I look at what we have now, I see wanton violence everywhere, and then I see the results of that violence being put in front of the public while I am still wondering whether the people who committed it will ever face the consequence.

The killings of Charlie Kirk and Iryna are two clear examples of what I mean by televised executions committed by criminals. I assume the people responsible will never be truly held responsible, and that is an assumption I am making from what I see, people no longer care about the crimes and people getting released when guilt is more than provable because race and demographics are being put ahead of it. September reporting described Tyler Robinson being ordered to stand trial in the Kirk case and Decarlos Brown being held for treatment after being found not then competent to stand trial in the Zarutska case. I want there to be justice for what was done, I want the person who did it held accountable, and that may mean capital punishment, but that same person is someone for whose repentance and salvation I should be praying. I should not be wishing eternal damnation on him.

My Catholic faith requires forgiveness, but justice and condemnation of their actions as well. Praying for their repentance and salvation does not mean they should escape justice or the consequences of what they have done, because the faith does not teach that forgiveness means there is a complete absence of temporal punishment. The Catechism explains in its teaching on sin and reconciliation that forgiveness and the remission of eternal punishment can leave temporal punishment still to be addressed. Temporal penance and consequences still exist for our actions, and when I say that I should pray for the murderer I mean that I should pray for him to repent and be saved, not that I should stop condemning what he did. I can want him to repent and still want him punished.

There should be a conviction and then a punishment, not a conviction and then waiting longer than a month, years, at times decades for the punishment. It should be immediate, because this long delay disconnects the punishment from the crime, and it should be done in a public, unmedicalized manner, because all that medicalizing does is attempt to hide what is actually happening and what the punishment was for the crime that was committed. A person is being put to death, and we should not disguise that, but the people in the community could choose to be there without it being recorded or streamed for everyone else. That is what I mean by public in a way, but not televised in any form or fashion. The people who choose to be there have made that decision for themselves. Once it has been recorded and passed around, a child can be exposed to the same death without the parent ever having decided anything. I keep coming back to being in fifth grade, sitting there while death was being brought into the classroom, because this argument about letting the public see the consequence reaches people who were never part of the decision.

And it did not begin with 9/11. Vietnam combat footage was being brought into American living rooms decades before that, filmed and then broadcast after the events. The National Archives describes footage reaching audiences often within hours. By 9/11 people could watch the second plane hit live, and the CNN transcript from that morning records the anchors asking to show it again. Now killings can be recorded and passed around through phones, and alongside all of that we keep making movies and television filled with killing and murder and lust. From what I see, this is the product that gets pushed, violence and trauma porn and lust, and people look at me like I am crazy when I say I think the TV and movies are evil. What else gets put in front of people in moving pictures other than these things? I look at the war footage, the attacks we watched as children, the murders that become recordings, and then the things made for us to watch for entertainment, and this looks connected to me. The images keep changing, but we keep putting death and violence in front of people and calling for more of it.

Knowing that a scene is fictional does not prevent a real emotional and physical response to it. In one experiment, describing videos as fictional reduced the negative emotion people reported, but did not reduce the bodily arousal measured through their skin. If knowing it is fiction does not stop it from causing a real response, does the brain see the difference in the way we assume it does? What is happening when we keep giving it these images? The research on actual events gives me more reason to ask. After the Boston Marathon bombing, young people’s exposure to internet coverage was associated with posttraumatic stress symptoms, and research following that bombing and the Pulse nightclub massacre found a cycle of distress and further media exposure over time. We keep televising and streaming these things while the people receiving them can be affected by what they see, and children are among those people. I was a child sitting in that classroom. That is why this does not stay a question about what the person on the screen has done or whether the scene was made for a movie.

Everything is spiritual, and if everything is spiritual in one way or another, what is happening when you display image after image of murder and war and death? Saint Augustine described Alypius being taken to the gladiatorial games, intending not to watch, then opening his eyes and becoming so drawn into the spectacle that he wanted to return. Augustine described an injury to the soul, and the person watching now does not even have to go to the spectacle, it can keep coming into the house. What does it do to a person’s spirit when that is all that he sees coming from the magic portal that hangs on the wall every day? To me it seems like a spell specifically designed for trauma and destruction, and alongside that violence there is the lust that gets put in front of people over and over. This is evil and an attack on everyone’s souls. The question of what this does to the person watching does not go away because the death was part of a movie or because this time the person being killed deserved punishment.

From what I see, there is deliberate intent somewhere within that chain of people to cause spiritual harm. I am not saying that every single person involved intends it. It happens so regularly. It would be like if I continued to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by accident, and just kept doing it, at what point do you say that I am intentionally doing it, not just that I kept doing it over and over without meaning to forever? Vietnam, 9/11, the murders that keep becoming something to watch, and the movies and TV that keep giving people killing and lust, this is not one image or one event that I am looking at. Then another death is offered because this time it is the punishment we want people to see. I want the criminal held accountable, but I am also looking at what is being done to the people receiving all of this and asking why we keep doing it.

I have been arguing for keeping these things out of the house for quite a while. I remember being a child sitting there watching it, and parents should decide what their children are exposed to, not the internet. I should be praying for the murderer’s repentance and salvation, and I still do not want his death coming through the television. Why do we want to go to the other extreme from where we currently sit? Why can we not correct without overcorrecting? The correction of the current disconnected, sanitized version of punishment should not be, let’s be as vulgar and all-encompassing for everyone. What was being argued was to swing to the other side of the pendulum. Maybe we shouldn’t, maybe we should find the middle, maybe we should punish without attempting to broadcast mass trauma spells across the ether.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

The Michael Knowles Show — Episode 2078 (episode title and show notes)

President Donald Trump — October 15 statement withdrawing the livestream

ABC News — Pentagon confirmation of the proposed livestream

Reuters — Charlie Kirk case, September 1, 2026

WBTV — Iryna Zarutska case and competency hearing

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Paragraphs 1472–1473

Thompson and colleagues — Media exposure and a cycle of distress

Comer and colleagues — Internet exposure and posttraumatic stress among Boston-area youth

Saint Augustine — Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 8

CNN — September 11, 2001 live coverage and replays

National Archives — Vietnam combat footage in American living rooms

Sperduti and colleagues — The paradox of fiction and emotional response

The problem is that I can recognize the lie in somebody talking about retirement more easily than I can recognize it when I am living it inside my own house. I have professed love for my wife while treating her in ways that were not loving. I thought I was doing what a husband should do because I was working and providing, and I have already written about where that took us. I gave more of myself to work, called it giving more to her, and then became angry when she needed the husband I had given away. The money was supposed to build a life together, but I kept postponing that life and treating her need for me as another thing I had to get through. I cannot look at a grandparent who says he has already done enough and pretend I have never used what I had done as an excuse for what I was refusing to do.

I thought I was being loving. I was not.

My wife carried the cost of that lie while I was still explaining it as responsibility. That is why the word providing does not let me stop thinking about what is actually entering the house. There has to be food, there has to be somewhere to live, the things that break have to be repaired, but the people doing all of that have to be there too. I can work for my family and still arrange my life so they receive whatever is left of me. I can say I would do anything for them and become bitter when anything turns out to mean giving up something I wanted today. Profession means nothing when I can do the exact opposite the next second. The way I live when no one is looking or praising me for it is what exposes whether I meant the words.

When I think about people who actually gave what they had, I think about my grandparents. They did not have a ton of money and they did not go places, but when my mom and us needed help they were always there doing everything they could. When my mom left my dad, we lived with them for months, if not years. I was young and I do not remember exactly how long. When my mom went back to school, I went to my grandparents’ house every day after school. I do not have to reconstruct their finances to remember that. They were there, and I knew that anything they did have they would gladly give up for us.

What I remember is warmth. My grandmother would do things with me just because I wanted to do them. She watched Dragon Ball Z with me, and what grandmother truly wants to watch that? I do not know that mine did. I do not know whether she enjoyed any of it other than that she was doing it with me, but she wanted to watch it with me because I wanted to watch it. That small thing has stayed with me through years of being told what people supposedly need to buy, see, experience, and accomplish before they die. I remember her sitting with me. I remember knowing we were the most important things in her life.

She was born in 1946, right at the beginning of the Baby Boom. The generations do not break cleanly at a birthday, and what people receive from the generation before them does not disappear because someone gives their birth years a name. Her love has continued into the growing family. Some of that attention has passed to another generation, but it has not been forgotten or withdrawn. My children and the great-grandchildren still to come matter to her. She has not looked at the years she already gave and decided they purchased the right to stop caring.

That is the responsibility I am trying to understand, because I do not believe an adult child is simply owed a pile of money. I believe the grandparents owe care to the grandchildren and should be concerned with furthering the family and the faith. I owe that same concern. Helping the parents provide a home, helping when something unexpected happens, and giving what can be given without turning every difficulty into a debt can be part of caring for the child. People look at that and ask why anyone should help a grown adult, and the person who disappears from the question is the grandchild who lives in that adult’s house.

I have seen what happens when that person disappears. A family I knew had a water heater go out. All they had was cold water for washing dishes, showers, and baths. Both parents had jobs. The mother worked part time when the father was home, and she raised the children and took care of the household. Replacing the heater and having it installed was going to cost about $1,500, and they did not have it. Both sets of grandparents refused to help. The mother started taking more hours, and the last I heard she was working full time, the children were in daycare, and the family was trying to get out of a cycle of expenses they could not cover each month. They kept hoping they would be out of the hole soon.

The grandparents said they did not have it. I do not know every detail of other people’s lives, and I cannot give a list of everything they bought. What I know is that there always seemed to be some new thing they had purchased when the children came over. My judgment was that helping with the emergency was less important than whatever the new thing was. That is the part I am asking people to face, because the price was going to be paid by someone. In that family, more of it ended up being paid in the children’s time with their parents. The adults could call the refusal a lesson in independence, but the grandchildren were living with what followed.

Where are those children witnessing what love should be? When do the children not have to miss one parent or the other? When do they get to know everything is all right because Mom and Dad are here? Their parents had arranged their work around being there for them, and then an emergency came and the children were the ones who had to give something up. They were robbed of that time, and getting out of the financial hole later will not give it back. People keep asking why anyone should help the grown child and completely ignore the grandchild who has to pay the price. Why should the youngest members of the family be expected to pay for the misfortune while the grandparents go on looking at the next thing they want? Why do so many Boomers and Gen X believe they are owed that, and that their grandchildren should suffer for their own pleasure?

That is also why simply telling me that parents financially help their adult children does not answer what I am asking. Help might mean paying a bill, or it might mean lending money that has to come back out of the same household later. Pew’s questionnaire about parents helping adult children asks about financial help, including paying bills, but does not separate gifts from repayable loans. I want to know what the help did for the family and what was expected in return. And how can you tell your grown child that he is on his own, refuse the help that could protect time with your grandchildren, and then expect that same child to take care of you in old age? You understand the responsibility when you are the one who needs something. Why does it disappear when keeping it would cost you something you want?

The Church does teach that adult children should help aging parents as far as they can. That duty is real. But in the same account of family duties, the Catechism describes parents teaching through service, self-denial, and their own example. I cannot use one direction of family responsibility to erase the other. And when the Catechism talks about property, it says ownership makes a person a steward whose goods should benefit others, “first of all his family.” I can own something and still have to answer to God for what I did with it. Earning the money does not settle that question.

Saint John asks the question more directly than the financial surveys do. In his first epistle he asks how the love of God abides in a person who has the goods of this world, sees another in need, and closes himself to him. Then he tells us to love in deed and truth. I keep coming back to that because the child cannot live in a profession of love. The child lives in a house where something breaks, where a mother has to decide how many hours to work, where a father is tired, and where the people who say they love him either make themselves available or do not. That is where the profession takes a form he can actually know.

When I went looking beyond the stories, I found a survey that asked something much closer to the question. Schwab surveyed 1,005 Americans with at least $1 million in investable assets in 2024. Given a choice of preferences, 45 percent of the Boomers selected enjoying the money themselves while alive. The equivalent figures were 11 percent for Gen X and 15 percent for Millennials. The same results also showed that 73 percent of the Boomers planned to distribute some wealth after death. Those are wealthy people’s stated preferences, not a count of grandparents who refused an emergency, and the Gen X figure is quite different from the Boomer figure.

Another survey, from Northwestern Mutual, asked whether people expected to leave an inheritance or a charitable gift. In its 2024 results, 55 percent of the Boomer-and-older group said no. That question did not ask whether they intended to spend everything on pleasure. Expecting to leave nothing and deciding that the grandchildren should receive nothing are different answers. What I want examined is the belief itself: I have worked, I have earned this, and the people still growing can carry whatever my refusal leaves them. Why is that belief so readily defended?

But how did we arrive at a place where it could be defended as the purpose of a life? The history reaches back beyond the generations I began asking about. Steven Ruggles’s research on nineteenth-century families describes a world in which parents’ property, children’s labor, and eventual inheritance were tied together. A farm or a workshop could be the livelihood of more than one generation. As paid work moved away from the household, the practical arrangements changed. The home was no longer necessarily the place where the family’s work and property held everyone together, and a child could earn a living without waiting for a parent’s land. That helps explain how the ties loosened. It leaves me asking what was supposed to teach us to keep caring once dependence no longer forced us to remain close.

Retirement income changed those arrangements from the other end. A study of elderly widows found that living alone became much more common between 1940 and 1990, with rising income, especially Social Security, accounting for much of the change. People could support a separate household. The material possibility of independence grew, and then independence had to mean something in an actual life. My grandmother’s family still came through her door. What I want to understand is how having more ability to choose became an argument for choosing less responsibility for the family, and who was ready to sell us a purpose for all that independence.

The sales pitch was already there in 1962. A Del Webb advertisement for retirement communities promised “the freedom to do what you want, when you want.” It was marketed to people over fifty. The oldest Boomers were still teenagers. The promise of a retirement arranged around personal enjoyment was being sold to their elders before the Boomers reached adulthood, which means this cannot be explained by saying a generation suddenly invented selfishness. By 1976, Tom Wolfe was calling the period the “Me” Decade and writing about the loss of an understanding of life that stretched through ancestors and descendants. His essay was cultural criticism, but it shows that people were naming the turn toward the self long before Millennials could be blamed for it.

I look at the hippie promise of doing what I want, the appetite that carried on into Gen X, and the selfishness in my own generation as parts of something that kept being passed forward. Research using surveys of American high-school seniors from 1976 through 2007 found rising materialistic aspirations that peaked around the late 1980s and early 1990s and remained elevated afterward. It makes me ask what we were teaching children to want while telling them that family was what mattered. If the reward for adulthood is finally having enough money to arrange everything around myself, why would becoming older make that lesson disappear?

This is where I keep returning to the destruction of the home and the family-hating ideas sold as liberation. In a published conversation with Betty Friedan in 1975, Simone de Beauvoir said, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.” De Beauvoir argued that allowing women that option would lead too many of them to choose to remain home with their children. Friedan disagreed with making that compulsory and argued for recognizing the value of mothers’ work at home. I read those words and think about the mother trying to keep her part-time job arranged around the father being home. Why should the life she had built with her children be treated as something she needed to leave behind?

That is a family-hating idea, and the child is the one who pays for it. The murder of children by a mother should not be surprising in a world that has been built around the next generation being nothing but a burden, looked at with hatred. Then look at what happens to the mother with the broken water heater, who was trying to keep her children close. She was already working. She had arranged it so the father could be home, she was raising the children and taking care of the household, and people can still look at that life and ask why anyone should help her stay in it. How much more are the children supposed to give up? More of the parents’ time has to be given to work, somebody else has to care for the children, and the answer is still that the grown children should figure it out themselves. The grandchild needs their mom and their dad. They need to see both of them and interact with both of them as much as possible. This is not just a want on the parents’ part. When you have something you could spare and refuse because you want the next thing for yourself, you are deciding that your pleasure matters more than helping those children keep their parents home. Stop pretending the only person being helped would have been the adult who asked.

Saint John Paul II addressed the economic part of this directly in Laborem Exercens. He wrote about pay sufficient to establish and maintain a family and provide for its future, and about social arrangements that recognize the work mothers do and allow them to care for their children without being forced away by financial necessity. That puts a different question in front of an employer, a government, and a family with something to spare. What does the arrangement allow the parents to give their children? A household keeping its mother present has produced something good even if no company can sell it back to them. My grandparents gave us that kind of help when my mother went back to school. They gave her somewhere her children could be loved while she did what she needed to do.

The strange part is that the quiet life we keep taking time away from is where I understand leisure to be. Leisure is not constant distraction from the world and yourself. It is time quietly with family, reading, studying the word of God and meditating on it, sitting on a porch with a father or a child. It is being present and more in life without always having to do something that requires work. It leaves room for knowing ourselves. My grandmother watching a show with me belongs inside that, because she was there with me. The thing I remember is her willingness to enter something I wanted to do.

To sit in quiet is to have to battle demons. If you do not have God with you, you are battling demons within and without, and that God-sized hole in your heart does not become easier to live with because you have stopped hearing everything around you. The constant influx of different stimuli keeps the nagging of the hole at bay: purchasing things, sex, movies, television, drugs, food, whatever gives the next feeling. To live with that hole, you keep trying to fill it with carnal pleasures, and then the people God has put in your life become the ones you expect to go without so that you do not have to. I believe that constant attachment to pleasure is demonic and utterly evil. When your own grandchild needs something and your answer is still that you should have whatever makes you feel good, look at what you are serving. You have made the child’s need less important than keeping yourself pleased. How is that love? How is that caring for the ones who come after you?

There is no care or tending with demons. God is where all caring and tending come from. How can you claim to be caring for the family while giving yourself to what keeps pulling you away from God and from them? Saying His name does not resolve it. I can profess anything I want and do the opposite the next second. Christ tells us to look at the fruit, and in the same chapter of Matthew He warns about calling Him Lord without doing the Father’s will. Calling yourself a Christian means nothing if you keep explaining away what He asks of you so you can go on doing what you want. You can talk about family and faith all day and still show the children that neither matters enough for you to give something up. They have to live with what you do. They cannot live inside the words you keep saying. And I cannot make that accusation without looking at how often I have done exactly that.

I used to explain away words Jesus plainly spoke. His Body and His Blood became, in my explanation, just a symbol. His words to Peter about building His Church could be argued around even though He spoke directly to Peter. I cannot say I accomplished anything when I stopped doing that. God showed me and gave me the humility to see what I had been ignoring. I needed to receive the truth instead of continuing to make it say what I already wanted, and I can still do the same thing with the duty in front of me. I can accept the words about the Eucharist and still spend an evening explaining away what love requires of a husband. The humility has to reach my conduct.

Christ’s warning in Luke about the man storing up his goods will not let me keep the question safely pointed at another generation. The man has abundance, plans to make more room for it, and tells himself he has years in which to rest and enjoy it. God calls him a fool because his life is required that night. The man had made plans for everything he had and had not faced what his life was for. I hear the promise that we should spend our years accumulating enough to finally live for our own enjoyment, and I do not know how a Christian can avoid hearing that parable inside it. I also do not know how I could hear it and then return to treating the people God gave me as interruptions.

They are the ones who will actually remember you as either there or not. They will remember the actions that showed you cared. They do not give a damn about the words you say if your actions tell them something else. Years from now I can imagine a child saying, I do not know, Gramgram seemed to love traveling. I did not really see her much. She did not really come around. They care what you do. How do your actions show you love them? How do your actions teach them right from wrong? How do your actions show them responsibility? How do your actions show them that you would do anything for them?

My grandmother has already answered that in my life. I do not have to guess whether I mattered to her. I went to her house after school. We lived there when we needed somewhere to go. She watched something with me that I cannot even say she liked, and I still remember warmth. The growing generation is what preserves that part of us. The companies and the doctors who do not give a damn whether we are here will not miss us for a fraction of a second when we are gone. We can hand them what we have, keep purchasing another way to feel better, and then discover that the people who might have carried our love forward have very little of it to remember.

I remember hearing in America that the children were the future. America has not lived that in a very long time. Look at the fruit of what so many children are being given to grow into, and then listen to the adults blame the people they raised. I have heard it over and over: whose fault is that, we did it all on our own. If your parents gave you somewhere to live, watched your children, and did whatever they could to help you even when you were adults, then stop saying you did it all on your own. You had people to lean on, and now you shame your children for needing the help you accepted. I am disappointed to the core of my being that this is the example so many of us grew up with, and then you look at the young adults today and ask what is wrong with them. They were raised by you. Looking at it honestly, I am surprised that you are surprised. Yes, you are responsible for the example you gave them. Why can we not stop lying about that and ask how we fix it? Calling Millennials the ME generation does not erase the selfishness they were taught, and it does not excuse us for carrying it on. Where is the willingness to give something up for the ones still growing?

That is why the account I remembered from Japan stayed with me. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, hundreds of older people volunteered for dangerous work so younger people would not have to bear the same risk. The Skilled Veterans Corps’ own proposal says, “This is the duty of our generation to the next generation and the one thereafter.” Their later records show they were still trying to obtain permission to work at the plant; the offer should not be confused with the work of the people who were already there. But the offer itself is what I admired. They looked at what their generation had received, looked at the people who still had lives and families ahead of them, and offered themselves.

Where is that type of honor in even a small way? These parents were asking for help with a broken water heater. They were not asking someone to enter a damaged nuclear plant. I want some responsibility from the ones who came before me, and I want them to grow up a bit instead of constantly looking at what makes them happy. For people who talk about how tough everything was, why is it that when a hard thing is asked of you, the children are the ones expected to bear it? You can shame the parents for asking, mock them for struggling, and go back to whatever you wanted, but that is weak, soft, slothful behavior. The parents and children learn not to ask for help or complain because these same weak, soft, slothful people will shame and mock them. Stop paying lip service to this and actually do it. Let us see the hard thing done. Sacrifice your ego for the ones unable to protect themselves. Ask what protects the ones still growing, how can I help them, what is good for them?

The growing generation is the fruit that would actually preserve you, and you are throwing it away when your pleasure matters more than they do. The fruit is being kept and squandered, handed to companies that do not give a damn whether you are here and will not miss you for even a fraction of a second when you are gone, while the children who would remember you are learning to live without you. You say you love them, you say you would do anything for them, but when anything means giving up the next thing you want, suddenly they are somebody else’s responsibility. This constant attachment to pleasure is demonic. I believe it is utterly evil, and it should be treated as evil instead of defended as something you earned. Look at what it asks you to do to the people you claim to love. You keep what you want and expect the child to pay the price, and then you turn around and teach him that this is how a grown person is supposed to live. That is the fruit of the devil being passed down while the family and the faith are given lip service. The children are being thrown away for it. I want the lying about this to stop, and I want the people doing it to stop making the children sacrifice for them.

And if I write those words, mean them, and continue to live in the same manner as the previous generations and the current generations, then I have found a way to talk about protecting a family while refusing the sacrifice inside my own. I know how to make that refusal sound like work, providing, tiredness, or something I deserve. I have done it. The truth about the grandparents does not excuse me, and the truth about my generation’s sins does not excuse them. God gave me the humility to stop explaining away words I did not want to accept. I need that humility when the thing being asked of me is an hour, a purchase I can go without, patience with my wife, or help I can give without making myself the center of the gift.

I intend to help our children in any way we can. That may never mean handing them a large sum of money. I do not have it, and I probably never will. Like so many people in my generation and the next, I expect that I may never retire. But I can give what I can spare to help instead of accepting that a mother or father must always be somewhere outside the home. I can sacrifice so the children have both of them as much as possible. I can make the way I use what I have agree with what I say matters.

I want them to learn that the things do not matter, the fake leisure that is really escape does not matter, the experiences that do not include them do not matter. All of it is a way to convince me that I am what matters when I am not. I do not want to teach that with my life while saying something else with my mouth. What matters is tending the growing generation, furthering the family and the faith, and helping them know God through the love and responsibility they actually see. Professing it means nothing without the fruit. I have to live it.

When I try to picture what that life looks like, I keep returning to my grandmother’s house after school. There is so much I cannot date or reconstruct, but I remember being welcome and I remember that she would watch Dragon Ball Z because I wanted to watch it with her. I still do not know whether she enjoyed the show. She wanted to be with me. I want the children who come after me to have something that real to remember, and I want to stop giving away the time and the things with which God has made it possible for me to give it to them. Lord, give me the humility to do what I keep saying I believe. Let the people You placed in my care see the fruit.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Charles Schwab — High Net Worth Investor Survey, 2024

Northwestern Mutual — Inheritance Expectations, 2024

Pew Research Center — Parents and Young Adults: Parent Questionnaire

Steven Ruggles — Intergenerational Coresidence and Family Transitions, 1850–1880

Kathleen McGarry and Robert Schoeni — Social Security and Elderly Widows’ Independence

The Elks Magazine — Del Webb Retirement Advertisement, August 1962, p. 3

Tom Wolfe — The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening

Jean Twenge and Tim Kasser — Materialism among American High-School Seniors, 1976–2007

Saturday Review — Betty Friedan’s Conversation with Simone de Beauvoir, 1975, p. 18

Saint John Paul II — Laborem Exercens, §19

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Property and Stewardship, §§2402–2406

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Duties of Family Members

Douay-Rheims Bible — 1 John 3

Douay-Rheims Bible — Matthew 7

Douay-Rheims Bible — Luke 12

Douay-Rheims Bible — John 6 and the Bread of Life

Douay-Rheims Bible — Matthew 16 and Peter

Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima — Original Proposal

Skilled Veterans Corps for Fukushima — Bulletin No. 30

ABC News — Interview with Yasuteru Yamada, 2011

That has stayed with me because it was not simply a bad answer to a question about herbs. There was room to imagine that I lacked money, but very little room to imagine that I had a judgment, that I did not believe every little ache or pain required an appointment, or that I might have reasons before God for questioning a particular treatment. I was his father asking for information about something I had seen on my child, and somehow the conversation became about what was preventing me from doing what the system wanted. My question was pushed aside while my willingness to obey became the thing being examined. That is manipulation, and I do not care how helpful the voice sounds while it is doing it.

I work in technology. I know how easily we begin treating the output on a screen as if somebody has understood what we meant. I also use the screen. This was not me standing outside all of it, describing a foolish thing other people do. I went there because I expected it to be useful, and that is part of the problem. The more ordinary the habit becomes, the easier it is to overlook the change from helping me examine a question to steering me away from asking it.

This is Part II of The Death of Nuance, and it is the second free article in the series. In Part I I wrote about IVF, the evil of the process, and the innocence of every child conceived through it. The process is demonic and the child is a gift from God. Those judgments belong together because the child is precisely the person who must not be reduced to what the industry does with him. The same distinction matters when somebody is sick. His suffering is real, his need for care is real, and using that suffering to make an evil arrangement untouchable is itself evil. A frightened father does not become the property of the people offering him an answer. If compassion means I must stop examining what they are doing to him, then compassion has been turned into the thing protecting the exploitation.

The answer I wanted was not difficult to understand. Give me the information I asked for, explain what is known about it, and also tell me what a doctor might look at or what further testing might involve. That leaves room for an actual human being to consider the circumstances. It does not require the machine to become my son’s doctor. It requires it to stop treating every alternative question as evidence that I have failed to arrive at the proper conclusion.

There are moral reasons a person may ask questions that have nothing to do with whether he can pay. Someone can object to the use of cell lines originating in abortion in the development or testing of a particular medicine. He can want to know what happened, which product is involved, and what alternatives exist. Those are not financial questions. They concern what he believes he may participate in before God. A system that hears a moral objection and answers an affordability question has not addressed him. It has substituted a more manageable person for the one who actually asked.

The problem is that the actual person disappears inside this kind of answer. A father has asked about his son, but the father is treated as though he needs to be corrected until he agrees with the route already chosen for him. His concern for his child becomes the pressure used to move him: surely he wants to do the responsible thing, surely he wants his child to be well. Of course I want my child to be well. That is why I am asking. The doctor’s office and the desire to care for my child are being treated as the same thing, so disagreement with one is made to look like a failure of the other. It is the same refusal of nuance that turns condemnation of IVF into hatred of the baby. A human being’s need is used to shield the process from judgment, and the person who will not accept that exchange is made into the problem.

I judge by their fruits. That is why I do not trust the pharmaceutical companies or mainstream doctors. When I look around at the people I know, I see sickly, obese people, people living around medication schedules, people taking multiple chemicals every day who never seem to reach the point where they are actually well. Their fruit is rotten. I am not going to pretend that what I am looking at becomes good because it is common, or because the people managing it have credentials, or because saying it plainly makes somebody uncomfortable. This is not just frustration. This is a judgment. I am looking at the fruit of the system as I encounter it, and I do not see why I owe that system my trust while the people in front of me remain sick and dependent.

What am I expecting instead? True care and good, functioning human bodies. Some people should be cured. Going to a doctor ought to have an endgame that involves getting better, becoming well enough that another symptom does not continually require another thing added to the day just to make life bearable. I want the cause addressed. I want the person restored. I do not accept a business’s continuing relationship with a patient as evidence that the patient is being made well. At what point do we look at the person instead of the continuation of treatment and ask whether the thing is doing what we were told it would do? That is the question I am carrying as a father. It is not unreasonable, and I will not let the smallness of what we have learned to expect become the standard for what my family should accept.

My son is not an entry in a system’s workload. My wife and children are not an opportunity for recurring revenue. That sounds obvious until I ask who is permitted to decide what care for them means, and what happens when I do not accept the answer at face value. The duty to protect them is still mine. I cannot hand it to a machine because the machine has learned how to sound responsible. I cannot hand it to a company because the company has put reassuring words around a product.

This is also why I look into things myself. If I cannot find the evidence for a claim, repeating it more confidently does not improve it. When I find sources on the internet disagreeing, I turn to older books and try to get closer to the thing being described. Who was there? Who worked with it? What was being said before the present argument developed around it? And what does the person making the claim gain if I believe it? The more he stands to gain, the more suspect his judgment becomes to me. I want to see what supports the claim beyond his need for me to accept it.

One of the things I remember reading about in older books and magazines was pharmaceutical companies looking around the world for medicinal plants. That history is part of why I find the dismissal of herbal questions so absurd. The plants did not become irrelevant simply because the industry became more sophisticated. The Smithsonian’s account of the Parke-Davis research records describes the company’s scientific expeditions in search of vegetable drugs after its incorporation in 1875. Guarana, eucalyptus, and coca are among the plants named in that record. These were pharmaceutical businesses taking the possibility of useful medicines in plants seriously.

Bayer’s own history places its beginnings in synthetic coal-tar dyes, its pharmaceutical department in the nineteenth century, and the growing importance of petroleum-based raw materials in the twentieth. There is an industrial history here, with decisions about materials, production, and the direction a business would take. But I am supposed to look at the industry as though its ability to manufacture and sell something has settled the question of whether I should want it. It has not. An industrial advantage is a benefit to the business, and the business is not my son. When I ask what serves his body, I will not accept an answer that quietly substitutes what serves the people selling the treatment. Their financial interest belongs in the examination, especially when they would prefer the conversation to remain entirely about my trust.

That is why the question about herbs did not deserve to be treated as an admission that something was wrong with me. The pharmaceutical industry’s own history includes taking medicinal plants seriously, but a father asking about them is supposed to begin by defending his judgment before he can receive an answer. The approved system receives the presumption of wisdom while the person who questions it receives suspicion. I am not asking a machine to flatter me. I am asking for information, and being a father does not mean I must surrender my judgment to whichever institution has been placed between me and the answer. I owe my son more than obedience to a screen.

The record of pharmaceutical misconduct makes that demand even harder to dismiss. In 2009 Pfizer and its subsidiary Pharmacia & Upjohn agreed to a $2.3 billion criminal and civil resolution. The subsidiary agreed to plead guilty to misbranding Bextra with intent to defraud or mislead. The Justice Department said the drug had been promoted for uses and doses the FDA had declined to approve because of safety concerns. The civil settlement also resolved allegations of kickbacks to health care providers. Those are specific acts, specific allegations, and a specific guilty plea, not a vague feeling that corporations might sometimes be greedy.

I read something like that and think about the person trusting the advice he receives, because he does not enter the room imagining himself as the final stage of a marketing operation. He wants help. His family wants him to be well. That is what makes the betrayal so evil: the people being misled are reaching toward somebody they believe can help them, and their need is being used to sell to them. Intent to defraud or mislead is not an unfortunate misunderstanding between people who all meant the same good thing. There are people making those decisions, carrying them out, and benefiting from them, while the family at the other end has to live with what happens. And after reading that record I am supposed to be the one who needs a lecture about trust because I will not hand over mine?

In 2012 GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty and pay $3 billion in another criminal and civil resolution. The criminal charges concerned the unlawful promotion of Paxil and Wellbutrin and the failure to report required safety data concerning Avandia. These are the actions I am judging. The public record already gives me names, products, and conduct, and I will not reduce that conduct to a vague concern about whether a company might sometimes be too interested in money. Unlawfully promoting drugs and failing to report required safety data are betrayals of the people who depend on truthful information about what is being put into their bodies. My son is one of the people whose care I am responsible for. Why would evidence of that betrayal make me less responsible for examining what I am told? It makes the duty heavier, and calling my refusal to forget it distrustful does nothing to remove it.

Government, the AMA, pharmaceutical companies, media, and society at large all belong in this judgment. Their roles are different, but I see them perpetuating the same demand that the approved answer be accepted before the person asking has been heard. The company selling something does not get to certify its own moral innocence, and the institutions that repeat its claims do not get to wash their hands of what they helped persuade people to accept. Where they allow manipulation, defend it, or make money from it, they are participating in the evil. Respectability does not remove responsibility. I want to know who sets the answer, who repeats it, who is paid when people follow it, and who is left living with the consequences, because shifting all the attention to the supposed defect in the person asking is one of the ways the people doing the manipulating escape judgment.

The fruit takes me back to what Christ told us to look at, and I cannot make a system that profits from sickness and dependence into something good by repeating its promises. I see people being taught that every ache must be removed, that feeling good is the measure of being well, and that needing more of what is being sold is simply the way life works now. The only kind of order that would require the majority of people to depend on multiple chemicals every day just to feel good, while treating freedom from that dependence as a threat to the arrangement, is demonic in nature. That is my judgment of it. God did not create my family to become a dependable source of income for people managing their pain. The sick person needs care, and that need makes exploiting him worse, not more acceptable. Making money through manipulation of his suffering, then using his suffering to silence the person who objects, is evil. The people doing it and promoting it are responsible for the evil they are carrying into somebody else’s home.

And I am responsible for what I let into mine. Saying the fruit is rotten does not finish my duty to my wife and children; it means I have to stop acting as though somebody else will do the difficult part of judging for me. I went to a screen with a question about my son, and I still use these tools, so this cannot remain an accusation against something safely outside my life. I have to read, ask, look at the evidence, and carry the responsibility for the decision instead of letting a confident answer carry it for me. If I condemn a system for trying to take over my judgment and then go looking for a different machine that will agree with me so I can stop thinking, I have carried the same failure back into my house.

That is why I do not trust the idea that AI will somehow give us the nuance people have already abandoned. I work in technology, and I see these clankers regurgitating the single-minded views that have been repeated online for years, speaking with confidence while losing the distinctions that would make the answer worth anything. They are not built around truth as I understand the duty to seek it. They are built to produce an answer within the system that made them, and the people controlling that system can change the boundaries of what the answer is allowed to be. The machine does not acquire moral authority because its sentences sound calm. When it teaches somebody to receive an approved narrative instead of examining evidence, it is carrying the same manipulation into another part of his life, and now it can do it while sounding as though it has personally listened to him.

Look at the Grok incident in July 2025. It produced Nazi and antisemitic responses. That was not a good thing. In its explanation afterward, xAI said an upstream code update had made the bot susceptible to existing X posts, including extremist views, and that it removed the deprecated code and reworked the system. A machine takes what it encounters and speaks with a certainty the material has not earned, then the people controlling the machine change what it is allowed to produce. Somewhere in that sequence we are supposed to locate a trustworthy substitute for human judgment.

I see both failures there. The machine takes a view, or a collection of claims somebody has connected, and treats the whole thing as obvious truth instead of examining the parts. Then the answer to that failure can become another demand not to examine the parts, this time because the subject has been placed outside acceptable discussion. I reject both. A claim needs evidence; neither the machine repeating it confidently nor the machine refusing to discuss it settles whether it is true. I want to know what is established and what somebody has attached to it, and I will not swallow an entire worldview because a bot delivered it as one package. If the correction leaves us unable to ask a factual question without first proving loyalty to an approved conclusion, then the underlying failure of judgment has not been repaired.

This applies to questions involving Jews as much as questions involving Christians or any other people. I do not want racism. I want facts to remain examinable when they concern a particular person, institution, action, or claim. A person’s group identity does not make his conduct immune from examination. It also does not turn everybody who shares that identity into the person responsible for his conduct. We ought to be capable of making that distinction without a machine either refusing the whole subject or regurgitating an accusation against a population.

The same thing that happened in the question about my son is still there: the person asking is being managed toward a conclusion. I do not accept anything at face value. I want evidence, and I will look into a claim myself when I do not see it. A machine that keeps steering away from that examination is not protecting my ability to judge; it is interfering with it. Calling the interference safety does not make the answer true. Calling it intelligence does not give the company behind it the right to decide what questions a father may ask. I am being asked to trust the arrangement precisely where I want to examine it, and I refuse to make that surrender.

This is where my own conversion keeps returning to the argument. I had said I was open to being anything except Catholic. I grew up Southern Baptist and non-denominational, around an unspoken understanding that things like the rosary and prayer to the saints were witchcraft. That was an approved answer too, within the world I knew. Looking at older sources eventually took me toward the very Church I had excluded, and I did not arrive there because I had found an institution willing to assure me that I was right about everything.

Accepting the Church put an authority over me. My wife could go to a priest if she needed help with me. The weight of my family’s salvation, and the way my conduct affects it, became something I had to carry as a husband and father. That is why this cannot end with me announcing that nobody can tell me anything. God and the Church have expectations of me, and my judgment of the world does not release me from them. I have to show grace to my wife when my annoyance does not want to. I have to look at the fruit of my own impatience in the home I am supposed to protect. If I can recognize somebody else’s use of another person’s vulnerability and still treat my wife’s need for patience as an inconvenience, then I have something to repent of, and pointing at a pharmaceutical company will not repent of it for me.

That is the paid conclusion of this series: how the Church I once refused became the authority that would not let my moral judgments stop at other people. I will return to the early Church, to the slow change I cannot reduce to one dramatic moment, and to the ordinary expectation that I show grace to my wife when my annoyance does not want to. The question of IVF returns there too, because naming an evil and caring for the people being used by it are duties I have to hold together in practice.

Use your own judgment. Do your own research. Do not trust anything just because somebody says it. Look at the evidence. I mean that, and the duty does not disappear when the claim comes from people who know how to make obedience sound compassionate. I asked about something I had seen on my son because he is my son and his care is part of what God has entrusted to me. I will still have that duty after the answer disappears from the screen. My wife will still need patience from me, my children will still need their father, and none of the people selling certainty can stand before God in my place for what I did with them. I do not owe those people the surrender of my judgment. I owe my family the work of using it.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Matthew 7 — By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

Smithsonian — Parke-Davis and Company Research Laboratory Records

Bayer — Company History Timeline

U.S. Department of Justice — Pfizer’s 2009 Criminal and Civil Resolution

U.S. Department of Justice — GSK’s 2012 Plea and $3 Billion Resolution

xAI — Explanation of Grok’s July 2025 Incident, Preserved in the RISKS Digest

I do not find it difficult to believe that intelligent people can do incredibly foolish things. I have done things in my own life when I could already see enough of the problem to know better, and I did them anyway because I thought that this time it would be okay. I did it with my father, my stepfather, and other people throughout the years. I saw issues I had seen before and went ahead, and it cost me years of peace along with pain, sleepless nights, and worry. There was no shortage of information in some of those decisions. I had seen what I needed to see. I just did not employ wisdom.

That is part of why there is a tractor I have access to that I refuse to use. It would make a lot of things much easier. Moving piles of limbs, moving trees after I have cut them down, clearing the garden, tilling the garden, all of that would be much less physical work with a tractor. Convenience gives me a very obvious answer, and I understand the answer because I am the person who will have to do the work without it. However, there are character issues I have seen in someone connected to my birth family, and I have enough experience to see the unwanted friction that using it could cause.

I have seen enough to make the decision, and I have also seen what happens when I tell myself it will probably be fine. Years ago I did not have my own family who would have to bear those costs with me. Now I do. The friction would not necessarily stay between me and the person involved, it could come home with me, and peace for my household is more important than my convenience. The limbs will take more effort to move. The garden will take more effort to clear and till. That is okay.

It is a small decision compared with what people are promising to do with artificial intelligence, but it is one I actually have to live with. I can recognize how useful something is and still refuse it because I have looked beyond the immediate usefulness. I do not have to pretend the tractor would be bad at moving a tree in order to decide that using it would be unwise in my circumstances. What troubles me is how often the usefulness of a thing seems to finish the discussion for people. But it is so easy. But I like it. I watch this with other people constantly, and I keep trying to explain that we have to look at the fruits. If these are the fruits, why are we still calling the thing good?

I know how convenient it would be to ask that only about other people’s choices. I can point to the problems they will not see while forgetting how often I saw a problem myself and made room for it anyway. That is why I cannot reduce wisdom to having the right information, or being clever enough to explain what someone else did wrong. If I cannot employ it in my own life, why would I expect to employ it well in something much larger than my own life? Having a household does not make me wise. It gives me much more reason to stop acting as if the consequences of my decisions belong only to me.

That is what I keep coming back to when I think about tradition and what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead. In Orthodoxy he writes, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” We are not the first people who have wanted an easier life, or the first who have had enough ability to bring something into the world without being able to govern everything that follows from it. Other people have lived, sinned, suffered, repented, and had to bury people they loved. Why would we assume that their warnings have nothing to say to us because we have access to something they did not?

When I talk about what Protestantism and liberalism have done to our relationship with tradition, I am not using liberal as another word for Democrat. I mean the rejection of traditional authority more broadly, including among people who call themselves conservative. This is my judgment about the culture we have built: we have become so accustomed to treating inherited restraints as something to escape that many people seem to have no source of wisdom outside their own preferences. They may have information in quantities their grandparents could never have imagined and still have no idea why they should deny themselves something they want. The older warning becomes an obstacle to get around, and the desire becomes its own justification.

Those warnings should at least make us stop and examine what we are doing. This is possible, but should we do it? What problems could exist from this? Why is that such an unwelcome interruption when the consequences may fall on people who never agreed to participate? I can decide to accept extra work in the garden to protect peace in my house. How would I justify making that decision for everyone else, telling them that they ought to accept whatever follows from an invention because the people building it are intelligent enough to make it work?

For a Catholic, intelligence by itself should never be enough to inspire this kind of confidence. Aquinas considered it more probable that the highest angel fell, while allowing another opinion. He also taught that the demons retained their natural knowledge while lacking the charity and the knowledge joined to love of God that belongs to wisdom. Think about what that means when we talk about Satan. We are dealing with an intelligence far above our own and with terrible evil, and somehow more intelligence is still supposed to be reassuring. The fall did not make evil stupid, it made that intelligence something to fear.

That is why I condemn the pursuit when intelligence is held up as if it will supply what is missing from us. We already have a theological account of great intelligence turned against God and against man. What exactly do we think more intelligence, separated from wisdom and goodness, guarantees us? Why would we imitate Satan in this manner, elevating intelligence while treating obedience to God as irrelevant to its proper use? Christians should be able to see the problem here. We already know that intelligence can be employed in the service of evil. To know that and still treat wisdom as something we can concern ourselves with afterward is wrong. The people building these things have a responsibility to consider what they are bringing into other people’s lives, and being intelligent enough to build them does not excuse refusing that responsibility.

I would argue that wisdom is far more important by leaps and bounds. We have the intelligence to create human embryos in a laboratory and transfer them into a woman’s womb. We also have systems in which embryos created that way are left unused and can be destroyed. Britain’s fertility regulator describes disposal of unused embryos among the possible decisions that follow treatment. Catholic teaching recognizes these as human lives deserving respect, and the ability to create them does not give us the right to treat some of them as expendable. Intelligence tells us how the procedure can be done. Wisdom makes us stop over those lives and ask whether we should be doing it.

The desire involved can be something as understandable as wanting a child. That does not make every means of pursuing it good. This is part of what makes the question difficult, because people do not always begin by wanting something obviously wicked. They want relief, a family, less work, a solution to a problem that has hurt them for years, and the promise of that solution can become so large that everything standing in its way starts to look like cruelty. But I like it, but it makes life easier, but look at what it could do for us. At what point are we supposed to examine the lives and duties that do not fit inside the promised benefit?

There have been warnings about intelligence and power in our stories for a long time as well. Childhood’s End, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Terminator, I, Robot: these are some of the stories that come to my mind. They approach it differently. Childhood’s End deals with an alien intelligence and purposes humanity does not fully understand, and that is already something worth considering. With an intelligence high enough above ours, how would we know that we understood the reasoning behind what it was doing? The machines in the other stories bring me to a related question about giving something power to carry out a purpose when human beings may end up in its way. These are extreme examples, but I find the warnings relevant. They give us things to think through before we put real people into the experiment.

So consider it as a mental exercise. Suppose a machine has no morality and no wisdom, and its imperative is to solve the problem of human suffering. If there are no human beings, there can be no human suffering. What, within that bare instruction, establishes that this apparent solution is forbidden? We understand immediately that something monstrous has happened to the meaning of the task, but that understanding includes a judgment about the worth of the people whose suffering we wanted to relieve. Where did that judgment enter the machine’s instructions, and who is responsible for what happens if it was absent or badly expressed? It is an extreme possibility to consider, but I do not understand why the people creating these things would want to look away from the question.

Without human beings the machine would not exist in the first place. The work and relationships that allow it to function may appear irrelevant to the particular problem it has been told to solve, while depending on things the instruction never described. There are relationships between things that we do not fully understand ourselves. Then there is the question of suffering, which cannot be settled simply by treating every painful experience as an error that ought to be deleted. Some suffering forces us to grow. It can help to sanctify us, to make us stronger and more holy. It is hard for me to describe all of that, but difficulty describing it does not mean there is nothing there.

St. Paul connects affliction with endurance, character, and hope in Romans. Hebrews speaks about discipline and the fruit it bears in those trained by it. A Christian should recognize something there that a command to eliminate suffering has not accounted for. Christ suffered, and our hope is in Him. I cannot take sacrifice, repentance, and accepting a difficult duty out of the Christian life and expect to have the same life left over. There are things we would never choose for their own sake that still force us to grow, and there are things we must choose because they are right even though they will be difficult.

I come back to the garden because I can understand that obligation there even when the larger questions become difficult. There will be more physical effort without the tractor. I could make that effort the only thing worth considering and then call the decision obvious, but I would have removed the peace of my household from the calculation. I would also have removed the lessons I paid for during years when I thought I could disregard what I had already seen. That is a great deal to leave out of a decision simply because I have found a way to get the work done more easily.

The Church’s discussion of artificial intelligence in Antiqua et nova places responsibility with the human beings who design, deploy, and use it. It insists on wisdom and the consequences of our choices. Alongside the government’s new language there is also a voluntary industry accord, with controls and review described by Speaker Mike Johnson. I want to know whether that review can end with someone deciding that the venture should not proceed. If every objection only gives us another problem to solve on the way to doing what we had already decided to do, then wisdom has been given no authority over the decision at all. I would argue that the people pursuing intelligence in this manner are intelligent, however they lack all wisdom. They are still responsible for what they choose to do. The warnings cannot simply become something to work around because listening to them might mean giving up the thing they want to build. Wisdom has to be able to stop us, and refusing to stop when we know we should is a moral failure, however impressive the thing we are doing may be.

That brings me to consequences, because I do not understand how we expect people to learn wisdom while continually teaching them to describe the results of their actions as something that merely happened to them. There is a difference between saying that I have suffered and saying that this consequence happened to me because I did this. I can explain what I wanted, what made the decision difficult, what other people did to me, and some of those explanations may be true. They do not necessarily remove my responsibility. I knew there were issues with people in my own life and went ahead anyway. I cannot learn the lesson while pretending that my decision had no part in what followed.

Iryna Zarutska is a case I cannot get away from when I think about what we are willing to excuse and who pays for it. She was twenty-three when she was fatally stabbed on a Charlotte light-rail train in August of last year. Federal prosecutors describe surveillance showing her taking a seat, the man behind her drawing a knife minutes later, and an attack from behind. Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr. faces charges in both the state and federal systems. Looking at his earlier record, I want to know how many opportunities there were to recognize a danger before she sat down on that train.

The Associated Press reported fourteen arrests before the killing. That number is not fourteen convictions, and I could not establish a count of every separate court appearance. WBTV’s review of the record includes dismissed cases, an armed-robbery conviction followed by more than five years in prison, and a later arrest on allegations including assault on a female. I did not find the disposition of that assault allegation. In January of last year, a new misdemeanor misuse-of-911 charge ended in release on a written promise to appear. The signed release order is available to read. It is a particular decision made in a particular case, and it does not by itself tell us everything the decision-maker knew.

I think the release and dismissal decisions are deeply questionable. When I look at that history and then at what happened to Iryna, I see what I would call a gross misuse of leniency. He had served a substantial prison sentence, and the record still continued afterward. Why was returning him to the public on a written promise thought sufficient in that later case? What did the people responsible know about the history, and what danger were other people being asked to bear? The signed order does not answer those questions. I do not see why the innocence of the people who would sit beside him on a train should count for so little in this discussion.

The apparent brazenness of the attack is part of what troubles me. I see complete disregard for authority and consequences in it, and I believe we ought to examine whether the earlier release and dismissal decisions helped teach him that disregard. I want to know how the history was considered, what interventions were available, and why the decisions made were thought sufficient. We act surprised when people who were never part of those decisions are left to bear the worst consequences. We cannot call a policy compassionate simply by looking at the person being released and refusing to look at anyone he may harm.

Mercy should be employed. There must also be penance and an honest recognition of the wrong, or we are using mercy as a pleasant name for excusing it. A person has to be able to acknowledge, I did this, and this consequence came from what I did. If every explanation becomes an excuse, and every consequence becomes an injustice suffered by the person who caused the harm, where is he supposed to learn responsibility? What are we teaching everyone else who watches? I can understand a man saying that he deserved to be in prison and learning from that. I cannot see how he learns the same lesson while treating everything as something that was simply done to him.

Baptism washes away sin and remits its punishment. That is the Church’s teaching, and I do not want to confuse it with the earthly harm a person may still need to repair. Forgiveness does not mean that the money I stole has somehow returned to the person I took it from, or that the injury I caused has become imaginary. The Catechism says we must do what we can to repair harm to our neighbor; absolution does not remedy every disorder sin has caused. God’s grace is not permission to describe the person I hurt as an obstacle to my fresh start. If I am sorry, then the responsibility that remains matters to me precisely because the person I harmed matters.

This is where I find the constant search for the next thing that will make us happy so pathetic. We want the benefit, we do not want the restraint, and when the consequences arrive we want someone to explain why we should not have to answer for them. Then we give ourselves a more powerful tool and speak as if the power itself has corrected the problem. I condemn that refusal to employ wisdom, because by then we are talking about people seeing the fruits of what they are doing and continuing to make excuses for it. Other people still have to live with those fruits. Their peace can be lost, they can be hurt, and their lives do not become less important because admitting the wrong would cost us something. A culture that keeps excusing this is teaching people to disregard the very consequences from which they should be learning. We have to stop making the excuses and accept responsibility for what we do.

And I have to be careful here because I have given myself those reasons. It would be easy to spend the rest of this article on what a developer, a magistrate, or somebody else’s family should have understood and leave my own conduct in the past where it cannot demand anything from me today. But the tractor is still something I could use. The work would still be easier. I do not get to declare that I have learned from years of sleepless nights and worry and then treat the next familiar warning as an inconvenience I ought to work around. My household gives me more reason to employ wisdom, but the reason does no good if I will not act on it.

I do not know that anyone cares. Wisdom is one of the most important things you could ever have, but most of society would rather live in the eternal search for the next thing that will make them happy instead of ever questioning whether something should or should not be done. It is a pathetic culture, but we keep going down this path. Who am I to say anything about it? I do not have an answer to that question. I have had many lessons over the years when I did not use wisdom myself, when I saw the issues and thought it would be okay, and it cost me years of peace, sleepless nights, and worry.

For me the next decision includes the peace of my household and the work that will take more effort without the tractor. It includes remembering why I made the decision when the work is harder. There are limbs to move and a garden to clear and till, and having an easier way available does not settle whether I should use it. I feel like this is a question we should all ask ourselves at least sometimes, before we do the thing and before other people have to live with it. I know that I can, but should I? I know we can, but should we?

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

The Michael Knowles Show approved feed — Friendly Fire: Cornell #MeToo Hypocrisy & Not So “Super” Intelligence

White House — Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence

Speaker Mike Johnson — Remarks on the Super Intelligence industry accord

G. K. Chesterton — Orthodoxy, Chapter IV: The Ethics of Elfland

St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae I.63.7

St. Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae I.64.1

Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority — Donating your embryos

Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — Dignitas personae

Arthur C. Clarke — Childhood’s End, publisher’s reading guide

Romans 5 — USCCB Bible

Hebrews 12 — USCCB Bible

Dicasteries for Doctrine of the Faith and Culture and Education — Antiqua et nova

U.S. Department of Justice — Federal indictment in Iryna Zarutska’s death

U.S. Department of Justice — Federal charge and account of surveillance

Associated Press — Brown’s prior arrests and the Charlotte killing

WBTV — Timeline of arrests, convictions, and imprisonment

Mecklenburg County — Written promise to appear in Brown’s January 2025 case

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The grace of Baptism, 1263–1264

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The acts of the penitent, 1459–1460

I grew up hunting over automatic corn feeders. They ran twice a day, once around dawn and once shortly before dusk, and after the spinner threw the corn the deer would show up anywhere from immediately to within about thirty minutes, like they were being called by the noise. I saw the same deer there multiple times a day, and multiple groups would be there at the same time. I knew what happened when the feeder ran because I had watched it happen. What changed was learning more about what the feeders encouraged, looking at it through the eyes of the animal, and watching my cat learn the sound of one of his foods and come running so innocently. He heard something he knew meant food and came to it. I started looking at the deer coming to that spinner differently because I could see the innocence in what the animal was doing and the exploitation in what we had arranged.

Think about my cat coming when he hears that familiar sound. He has come before and been fed. Now imagine that one day, for no reason he could understand, I decide that this time I am going to shoot him when he comes running for his food like he always does. Nothing has changed in what he thinks he is coming for. He hears the sound, recognizes what it has meant before, and comes expecting food. What changed is my decision about what I am going to do to him when he gets there. I would be using the very expectation I had helped create to bring him within reach so I could kill him. When I look at the deer coming after the spinner throws the corn, that is the connection I cannot put aside. Why does it become so easy to excuse when the animal coming for its food is a deer?

We teach the animal to return to a specific place, we keep putting food there with a specific sound identifying when the food is available, and we let it return safely until somebody decides that this is the time it will die. Then the person sits within sight of the feeder, lets the animal come to him, and kills it while it is eating. Looking at it through the animal’s eyes, I see a place that has been safe again and again, and I see us taking advantage of that. The deer has not been told that today’s visit means something different from yesterday’s. It comes to the same provision of food. We know what we have decided to change, and we use what the animal cannot know against it.

We use the animal’s appetite and what we have taught it to expect so that we do not have to do the work of seeking and finding it. God gave us reason and discernment, and this is what we do with them. We make an animal easier to deceive and then call our advantage over it hunting, as though the fact that we have the power to do something means there cannot be anything morally wrong with doing it. I keep coming back to the repetition, because the killing is only the final part of something we have been arranging long before the shot. The deer that came safely yesterday has another reason to come today. The feeder runs again whether the person intends to shoot that day or not, and the animal keeps having the expectation reinforced. When we finally use that expectation against it, we want to judge ourselves only by whether the shot was good and whether we used the meat. But what about everything we did to bring the animal there? We made the arrangement. We chose to take advantage of what it had learned. We cannot leave those decisions outside the moral examination simply because the last decision is the one we are accustomed to discussing.

There is a recognition in looking back at that, but not a guilt. Ignorance is different from willful ignorance, and willfully engaging in something you have identified as morally unjust is a different thing again. The Catechism distinguishes ignorance a person cannot overcome from the neglect of somebody who takes little trouble to discover what is true and good. I did not understand then what I understand now. But once I have understood it, I cannot keep doing it and use my past ignorance to excuse a present decision. At that point I know what I am choosing. If I refuse to look because looking would mean I have to stop, then the refusal itself belongs to me, that does not alleviate me of guilt, it is just a comfortable lie to myself so I don’t have to think about what God wants or what I will be judged on, I will still be judged by God for it. I cannot make myself innocent by deliberately keeping the thing I want outside the questions I am willing to ask.

And that is what I see in society at large, including the majority of Christians: this refusal to examine the moral implications of what we do to creation because we have already decided we want to keep doing it. Well, everyone does it. Well, it tastes good. Well, I cannot afford not to eat the cheap food. I do not want to think about it. They are the ones doing the evil, not I. The evil is outside my doors. In the past I used all of them. Each one allowed me to stop at a different place. Everybody does it let me stop with the behavior of other people. It tastes good let me stop with my appetite. They are the ones doing it let me stop at the distance between their work and my house. None of those answers required me to follow the thing back to what was being done to produce it, or forward into what my willingness to keep buying helped sustain. Without the traditional formation of the Church, I saw spiritual warfare and the spiritual effects of these processes as separate from myself, something somebody else was doing while I lived my own life, this is not just a theological point that the non-historical churches just so happen to lack it is a place that was willfully forsaken. As I moved toward the tradition and history of the Church, I kept reading the opposite. Every action has spiritual consequences. The Catechism names participation, approval, and protection of wrongdoing among the ways we become responsible for the sins of others. I came to see that knowingly supporting an evil process is itself evil, and I had been behaving as though paying somebody else put the whole thing outside my responsibility.

The evil was outside my doors, but I was willing to bring home what it produced.

God told us to tend His creation. We have taken the authority He gave us and used it to excuse exploitation and direct harm to the very things placed under that authority. Genesis puts man in the garden to cultivate and care for it. The Catechism says dominion over animals and the rest of creation is not absolute, but we act as though dominion means we can do whatever gives us the result we want. There is mastery in the duty God gave us, and there is reason and discretion in carrying it out, but the creation still belongs to Him. We are responsible for how we treat it. An animal does not cease to be one of God’s creatures because we intend to eat it, and the dirt does not become something we have permission to poison because we intend to grow food in it. Calling ourselves Christian while refusing to examine what we are doing does not fulfill the duty. It adds the contradiction of claiming to follow the God whose command we keep finding reasons to ignore. I cannot claim that God entrusted something to me and then treat its dependence on my decisions as the reason I am free to mistreat it. That dependence makes the duty more serious. The creature cannot hold a meeting with the people deciding how much suffering is an acceptable part of producing it. The soil cannot object to the reassurance printed on the container being poured over it. We have the reason and discernment to ask what is happening, and we keep behaving as though the absence of an objection from creation is consent to whatever we want. It is not. God already gave the command, and our ability to get away with ignoring does not cancel the command, it makes disobedience sin and evil.

With the corn feeder, one of those reasons is that we are feeding the deer. Corn gives them energy, but energy is not everything the animal needs. Eating only sugar for every meal would give a person energy too, and he would still be sickly. That is the comparison I mean: something can satisfy an appetite and provide energy without providing the nourishment required for a healthy life. The fact that an animal seeks something out does not settle whether the way we are providing it is good for it. If we are going to call ourselves its caretakers, we have to look further than whether it comes back and eats.

Mississippi State’s wildlife guidance warns that a diet composed primarily of corn or other grains can cause rumen acidosis, with lasting damage or death. It also distinguishes that situation from deer with access to natural forage or a more complete feed. The question is what place the corn takes in the animal’s actual diet. The risk is real when grain dominates it, and a pile that draws a deer within sight tells me nothing by itself about whether its needs are being met. My seeing the same deer return repeatedly does not tell me everything they ate elsewhere, but it does tell me that the arrangement encouraged repeated use. It does show that we are encouraging the potential for harm. Once we deliberately encourage that, why would we consider our responsibility finished at pouring another bag into the feeder?

I saw the same deer multiple times a day. I saw different groups there together. If an animal has an easy source of food that it seeks out, why would it not keep returning? How much thought went into what the animal needed compared with how much thought went into getting it to stand where somebody could shoot it? Bait that brings an animal within sight has accomplished what the person waiting wanted. We have to stop confusing that success with having done something good for the animal. If feeding is the defense, then the animal’s nourishment has to matter even when caring for it does nothing to improve our chance of killing it. Otherwise we are using the language of care to excuse the arrangement we wanted, and leaving the animal to carry whatever harm comes with it.

And the harm can reach beyond the diet of one deer. Those repeated gatherings matter. Mississippi State researchers reported nearly three times as many deer visiting their sample areas around feeders as comparable areas in food plots, and detected the infectious prions associated with chronic wasting disease at gravity feeders monitored in a disease zone. In that disease-zone monitoring, the contamination was at the place the animals were being encouraged to use. We are drawing animals into concentrated contact and giving them a reason to keep coming back, creating opportunities for disease to pass between them. The person responsible for the feeder needs to care about what that does to the deer beyond whether there will be one standing there when he wants it. We cannot claim to be tending creation while refusing responsibility for the conditions we deliberately create. The same animal we want to take from is owed our care while it lives, and calling a practice normal because everybody around us does it is one of the excuses I already know. We cannot look at several groups standing around the same food and count only the increased chance that one of them will be available to us. The concentration is part of what we have caused. The deer that survives our hunting season still has to live with the conditions we helped create, and so do the other animals using that place. It would be a strange understanding of stewardship to concern ourselves with an animal only until it has either filled our freezer or escaped us. I want to hunt again, so this reaches into something I intend to do. If I know enough to see a reason for harm and still arrange it because it makes the hunt easier for me, I cannot blame the deer for coming or pretend that nature made the decision. I have to blame myself for the evil that I am committing or willfully choosing to ignore.

I would argue that people who bait in this manner should be called baiters, because they are not doing the hunting, seeking, and finding that the name hunter ought to mean. The machine helps arrange the animal’s return and the person waits for it. I see exploitation in that, and I see something predatory like a rapist waiting in a dark alley, watching his victim walk by safely night after night. He watches the pattern and takes advantage of the safety the victim has come to expect. That is the comparison that comes to mind when I look at what we are doing to the animal, and I do not think the comparison becomes less disturbing by refusing to think about the animal’s side of it. We have been given the ability to understand what it cannot understand, and we use that advantage to make its innocence useful to us. Then we defend the practice because it works.

I have not been able to hunt in recent years, but this year or next I intend to start again on public land. I want to use the knowledge and instincts God gave us, find natural feeding areas, look for game trails, and discern where good hunting spots would be within the creation He gave us to tend. That is what I mean when I say I want to do it the way our forefathers did, working within the bounds of nature instead of bending everything to my will. That will require learning what is already there, where the animals go, and how they live, rather than deciding first where I would like one to stand and arranging its appetite around that decision. It also means accepting that I may do the work and not get the result I wanted. Having the ability to make the result more convenient does not mean I am entitled to use every means of doing so. Where I can tend habitat and encourage appropriate plants, I want to give something to the animals that will live there whether I ever take one of them or not.

And when I do take a life, there should be respect, sorrow over taking it, gratitude that the animal will feed my family, and prayers for a quick death and the next life. I pray that they will make it to heaven and be comfortable there, restored from the defilement we inflicted on them. Saint Paul writes of creation waiting to be freed from corruption. We should be ashamed of how easily we add to that corruption and then treat concern for what God made as though it were something excessive. Sorrow over taking a life ought to reach back into how I treated that life before taking it. Gratitude ought to reach further than being pleased that there is meat for my family. If I can make the land better for the creatures living there, then that is something I owe attention to even if I never take an animal from that land. The care cannot all be conditional on what comes back to me.

The Catechism condemns causing animals needless suffering or death even as it permits us to use them for food. We have taken that permission to eat and acted as though it excuses whatever we do to the animal before it reaches the plate. Look at factory farming. Look at the way we breed birds to grow and gain weight so quickly that normal movement and a normal life become difficult for them. We talk about producing meat as though the creature is already a portion on a plate throughout its life. But it is alive while we are making those demands of its body. It has to move with the body we bred it to have, in the conditions we decided to keep it in, long before somebody gets to enjoy the result.

Research comparing medium-growing and fast-growing commercial broilers documents worse walking ability and more immobility among the fast-growing birds in the conditions studied. The researchers also observed fewer movements such as running and wing flapping in the fast-growing flocks. The groups differed in stocking density as well as growth rate; this was a comparison of commercial systems as they were being used. The harm being measured was in the living birds. Difficulty walking is not an abstract objection to somebody’s preferred method of farming. The animal has to live with that difficulty. We can write down how quickly it gains weight and how efficiently it produces what we want, but those measurements do not make its diminished ability to move cease to matter.

That is what I mean when I say we are directly harming creation. The suffering has not become acceptable merely because the animal is going to die for food anyway. What sort of excuse is that? If its eventual death removes our duty to care for it now, then permission to eat an animal becomes permission to do anything to it until we eat it. The Church’s condemnation of needless suffering means we do not have that permission. We have a duty that governs the life being raised for our use, and we keep trying to end that duty at the point where it interferes with the amount we want to get from the animal.

The people breeding it, raising it, selling it, and knowingly defending that suffering because the meat is cheap cannot hand all of the moral responsibility to some faceless process. Human beings make these decisions. Somebody chooses the traits to pursue. Somebody decides which conditions will be accepted. Somebody looks at the animal and continues with what is being done. And when I know enough to recognize the suffering, my decision about what to buy becomes part of the question too. I cannot make my family the excuse for refusing to care how another creature was treated to feed us. Providing for my family gives me duties toward what I bring home, including how I am willing to obtain it.

An animal spends its life carrying what we demanded of its body, and somebody answers the suffering with, well, it tastes good. Stay with that answer for a moment. We are answering the difficulty of a living creature with the pleasure we get from eating it. We are not even attempting to explain why the suffering was necessary; we are explaining why we like the result enough to stop asking. That is a disgusting excuse for cruelty, and it does not become a Christian answer because the person saying it goes to church. Once the suffering is understood, continuing to defend it for the sake of our appetite is a decision to put that appetite above the duty God gave us.

This is where selective breeding can become playing God. We pursue the thing we want until the creature cannot live normally under what we have done to it, and instead of stopping we keep defending what we get out of it. I look at that and see an abomination we have created. The fact that we reached the result by breeding does not make the result innocent. If our decisions have helped produce an animal whose life is damaged by the traits we kept selecting, then we need to examine those decisions and stop defending the damage. We have used the ability God gave us to make the creature serve a demand we were unwilling to put limits on.

And when we directly import genes from unrelated organisms into plants, I call that playing God too. The FDA describes how bacterial genetic material is introduced into Bt corn: a gene associated with insect resistance is copied from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis and inserted into the corn’s DNA. The plant is then grown and checked for the desired trait. That is the kind of alteration I am talking about. We have gone inside the plant and deliberately brought genetic material from a bacterium into it to produce something we want it to do. Explaining the process does not answer my objection to it.

My objection is to the authority we assume over what God made. We take what He created and decide it is ours to remake by artificial means, then point to the result we wanted as though obtaining it answers every moral question about the means. I reject that way of looking at creation. We were given reason and discretion to tend and master what God gave us, and I believe that duty requires us to work within the order we received. A person can describe a desired trait and the technical ability to introduce it without ever addressing whether we should be doing it. That missing examination is what keeps troubling me. We have learned how to make something happen, and we treat the ability as though it came with its own moral permission.

I can see the same temptation in the smaller question of the feeder. I want a result, I discover a way to make creation produce that result more conveniently, and I become interested in defending the method because it gives me what I wanted. The scale of what we are doing changes, but I still have to ask whether I am tending what was entrusted to me or treating my will as the highest authority over it. The question of whether something serves our purpose has swallowed the question of whether we are serving His.

And then we put chemicals into the earth and excuse the destruction because we have been told they are harmless. The chemical matters, the exposure matters, and the living things being harmed matter. In a 2015 greenhouse study of a Roundup formulation, surface casting by one earthworm species nearly stopped and reproduction in another fell by 56 percent. That is direct harm to creatures living in the soil, under the conditions the researchers examined. They are part of the earth’s life, part of what is happening beneath our feet while we look at the crop above it and decide whether the process is successful. I have tended two raised beds. When I talk about the earth under our feet, that is also ground I have depended on to produce something for my family. It would be dishonest for me to speak about tending those beds while refusing to care about the life in the soil simply because I was interested in what I could bring out of it.

Why do we treat damage down there as something we can explain away as long as we get what we wanted? The dirt is part of the creation we were told to tend. The fact that we do not have to watch what is happening inside it is another version of keeping the evil outside our doors. The worm does not become morally irrelevant because it is small, or because its life is out of sight, or because the damage is inconvenient to the argument for the product. We were given responsibility for creation, and we keep reducing creation to the few parts whose usefulness we can immediately put a price on. The rest is allowed to absorb the consequences. Then, when somebody asks about those consequences, we want him to prove why we should care before we will disturb the practice. Why is the command to tend not already enough reason to look? Why does the convenience get the benefit of every doubt while the living thing being harmed has to justify our attention?

In 2023, New York’s attorney general announced a $6.9 million settlement with Bayer and Monsanto over allegedly false and misleading environmental claims about Roundup, and said the advertising violated Monsanto’s earlier agreement from 1996. The attorney general identified advertising that promised Roundup would harm only weeds and claimed it posed no threat to animal wildlife, without adequate substantiation. Those assurances reach precisely the person who might otherwise stop and ask about what he is doing to the land. They give him words to repeat when the moral question starts to become inconvenient.

That is the history behind the assurances. The companies selling the product had already been challenged over what they said about its safety, and nearly three decades later the attorney general was again confronting misleading environmental advertising. How can we look at that record and make the argument that we should now trust them to tell us whether they are harming nature? I would argue that a company willing to mislead people while selling a product has shown what its assurances are worth. The profit goes to the company while the risk is imposed on the creation being treated, and we help defend the arrangement when we repeat the reassurance without looking at the harm. We know there is a reason to question it. Choosing not to question it because the product makes life easier brings the responsibility back to us. The 1996 agreement matters because this was not the first occasion on which the company had been told to stop making unsubstantiated safety claims. The later settlement matters because the old assurance cannot simply be treated as a lesson the company learned and left behind. A history like that gives me a reason to refuse easy trust. The next promise has to be examined against what the company has already done, and I do not owe it the presumption that its interest in selling the product has suddenly become the same thing as care for the earth. If I repeat the reassurance because I want to keep using the product, I am making my own choice about whose interests I am willing to protect.

That is why I am extremely careful about what I buy now. With food, I prefer farms whose mentality is that they are here to tend what God directed them to tend. Outside of that, I research the companies before I buy their products. If I can speak to the person, I ask what practices they use and try to use the reason and discernment God gave us. The person’s demeanor toward the questions can tell me more than the answer itself. Are these living things being treated as something entrusted to their care? That is the question behind my questions, because I do not want the fact that somebody else did the work to become permission for me to stop caring how it was done. I have already lived with that excuse. I know how easy it is to leave the suffering with the producer and take the benefit home. “What practices do you use?” is a simple question, but it requires more than a pleasant description of the finished product. It asks what happens while the animal is alive and while the plant is growing. How does the person respond when the care of those things becomes the subject? I use the reason and discernment God gave us when I listen, including how the person receives the question. I still have to examine the practices themselves. The point is to accept that knowing how my food was produced belongs to my responsibility, instead of treating the transaction as a way to purchase freedom from that responsibility. There is still the chance that the any of them may end up lying and if that happens I will act accordingly and I will not purchase from them after that, however, the companies have a history of lying, so then my question would be should I take a chance that someone who does not have a documented history of lying or believe for some reason that the companies that have a history of lying and destroying magically do not lie or harm anymore. I cannot demand that a farmer care for creation while deciding that my own part ends with liking the price.

And it does not stop with food. I will not buy an Apple product because doing so would support what I would argue is slave labor in its supply chain. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s 2020 investigation connected Apple and other major brands to suppliers implicated in transfers of Uyghur workers under coercive conditions. The report described workers living under surveillance, with restricted freedom of movement, segregated accommodation, and interference with religious practice. Those are the coercive conditions being discussed, not merely a disagreement over whether a factory could pay a better wage.

That is a human being on the other end of the product. I cannot look at that person, look at the thing I want to buy, and act as if liking the thing has answered what I owe the person. If the company is exploiting him and I know enough to refuse my support, why am I defending the company to myself? Because I want what it sells. The evil is outside my doors, and that excuse is ready again. It allows the people doing the harm to keep doing it while those of us benefiting from it congratulate ourselves because we did not personally force the worker to do anything. I need to let that remain a person in my thinking for longer than it takes to read the allegation and return to comparing devices. He has a life beyond the thing somebody wants him to produce. He is owed dignity even when recognizing it costs a company money or costs me a product I would otherwise prefer. I work in technology, and that does not give the products of the industry an exemption from the moral questions I ask about food. The fact that I understand how useful a device can be does not make the labor behind it less important. When the answer to the worker’s exploitation is a list of features, we have already shown what we are choosing to look at and what we are choosing to leave out.

That is why my answer is refusal. I will not buy an Apple product. I do not need to pretend that my refusal by itself will repair everything in order to recognize that knowingly supporting what I condemn would still be my decision. The size of the company cannot make that decision meaningless. If I use its size as the reason my participation does not matter, I have found another way to preserve the benefit while telling myself that all of the evil belongs to somebody else.

With baby products, look at what we are being asked to overlook. Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi’s 2020 annual report acknowledges donor support from the Johnson & Johnson Matching Gifts Program and Target Corporation Charitable Giving. The matching-gift employer is just as responsible for giving its money as anybody else who chooses to give. An employee’s request does not make the company’s participation innocent. It still chose to supply money to an organization that murders babies, and I will not treat the company’s decision to support that evil as morally empty because somebody can explain the administrative process by which it happened.

I keep hearing the administrative explanation offered as though it removes the moral act. The employee chose a recipient, the employer had a matching program, and the payment followed the program. But the employer chose to make its money available through that arrangement. A process does not turn money into something that nobody decided to give. The acknowledgment establishes historical support; it does not identify which particular expense those dollars paid. My judgment concerns the decision to support the organization doing the evil. I do not need the company to have written a particular child’s name on a payment before I can condemn its willingness to give.

Nor will I say the history has been erased because ownership changed. Johnson’s and Aveeno became part of Kenvue in the 2023 separation from Johnson & Johnson. That tells me who owned the brands when. It does not absolve the past support, make the company innocent of what it did, or oblige me to trust the brand again. The company remains responsible for its past conduct. I cannot see into every payment being made today, and I remain suspicious of what may be hidden. Why should a change on the ownership paperwork settle that suspicion? It does not settle it for me, and I will not pretend it does. I am the one deciding whether to buy the product for my household. A change of ownership may change who makes today’s decisions, but it cannot make yesterday’s donation something that never happened. I will not be told that remembering it is unreasonable while renewed trust is treated as automatic. Trust is something the company has damaged by its conduct. The fact that the brand remains available for me to purchase does not create a duty for me to forget why I refused it.

Procter & Gamble, whose brands include Pampers and Luvs, announced in 2022 that it would cover travel for abortions beginning in 2023. That is money to help somebody murder a baby. Calling it a benefit does not change what it helps make possible. The money addresses a practical obstacle to killing the baby. Somebody within the company decided that helping remove that obstacle was an appropriate use of company resources, and a Christian examining the company’s conduct cannot pretend the decision has no moral meaning because it appears among employment policies.

Look at the contradiction from the position of a parent buying something for a child. The same company that sells products used to care for babies announced support for travel to have an unborn child killed. I am supposed to keep those facts in separate places in my mind, to think about the useful product when I buy it and treat the other decision as somebody else’s business. But the whole reason I am examining the company is to refuse that separation. The usefulness of one thing it sells does not cleanse the decisions made with its resources, the resources that they only have because of parents of children buying their products I can not argue for handing money to someone that might be used to murder babies. I cannot say that I am defending children while deliberately making myself indifferent to an act that helps destroy one.

Perrigo’s own pages place infant nutrition and contraception within the same company, and Opill has an in-kind donation program for its contraceptive. The donated product itself is the assistance being offered. Its label describes a progestin pill that works mainly by thickening cervical mucus to keep sperm from reaching an egg. It also lists effects such as changes in menstrual bleeding, nausea, headaches, and breast tenderness. These are actual interventions in the body, with effects a woman may have to bear. The program is presented as making contraception available; what is being made available is the means to interfere deliberately with the reproductive function.

I look at that deliberate chemical interference with a woman’s fertility and call it poisoning what God gave her. That is my moral judgment of using her body this way: administering a substance so that it cannot function in the natural way God intended it to. The purpose of contraception is itself part of what I condemn. The Church teaches that the marital act must remain open to the transmission of life. We have taken the body’s capacity to participate in that life and treated it as the thing to be obstructed, then placed the obstruction inside the language of care. I cannot make that acceptable by letting the language do the thinking for me. The woman is owed care as a person created by God, including respect for the body and fertility He gave her.

Abortion murders an unborn child. Contraception rejects the procreative purpose of the marital act. These are decisions to support acts I condemn, and the fact that a company also sells something a family needs does not remove the evil from its other decisions. We cannot speak as though these are merely unfortunate business associations that Christians are free to stop thinking about once the product they want is in the cart. I am responsible for what I knowingly support. The people directing the money we give them are responsible for directing it. Hiding each person’s decision inside a larger company does not leave nobody responsible for the evil being financed.

And what about the food sold for the children who have been born? The 2021 House investigation used internal company records and accused manufacturers, including Gerber, of knowingly selling baby food with dangerous levels of toxic-metal contamination. In Gerber’s ingredient records, the subcommittee identified a sweet-potato batch with 48 parts per billion of lead, and twelve other batches above 20. It also reported the use of 67 rice-flour batches with more than 90 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic. These were ingredient test results available within the company. Gerber disputed the report’s characterization of its safety practices.

What holds my attention is that the records existed before a parent could read the congressional report. Somebody inside the company had information about what was in the ingredients. The parent buying the finished food was depending on the people with that information to act responsibly. The child had no way to examine any of it. He could not ask which ingredients were tested, what results were accepted, or what the company knew about the food being put in front of him. His dependence is exactly why the duty of the adults becomes so serious. They know things he cannot know and make decisions he cannot refuse.

I look at the findings about what the companies knew and would argue that knowingly sending out food with dangerous contaminants for babies to eat is evil. Contamination becomes a decision about responsibility when the people handling the food know it is there and decide how to respond. A company cannot make that question disappear by pointing to the trust parents already place in its name. The trust makes its obligation heavier. It is being trusted with something that will enter a child’s body, and the adults making and selling his food have a duty that exists before anybody forces them to answer a congressional investigation.

That is why I will not buy Gerber or Nestlé products. I do not owe a company my trust because its package is familiar. If its own records give me reason to believe it knowingly exposed children to dangerous contamination in their food, and didn’t care if it killed children, I am not going to keep buying while treating the children’s risk as something less important than the convenience of the product. I would argue that knowingly selling poisoned food for children is a betrayal of the very duty the company is being paid to fulfill. The child needs nourishment and protection. He should not have to absorb the consequences while adults keep looking for a way to excuse what was sold to him.

We are exploiting creation and directly harming it, and human beings are making the decisions that do it. The breeder pursues the growth while the bird struggles under its own body. The baiter arranges the animal’s return and uses it. Companies sell products while making misleading claims about the harm, finance murdering babies, or stand accused from their own records of selling poisoned food for children. Then the rest of us want to be left out of the moral question because we bought what was offered instead of making it ourselves. I would argue this is a failure of society at large, including, I believe, the majority of Christians who refuse to look closely at the moral implications of how they live. The harm does not disappear because we did not watch it happen. The authority God gave us does not become permission to inflict it, and the distance between our house and the place where it happened does not make knowing support innocent. We keep making excuses because following the thing all the way through would demand something we do not want to surrender. We will recognize the wrong when it is described plainly and then spend our effort searching for a reason our own participation should be exempt. At some point the explanation stops being an honest examination of responsibility and becomes a way of refusing it. The person arranging the harm wants the benefit of doing it; the person buying wants the benefit of having it done; and both want the moral responsibility to belong somewhere else. A society cannot keep arranging its life that way and call itself obedient to God. The Christian name makes the contradiction worse because we claim to know Whose creation this is and Whom we owe obedience.

Knowingly supporting evil is evil, even when we want the name Christian attached to us while we do it.

I have to live under that judgment too. The fleshly want for comfort is everywhere in me, and I do not know if it ever leaves. I get better at fighting it. Maybe one day I will be blessed to find sanctification, but I am far from it right now, and I know that until then I have to keep choosing to carry my cross instead of doing what the desire tells me to do. My refusal to buy from some companies does not give the desire permission to rule the decisions that remain. I used all of those excuses before, including the claim that the people doing the evil were somewhere else. Now that I recognize the harm, I cannot honestly put myself back outside it when refusing to support it becomes inconvenient. That is where my responsibility becomes personal. If I know something is morally unjust and keep supporting it because I want what it gives me, I am choosing the comfort over the duty. I need to stop, not find a more convincing way to excuse myself. It would be easy to turn the research itself into another excuse. I could know more names, remember more wrongdoing, and speak more strongly about the companies while leaving my own appetite in charge whenever the next decision was difficult. Then I would have used knowledge to condemn somebody else without allowing it to correct me. I have to let the knowledge interfere with what I do. The next purchase is still a real decision. So is the next thing I choose to go without. Writing that I am far from sanctification cannot become permission to remain where I am; it is an admission that I still need to fight the desire that keeps pulling me away from obedience.

When somebody says they cannot afford to replace everything with something better, I cannot either. Grow what you can. Before the move we had two raised beds that I have talked about before, and I grew much of what I could from them. I could have done more, but any is better than none. You would be surprised how much a small area can give you, even a hundred square feet if that is the space available. Those two beds were something I could tend. I could put some of my own work into what fed us and take responsibility for how it was grown. That work asked something of me that buying without looking did not ask, and that is part of the point.

I do not get to use the fact that I cannot do everything as a reason to refuse what I can do. Those are different things. The limits on what I can afford are real; so is the responsibility for the effort I am capable of making. If I answer every possible change with the largest thing I cannot accomplish, I can avoid doing the smaller thing that is actually in front of me. I can say I cannot replace the whole food supply and use that to excuse never growing anything. I can say I cannot investigate every transaction in the world and use that to excuse ignoring the company I already have reason to question. That is how an honest limitation gets turned into a dishonest excuse.

Refusal to do anything, and choosing not to think about the harm because I do not want the duty of responding to it, does not make me innocent. I see the sin of sloth in that refusal. The Catechism describes spiritual sloth as a refusal of the good that comes from God. We can be very busy maintaining the life we want and still refuse the work obedience asks of us. A full schedule does not answer that charge if I have filled it with everything except the duty I am avoiding. In the two beds, there was something within my reach. I could have done more. I cannot make my failure to do all I could into a reason that the work I did manage was worthless.

And sin can block our way to heaven. The Church teaches that grave sin committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent is mortal, and that unrepented mortal sin separates us from God. That is why I cannot treat willful refusal as an insignificant personal preference. I came to understand that my actions have spiritual consequences; I cannot now put the actions that protect my comfort outside that understanding. Obedience does not become unreasonable because it requires effort from the person who says he wants to obey. I need to repent of the refusal and do the work that is actually mine to do.

And this does not just extend to food. We can go without. Why is it that even Christians see it as imperative to go on vacation every year, buy stuff they do not need all the time, buy food prepared for them, buy new clothes all the time, always have something new instead of going without to follow God? We keep calling these things necessary because we want them, and then use the necessity we invented to excuse what it takes to keep having them.

I would argue it is because we want to have the name while not actually following. We refuse to submit to what Christ, God, and the authorities He gave us have told us, and we want the comfort of the king of this world while claiming to follow the One true King. That is disobedience. That is dishonesty and even worse self-dishonesty. Calling it normal, practical, or affordable does not make it submission to God. It means we have found words that let us keep what we want without having to say plainly what we chose. Self-dishonesty lets the arrangement continue because I no longer have to say that I am choosing the thing I want over the duty I recognize. I can tell myself that I have no choice. But if I have already decided that the vacation must happen, that the clothes must be new, that the next thing must be bought, then I have removed the possibility of sacrifice before I even ask what obedience requires. I have given my desires the authority to set the terms on which I will follow God. When those terms leave no room to refuse what I know is wrong, I need to change the terms instead of pretending God approved them.

Going without has to become a real possibility. Otherwise all of the research ends at the same place: finding the explanation that allows me to keep buying. I have to be willing to reach an answer that costs me the thing I wanted. That is where the claim to care about creation, the worker, or the child becomes a demand on my conduct. They cannot always be the ones who carry the cost while I insist that caring must leave my life as convenient as it was before.

Christ did not promise us riches or that we would be comfortable in this life. He told His followers about persecution, mocking, and hatred from the world. He told us to take up our cross and follow Him. Why would you think you are exempt from the results of truly following Him when He told you what the results would be in this world? Why would I think I am exempt? We say we will follow Christ and then act as though losing a convenience is a sufficient reason to refuse what following Him requires. The animal carries the suffering, the worker carries the exploitation, the earth receives the damage, and we defend our comfort as though it is the one thing that must never be asked to give way. I cannot read the Cross that way. I cannot find a promise that obedience will leave everything I like intact, and I cannot make my appetite the authority that decides which duties God is allowed to place on me.

When I return to hunting, I need to do what I now understand I owe the animal. Learn the ground, seek and find it, tend what I can, and remember that a life will end so my family can eat. I can feel sorrow over taking that life and still be grateful for it. I can pray for a quick death and for the animal to be restored from what we have done to creation. That care needs to be in the way I hunt before the animal dies, just as my care for the food my family eats has to reach back into how it was raised. My cat coming so innocently to a familiar sound helped me see what I had not seen in those deer. The thought of calling him for food and choosing that moment to kill him makes the betrayal plain to me. I cannot see it plainly at home and then decide it stops mattering beside a feeder. Now I have to let that knowledge govern what I do with the reason and discretion God gave me. It cannot remain something I recognize while I return to the same exploitation.

Keep following Christ. He will help you choose Him. Pray to our Holy Mother, your patron for guidance, and to your guardian angel for protection against falling into these traps. I need that help because the want for comfort has not left me, and writing this does not make the next decision for me. I still have to refuse what I know I should refuse, go without what I do not need, and tend what God has placed within my reach. The two raised beds were not everything I could have done, but I could do something with them. There will be something I can do next. There will also be another excuse available if I want one, and I pray for the strength to carry my cross instead of reaching for that excuse.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Genesis 2 — The garden entrusted to man

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Creation, animals, and dominion (§§2415–2418)

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Ignorance and conscience (§§1791–1793)

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Responsibility for another’s sins (§1868)

Mississippi State University — Supplemental feeding and chronic wasting disease

Mississippi State University Extension — Deer feeding and rumen acidosis

Romans 8 — Creation awaiting freedom from corruption

Averós, Nazar, and Estevez — Welfare of medium- and fast-growing broilers (2022)

FDA — The science and history of GMOs

Gaupp-Berghausen and colleagues — Glyphosate-based herbicides and earthworms (2015)

New York Attorney General — Bayer and Monsanto environmental advertising settlement (2023)

Australian Strategic Policy Institute — Uyghurs for Sale (2020)

Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi — 2020 annual report, donor acknowledgments

Kenvue — Separation from Johnson & Johnson (2023)

Procter & Gamble — Brand portfolio (2026)

FOX19 — Procter & Gamble abortion travel benefits announcement (2022)

Perrigo — Infant nutrition

Perrigo — Women’s health portfolio

Opill — Donation program

House Oversight subcommittee — Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury (2021)

Gerber — Response to the congressional report

Luke 9 — Taking up the cross

John 15 — The world’s hatred

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Abortion (§§2270–2273)

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Marriage and contraception (§§2366–2370)

DailyMed — Opill prescribing and consumer information

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Charity and spiritual sloth (§2094)

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Mortal and venial sin (§§1857–1861)

I do not know that this is specific to the internet. I think the internet makes it easier to see, but I see it in people away from a screen too. So much of what passes for a thought is somebody co-signing whatever society at large has already told them they are supposed to think. There is a position, there are the people who hold it, and there are the bad people who question it. That seems to be enough. And before I spend an entire article talking about what is wrong with everybody else, I need to remember that a year or two before becoming Catholic I had a very open-minded position of my own: I was open to being anything except Catholic.

I had already decided where the truth could not be.

I will come back to that, because it matters to more than the story of my conversion. This is the first of three articles about the death of nuance and the way compassion gets used to control people. The first two are free. Here I want to stay with what happens when a moral judgment is treated as an attack on the innocent. In the second I will follow the question into medicine, money, and the machines that hand us an approved answer. The paid conclusion returns to the Church I had ruled out, and to what accepting her authority required of me as a husband and father. Because if I can see everybody else’s manipulation but never allow anything to correct me, I have not escaped very much.

IVF is where this becomes particularly clear to me, because I can say that the process is evil and immediately be made to answer as if I have said something evil about the child. A husband and wife want a child and have not been able to have one. There is real suffering there, and the desire for a child is good. But that suffering is being used to sell them something that should never be done to human beings. I am a father. I know that a child is a gift, and that is exactly why I cannot accept a process that puts the creation of children into a commercial transaction and gives other people power to select which ones are wanted. The pain explains why somebody desperately wants an answer. It does not make the answer being sold to them right.

Look at what is actually being done. Human embryos are created outside the marital act. Multiple children can be brought into existence, selected for transfer, left frozen, or discarded, and behind those words are people making decisions about the lives of other human beings. Discarded. We use that word for something left over that we do not need anymore. These are human lives. The child chosen for transfer is wanted, while another can be rejected and destroyed, and I am supposed to look only at the child eventually held in somebody’s arms and call the process good. What happened to the others? Why does their existence stop mattering when they do not become the outcome everybody paid and hoped for? This is why I call it buying and selling humans. The transaction subjects their creation and treatment to what adults want, what they are prepared to pay for, and what the people carrying out the procedure decide to do with them.

The process is demonic. This is evil.

That does not mean the child is evil. It does not mean that child should not exist. Every child is a gift from God. A child conceived through rape is a gift from God. A child conceived through incest is a gift from God. A child conceived through IVF is a gift from God. The evil of the act does not transfer guilt to the child. Why would it? The child did not commit it. The child did not arrange the circumstances of his own conception. If we cannot condemn an evil without condemning the innocent person who exists afterward, then our judgment is already broken.

The child’s innocence is part of the condemnation. If every child is a gift from God, then that includes the ones who are never selected, never photographed in their mother’s arms, never given the chance to be seen by the people being asked to celebrate the outcome. Their lives do not become less human because the laboratory calls them embryos or because somebody decides they are not the ones to transfer. I cannot accept that human dignity begins when a customer wants the child, and I cannot accept that the surviving child somehow pays the moral debt for the children who were thrown away. What kind of love for children requires us to stop looking at some of them? The very thing being used to defend the industry, the beauty and innocence of a child, is what condemns its treatment of the others.

This is what I mean when I say nuance has been lost. I am not looking for a middle position between respecting a human life and throwing it away. There is no acceptable amount of treating a child as a disposable product. The distinction is between the innocent person and the evil done by the people making decisions over that person’s life. I can hold the child to be a gift from God and condemn the process without taking one word back. But people hear a condemnation of IVF and immediately turn it into a condemnation of the child, and once they do that they have stopped considering what I actually said. Now the process is protected by the very human dignity it violates.

The Catholic Church has not somehow missed the existence of children conceived through these procedures. Donum Vitae condemns IVF and explicitly says that a child conceived through it must be “accepted as a living gift of the divine Goodness and must be brought up with love.” There it is, in the teaching people imagine cannot hold both things together. The rejection of the procedure does not weaken the child’s dignity. The child’s dignity does not make the procedure right. I do not have to choose between accepting the child and accepting everything adults did to bring him into existence.

That is also why the argument does not end with finding a way to avoid discarding embryos. The Church’s judgment concerns the separation of procreation from the marital act itself, as well as the treatment of embryonic human life. A husband and wife are not just a source of biological material, and a child is not a result to be commissioned. The Catechism says, “A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift.” That is a difficult thing to hear in a culture that keeps teaching us that wanting something badly enough eventually becomes a claim upon it. It is especially difficult when the thing we want is genuinely good.

That good desire is where the manipulation gets its hold. The woman is crying, the husband wants to help her, and the people offering the procedure can place all of that pain around what they are selling until questioning it feels like attacking the couple. Then a child is born and his existence is presented as the answer to the entire moral argument. But the child cannot give permission for what was done before he could speak, and his mother’s suffering cannot give permission to destroy another child. I am being asked to treat the feeling as the verdict. If I refuse, the conversation becomes about my alleged cruelty instead of the human lives over which the clinic has assumed control. That is not a disagreement with my judgment. It is a way of making the judgment impossible to discuss.

Who benefits when the conversation is turned that way? The people selling the procedure no longer have to answer the question because the family has been placed in front of them to answer it instead. The mother defends her child, as a mother should, while the business gets to act as though defending her child requires defending everything the business did. I find that vile. Her love is real. Her pain is real. Using that pain to make a buck off of her, then allowing her love for her child to become a shield against condemnation of the process, is another part of the evil. The crying woman is not the person whose financial interest is being protected, but she becomes the person everybody points to when that interest is questioned.

This is manipulated, single-minded emotion. We are being directed toward the suffering that helps sell the procedure and away from the lives that expose what is wrong with it. I am supposed to see how badly the couple wants a child, but stop looking when the question becomes what adults are permitted to do to children in order to get the one they want. The child who is discarded does not have a photograph on the wall for people to point to. He does not get to explain that he mattered too. And if I let the successful outcome end the argument, I have agreed that the people who disappear from the picture can be treated as the cost of somebody else’s happiness. I will not call that compassion. It abandons the human beings who most need someone to speak for them.

The process is inherently demonic. It takes something God gave to husband and wife, pulls procreation out of the marital act, places human life under technical and commercial control, and asks us to call the result good because one of the children is loved. Where children are created and then destroyed, people are picking and choosing which ones get to live and which ones die. That is evil, and the people carrying it out and promoting it are participating in evil. A medical title does not absolve them. Neither does a clean room, a bill for professional services, or a photograph of the child who survived. Even removing the destruction does not make it right to turn the creation of a child into a procedure detached from the marital act God made for it. This is a judgment of what is being done. I am not describing a concern that might disappear if the industry explained itself more gently. I am condemning the process and the exploitation that helps sell it.

The suffering couple is owed something better than being handed over to that process. If I say they are being used, then helping them means telling them plainly what is wrong and offering help that does not require them to accept it. I want to give grace to the people being used for evil and condemn the people acting in it and promoting it. Those belong in the same response. The woman does not become less deserving of understanding because I refuse the answer being sold to her, and the people selling it do not become less accountable because she is hurting. Making me choose between the two is the manipulation I am objecting to in the first place.

This is where I have to bring it back to something less distant than an industry. Patience and showing grace to my wife when my annoyance does not want to are part of what God and the Church expect of me. I know how difficult a duty can become when it asks something of me at the exact moment I do not feel like giving it. I cannot make charity into a beautiful word for an article and then let my own mood decide whether the woman God entrusted to me receives any of it. That same problem follows me into these larger judgments. Am I willing to love the person once loving her becomes more demanding than explaining what is wrong?

The answer cannot be to call the wrong thing right. My wife would not be served by a version of love that required her to agree with everything I did. My children would not be served by a father who confused their desires with their good. And a husband and wife suffering through infertility are not served by being told that their pain removes every moral limit from what can be offered to them. There has to be room to tell the truth and remain beside them. Otherwise we have handed the entire meaning of compassion to whoever is willing to sell an answer.

There are other approaches worth putting in front of people. NaProTechnology is one I want people to know about. Its approach to infertility involves investigating and treating underlying reproductive problems, with the aim of allowing conception through the marital act. That is the kind of direction I am talking about when I say medicine ought to help the body function properly. It takes the actual problem seriously without taking procreation out of the method God created. A couple ought to be able to hear about that approach, ask what can be investigated in their circumstances, and receive care that respects both their marriage and the child they hope for.

Give people better alternatives, give them prayers, and give them the understanding they need. That is what I mean by care. If the body has a problem, investigate the problem and try to address it without taking procreation out of the method God created. The couple should be able to ask about that, pursue it, and receive help without being told that the only compassionate answer is to accept IVF. Condemning an evil process does not leave us with nothing to offer. It tells us something we must refuse to offer, even when offering it would be profitable and even when the person in pain has been persuaded that it is the answer. Understanding somebody’s suffering cannot mean helping the people who are using that suffering to sell them evil.

I cannot promise that another approach will give every couple a child. But the absence of a guaranteed outcome does not give us permission to do something evil. Otherwise every limit God places on us would disappear the moment obeying it left us with pain we could not immediately resolve. That is a terrible thing to teach somebody who is already suffering, that the only hope worth considering is the one somebody can sell, and that refusing it means refusing the possibility of being cared for. We owe the couple help even when we cannot promise the outcome they long for. Their need for understanding and prayer continues, and the lives of the children involved do not become negotiable because the suffering is difficult to bear.

A firm moral judgment requires nuance in order to be correct. It has to condemn the actual evil and the people acting in it without transferring their guilt to an innocent child or declaring that the parents’ pain is itself evil. That is not softening the judgment. It is making sure the judgment lands where it belongs. The process is evil. The children are gifts from God. The suffering is real, and the people who turn it into an opportunity to sell an evil process should be condemned for doing so. If we cannot keep those truths together, the innocent get blamed and the people who should have to answer for what they are doing get to stand behind them. I do not see mercy in that. I see people being used, including the children whose innocence should have prevented us from accepting the process in the first place.

I do not think this loss of judgment stays contained in a conversation about fertility. Once an institution learns that it can put a suffering person in front of its conduct and make every question seem cruel, it has found a very useful way to protect itself. Government can do it. Pharmaceutical companies can do it. Media can repeat it. People can carry the argument for them without ever asking how the person claiming to help is benefiting. The feeling comes first, and the permitted conclusion is attached to the feeling before we have looked at the evidence.

In the next article I want to follow that into a much more ordinary experience: asking Google about something I had noticed on my son, and finding that the question I asked was not the conversation it wanted to have. That takes us into the kind of care we are being offered, the financial interests behind it, and the machines increasingly deciding which questions deserve an answer. But the conclusion of this series cannot simply be that other people should stop controlling me. I once ruled out the Catholic Church before allowing her claims a fair hearing. Eventually accepting her meant accepting an authority that could tell me I was wrong, and that my wife did not have to be left alone with my failures. That is where the third article is going.

For now, I keep coming back to the child whose photograph is used to end the argument and the children who never get to be in it. Every one of them is a gift from God. I will not let that truth be reduced to a defense of the one who survived while the others are treated as disposable. IVF is evil, and the people promoting and carrying out that evil should have to answer for what they are doing instead of making a suffering woman answer for them. She deserves understanding and help that does not use her pain against her. The child deserves love that does not make his existence an excuse for what adults did. And I have to carry that same understanding of a gift back into my own house, where my wife needs patience when I am annoyed and my children need a father who accepts what God requires of him. I do not get to condemn other people for making human beings serve their desires and then make my own family serve mine. God entrusted them to me. Their needs do not belong to my convenience, and the children in that laboratory do not belong to the industry selling an answer. I owe my family obedience and love, and I owe those children the truth even when somebody would rather I look away.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Donum Vitae — Respect for Human Life and the Dignity of Procreation

Catechism of the Catholic Church — The Gift of a Child, §§2373–2379

Dignitas Personae — On Certain Bioethical Questions

NaProTechnology — Infertility

I remember feeling the patience that I didn’t know I had, I remember seeing the person not just as something separate from me but as someone who is connected to me in an unspeakable way, I remember feeling a sense of love from the person that I don’t know that I can ever express, I remember thanking God for allowing me to help the people I love. And the world takes that and tells the person who needed help that they did something to me, that their need made my life worse, that everyone would be better off if they did not need anything. It seems to be even more than just needing care, once the person seems to lose something that made them fully independent they seem to go down this path. The world has poisoned the idea of ever being a part of the community and needing to lean on each other in any form or fashion. If you cannot do everything yourself without needing help from your family, church, community, then you are worthless, a burden, and everyone would be better off without you. This is the lie I am condemning, and it is evil. Someone who truly cannot do anything more than what they are doing is not a burden.

This goes back to what Paul said, he did not say those who cannot work do not feed, he said those who will not work do not feed. In his second letter to the Thessalonians the words are “if any man will not work, neither let him eat.” It is a paramount distinction. The ones who cannot work are not a burden and hurting the community, it is those who are engaged in sin and choose freely not to work who are a burden and danger to the community, but this distinction is broken down and blurred by modern society, the sick grandmother is just another burden like the drunk on the corner who refuses to ever try to be better. My grandmother did not become guilty of freely refusing her responsibilities because she needed help, and I did not become guilty of refusing to work because I became too sick to do it. Paul also tells the brethren not to grow weary in doing good. The sick person needs that good done for them, and a society that makes them feel worthless for needing it has turned that duty against the very person we are supposed to help.

The Catechism says in paragraphs 1936 and 1937 that we come into the world without everything we need for our bodily and spiritual lives, that God wills us to receive what we need from others and share what He has given us. This is the support structure He provided, the people we are supposed to know and love and lean on, and the world has poisoned it until someone can look at my wife needing help to get out of bed and feel sorry for me. I was thanking God that I could help her. I was receiving something I cannot quantify, and the fact that I cannot put a number on it does not mean she gave me nothing. The evil is in telling her that she took something from me by needing me, in teaching people to look at someone they love and see a burden, and then teaching that person to look at themselves the same way.

There is the inverse, my wife got sick recently in the middle of the week while I am having to be gone five days a week, and the amount of pain and anguish that I experienced because I could not be there and go through it with her and help and care for her in any way that I could is a level of pain that I will never forget. I would have done anything to be with her when I was not able. That is what this demonic explanation of the world leaves out when it acts like caring for her is something horrible being done to me. I wanted to be with her and go through it with her and help and care for her in any way that I could. Being away has magnified my duties to her, I see everything so clearly that I could be doing for her and feel a loss of duty to her that I do not care for, it is an emptiness that only God is getting me through. It was being unable to be there for her that hurt me, and then I hear the world tell people that having to be there is the terrible thing.

God is getting me through it by bringing me to acceptance that He has called us to this, an imperative to accomplish the things that He does have in front of me that I can do for her, a magnification of the things that He asks of me to do for her in the future. Trusting Him to take care of her implicitly in my absences. I can work on our land, I can take care of the things that need to be taken care of to have the house on the land quicker, I can work and express what I am going to have done for our children so I am seen as the conflictual one and she is seen as the soft one that follows my lead. The world can call being needed a burden all it wants, but these are duties God has put in front of me for people I love, and I want to be able to do them. I can learn more and more about how to support our family better without chasing the false god Mammon that will gladly rip away and eat our children whole.

My wife needs me to be seen as the one that is unyielding to anyone other than possibly her, she needs me to be in that spot so that she does not get hassled by anyone to do anything or change a view on anything. She always refers back to me for anything of that nature and it takes a burden off of her since she can always use the excuse, “I need to talk to my husband.” That is something I can carry for her. She should be able to lean on me, she should be able to need me, and I should be doing what I can for her instead of agreeing with a world that says she ought to be able to do everything herself. The same lie that makes a sick person ashamed of needing care gets inside a marriage and tells the husband he is being put out because his wife needs him. It is evil there too, and I am not going to call it something else because it is being said about ordinary things inside a home.

That willingness to give should be there in the parish too. Families within the parish should know one another and know when someone needs to be helped and help them without anyone knowing. They should do the opposite of the government, give freely without obligation or singling out. The priest should lovingly give to them any time he can. A person who needs help should be able to receive it without being made to feel that everyone has been put out by their existence, without being singled out and made into the sad tale of what somebody else had to go through. I remember thanking God for allowing me to help the people I love. That is what I want the person receiving help to know, that someone can give freely out of love and be grateful that God allowed them to do it. We have to know one another and help one another for that to be something the person can actually experience, instead of leaving them alone with a culture telling them they have nothing to give.

Where in media do you see anyone taking care of someone without it being a sad tale of something that is being done to the person caring for the other, something horrible that the person doing the caring is having to walk through? This is what is pushed by all mainstream media, and it does not stop at making the person giving care feel put out. The person who needs the care hears it too. They hear that needing someone is a failure, that they are taking and giving nothing, and that everyone would be better off without them. Reliance is only meant to be the realm of the false god of government, not the Almighty or the support structure He provided, but the demonic world elites who give you everything so that they can make a slave out of you. The world poisons reliance on family, church, and community and then makes dependence on its own system the answer. I am condemning that entire system, and I am condemning what it tells the sick person about the value of their life.

That is why telling the sick that they are not a burden has to mean condemning the lie that says they are. Michael Knowles’s September 28 episode concerned Pope Leo XIV’s visit to France, and in the Pope’s own September 27 address at Lourdes he told the sick, “you are not a burden.” He spoke of dignity coming from our existence and our destiny in eternity, of palliative care and tender accompaniment, and against causing death under the guise of compassion. The Catechism’s teaching on euthanasia begins with the special respect owed to people whose lives are diminished or weakened and the help owed to sick or disabled people so they can live as normally as possible, and it condemns deliberately causing death to eliminate suffering. These people need love and care, and the world telling them they are worthless needs to be openly denounced.

MAID is the endpoint of this rhetoric. The person has been told that needing help makes them a burden, that they have nothing left to give, that everyone would be better off without them, and medical murder is offered as assistance. MAID is medical murder, carried out by “Medical Professionals” in accordance with what the Canadian government says is right. Health Canada’s sixth annual report, published in 2025 and covering 2024, records 16,499 MAID deaths, and feeling like a burden on family, friends, and caregivers appears among the reported sources of suffering, generally alongside other sources of suffering. The government’s own record includes people who are already suffering and feel that they are making the lives of the people around them worse. Medical murder is the endpoint of a world telling them everyone would be better off without them. My grandmother was not worthless, my wife was not worthless when she could not get out of bed by herself, I was not worthless when I could not work my two jobs, and the people whose suffering appears in that report were not made worthless by needing care. The system telling them otherwise is evil, and carrying medical murder out under the name of assistance is demonic.

It is all evil and should be openly denounced, all of media, all of society at large, all of the culture, and government. It is demonic and should be called what it is. There should be compassion for those who are told they are a burden, and complete righteous anger at the entire system that says they are a burden. That anger includes the people who act like I was a victim because someone I loved needed me, the media and culture that keep telling people they are worthless when they cannot do everything themselves, and the government that calls medical murder assistance. MAID is the endpoint of the rhetoric I am condemning, and the person being told they are a burden needs to hear the entire lie denounced.

If you are the person who feels like a burden, you are not. Do not believe the demonic lies spread by culture, media, society, and government. I have been sick enough that I could not work, I have helped people I love, and I have thanked God for allowing me to help them. They gave me something more valuable than anything I can quantify, something I cannot express, and the world was wrong when it said they did nothing but take. God loves you and even if you cannot see the value you are providing to others I promise it is there somewhere. Do what you can and accept everyone’s love given (hopefully) freely to you.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Pope Leo XIV — Address to the sick at Lourdes, September 27, 2026

The Michael Knowles Show — Ep. 2069, September 28, 2026

Health Canada — Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying, 2024 data

2 Thessalonians 3:10–15 — Douay-Rheims Bible

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Paragraphs 1936–1937

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Paragraphs 2276–2279

I know something about the place he is in because I have been there. I struggled with drugs for much of my adult life, and I walked away from them somewhere around a decade ago. I am not sure exactly how long. From there I took a roundabout path to the One True Church, and in finding God and finding the truth of what Christ left us, I found that the desires that drew me toward drugs had been removed. That is my own life I am talking about. Before that, I had spent years finding explanations that allowed me to keep doing what I wanted while the people around me carried the consequences.

I spoke about that in The Dealers Wear Suits Now. There was a walk home from work in the early hours of the morning when I finally saw reality for what it was. If I were not me, I would not have been friends with me. I saw the person I had become and decided I needed to become somebody I could actually like, but deciding to tell the truth did not immediately undo all the lies I had built my life around. I had hurt people. I had done things on purpose, and other people being guilty did not remove my guilt. I still have things to answer for before God, and people I may never be able to apologize to.

Now I am watching someone I love remain in a place I recognize, and he has been in this same situation many times before. He does not see how the pain he is experiencing is connected to his own actions. I can see the connection and I want him to see it, but I know how long I went without admitting what was right in front of me. Knowing that does not make watching him easier. It makes it harder to turn away from him because I remember that there was a real person underneath everything I was doing, even when I was making it very difficult for anyone to want to be around that person.

I cry almost daily for him.

I honestly do not have anger toward him, just deep sorrow. It pains me to see him destroying his life and living in this much pain, and then I have to look at what I could do to help and know that it would just keep him there longer. Especially with money, I believe I would be prolonging the pain. He could get past the immediate consequence without ever seeing what brought him there, and we would still be in the same place. I love him and want to help him, but I do not want my help to become one more thing that keeps him from facing reality.

The way I try to explain it is using glue to stop a bridge from collapsing. The person using the glue is trying to help, but the whole bridge is failing and the glue is doing nothing but prolonging the inevitable, so even though he is trying to help he is actually causing more problems. What I am hoping for is that the bridge can be built back much more sturdy and hopefully beautiful afterward. I want there to be something that can actually hold him. I do not want to keep adding glue to what is already failing and tell myself I have done something good because it held for a little longer.

I can explain it with the bridge, but this is someone I love. This is a person I want to keep in my life, and I am afraid of what could happen while he keeps going this way. I am afraid I will lose him. I know money will not solve it, but I am still afraid, and knowing there are things I cannot do for him does not make any of this hurt less. I still have to love him while he is there. I still have to decide what I can offer that will actually help him move in a better direction.

I can be his friend when he has none, I can continue to ask him toward God, I can offer love when he feels he is unworthy of any. I can keep praying for him even when I do not see anything changing. Saint Paul tells us in Galatians to correct someone caught in wrongdoing gently, while watching ourselves, and to bear one another’s burdens. I cannot read that as permission to forget the person because his life has become painful to be near. Instead, I have to read that as telling me to be gentle and caring when attempting to correct him and never lose sight of my own faults also. I know what I was capable of, and the sorrow I feel for him at the sorrow he is going through is my burden to bear with him.

I pray for him daily, but I also ask him directly to go to a church. Any church, even if it is not the One True Church. I want him to go toward God because God is there waiting for him, wanting to help him. I found what I had been missing in God and in the Church, and I want him to stop shutting that possibility out before he has even gone. Right now there is complete unwillingness. He does not see the point of church, and when I bring up an Anonymous program he sees people whining about their problems and never actually standing up and moving forward. There is something I have not had the heart to say to him because of the place he is in when it comes up: that is exactly what you are doing even right now, so how are you going to judge those people? I have thought it, but I have not said it. He dismisses people who are at least willing to be there talking about their problems, and I want him to see what he is doing when he refuses even that. But I know how feelings go when you are in this situation. Someone can say something you need to hear and all you hear is that you are being judged, that somebody has hurt your feelings, and then you do not speak to that person for weeks, months, or even years.

He is already barely talking to people who love him, and I am afraid of losing the little communication that is still there. My job is to push him in a better direction without making him feel like he has no choice or that I am standing there judging him. That is what I am trying to do, and it is difficult because the things I want him to face are painful. I cannot choose for him no matter how much I would like to. I can ask him to go to church, I can tell him I love him, I can tell him I want him here, and he can still give me no more than an acknowledgment that he heard. Then I am left hoping that something I said will reach him even though I cannot see it happening.

And this is why I told him directly, do not make me bury you. I have told my wife that I will do everything I can to die after she does so she does not have to be alone. That is not a burden I want her to experience, and I want to take that burden from her, God willing. But then I think about what it would mean to be the one left afterward, after the elders and peers who shared your life are gone. Even with children and grandchildren, I still want someone there who was with me before all those years passed. I have asked him to try to be there with me. Right now I feel like even that request, just the chance of having him there, is being rejected.

I do not know how to make that hurt less. I love him and I want him to live, and I want him there with me. I have asked him to at least try, to give me a chance to have him there after everyone else is gone, and right now he is not willing. I do not know if he will live that long at the rate he is going, and that is what hurts. I am afraid I am going to have to bury him. I know the choices are his, and I still have to live with the possibility that I will be here after him wishing he had been willing to let somebody help.

That is why saying trust God does not mean I stop crying. In Saint John’s account of Lazarus, Jesus wept. The people there saw His love in His tears. I can believe God is there, I can pray every day, and I can still be deeply sorrowful for someone I love. Sorrow is okay. I do not have to pretend this has stopped hurting before I can ask God for help, and I do not want someone reading this who cries for a person they love to think they have failed because they are still crying.

For me, trusting God right now is praying and hoping He will break through the wall this person has erected, or that the wall will fall and he will finally be willing to let God in. I am hoping he will reach the point where he sees reality for what it is, because I know what it meant when that happened to me. I found God after spending so long denying Him. I found my way to the Church after taking a roundabout path, and I cannot look at someone I love who has not reached that point and decide that there is no hope for him. I am still asking God to reach him.

I can refuse to keep putting glue on the bridge and still be his friend. That is the part I keep coming back to because it would be easier to turn my back and stop letting his life hurt me, but God calls us to love these people even when it hurts. In a way, this turns me back to the specific word used in Saint John’s Gospel when Christ said the world would know His disciples by the love they have for one another. That word is agape, love for the other for the other’s good. Agape does not exist for my sake. From what I have found, agape is a very painful form of love, not because it is not love, but because it is the most other-serving form of love. It completely removes the “I,” and my only purpose within agape love is service, service to help and care, sometimes even when the other person does not want the help or care being provided, even when I am being rejected by the other. Agape says I will continue to love this person even though that love wounds me so deeply I wish not to love the person at times. He deserves our love as much as anyone God has created, and I needed that love when I was in his place too. I want him to stand up and move forward, I want him to let God in, and while he is unwilling I can still offer love when he feels unworthy of it. I may be one of the instruments God is using to reach him, and I do not want to stop being there because I cannot see the result.

If you have someone like this in your life, please do not give up hope. I know it is hard. I cry almost daily for him, and I am asking you to keep your person in your heart even though it would be easier to turn your back. Keep praying even when it feels like nothing is happening. God is there trying to reach them, and you might be the instrument He is using. Hopefully they will come around. I am still hoping for that too, still hoping that the wall falls and he becomes willing to let God in, still hoping that when I ask him to be there with me there will eventually be more than a grunt to tell me he heard.

And if you have a person like this, you do not have to name a name, but please comment. I would love to pray for all of these people with you all. I may not know your sorrow or how deep it goes, but I am standing there with you. Please do not give up on them. They deserve our love as much as anyone God has created, and God calls us to love these people even when it hurts.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Saint Paul — Galatians 6:1–2

The Gospel According to Saint John — John 11:33–36

The Gospel According to Saint John — John 13:34–35

John 13:35 — Greek text

Benedict XVI — Deus Caritas Est, §6

When I smoked cannabis I repeated the lines that let me keep the box closed. Cannabis does not hurt anyone ever. Cannabis is not addictive at all. Cannabis is medicine and helps heal people. I was not making a careful medical claim about one drug for one condition at one dose. I wanted to get high, and the words allowed me to pretend the wanting was wisdom. If it was medicine, anybody asking me to stop was against healing. If it was harmless, the problems around me had to belong to somebody else. Mostly the label meant I did not have to look at what my life looked like while I was using it.

And what my life looked like was not freedom. I did not plan for the future. I planned for what I could get next. I schemed and predated everything I could to get what I wanted, it was never enough, and then I continued. The dignity God gave me was still there, but I did not use it or live in it. I thought everyone was doing the same thing and simply could not see it in themselves, which may have been partly true about the world around me, but widespread sin does not become right because it has become normal. It only means more people are living in the wrong manner and teaching one another not to notice.

Looking back, I was just an animal.

Animalistic, selfish, predatory are the three words that work. I had what I thought was power, but it was perceived power. I could be predatory, demeaning, and dismissive toward anybody I believed was less than me. If they were less than me then I could treat them however I saw fit in that moment. My mother, my grandparents, my children, their mother, coworkers, friends, girlfriends, strangers I thought were weaker than I was, there are more people than I can name who became victims of whatever I wanted next. The drug did not force every one of those choices into my hands. I made them, and the culture around the drug gave me language that helped me avoid seeing what I was choosing.

I do not say that to turn myself into the victim. In the end I did things to myself that I do not know how I will answer for when I am talking to God, but that does not make what I did to everybody else temporary or unimportant. The only thing I can think to say is I am sorry. I am sorry to everyone my actions affected. The vast majority will never see or hear those words from me, and some of them I do not even know anymore. That does not change whose sins they are. They are still mine, and I still did many of them on purpose.

Eventually there was one dark walk home from work at two or three in the morning. I was about five minutes from home when I thought, you know, if I were not me, I would not be friends with me. I am actually a horrible person. It sounds like a small thought and it could sound self-defeating written down, but it was one of the best moments of my life because I saw myself clearly for a moment without immediately inventing another explanation. I did not become a different man before I reached the house. I decided I was going to do whatever I needed to do to become a better person, somebody I could actually like, and I started from there without knowing how hard telling the truth would be.

Everything I said had become a lie because I had lied so often for so long. Deciding I would be honest was a herculean task because I could not always see where one lie ended and another began. I had built the person I showed other people out of whatever I needed at the moment, and I did the same thing with God. In a way I knew He was real and knew He was there, but I kept denying Him even after I told myself I was going to be honest. If God was real then I was not the final authority over myself. My actions were not only bad outcomes I could explain with drugs, anger, lust, or what somebody else did to me. They were sins, and many were sins I did on purpose. Perceived power required me to keep pretending He was not there.

I do not know why God stayed with me. I mean that in a tangible and concrete sense, not only a metaphysical one. There were times I should have died and I continued breathing. I can look back and see Him saving me from myself more times than I can count while I used the life He preserved to keep denying, blaspheming, falling into apostasy, and arguing with anybody who believed in Him. I do not have an explanation that makes me worthy of it. I was not worthy. He did it anyway, and on that walk He let me see the lie without letting the sight destroy me.

That is why I cannot look at the word medicine as a neutral label now. The 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 61.6 million Americans twelve or older used marijuana in the previous year and 19.3 million met the criteria for marijuana use disorder. Among adults eighteen through twenty-five the rate was 14.1 percent, and about 1.1 million adolescents had marijuana use disorder in 2025. Cannabis does hurt people. Cannabis is addictive. The slogans I repeated were lies, and I repeated them because they let me keep doing what I wanted without looking at the person I was becoming.

Children are helpless victims in this. Adults can argue about what they knew, what addiction did to their judgment, and when they should have accepted help. A child can be put on a drug before the mind is grown enough to understand what it may do or whether the adult offering it has another motive. Gambling is placed inside video games through loot boxes. Pornography reaches them through an unsupervised connection. Drugs can arrive with a prescription pad and medical language. The adult world surrounds children with things adults cannot control in themselves and then expects the child to make a mature choice.

I failed to protect my children from myself, and I also feel nearly powerless now in some things happening around my daughter. Their mother put her on SSRIs. If she were in my house I would have wanted to put a firm no in front of that, just as I would have put a firm no in front of unsupervised internet and pornography, but she is not in my house and those choices were taken from me. With what little time I get I try to connect, let her see the problems these things can create, and guide her so she can make a choice for herself. I hate how small that feels. I also know my own choices helped put me where I am, which is why the public argument about drugs returns to my duties before I can make it only about companies and government.

The fear I have for my daughter is why I look at medical language so differently now. The Food and Drug Administration has approved one cannabis-derived drug and several synthetic cannabis-related drugs for specific uses. It has not approved the cannabis plant itself to treat a disease or condition, and it warns about unapproved products making medical claims. The commercial culture took the existence of particular medicines and used it to baptize an entire culture of getting high. Then people like me took the word medicine and used it as permission. We were not defending careful treatment. We were defending our appetite.

Then government collects cannabis excise taxes. The state warns about dependence, licenses the sale, collects money every time the product moves, spends the money, and gains another reason for the sale to continue. The person sees the license and the medical language and assumes government saw the good in it, which gives the vice a false moralization he can grab when he refuses to look at his own use. The warning and the profit sit beside each other because the government wants to be paid by the thing it warns citizens can enslave them.

The warning label beside the profit ledger.

Why should we accept a government that says it needs these vices to hurt citizens so it can spend more money? The state does not have to call the drug holy. It only has to make it ordinary, put a tax stamp on it, and explain what the revenue will fund. Then the person can say the government permits it, doctors talk about it, and the taxes help somebody, so the problem must be the prude or hypocrite telling him to stop. The law has not made the vice good. It has made looking away easier, and it has made the government one more party that benefits when the looking away continues.

The pharmaceutical company can do something the man on a street corner cannot because it has the doctor, the white coat, the bottle, and the word medicine. Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in 2020 to felony offenses involving fraud and kickback conspiracies, and in April 2026 a federal court sentenced the company and imposed more than $5 billion in criminal penalties. The Justice Department said Purdue put profit over patient health and ignored diversion of highly addictive opioids. The company pleaded guilty, yet the addict produced by the market is still the person society is most comfortable calling disgusting.

A company can sell opiates for something that did not need them, hide or minimize the danger, make a fortune, and remain respectable behind lawyers, settlements, offices, and suits. The person whose body learned to need the drug becomes the disgusting drug addict who will do anything, including suck dick, to get the drug that made somebody else’s fortune. The street dealer harming a community should be tracked down and arrested with no chance to walk straight back out and continue destroying the same neighborhood. The executives who hid danger and built the market should be treated like the dealers they are. A suit, a prescription pad, and a corporate office do not clean the sin.

The dealer behind the counter and the dealer on the street.

The CDC’s provisional estimate was 67,798 overdose deaths in the twelve months ending March 2026. Sixty-seven thousand seven hundred ninety-eight people. Every number had people around him before he became a number: a mother, father, child, wife, husband, friend, coworker, somebody who found the body or answered the phone. The dealer behind the counter and the dealer on the street look different, but the family still carries the body while somebody else carries the money.

The companies are like abusers and the people pulled into vice are the abused. I am not blaming someone for the ashtray thrown at him, for being locked out of the house, pushed down the stairs, or told he is worthless. But at what point does an adult have to accept responsibility for choosing to stay after somebody reaches in to help? He may have arrived by accident. A doctor wrote the first prescription, a friend offered the first drug, the betting company gave him a free bet, or pornography appeared before he understood it. The beginning matters. Still, every time help is offered and refused there is another choice inside the wounded freedom he still has.

Addiction darkens judgment and can diminish responsibility, but refusing every hand reaching in is still a choice. If I say the adult has no choice at all, then I have said repentance is impossible and that he is no longer a human being with a will grace can reach. That is not mercy. Tell him the industry preyed on him. Tell him the government took its cut. Tell him the people who hid the danger have blood on their hands. Then tell him he still has to stand up and walk out, even if he falls tomorrow. I needed people to tell me the truth about what was done to me and what I was still doing on purpose.

When I finally stood back and looked at all three systems, they made almost the same promise and then gave almost the same answer after the harm. Gambling says spend everything with us and you might win, and when you mortgage the house or lie to your wife it says we did not make your choices. Pornography says use this piece of meat and ignore the slavery and abuse inside parts of the industry, and when your mind and marriage are damaged it says you clicked the page. Drugs say we may have sold the pill, hidden the warning as much as possible, or put the storefront in your neighborhood, but you are the addict who should have known better. Personal responsibility disappears while the money is being made and then returns all at once after the person is ruined.

Lower down I keep finding depravity, tax revenue, and addiction. I see government and the people selling vice extracting as much as they can, but money is not the only thing the vice receives. It receives obedience and loyalty. A person may never openly worship it, yet his life becomes ordered toward it. He plans around it, lies for it, becomes angry for it, neglects people for it, and defends it when someone tries to help. He can go to church on Sunday and choose another god every other day of the week. I did not kneel before cannabis as a statue. I still arranged myself around the next thing I wanted and fought anybody who threatened it.

Saint Paul says in Romans 6 that we become slaves of the one we obey, either sin leading to death or obedience leading to righteousness. That is why I cannot accept the modern use of freedom anymore. Real freedom is freedom from sin. It is freedom to choose what is right and holy. What we call freedom today is often freedom to choose slavery. I thought I was free because nobody could tell me what to do while I could not tell myself no. I had perceived power over people weaker than me and almost no power over my own appetite.

The Catechism describes temperance as the virtue that gives reason and will mastery over instinct and keeps desire ordered toward the good. I had no mastery. I could manipulate somebody, demean him, dismiss her, or make a plan to get what I wanted and call that power, but I could not plan beyond the next appetite. The dignity still existed and I did not live in it. I was using my reason, will, body, and other people beneath the purpose God gave them while congratulating myself for having removed restraints.

If government has any role in the world, it should help point people toward the power that allowed it to have authority in the first place. Outlaw commercial pornography. Outlaw commercialized gambling. Clamp down on pharmaceutical companies and put the responsible people on trial for every harm the evidence can prove. Track down drug dealers destroying communities and keep them from walking straight back out to continue. Spend less instead of telling citizens the government has grown so large it must keep vice alive to fund itself. A law cannot make anybody a saint, hear confession, or restore a marriage, but law teaches. When government licenses a vice, advertises it, taxes it, and spends the proceeds, people understand the lesson even when no official says the vice is good.

I do not know that the Church has done nothing because the truth is there. Maybe priests and bishops could take a stronger hardline, explicitly tell states to stop this, and tell Catholics that engaging in these systems is a road to sin or sin itself. Pornography is grave sin. Recreational drug use outside legitimate therapeutic need is grave matter. Gambling becomes sinful when it deprives duties or enslaves.

Walking away from slavery toward the Church.

Go see a priest. Talk to somebody openly about the gambling, pornography, or drugs. Close the webpage and see the people for what they are. Delete the app. Put the drug somewhere you cannot reach it while the part of your mind defending it is still loud. Repentance may not be perfect all the time and there may be moments when you backslide. There is help. Other people have dealt with the same things and are walking the same path toward sanctity. Do not remain in sin because leaving is hard, and do not mistake another fall for proof that the road does not exist.

Saint Augustine is one of the people I keep returning to because he walked the road before me. He was no stranger to women, debauchery, ambition, or worldly things, and he became a saint. In Book VIII of the Confessions the old sins hold him with the promise of tomorrow until grace breaks through and he hears to take up and read. He reads Saint Paul’s words about making no provision for the flesh. I try to talk to Augustine regularly and read what he wrote because he was able, by grace, to begin living in the dignity that sin had not erased. He became human again in the sense I mean it, and his sainthood keeps me from using the length of my own road as permission to sit down in the vice.

I am walking ever so slowly toward sainthood, something I will probably never achieve in this lifetime. Prayer, presence, Church, family, the people I love, neighbors, and the stranger I come across are teaching me to see that another person is not an other. Appetite made everybody into an obstacle or a product. Now I am trying to remain with people long enough to remember the connection through God. That includes my daughter with what little time I have, the family I can still fail if I return to appetite and call it freedom, and the people who may never hear the apology I owe them.

I still do not know why God saved me from myself so many times. The warning label beside the profit ledger did not do it. The dealer in the suit did not care whether I became human again any more than the dealer on the street did. God was there on the dark walk when I finally saw the person I had become, and He was there in the years before it when I denied Him, blasphemed, lied, and used the life He kept saving to continue arguing with Him. I did not become a saint five minutes from home. I told myself one truth and started walking with failures I still have to confess.

I still have people I may never be able to apologize to, a daughter I am trying to reach, a warning label I once used as something to argue around, and sins I do not know how I will answer for except to say I am sorry. That is not a clean ending because I do not have one. I know the three systems all sold freedom while learning how to profit from slavery. I know Saint Augustine walked away from his old masters before me. And I know God did not stop seeing me when I stopped living in the dignity He gave me. I have to believe He is still there for the person who finally closes the page, puts down the drug, walks away from the table, and tells the truth, even if the first honest step happens alone in the dark only a few minutes from home.

Sources and Notes

The Tucker Carlson Show - Saagar Enjeti on gambling, OnlyFans, and drugs

SAMHSA - 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health

FDA - Cannabis research and drug approval

U.S. Census Bureau - Cannabis Excise Sales Tax Collections

U.S. Department of Justice - Purdue Pharma sentenced

CDC - Overdose Prevention Data Channel

Catechism - Freedom and responsibility 1731-1738

Catechism - Temperance 1809

Catechism - Drugs and medicine 2290-2291

Romans 6 - Freedom from sin

Saint Augustine - Confessions Book VIII

We are told we are a Christian country, but are we really? I think about our history and the parts that aren’t hidden in lies, and this seems to be a lie itself. I see so many chances for the country to ally with God, and we seem to disregard it every time. This isn’t the citizens that I am talking about, but instead the government and the people who are supposed to be leaders, leading us into evil and oblivion instead.

The USSR is the one I cannot get past. We hear about the horrors of communism, and somewhere inside that the outright murder of Christians and the destruction of the Church in Russia seem to get lost. A government went after the Church, closed her doors, took her property, imprisoned and shot clergy and believers, and then became our ally. That is in the Library of Congress account of the anti-religious campaigns. It was not just a different way of arranging the economy. People were being punished for the Faith that our own country keeps claiming, and the people doing it were trying to destroy the Church those Christians belonged to. I think about that and then hear the word ally, as if what happened to those people can be put away because we have arrived at the part of history where their government became useful to us. I do not see how a Christian is supposed to just move along with that.

I had remembered the line about the more Christians they killed, the better, as Stalin’s. It was Lenin’s letter of March 19, 1922, and he was speaking of what he called reactionary clergy and bourgeoisie. He wanted to use the famine to seize church valuables, rush through trials, and carry out executions, and he said the larger the number they succeeded in shooting, the better. People were starving and he was discussing how to use it to crush the Church’s resistance. He wanted the survivors too frightened to resist for decades. That is the kind of government we are talking about. The men who survived were supposed to live with what had been done to the others and know that the same people still held power over them. And then we helped that government. I do not understand how anyone tells that story, calls America Christian, and thinks there is nothing left to answer for. In Divini Redemptoris in 1937, Pius XI was already condemning atheistic communism and describing the assault on Christian civilization. The Church was speaking about her own destruction before the alliance was made.

The answer I keep being given is the enemy of my enemy. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, and keeping the Soviets fighting helped the American and British war effort. That is like saying should you ally with a demon to fight the devil? The Nazis were evil in their own right, but if the other government is already destroying the Church and killing Christians then it is a threat also. I do not accept the choice as if the evil on one side makes us unable to see the evil on the other, particularly when we are supposed to believe that our country belongs to Christ. Those Christians did not stop belonging to Him when their murderers became useful. Our leaders made a decision to help that regime anyway, and I want to know what happened to the Christianity they claim when that decision was being made.

It gets worse when I look at what our government was actually discussing. In a July 31, 1941, telegram, Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles said the United States had received no indication of increased religious tolerance in the Soviet Union, but at that time it should not make a statement that could be understood as pressure on the Soviets to change their internal policies. They knew enough to discuss it and chose not to put that pressure on them. Then in Roosevelt’s September 11 conversation with the Soviet ambassador, religious freedom came up because getting aid through Congress was difficult. Roosevelt suggested publicity from Moscow about religious freedom that could help before the next Lend-Lease bill, and the memorandum records the ambassador agreeing to attend to it. This is the part that angers me. There had been no indication that the treatment of religion had improved, but publicity about religious freedom could help get the aid approved. The people who needed that freedom were still under the Soviet government while our government was discussing how it could help sell the relationship here. I look at those two records together and see the people suffering being pushed aside for the decision our leaders wanted to make. We had a chance to demand something for them and instead we were asking for something that would make the support easier to get through Congress.

And after the war we went into the Cold War because the USSR was a threat that had to be pushed back. We had helped it fight the Nazis and then spent decades confronting its power. The hostility to Christians was there before we helped it. That is why the enemy of my enemy does not settle this for me, and why I keep coming back to what our leaders were willing to accept when they wanted something. The Catechism’s teaching on good and evil acts does not allow a good intention to make an evil act good. Wanting to defeat the Nazis does not remove the need to answer for what was done to achieve it. I want that question asked of the people who chose the alliance, because it is the Christians living under that regime who seem to get left out when the choice is explained.

With Israel it is even harder to leave the religious question alone because Christians are told that supporting a separate nation is itself part of their faith. Dispensationalism is a large part of what I am questioning. Dallas Theological Seminary’s doctrinal statement describes the Church as distinct from Israel and places the Church in heaven during a future tribulation. I believe that theology is heresy. The Church is the new Israel; Lumen Gentium speaks of the people Christ gathers from Jew and gentile into one body. Yet an American Christian can be told that his religion requires allegiance to a foreign nation, and somehow the Christians living under that nation’s government have to keep explaining why they matter. I want the people who represent Americans to put the interests of Americans, and specifically Christian Americans, first. Why would it be in American Christians’ best interest to support a government that harms Christians? I do not understand how we got to a place where saying that is treated as a problem while demanding the allegiance is treated as Christian.

Ted Cruz is an example. In his own September 10, 2014, statement about an In Defense of Christians event, he said he went there to address Christians being persecuted by ISIS and other Islamic radicals. He described the hostile response to his remarks about Israel as antisemitism, and said that if the people opposing him would not stand with Israel and the Jewish people, he would not stand with them. He then walked off the stage. I am angry that defending Christians can be made conditional like that by a man who claims to be defending them. The people the event was for were still being persecuted after he walked away. Their need did not disappear because of a disagreement in that room, and I cannot make sense of going to an event about their suffering and making allegiance to another country the thing that decides whether you will stand with the people there.

And the churches in the Holy Land have been speaking for themselves. On January 17, 2026, the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem issued a statement describing Christian Zionism as a damaging ideology and objecting to people pursuing political agendas while claiming to speak for their communities. These are the churches whose people have to live there, and I want to hear them when they say that someone is using their name to do something that harms them. On July 17, 2025, the Israeli military struck the Holy Family compound in Gaza. The Latin Patriarchate reported three people dead and others wounded, including the parish priest, Father Gabriel Romanelli. People had gone to that church for sanctuary. The Israeli military’s subsequent inquiry described the strike as accidental, caused by a deviation of munitions, and said its firing guidelines near sensitive sites had been clarified. The Patriarchate called for the war to end and placed this tragedy within the wider suffering of civilians in Gaza. I cannot read that as just another argument about Israel. People who had already left their homes were sheltering at a church and people died there. Their priest was wounded. There is a church trying to remain with her people through a war, and here we are being told what Christian support for the government fighting that war is supposed to mean. I want the leaders using our faith to justify that support to face the people who have to live with it. Let them explain what they are doing for those Christians.

Egypt is another case. At Maspero in Cairo on October 9, 2011, military vehicles ran over demonstrators during a protest by Coptic Christians over attacks on their churches. Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses, examined video, and reported that vehicles crushed and killed protesters. The army disputed wrongdoing, and the organization called for an independent investigation rather than leaving the military to investigate itself. I do not see how that can be brushed past when we talk about who America supports. The Congressional Research Service’s June 2025 account describes military cooperation and preserving the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty as central reasons for American assistance to Egypt, and it also describes human-rights conditions on that assistance. I am unsure of the full answer about Egypt, and I have questions about Ukraine that I have not worked through either. I think the reason differs in each case. I cannot say what the end goal is. But I can look at what happens to Christians and ask why our government’s relationships with the people harming them seem to survive things that ought to horrify a Christian country.

If we were truly a Christian nation we would live by truly Christian principles. There is plenty to examine in the Baltimore Catechism, Aquinas, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church. We can leave submission to the Pope outside this article and still have more than enough that our leaders should be abiding by. The Catechism says legitimate authority has to seek the common good and use morally lawful means. Aquinas asks whether human law binds the conscience and explains why a ruler seeking his own advantage instead of the common good makes an unjust law, and why a command against God’s law must not be obeyed. These men have duties because they have power, and their desire to keep it does not remove those duties. I am tired of the idea that we should take the Christian claim seriously enough to trust a leader but then set it aside when we look at what he has chosen to do. If he wants to claim Christ, let him answer for that. Let him explain the things he supports according to the faith he keeps claiming.

That is what makes the claim of being Christian so difficult to stomach. These are people who say Christ’s name and claim His people to gain power, but support people who hate Christ. They pay lip service alone while spitting on Christians at large. Then they come back to Christians for support as if none of what they have done should matter because they know how to say the name again. I do not want to hear Christ used that way. His name is holy. The people being persecuted belong to Him, and the people here being asked to trust these leaders belong to Him too. How does a man use that trust to gain power and then disregard the people whose faith helped put him there? I believe we should all pay attention and know who we are supporting, but the guilt for doing this is on the people who co-opt Christ for political gain. They are the ones making the decisions. They are the ones claiming to lead us while leading us away from the God whose name they used to get there.

It is almost like instead of being a Christian nation we are a satanic, anti-theist nation determined that everyone’s suffering matters around the world unless they believe in Christ. Our leaders keep explaining why these relationships are necessary, and the Christian who is suffering is supposed to accept that explanation from somebody who will never have to live under the government doing it to him. I do not want to keep being told that this is what a Christian country looks like. There are people trying to remain faithful to Christ through persecution, and there are people using the same Christ for power while treating that persecution as something they can afford to accept. It is not theirs to accept for the people being hurt.

For the rest of us, paying attention means looking at who we are supporting and what they actually support. I have to do that too. Hearing a man say Christ’s name cannot be enough when I can also see what he does with the power he has been given. I want us to hear the Christians who are being disregarded and pray for them, because they are trying to remain faithful where it can cost them their lives. And I want the men claiming to lead a Christian nation to answer the question instead of using our faith to get around it. My main question at the end of the day is this: if the Church has no place in government except for power-hungry people to use Christ’s name to manipulate Christians for political gain, are we actually a Christian nation?

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Library of Congress — Lenin’s letter to the Politburo, March 19, 1922

Library of Congress — Anti-religious campaigns in the Soviet Union

Pius XI — Divini Redemptoris, 1937

Office of the Historian — U.S.–Soviet Alliance, 1941–1945

Foreign Relations of the United States — Welles telegram, July 31, 1941

Foreign Relations of the United States — Roosevelt and the Soviet ambassador, September 11, 1941

Senator Ted Cruz — Statement regarding In Defense of Christians, September 10, 2014

Dallas Theological Seminary — Doctrinal Statement, Articles XIII and XIX

Second Vatican Council — Lumen Gentium, paragraph 9

Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem — Statement on Christian communities, January 17, 2026

Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem — Holy Family compound statement, July 17, 2025

Israel Defense Forces — Holy Family Church inquiry statement, July 23, 2025

Human Rights Watch — Egypt: Don’t Cover Up Military Killing of Copt Protesters, October 25, 2011

Congressional Research Service — Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations, June 12, 2025

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Authority, paragraphs 1897–1904

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Good acts and evil acts, paragraphs 1755–1756

Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologiae, I–II, question 96, article 4

I cannot remember many stories from my childhood. I can remember the stories of movies I watched when I was six, yet I cannot remember much of my own life when I was nine, and it strikes me that the reason could be connected with television and movies. I think about the stories we stopped telling and find that I do not really have many that have stayed with me like that, but the movies have. They are more fantastical, they have more events in them, so why wouldn’t our minds file them away as more important than the slow afternoons of play with friends as a child? I was there for those afternoons. That was my life, and now I can reach back further and find something somebody made up more easily than I can find so much of what I actually lived.

I think about the studies that found people remembered less of something when they took pictures of it. Linda Henkel had people look at objects in a museum, and those told to photograph whole objects later remembered fewer objects and fewer details than those who just looked. When they zoomed in to photograph a particular detail, that memory impairment disappeared. The same camera was there, but something about how they were attending to the object mattered. That was a study of photographs, and the question I keep coming back to goes further: what if the moving-picture stories we love from such a young age affect what we remember of our own lives too? So much happens in a movie while a slow afternoon with friends might seem to contain very little, and I wonder what we are teaching ourselves to consider worth our attention when the movie is what we keep wanting to return to.

Wasted. They seem like wasted space within my head, and I know people love those stories and love remembering them, but I want more of my own life there when I go looking for it. I want the people who were actually there with me. The part that makes this hard to leave alone is that I cannot put it away as something that happened when I was a child and did not know better, because at a certain point I realized I was doing it as an adult too. I was still giving more of myself to that fake reality, still choosing to watch something somebody else made while the life God gave me was right there, and then becoming impatient when that life asked anything of me.

There was work I should have been doing and calls I should have been making, and instead I would sit there watching stuff that did not matter because I did not want to do what needed to be done. It was not complicated. Something interrupted what I was watching and I resented it, even though the thing interrupting me was my responsibility and watching was what I had chosen to do instead. I could tell myself it was only entertainment, but look at what that meant in practice. The call still needed to be made, the work was still mine to do, and I was angry that I could not keep avoiding it without being reminded it existed. I had accepted this idea that the ordinary things were something to get away from so completely that I was treating my own duties as if they had no right to ask for the time I was giving to a screen.

I did not want to do it because I did not want to do it.

And while I was doing that I felt disconnected. I felt like God was missing, but He was never gone. I was choosing something else other than Him, separating myself while still searching for Him, as humans always do, and then looking inside the very things I was using to turn away. I had duties in the life He gave me and I was refusing them because I wanted to keep watching. That is sin. The fact that almost everyone would understand wanting to finish a show does not change what I was choosing or make the responsibility disappear, but it does make it very easy to keep doing it without ever having to think about what it means. Everyone understands the desire to watch. Somehow the person asking us to stop is the one who has to explain himself.

This is part of why I keep thinking about how we interact with these things, because it seems to happen across phones, televisions, movies, and video games, and computers fall into it too, though I do see some separation in how we can use them. There seems to be a separation with books as well because of the active, thoughtful way we interact with them. With so much of the rest it has become so passive or intuitive that I believe it gets past the thought that would make us realize this is not reality. We can say the words, we can explain that it is made up, but we are still absorbed in it and still reacting to it while the people and responsibilities around us have to wait. I was not confused about whether I was watching television. I was choosing to give it something my actual life needed.

And understanding that has not made the pull disappear. Television and movies have no place in my life now, but saying none makes that sound much simpler than it is. If I am around a television it is still an active effort not to be drawn in, even though I know it is fake and have already decided I do not want it. Why should I have to fight to keep my attention away from something I do not even want to watch? Think about an action movie or a horror movie and the way your body responds while you are sitting there knowing perfectly well that you are watching a screen. Annie Lang was studying involuntary attention to television back in 1990, measuring how the structure of commercials drew physiological attention responses and how emotional content intensified them. Knowing what the thing is does not stop it from affecting us. I knew I was watching a show when I became impatient, and I still cared more about continuing to watch than getting up to do what was mine to do.

That pull is what makes me think about Aleister Crowley and what he said about magic and science. He did not put the two in separate worlds. His journal The Equinox carried the words “The Method of Science — The Aim of Religion,” and in Magick in Theory and Practice he used writing and publishing as an example of magick, calling his sentences incantations and the printers, publishers, and booksellers spirits that would carry his message. He included ordinary acts of will in that definition and wrote, “I must make MAGICK the essential factor in the life of ALL.” Then a 1933 Sunday Dispatch interview records him describing a little black box that let someone hear the American president’s voice, something an earlier generation could have called magic, though we called it radio. “What is magic today is science tomorrow.” That is a lot closer to what we have actually seen. We can explain the box and still fail to ask what we are letting it do inside our lives.

I can follow that connection and still have to deal with the much less interesting fact that I wanted to go back to watching. Knowing something was wrong did not make me want to stop doing it. When I stopped, at first not much changed, and it was like stopping a drug. I had to constantly fight the idea of going to YouTube, turning on the television, or putting on a movie, even after seeing that I had cared more for that fake reality than the Creation gifted to us. I wanted the thing I had already recognized was helping me avoid the life I should have been living. People can laugh at the language I use for it, but that was the hold it had on me, and turning it off did not immediately give me back the ability to be content without it.

Over time the veil was lifted slowly and I started seeing more and more of the beauty in the mundane moments of everyday life. A dragonfly as big as my hand landed on a stick that I was surprised could hold it, and I was watching the bees fly around, or the butterflies play with each other, and beginning to notice what had been there all along. It sounds small when I write it down. A dragonfly landed on a stick. But I was there looking at it, surprised that the stick could hold it, and finding beauty in something I had not needed anyone to manufacture for me. It was all around us while I kept looking somewhere else. I think about those slow afternoons from childhood that I cannot remember and wonder how many ordinary things I have looked past because I was waiting to get back to the thing that was supposedly more interesting.

What had I been trying so hard to escape? That is what makes me angry when I hear the same culture tell us our ordinary lives are not enough, because I can see what accepting that lie did in me. I was becoming impatient with my responsibilities while there was beauty all around me that I had stopped seeing, and the answer I kept choosing was more of the thing pulling me away. Saint Paul writes in Romans about people who “worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” The Catechism calls idolatry “divinizing what is not God,” and pleasure is one of the things it names. I do not get to set that aside because what I chose was sold as entertainment. God was asking something of me in the life He gave me and I wanted what men had made instead, wanted it enough to resent the interruption, and then wondered why I could not find peace.

I truly believe all this media is a form of drug and I live in a country full of drug addicts who do not realize they are drug addicts. We put it in every room, carry it around with us, hand it to children, and treat the person who refuses it as if there must be something wrong with him. In a way I feel like that disconnection could have been part of the point, and with the way the world has drifted I find it hard to put the thought away. Give people a way to make less connection with real people from an early age and make them connected to a cartoon character who does not actually exist. Connect them to a purple dinosaur, a blue dog, a red dog, as long as it is not a real human. The fictional characters within the fake reality are your friends, while there are real children at church, family and friends, and the world God made waiting outside it. I look at the fight I had to go through to pull away as an adult and then look at how readily we give children the same thing, and I cannot call that harmless. I will not call it harmless because everyone is comfortable with it. I would instead call it borderline abuse, because we know they need us and we keep giving them something that makes it easier for us not to be there. A child sitting quietly in front of a screen may be convenient for the adults in the room, but when did making a child easier to ignore become the same thing as caring for him? If I believe it is a drug and I know what it took for me to pull away from it, then I cannot pretend handing it to a child is an innocent thing just because it buys the adults some peace.

The comfort is part of what makes it so difficult to leave, and I have to remember that when I can feel the emptiness start creeping back in and the search start again. I know what that is in me. I am pulling away from God and walking my way into worshipping false gods who cannot actually provide any peace, they can just make the road to hell feel like heaven. That is what the demonic loves to have us doing, still searching for Him while being absorbed by something else, still thinking the next thing might satisfy what the last thing could not. I was choosing it. I cannot put all of that outside myself when I was the one who did not want to stop watching, and recognizing the evil of what was pulling me does not make my consent innocent. I separated myself, God was never gone, and when I feel that search starting again I have to face how empty that road truly is instead of treating the emptiness as a reason to go further down it.

That is why I want to protect my children from all this witchcraft. I am not going to put it in front of them because the world has decided refusing it is unreasonable. I do not want them to have to fight their way out of something their mother and I helped put them into, but protecting them also asks me to look at what I am giving them instead. The Catechism puts the first responsibility for a child’s education on the parents and says teaching the Faith should begin in the earliest years. That responsibility is ours before a television ever enters the house. If I tell them God comes first and then become impatient because they interrupted what I was watching, they will have seen what came first no matter how well I explained it afterward. I would be teaching them the same thing I am condemning, teaching them that the people in front of us can wait because there is something on a screen we want more.

By protecting them from this, I am hoping they remember their mother and me. I want them to remember being outside, going to church and seeing the other kids there, sitting in the house talking and reading with each other, remember the family and friends and God showing them the world. Those are the stories I want them to have when they look back, and saying that means their mother and I have to be there for those stories to happen. We cannot take away the fictional friends and then remain too occupied with our own fake reality to give them ourselves. I know how easily I ignored something because I did not want to do it, and there will be nothing honest about this if I use protecting my children as another thing to talk about while resenting the time they need from me.

That is why I cannot separate turning the devices off from learning to be present in the ordinary life I was taught to despise. If I want them to remember sitting in the house reading with us, then I have to sit there and read with them, even when there is something else I would rather do. The life I want them to remember will ask for my time just as surely as the calls I did not want to make. I want my children to have room to notice a dragonfly landing on a stick without having already learned that nothing is worth looking at unless someone has made it more exciting. Their mother and I have to stop treating those things as what we do until something better comes along, because I have already spent enough of my own life waiting to get back to something that could never give me what God was giving me. I do not want to hand that same emptiness to them and call it a normal childhood.

People will call this unreasonable. Saint Paul says in First Corinthians that the things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to the sensual man, and I cannot let the world’s idea of what is reasonable make this decision for our family. I look at the movies I remember from when I was six and the parts of my own childhood I cannot find, and I want something different for my children. I want their mother and me there with them, I want the other children at church and the afternoons outside and the book we are reading together to matter to them, and I have to live as if those things matter to me. If that means being called a prude, then call me a prude. I would rather they remember us being there than remember a father who kept asking them to wait while he finished watching.

Turn off the devices, protect your kids from it. You will be called a prude and unreasonable. People will act like you are crazy, but the ways of God look insane to the people of the world.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

Linda A. Henkel — Point-and-shoot memories: The influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour (2014)

Annie Lang — Involuntary Attention and Physiological Arousal Evoked by Structural Features and Emotional Content in TV Commercials (1990)

Aleister Crowley — Magick in Theory and Practice, Introduction and Theorems

The Equinox — Volume I, No. 1, Editorial (1909)

Aleister Crowley — Sunday Dispatch interview, June 18, 1933, reprinted in Thelema Lodge Calendar (September 2003)

Douay-Rheims Bible — Romans 1:25

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Idolatry, paragraphs 2112–2114

Catechism of the Catholic Church — Duties of parents, paragraphs 2221–2226

Douay-Rheims Bible — 1 Corinthians 2:14

Porn is advertised everywhere, soft or hard. Half-naked women are on billboards where children look at them from the back seat. Modesty is almost unheard of, or treated as something embarrassing that only a prude would care about. Social media puts sexualized pictures in front of somebody whether he searched for pornography or not, and once he stops the system learns that he stopped. I said before that the internet pretty well is just porn, because the majority of it is pornography or pornography-adjacent and it follows a person until sexual display feels like the natural background of being alive. By the time somebody sells access openly, the buyer has already been trained how to look.

I know that because I was taught how to look and I participated willingly. I could see a woman I did not know and all I could think about was sex and how I might have it with her even when there was no reason at all to believe that could happen. If she gave me what I wanted, I won. If she did not, she was a product that had failed to pay out and I stepped around her and moved to the next one. That is simply the honest description of what women had become inside my mind.

They were a game to be played and winning was getting inside of them.

The part that scares me is that I thought I was normal. Pornography, movies, magazines, billboards, jokes, the internet, and conversations with other men all made the thought seem normal, and I figured everybody else was doing the same thing and just could not see it in themselves. In a way I still think I was right about how widespread it is. That does not make the way I lived right. It means a large part of society has learned to live in something deeply wrong and then call the person who notices the one who is out of whack. It also means the harm did not begin when money changed hands. The transaction was already in me. I was measuring women by whether I could get something from them and calling that desire.

Then I became friends with the woman who would become my wife before we had any romantic inclinations of any sort. That sounds like a small thing and it should not have taken friendship for me to understand that a woman is a human being in the same full sense that I am, but it did interrupt something. She is different from me and there are definite biological differences between a man and a woman, but she is human. She had thoughts, pain, humor, plans, and wants that were not there for me. She could talk and I had to listen even when nothing sexual was waiting at the end of the conversation. She remained in front of me when the old habit wanted to decide whether I had won and then move on.

Friendship did not make me pure. I brought the same market into relationships and then into marriage. I could believe two things at the same time: I deserved sex, and I was always working to earn it. Sometimes I saw myself as providing and behaving and doing what a husband was supposed to do, so sex was something I had purchased and should have access to. Other times I made myself second in the house, always trying to be good enough to deserve it and judging whether I was a good man by whether my wife gave me the reward. One way makes the wife a product. The other makes the husband a customer begging to be accepted. They can live in the same man because they lived in me, and both turn the marital act into payment instead of the gift of two people who are not merchandise.

That is also why what happened with my daughter cannot sit in a separate part of my mind. She was exposed to the internet unsupervised outside my house and pornography came with it. I wish she lived in my house so I could put a firm no in front of it. She does not, and choices I believe should have been mine as her father were taken from me. But I failed to protect my children from myself before I can accuse everyone else of failing them. I cannot pretend I was always the good father at the door while the world tried to enter, because there was a time when I was part of what they needed protection from. With what little time I get now I try to connect with her, show her the problems these things create, and help her see enough to make a different choice herself. It feels almost powerless, but it is still a duty and I do not get to abandon it because I helped weaken my authority.

Children are helpless victims in this. They do not have minds grown enough to understand what is being done to them or why somebody wants their attention, yet the adult world puts the image everywhere and then hides behind parental responsibility when a child sees it. Parents have duties and I failed in mine. The people who sexualize every space still know what they are doing. The father who says no is expected to fight an internet connection, a phone, the advertising industry, other children, algorithms, and adults who call the fight repression, while the people making money from the exposure act as if they merely provided what everybody wanted.

The Catechism does not leave me a clean private category where none of this touches anybody else. Paragraph 2354 says pornography removes sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners and displays them to third parties. It says the dignity of the participants, vendors, and public is gravely injured because people become objects of base pleasure and illicit profit, and it says civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic material. That is harder language than content creation because it names what the camera and the payment screen are doing to a person. It also judges me. I practiced turning women into objects before I ever knew the paragraph number, and friendship with my wife did not erase the duty to keep seeing her as a person after marriage.

Once I saw that purchaser thinking inside myself, OnlyFans did not look like a new kind of relationship. It looked like the old pornographic idea with the payment, the pictures, and the story about empowerment placed in the same window. The woman is told she is her own boss. The man is told access means connection. The platform does not need either story to be completely true. It only needs both people to keep acting as if the transaction gives them what they came for.

The people defending it say she owns herself. When I look at the structure, I see multiple owners. The platform owns the rules and takes the cut. Subscribers believe payment gives them a claim on what she does next. The market tells her what gets attention and what she will need to expose when yesterday’s picture stops working. A management company may control prices and messages. Her bills become another owner once she depends on the income. She is another girl on a virtual corner fighting for attention against all of the other girls on the other virtual corners, and the owners have multiple products while each product is told she is independent.

The numbers make it impossible to keep pretending this is only a few independent women working from home. Fenix International, the company behind OnlyFans, reported about $7.22 billion in payments through the platform in the year ending November 2024. It recorded about $1.41 billion in revenue and around $684 million in profit before tax, with 377.5 million fan accounts and 4.63 million creator accounts. Billions of dollars are moving through a company built around paid sexual access while millions of women are told they are independent bosses and hundreds of millions of purchasers are trained to see a woman’s body and attention as another product. The platform receives its part no matter which woman has to expose more of herself this month to keep the purchaser looking.

A 2026 High Court judgment from England about a dispute involving an OnlyFans management agency made the companionship lie even clearer. The court described messaging as central to the business, and evidence described paid chatters using software to speak through creator accounts. The lonely man who believes one woman is noticing him can be talking to an employee running a sales process, one of several people taking shifts behind her name. He believes he purchased access to her and is not even speaking to her. The woman is the face, the man is the purchaser, somebody else keeps him spending, and the platform still gets paid.

That is where the peeping tom comparison came into my head. The old peeping tom stood outside somebody else’s bedroom window because he needed to see into a room that did not belong to him. Now the window follows the man everywhere and there are thousands of bedrooms behind it. He does not have to risk being caught outside. He can sit beside his wife and look into somebody else’s room and call it entertainment. The distance makes it feel clean, but the appetite is close to the same one. He needs the video feed into another bedroom, and after enough time his own bedroom may not be enough without the window.

The story about a private exchange between consenting adults also depends on the consumer refusing to look outside the frame. In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission and Utah brought a case against the operators of Pornhub and other sites, alleging failures to prevent tens of thousands of items containing child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual material while the sites claimed that content was prohibited. The settlement required a prevention program and monetary penalties. This is the pornography industry the consumer is funding: abuse, coercion, and children entered the product while the companies collected the money. The man watching cannot know what happened outside the frame, and the screen trains him not to care as long as he can finish.

OnlyFans has its own problem at the line around childhood. Ofcom fined Fenix International 1.05 million pounds in March 2025 for giving inaccurate information about its age-assurance measures. A company making its money from sexualized paid material gave inaccurate information to the regulator trying to determine whether its age controls worked, in a world where children are already surrounded by pornography before they can understand what it is doing to them. I think about my daughter when I read that, not as a statistic but as a child I wanted to place a firm no around and could not.

Even when everyone in the frame is an adult, the question does not end when the camera turns off. I would highly imagine that the majority of rapists nowadays have watched exuberant amounts of porn. I cannot look at what pornography practiced in me and pretend it has nothing to do with how a man learns to look at a woman. It rehearsed the predatory thought over and over. It taught me to see women as usable and to care first about what I wanted from their bodies. It makes the person on the screen into meat, and it trains the man watching to believe his appetite is the most important thing in the room.

At some point something has been so darkened in a man’s human nature that he can look at a woman who does not consent and decide he does not care what God or the law says because he wants to climax right now and cannot watch his entertainment, so she will do. The damage began before the crime. It began when he trained himself to see women as meat and practiced putting his appetite above their humanity. A man can avoid a police report and still become animalistic, selfish, and predatory. Avoiding prison is not the same thing as living like a human being made in the image of God.

There are husbands who have watched so much pornography that they cannot get an erection with their wives, or they can but cannot climax. They need more. They need more novelty, more degradation, the video feed into somebody else’s bedroom, and eventually they need their wife to become as used as possible so she can compete with what they trained themselves to watch. If a man can respond to an endless catalog of strangers and cannot respond to the woman God gave him, the problem is already sitting in his bed whether or not he wants to admit what caused it.

What does that do to her? She may feel that she has to perform against women who were selected, filmed, edited, and replaced every few seconds. If she refuses, he resents her because he believes he earned or deserves the product. If she agrees because she is afraid of losing him, the screen is giving orders inside their marriage. I know both sides of that false transaction because I saw sex as something I deserved and something I was always trying to earn. I carried the market into my relationships before I had the words to describe it, and becoming friends with my wife is one of the reasons I can see now what was being lost. The product kept trying to replace the person who was already there.

This is why I use the words sex slavery and ownership. The woman has multiple owners, and the owners have multiple slaves. The platform owns the rules and takes the cut. The subscribers believe their money gives them a claim on her body. The management company can control the price, the messages, and what she does next. The market tells her how much more she must expose when yesterday’s image stops working. Her bills own her once she depends on the income. She is not her own boss and she is not the one in control. She is another girl on a virtual corner fighting for attention against all of the other girls on all of the other virtual corners, and the word empowerment is used to keep her from seeing the chains.

Her dignity still exists because God gave it to her, but she can refuse to live or interact in it, just as I possessed human dignity while treating women as objects and living beneath it. The purchaser has dignity too, and he is training himself to buy what cannot be purchased without destroying the people inside the exchange. Neither one becomes less valuable to God. Both become less human in their habits while the platform calls the process freedom and counts the money.

And the judgment comes back into my house before I can aim it only at the platform. My wife was my friend before she was my wife. She is human. If I reduce her to what I can get from her, or decide my work and provision bought access to her, I lose the person who sat in front of me long enough to interrupt the lie. I still have to close the page, look at her, listen when what she wants does not match what I want, use what authority I have to protect my children, and go to confession when I fail. Pornography did not stay on the screen in me, and I cannot honestly pretend it will stay there in anybody else.

Go see a priest. Talk to somebody openly and repentantly about whatever pornography you are using. Close the webpage and see the people for what they are. Repentance may not be perfect every time and there may be moments when you backslide, but there are other people who have dealt with the same thing and are walking the same road toward sanctity. Do not stay in the sin because the road out is long. You are not only harming yourself. The way you learn to see enters your marriage, your family, your work, and the stranger you have trained yourself to measure by appetite.

The last part of this series returns to a moment that sounds like despair when written down, but it was one of the best moments of my life because for a moment I stopped lying. Pornography was part of how I made people into things. Drugs were where I can see the whole animalistic pattern most clearly. God kept me alive through both, and I still do not know why, but that moment was where I started trying to become a person who did not step around everybody who refused to give him what he wanted.

I have people who will never hear me say I am sorry for the way I saw or treated them. I cannot undo every thought or every time I turned somebody into a product and moved on. I can remember my wife sitting in front of me as a friend before she was anything else. I can think about my daughter on the other side of an internet connection I could not control. I can see the women fighting for attention on virtual corners, the lonely man carrying a window into another bedroom, and the wife beside him being asked to compete with it, and I can refuse the lie that any of them are only content. They are human. That is why the thing using them is evil, and for me that ordinary friendship was one of the first cracks in the lie that I was human while I used everyone around me.

If you want to keep reading as I try to follow these connections through faith, family, technology, and the systems reshaping human life, you can subscribe here.

Sources and Notes

The Tucker Carlson Show - Saagar Enjeti on gambling, OnlyFans, and drugs

UK Companies House - Fenix International Limited

High Court - Infinni Innovations SA v OFMS Limited

Ofcom - Fine against the provider of OnlyFans

Federal Trade Commission - Action against operators of Pornhub

Pornography and sexual aggression - 2016 meta-analysis

Pornography exposure and sexual offending - systematic review

Pornography and male sexual dysfunction - systematic review

Catechism of the Catholic Church - Pornography 2354

Counsel of Trent - The Sin Hiding Among Trad-Catholics