The Boa Constrictor Doesn't Squeeze All at Once
On Pride caps, thought crimes, and why rules are often a ruse
This is more or less what I worked through on the stream this morning. It started in a dark place and ended, as these things tend to, back at the foot of the cross. I'm putting it down here for those who couldn't be with me live, and for the folks who keep emailing me the stories I end up talking about. This is a communal effort, and I'm grateful. Keep in mind that there’s no way for these summary articles to cover all of the material that I cover in that hour. If you enjoy the content, join me for the live stream!
I sat down to my pile of news this morning and very nearly couldn’t begin. There’s a report out of the United Kingdom that I decided not to walk through in detail, because it sends you to a Psalm 139 kind of place — the rage where you ask God to deal with the wicked because you cannot. A privately funded inquiry estimates that over the span of about fifty years, a quarter of a million British girls were systematically abused by grooming gangs, overwhelmingly white and working-class, preyed upon largely by immigrant men, mostly Pakistani. Elon Musk was saying this out loud a year ago and was told there was nothing to see. Now we see. And the worst of it isn’t even the crime. It’s that authorities didn’t merely look away — they actively covered it up and punished the people trying to stop it.
I don’t have a tidy lesson for that. I prayed for Britain this morning and I’ll pray again here. If I were a British man right now, I don’t know what I’d do with what’s in my chest. So I asked the Lord to help us see things as they are, to protect those in our care, and where there is chaos and destruction, to build order through His people — and to make us willing to be a part of that.
A Quick Walk Through the Wreckage
That set the tone, and the rest of the morning’s headlines didn’t lighten it much.
The FBI disrupted a plot to attack the UFC event at the White House — drones laden with explosives, snipers positioned to fire on the fleeing crowd, at least five people charged. The detail that stuck with me: the plot was reportedly uncovered by the mother of the nineteen-year-old suspect, a young man apparently incensed about the government’s handling of the Epstein files. I understand the frustration. A lot of us share it. But that is not the answer, and a mother turning in her own son is its own kind of grief.
There’s the ongoing war over gender ideology: Idaho, a conservative state, passed legislation to keep men out of women’s spaces, and a federal judge simply blocked it. And then there’s the Southern Poverty Law Center — the outfit that publishes lists of supposed “hate groups,” with the label getting broader and the standard lower over the years until it’s become a kind of leftist McCarthyism: once you’re on the list, you’re blacklisted. Now a top SPLC official stands accused of funneling $1.2 million to an “informant” inside a white supremacist group — a man who, it’s alleged, was also her lover. I put “informant” in quotes; they don’t. The Department of Justice’s superseding indictment accuses the nonprofit of redirecting donor money to the very groups it claimed to be fighting. These things have an incentive structure. If there isn’t enough hatred to go around, apparently you fund some.
I’ll give you one bright spot, because we need it. With the World Cup bringing the world to America, foreigners are discovering — often to their visible shock on X — that once you get past the coastal cities and into fly-over country, this is an astonishingly good place to live. “I was dead wrong about America,” they keep saying. It reminds me of the man who stood outside Harvard offering students a one-way ticket plus cash to any better country they could name — and suddenly everyone had family here, reasons to stay. America is a great place when the people who claim to hate her won’t leave. It doesn’t compare to heaven — and when heaven comes, we lay every weapon down — but in the meantime, this is a good place to be.
Genesis 9 on a Pride Cap
Here’s the one I really want you to sit with. Major League Baseball warned three San Francisco Giants pitchers for writing on their caps during Pride Night. Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker added Bible verses to the rainbow Pride caps the team was made to wear. Roupp wrote “Gen 9:12-16” — and the reference overlapped the rainbow logo on purpose. A fourth pitcher, Sam Hentges, just wore the standard black cap instead.
Pull up the passage and you’ll see exactly what he was doing:
And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth... When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.” — Genesis 9:12-16
The rainbow isn’t theirs. It was God’s sign first. Roupp wasn’t picking a fight; he was submitting a symbol the world has co-opted back under the Lordship of Christ. As he told reporters, “that’s just kind of something I believe in, and I stand firm in that.”
MLB’s response is the whole sermon. They said the writing violated uniform rules, that the warning “had nothing to do with the content of the message” — which is a lie, obviously — and that they’ve issued the same warning over innocent things like “Happy Mother’s Day.” It’s just a rule. Don’t ring that religious-persecution bell. But notice the actual shape of it: the rule is that you must wear the Pride cap, and you may not contextualize it. One man opts out, two qualify it under Christ, and the league cannot abide even that.
This is how societal drift happens — not in one great shove, but in small required gestures where you’re made to bend the knee to the current thing. We’ve already watched it: a hockey player disciplined for declining the Pride warmup, an NBA figure pushed out for speaking against the agenda. There’s only one side you’re permitted to articulate. Say anything outside it and you’re gone.
And here is the mechanism, the thing I keep coming back to. It’s death by a thousand cuts. The world doesn’t squeeze you all at once. It works like a boa constrictor — it doesn’t crush you in a single grip. It simply tightens a little every time you exhale, until one day you cannot draw a breath at all. That’s how the church has been constricted in the West: through innocuous rules, small compromises, little cuts along the way, until you’ve abandoned your first love and gone not just lukewarm but stone cold.
“You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people’s feet.” — Matthew 5:13
That should put the fear of God in us — not just about whether we are saved, but about whether the church we’ve handed our children will still be a church at all.
More Thought Crimes Than China
If you doubt how far the squeeze can go, look back across the Atlantic. Elon Musk reposted a chart this week claiming that Britain now arrests more people for social media posts than China, Russia, and Turkey combined — on the order of twelve thousand arrests for what amount to thought crimes. The country that gave us the very idea of free Englishmen now leads the world in jailing people for what they say online. And it isn’t only Britain — Denmark is prosecuting along these lines, Canada is doing it, and under the previous administration we crept right up to the edge of it here.
I see the same playbook against the Abolitionists who go into public squares to plead with people about the sin of abortion. The rules always sound reasonable: We believe in free speech, but you need a permit here, and there’s a fine, and I’d hate to have to call the police. They write rules that sound innocuous, and then they wield them. And Christians act perpetually surprised. In the United Methodist Church we were given assurances the rules wouldn’t be used against us. They were.
That is the lesson I cannot stop preaching: it is not enough to have the right words on paper. What matters at least as much is the character of the people who will enforce them.
Holy Fruit Inspectors
One of my regulars quoted the Lord Jesus in Matthew 7 this morning, and it’s exactly the point. We are called to be discerning. We are, as I like to put it, holy fruit inspectors.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will recognize them by their fruits... Every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit... Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.” — Matthew 7:15-20
We have a right to our own thoughts; we have no right to be wrong in opposition to God’s truth. And one of the hardest things about being a pastor is that nearly everyone you deal with will, at some point, lie to you — and most don’t even know they’re doing it, because they can’t tell the difference between their opinions and the facts. They lie to themselves first, and then to you. You don’t get pure villains and pure saints; you get messy people, some better put together than others, and you have to scrutinize everything.
Which brings me to bishops. A viewer told me his bishop in Mississippi is threatening churches over apportionments, and I’ll say plainly what I said on the air: do not trust a United Methodist bishop — not a single word. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve known men who were stand-up Christians of real integrity before they took that office, and something about the role warps them — compromising not only their walk with the Lord but their very capacity to think straight. Power is corrosive. It usually corrupts, though I don’t believe it always must — which is exactly why we’re obligated to lift up the rare leaders who hold power and keep their integrity.
But you only know who those people are if you inspect the fruit. How often have we been blindsided by someone everyone assumed was strong in Christ, simply because no one scrutinized him? A prominent pastor exposed for sexting a campaign worker. Ravi Zacharias — a wound so many of us are still carrying. The man seemed legit. That’s the whole problem.
It’s Not the Paper. It’s the People.
As General Conference approaches, this is the drum I’ll keep banging. We watched Robert Barnes follow the United Methodist process exactly as designed — bringing charges against a bishop teaching rank heresy — and the people in charge simply declined to act. When that happens, you have no recourse. The document is a farce. A beautifully written rulebook is worthless in the hands of people who enforce only the parts they like.
So I care far less about getting the language perfect than about getting the right people in place — which is why I’ve pushed so hard for real access to scrutinize episcopal candidates before we vote. One question I use to take a man’s measure is simple: what percentage of the people in our pews do you think actually make it to heaven if we all died tomorrow? If he says ninety percent, he’s too Pollyanna-ish to be trusted with the hour we’re living in. If he says five or ten, I’ll walk a long way with him, because he understands what’s at stake. The charming optimist will give a wonderful speech and then be first to recant on the day of trial, first to say surely we don’t need to die on this hill.
We do. There are hills.
What the Squeeze Is For
So let it cohere, because it coheres for me. Britain’s thought-crime arrests, a baseball league that can’t abide scripture on a hat, a denomination whose rules mean nothing without men of integrity to enforce them — these are not separate stories. They’re the same constriction, the same patient tightening that asks you to give up just a little more breath each time, until Christ is no longer glorified in you.
None of this is cause for contempt. The world will hate us; the Lord told us it would.
“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you... because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” — John 15:18-19
We’re not trying to irritate anyone. But we should expect the friction, and refuse to compromise in the small things that lead to the large ones. My prayer this morning was the one I prayed for everyone who sat with me: that God would give us eyes to see the world as it is and ears to hear where He’s calling, make us sober and faithful and rigorous, equip us for the day of trial, and keep our hearts grieving for this nation, for Nigeria, and for the suffering church around the world, until He sends a spirit of repentance and renewal.
We began with an old Puritan prayer, “The Name of Jesus,” and I’ll leave its hope with you: in Christ “the enslaved find redemption, the guilty pardon, the unholy renovation.” That’s still true this morning, in Britain and in Yazoo City and in every place the boa is tightening. Don’t give in. Withstand. Persevere. See evil and compromise for what it is. Keep your integrity.