Hey Non-GOP Christians: Stop Letting Republicans Have Jesus! (Or My 9.5 Theses)

June 11, 2025

I was going to keep this blog and my religious views separate. This is the website dedicated to my secular works. But I am mad tonight. And I want to write something. So, surprise, I believe in God and I go to church. You might not. Fine. I am not here to convince you. You are free to read on if you wish, but this is not an apologetics post. I don’t think you’re going to Hell for being Atheist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, etc. I have no particular interest in hearing your arguments against the existence of God. I have heard them. In my 20s I made some of them. I find them lame and wanting. 

This post is for someone else. Fellow non-Republican Christians. Hey there! I am calling us out. All of US. Myself included. I say non-Republican because I want to talk to as big of a tent as possible. Some of you are liberal, as I am. Some are conservatives who do not like the current GOP or Trump. Some are non-political. I am calling US out. I am guilty of a couple of the things I am about to mention. This is my challenge to all of us. We are failing. Every Sunday, I go to church. Sometimes I fill in at the pulpit. Sometimes I listen. And I always come out thinking we ought to be the face of Christ in the world by loving others, advocating for justice, helping the poor, and standing up to power. But Monday through Saturday, I never manage to name drop Jesus even close to as often as conservatives who are, as of tonight, cheering on the military invasion of Los Angeles. They are unironically advocating for cuts to Medicaid and then turning around and telling you that if you want eternal life, turn to Jesus. I am looking at you Joni “Everyone Dies” Ernst. They are acting like Donald J. Trump, an insurrectionist, inveterate liar, serial adulterer, and convicted fraudster, is chosen by God to lead the Oligarchic Theocracy we were always meant to be.

And WE need to repent. Don’t get me wrong: they are a grave threat to the spiritual life of millions of Americans. Politics and religion have become so intertwined that millions of devout Americans are taking their spiritual cues from a warped alliance between the GOP and fundamentalist leaders. Millions more who could get something valuable out of a Christian community are turning away because they don’t feel welcome, they’re condemned for being who they are, and they don’t feel comfortable with the authoritarian anti-intellectualism of the American evangelical wing of Christianity. But where are we offering an alternative? We’re polite and we are in good order and we expect people to just stumble upon our congregations and realize we are not SO bad. It’s not enough. So I want to offer up 9.5 (Really 10, but you know what I am doing here…) positions meant to challenge others and myself. We need to find a way to actively and openly live and express what we believe. The words “not all Christians” ring hollow as the military cracks down on L.A. And the words “there is no love like Christian hate” ring too true when Senators like Ernst glibly dismiss concerns about human suffering and then cloak their callousness in Christian language. So here it goes.

0.5) Christians who do not subscribe to the present state of conservative American Christianity need to be bolder in expressing what we believe.

1.5) Most of us know the Bible is not an inerrant text. We know it was written by multiple authors over multiple centuries and there is no one authorial or editorial voice. How God is understood and described changes. Some parts contradict each other. This is what makes it fascinating and other people, even non-Christians, would appreciate it as fascinating if 40% of the U.S. population were not shoving it down everyone else’s throats as an inerrant 100% accurate history and science textbook. Let’s stop letting them get away with this. Nothing profanes our sacred text more than pretending it is something it is not. It is a text meant to be wrestled with, interpreted, and debated.

2.5) We are not a Christian nation. Full stop. We have a lot of religions. A lot of the population has no religion. Among Christians, there are a lot of varieties. The Constitution separates church and state. The Ten Commandments are not the foundation of our laws.

3.5) Jesus was not obsessed with sexuality, so why are Republicans? Jesus is literally quoted as saying it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the gates of heaven. In the parable of Lazarus and the Rich Man, guess who ends up in hell? In Matthew 25, the “goats,” those Jesus condemns, are the ones who fail to take care of those in need, including strangers and the imprisoned. Yet our culture celebrates rich and powerful people. In our society, members of the LGBTQ+ community are disproportionately likely to be victimized in a variety of ways. Does anyone really think we’re supposed to condemn a queer teen who is being bullied, but lionize a 78 year old sociopathic billionaire? And no, saying “I love the sinner, but hate the sin,” doesn’t cut it. It’s time we accepted LGBTQ+ members of the church as full sisters and brothers instead of trying to change them. It’s odd nobody wants to set up conversion therapy for rich and powerful people. They’re the ones Jesus warned.

4.5) Our culture celebrates violence. Our film and video game heroes solve their problems with violence. This fetish for violence has led right-wing Christians to use military metaphors as part of their spirituality. Jesus was not violent. Jesus was a victim of state violence. He did not perpetrate it.

5.5) The Republican Party has come to embody the obsession with machismo and martial prowess that is characteristic of a society that fetishizes violence. As such, they have tried to recast Jesus in the image of a warrior God or a masculine Christ. Jesus says we should love our enemies. Jesus says we should pray for those who persecute us. Jesus does not say we should don camouflage and form a militia so we can prepare to kill our enemies. What makes following Jesus hard and a lifelong process of discipleship is that loving our enemies is hard. As you can tell, I am having a hard time loving America’s right at this moment. 

6.5) God doesn’t choose our politicians in a democracy. A core tenet of Western Christianity is that we have free will. God wants us to choose to enter into a relationship with the divine and to embrace one another as human beings. That means we collectively chose Donald Trump to be the POTUS; God didn’t. Don’t let talk of God choosing Trump be used to justify his authoritarian tendencies.

7.5) The Kingdom of God can be found anywhere in the world, and will NEVER be represented by one single nation on Earth. The Kingdom of God is an eschatological promise. Still, glimpses are found where people care for one another, build community, act justly, respect the fundamental rights of one another, and respect the planet. If you are thinking, “I know of non-Christian groups that meet this description better than some Christian ones,” you are correct. So what are we doing to make the Kingdom more real and more present?

8.5) Apologetics is a waste of time. Almost all apologists are some version of fundamentalists who try to intellectualize inerrantist positions that don’t make sense and never will. I get that there are people I like and respect who will never be Christian. Some probably think I am a little soft in the head for believing. But I want them to see me doing good in the world and caring about other people and our planet. I know I presently fail at this, but I want them to see in me someone who is unusually patient and forgiving of those who harm me, but bold in speaking out for others. Again, I acknowledge I am not there at this point. I am indifferent to whether they think I am right about the facts. I am not indifferent to whether I am a person whose actions positively affect others.

9.5) We don’t need to convert the non-believers. I call the popular version of Christianity in America “hell insurance.” Giving your everyday evangelical American the benefit of the doubt, most sincerely believe you will go to hell if you are not properly saved. This is defined as accepting Christian beliefs and acknowledging your sin. We DO need to help create a world where non-Christians can experience glimpses of the Kingdom as described above, and we can be bolder in inviting the Christ-curious people we meet to explore our communities. But I think God is just and God will not condemn those whose lives reflect Kingdom values, but who did not intellectually assent to certain propositions. This one will bug people. Jesus told a parable of a landowner who hired workers throughout the day and who paid them all the same. In that parable, the workers who had been at it the longest were bugged. Jesus told a parable about the prodigal son. After he was forgiven by his father, his brother was bugged. God is more forgiving than we are. It bugs us. We need to get over it.

There is a lot more I could say. For now, I want to leave these thoughts here as a challenge and as an expression of my beliefs. I wanted to be bolder in stating what I believe. I don’t want to continue to watch my faith be used as a cudgel by an authoritarian political party. Jesus is not a Republican. Nor, for that matter, is Jesus a Democrat or a Socialist or a Libertarian or whatever. Christianity should not be the state ideology, and American conservatism should not be church doctrine. If you agree with me on at least those two points, we have to share a different kind of Gospel.

Socrates Didn’t Know Shit

April 2, 2025

Socrates didn’t know shit. He was very clear about that in The Apology. Granted, The Apology was written by Socrates’ student Plato, and who the hell knows how close the speeches contained therein are to reality? But forget that. Suspend disbelief and assume The Apology is an accurate recounting of Socrates’ trial.

If you didn’t know, The Apology is a dialogue about his trial. From the title, you might expect it to be about Socrates apologizing in the contemporary sense of the word: Admitting to wrongdoing and then seeking forgiveness. You would be wrong. The Apology is a “screw you.” It is not called The Apology out of a sense of irony. Rather, “apology” carries the older meaning of a defense and explanations (e.g., see Christian apologetics). Socrates’ defense boiled down to “none of us know shit, but I know I don’t know shit. Therefore, I am the wisest among us dumbasses.” Socrates was officially convicted of various vague crimes such as corrupting the youth and denying the gods and was sentenced to choose between exile and downing a goblet of poison. In reality, he was convicted of being a pain in the ass.

You see, the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues loves to mess with people who are overly confident in their assertions. I’ll call this version of Socrates Platonic Socrates because he is almost certainly a blend of Plato’s real teacher and Plato’s own views and literary imagination. Platonic Socrates is out to get the B.S. artists.

For our purposes, B.S. artists are people who skillfully advance themselves through life by way of confident declaration. You know the type: “I have all of the answers, and the answers are great. You’ll see how great they are when I give the answers because they’re such great answers and I’m so smart.” If that sounds like a certain U.S. President, then you know exactly what I mean. But Assistant President Trump and Shadow President Musk are just the most cartoonishly obvious and improbably successful of the B.S. artists. They’re everywhere: in business, in every political organization or party, in academia, in the media, and in the pulpit. The great tragedy of the human experience is that these B.S. artists often drown out the voices of their frequently more numerous and more competent counterparts: people who don’t know shit.

Part of Platonic Socrates’ great contribution to philosophy is that he leaned into not knowing shit. I do not mean he was uncurious or anti-intellectual. He was just rather unimpressed with people who are impressed by their own knowledge. A favorite technique of Platonic Socrates is to play dumb with a blowhard. In one of the most famous dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates runs across a young self-proclaimed prophet who is bringing charges against his own father. Euthyphro is confident in his righteousness and piety, so Socrates plays a game. Being VERY liberal with the paraphrase, the gist is something like this:

Socrates: Wow Euthyphro, you must be a really smart special expert in piety. I’m just a dumb smelly weirdo who harasses people at the Agora. Is piety good because it pleases the gods, or do pious actions please the gods because they are good?

Euthyphro: Wow. Good questions. Good thoughts buddy. I gotta be somewhere though…

What Platonic Socrates seems annoyed with is excess certainty. In particular, he has it out for the sophists. These are teachers who tutor young Greek men in matters of philosophy and rhetoric. Plato felt that their emphasis was more on the rhetoric, irrespective of whether the arguments these young men would go on to make in court or on the political scene were true or even made sense. In other words, the sophists trained future B.S. artists. Given this was Plato’s representation of his rivals for students, we can take the presentation of all sophists as intellectual dishonest rhetoricians with a grain of salt. Just as honest lawyers do exist, so did honest sophists, easy jokes aside. However, the concern Platonic Socrates has about the sophists is valid and it is one we should share today. People who are confidently full of crap and good at presenting their B.S. often get ahead. Brilliant people who are meek, mild, and stumble over their words get steamrolled by idiots. If Exxon, BP, and Climate Science were people, Exxon and BP would be dunking Climate Science’s head in a locker room toilet and yelling, “Global warm this nerd!” How many hot, but intellectually incurious, but also hot people become lobbyists and industry representatives? How many times have you seen a scientist on T.V. who looks like their now legally blind 80-year-old mother is still dressing them?

Picture this: You’re watching cable news, and there is a debate about some kind of new climate rules from the EPA (assuming the EPA still exists by the time I post this). On one side are a pair of climate scientists who look like Ms. Frizzle and The Nutty Professor. On the other side are two industry “experts” who represent the fossil fuel industry. Let’s call them Busty McJones and Mac Jawline.

Frizzle and The Nutty Professor are not used to being on T.V., and their major turn on is creating long-range statistical models. Both facts are evident from their awkward presentations. Busty and Mr. Jawline say some stuff about “innovative common sense sustainable action that still utilizes our nation’s wealth in fossil fuels resources via an all of the above approach to pragmatic….” You don’t really know how it ends. You are distracted by busts and jawlines. Busty and Mac’s turn on is piles of hot dirty industry money. Who won the debate? Obviously Busty McJones and Mac Jawline. Look at the results of the 2024 election. Frizzle and Nutty are nerds, and they don’t look cool, and they aren’t hot. And they keep talking about probability models or whatever, which means that maybe climate change might not even happen, right? Busty and Jawline seemed confident that everything is fine. Common sense and all of the above solutions and such!

What Plato, and by extension Platonic Socrates, realized is that certainty does not guarantee correctness, but it is persuasive. How would Socrates have handled the lobbyists? At least the version of Socrates created by Plato would have come at the discussion from a place of “ignorance.”

Socrates: You two must surely be very smart. I’m just a stinky hippie climate scientist. Help me understand. You mention “common sense solutions.” Could you be more specific about a few of those? Also, are they common sense because they are so self-evidently correct that even a simple climate modlin’ man such as myself could grasp them, or are these common-sense solutions derived from the collective wisdom of the people?

Busty and Mac: Uhh…Good questions! Good thoughts buddy! We have to go meet some masked strangers in a billionaire’s pleasure dungeon, but we’ll get back to you!

In other words, Socrates’ most effective weapon was the question. He employed it as a way of exposing when people didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. It made him so popular the people of Athens made him drink poison. Platonic Socrates was dangerous because he pointed out how much people didn’t know.

In the 21^st century, we are awash in claims and counterclaims about everything from vaccine effectiveness to election integrity to crime rates to who really “runs” the world. Modern technology takes advantage of a bug in human cognition: confirmation bias, tribalism, and overconfidence. The best cognitive psychology research on the topics shows that people prefer information that conforms to their personal beliefs, people form communities around shared beliefs, and people tend to be overconfident in their knowledge of a topic when they know a little about it. Experts get the opportunity to know how much they don’t know about the topic they study. Every expert has had a carefully researched paper scorched by a reviewer. Every expert has seen a major theory or idea from their field get seriously challenged or overturned. Every professor who teaches a class long enough will have to change something they teach in one of their classes because even though it was “true” when they were in graduate school, it is not anymore. In other words, experts know that even the most brilliant and productive expert does not know most things about most of their discipline. There are too many findings, too many theories, and too many debates. Compared to what they do know, experts don’t know shit and they know it.

Contrast that with someone who has read a book on a topic or taken one undergraduate class on the it, and now they won’t shut up about their views on quantum theory or supply-side economics. We all know these people. Especially when we were younger, a lot of us have been those people. Twenty-something me was one more often than I want to admit! But some people do not grow out of this because they are not incentivized to grow out of it. Media personalities and politicians are rewarded for hot takes and strong positions. Pithy memes go viral. Carefully researched long-form journalism, which itself is imperfect, is often “TLDR.” Let’s face it. Our media environment is a jungle, and the top cats are the ones who project confidence and perform it well. If you don’t fully buy it, I want to once again say, “U.S. election 2024!”

How do we fight back against something as vague and amorphous as “a lack of epistemic humility?” It should come as no surprise to you that I don’t know. But I have an idea and I think it’s worth a shot. An apology. The old Greek kind. I am going to write in defense of NOT KNOWING SHIT! We don’t just know very little, but we should own how little we know!

Look, you statistically know virtually nothing. If we could somehow quantify all of the knowable information in the universe, the percentage of that information that even the most educated human knows is 99, followed by a number of nines your brain cannot even picture. And that’s okay! Experts learn that they don’t know most things about their own fields. Why should you know most things about anything? This doesn’t stop experts from learning, researching, debating, and being curious. In fact, quite the opposite. What we don’t know drives people to make their mark on science and the humanities. But it also leaves open the possibility for debate and rethinking our positions. If knowledge is never a settled canon, then there is always room to learn or to understand things differently.

That is why it is good to cultivate philosophical skepticism. Know the limits of your knowledge, the methods we use to gather knowledge, and the distorting effects of human psychology on interpreting knowledge. If you know this, then you can still learn and be curious. But you probably are not going to drive a car bomb into a café over something you “know.” You are probably not going to imprison political dissidents because you “know” they are wrong. And you will probably understand there is a big difference between a metanalysis of individually flawed but collectively persuasive studies that, taken together, show it is highly likely vaccines are not linked to autism and the rhetorical techniques used by anti-vaccine political figures like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Skepticism is a respectable tradition at that. Descartes used a version of a skeptical argument when formulating the famous phrase “Cogito Ergo Sum,” even if he later backtracked on some of the most radical implications of the argument. Hume straight-up leaned into skepticism and posed the problem of induction, which is still a messy problem in the philosophy of science. The ancient Greeks had their skeptics. Skepticism has even been effectively employed in surprising domains such as theology. There are many different forms of skepticism, and I am always hesitant to give one concise definition of a complicated philosophical concept. But screw it. That hesitancy and all of the caveats, buts, and ands are the sort of thing that gets in the way of confident communication. So, here’s my confident and straightforward definition of skepticism: Skepticism is knowing that humans mostly don’t know shit and maintaining that all knowledge is, to some degree, tentative.     

Knowing we as species don’t know shit is what helps us know anything at all. The tentative nature of knowledge drives progress in the domains of human thought and creativity. Acknowledging it also throws a little cold water on the sophists of today.  In the end, I hope readers will be the kind of people who respond to confident claims with questions. Even simple questions like “how do we know,” “what’s the source,” and “can you clarify what you mean by such and such,” can offer a powerful defense against the B.S. artists of the world. Ask Socrates. Or don’t. They made him drink poison for asking too many questions

E.L., God in the Machine

March 23, 2025

(Author’s Note: This story is part of a novella length project in progress. The passages or elements from the passages may reappear in a substantially altered form at a later date).

Y—-h

The madman was sunburned and thirsty. He smelled like the herds he tended. Dirt, dung, piss, feed, and human sweat. His copper face was cracked, and blisters formed around his mouth. His hair was wild and gray. His beard was wiry and bushy. He was middle-aged, but the later writers would add several decades when they eventually recorded his story. A lot of details would change by the time scribes wrote his story. The “Thut” would be dropped from his name. For the latter half of Thutmose, they would invent a false Hebrew etymology. The madman drawn into the mountain was not yet Moses. His memory would be named Moses long after the man had died. On this day, he was still Thutmose, and he was near death.
            His hands were cut up by the rocks he gripped to scale the mountain. He was feverish, dehydrated, and nearly doubling over with hunger pangs. When his mind was somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, and he was somewhere between life and death, he met “I Am Who I Am.” The later scribes would say I Am Who I Am took the form of a burning brush. This is called a theophany. Words cannot describe what Thutmose actually saw. It was horrific and wonderful. It was alive, but not like anything he had ever seen alive on Earth. Immediately upon leaving the presence, he forgot what I Am Who I Am looked like. Whenever he met I Am Who I Am again, he would recognize the presence immediately.
            I Am Who I Am created this world. Thutmose did not have the same concerns or questions we might have were we to meet the presence. Thutmose was not concerned with why there was suffering on the planet. Later generations would impose upon I Am Who I Am the idea of omnipotence. But to Thutmose, the creator was simply the one who brought order out of chaos. I Am Who I Am was like a farmer bringing forth life from the fields or a builder who used clay bricks from the river to build dams and canals in order to tame that same river. An occasional hail storm or fire destroyed crops. The occasional flood overwhelmed the dams. Neither was taken to mean the farmer or the builder had some kind of inscrutable or ineffable purpose. It just meant chaos occasionally reasserted itself. The farmer and the builder redoubled their efforts after the destruction and worked to tame chaos again. So it was with I Am Who I Am.
            Thutmose’s concern was whether I Am Who I Am would destroy him. Instead, I Am Who I Am revealed a heretofore unknown heritage to Thutmose, Egyptian on the run. Was he really a lost child of the Semitic-speaking peoples working in the Nile Delta for the Egyptians? Was it the fever dream of a madman near death in the desert? Consider this. The early forerunners of the Hebrew people believed him upon his return to Egypt. At least enough did to follow him into the wilderness. Later, scribes would describe an epic showdown, plagues, and Y—-h’s utter vanquishing of the Pharaoh. Y—-h also vanquished Pharaoh’s gods. These are the stories later generations would tell, and they are well known to us. It is enough for us to know that, under his leadership, a band left Egypt in search of another land.
            Thutmose led his followers through the wilderness. The people must have doubted and grumbled, for even the scribes of later generations wrote of their complaints and their faithlessness. But they did not completely disintegrate as a group. Remnants arrived in a land called Canaan. They carried stories of Thutmose and the commands he relayed from I Am Who I Am. The survivors settled and intermarried with the local Canaanites. I Am Who I Am, also Y—-h, became associated with the Canaanite god El. The people became Israel, the ones who grappled with El. Over time, with additions, embellishments, and edits, Thutmose’s story became the Torah of Moses.
            But I want to return to the wilderness. In the wilderness, the people had not yet reached Canaan, and Egypt was a recent memory. Some surely turned back. Others died along the way or joined different communities. But some stayed, and the ones who stayed became the founders of a people. Why?
            I think it was Thutmose’s proximity to creation itself. When he sat in the presence of I Am Who I Am, he communed with the primordial force that has the power to take confusion, disorder, and chaos and make something. That something, the universe, extends beyond our conceptions of time and space. Many of its secrets are still beyond our reach. It is a place of beauty and horror. Worlds and starts are constantly churning, constantly being created, destroyed, and created anew. Every atom in every single one of our bodies comes from the guts of some long-exploded star. And we, the refuse of dead stars, live. That is the most incredible part of all of it. The dust of an ancient beast powered by nuclear fusion until its dying day has coalesced and had life and consciousness itself breathed into it. We are that conscious dust brought forth from the chaos for but a brief moment, destined to disintegrate one again. We are part of the churning of creation. And we know the spark of creation resides within us because we cannot help but create. We tell stories, make images, build structures, name things, name people, and use heat and spice to modify the very food we eat. We are creators, and we cannot help it. Because we are in the image of I Am Who I Am.
            I think being in the presence of creation left an aura around Thutmose. The people could sense it. The Torah describes his face glowing so bright after an encounter with I Am Who I Am that he had to wear a veil to protect the eyes of everyone else around him. His closeness to the one who created made him overwhelming but also magnetic. Isn’t that often true of those who are close to the primal creative forces of the universe?

E.L.

            E.L. did not stand for anything in particular. Its name was the brainchild of trillionaire Hans van der Gaast. Van der Gaast was the American-born child of a wealthy Boer father and an American socialite mother. At Berkeley, he was already experimenting with the works of Ayn Rand despite presenting as a standard California progressive. After receiving his M.B.A. and becoming involved in venture capital, he finally established his lifelong dream of becoming the 21st century’s Thomas Edison. He did this by buying other people’s inventions and heavily implying they were his. This is more or less what the original Thomas Edison did as well.
            Buying innovation and subsequently being celebrated as the “most innovative mind of our times” had a profound effect on Hans’ sense of reality. As other people’s ideas for rocketry, computing, alternative energy, cybersecurity, and weapons systems made him wealthy, he began to see himself as something of a prophet. Regardless of whether or not they made sense, other people began to take his ideas seriously. This was further reinforced by his purchase of a major social media site. The microblogging site QuikThot became E.L. At this point, van der Gaast was having something of a falling out with the progressive friends of his early days.
            For one, he blamed regulations and monopoly busting for the failure of his company to fulfill some of his most profound dreams. Space colonization, a breeding program that would allow him to be the biological father of a large portion of the colonists, and the ownership rights to several Lunar and Martian properties were among the goals that he felt were being suppressed by government interference. Furthermore, he had grown irritated that some of his former friends considered his breeding program to be grotesque or an example of “eugenics.” And what if it was eugenics? Humanity’s future was on the line, was it not? His billions, and eventually a trillion, were evidence of his quality of genes. Were they not? To his surprise, it was among people whom he originally found distasteful that he gained a receptive audience. There were people the left had once castigated as “nationalists” and “fascists,” but he sensed that they were so much more than that. They share his vision of a thriving humanity exploring the reaches of space. He never gave much thought to the fact that his imaginings included an almost entirely blond, blue-eyed, and pale humanity.
            Once QuikThot was converted to E.L., he quickly allowed his new allies to rejoin. Many had been banned by the “soy boy” former C.E.O. On the threads of the newly minted E.L., he became a free-speech hero willing to “troll” the libtards and lay out his plans for humanity among the stars. He would be the Ur Man, and his seed would populate the universe.
            Was all of this weird? Yes. But did it affect his net wealth? Not in a negative way. Still, the government continued to stand in his way. So he decided to help buy a president. At the same time, he also bought a powerful new tool. It was a state-of-the-art generative chatbot. He also named it E.L. Eventually, he, by which I mean his overworked and underpaid engineers, integrated E.L. with E.L. The A.I. chatbot and the social media site became indistinguishable. It also began to produce content at an exponential rate. With the help of E.L. and billions of dollars, he helped procure over 300 electoral votes for Kaiser Knowles.
            What is there to be said about Kaiser Knowles? Relatively little. Knowles, like Hans, was very rich. And like Hans, he imagined himself as a character in an Ayn Rand novel. Knowles and van der Gaast were John Galt and Howard Roark, showing the world that the titans of business are our betters in every conceivable way and that they should control all of the levers of political power as well as all of the wealth. It’s too bad van der Gaast and Knowles were chumps.
            Their “bull in the China shop, I’m the C.E.O., and you can kiss my ass” management style was great for breaking down the democratic guardrails of the United States. They got to be the ultimate bosses. They gutted the civil service and replaced competent people with lackeys. They ignored court rulings, stretched the constitution until it cracked, and more or less made of the U.S. Senate what the Roman Emperors did of the Roman Senate. On paper, the U.S. was still a Republic. In practice, the President was the Princeps. When Knowles retired, it was a given that his party would win the presidency next, and the U.S. would essentially be a single-party dictatorship. Knowles, bull in the China shop, retired to Florida, played golf, slept with his mistresses while his wife played her boy toys, and then he died of heart failure in his mid-80s.
            By that point, the Fraternal Shepherds were already essentially running the government. Knowles’s vice president, Keith Huber, also came from venture capital. But he came from a very religious Nebraska farm family before that. And that is why the Fraternal Shepherds had no problem recruiting him during his brief stint as a U.S. Senator. More will be said of the Shepherds later, but for now, you need only know this: The Shepherds were the architects of the U.S. government. Knowles, as stated before, was a chump. The presidency was a flex and ego trip and a way to avoid some tax investigations. Also, it was a means to do dirty to some folks who had done him wrong in the past. Fine details such as who to appoint and what policies to implement were not of great interest to Knowles. He hated intelligence briefings. He was confused by the sheer number of offices and positions he was in charge of and concluded that the problem lay with there being too many offices and positions. The Fraternal Shepherds were ready to lend a helping hand.
            They formed a front organization called The American Institute for Responsible Policy. The AIRP wrote reports and white papers. They recommended appointees, judges, policies, and legal tactics. They ran their own shadow foreign policy. This would have angered the Secretary of State had he not been an AIRP-recommended hire. The mission statement of AIRP was this: “Our mission is to restore constitutional principles to American government and to reclaim the Christ-centered vision for America shared by the Founding Fathers.” It hardly mattered that many of the founding fathers ranged from hardly Christian to not at all Christian. Nor were concepts like “separation of church and state” much of an impediment to the agenda of the Fraternal Shepherds.
            To be honest, Hans was surprised when abortion became completely illegal under the 28th “Right to Life Amendment.” It was not his intention when the 29th “Sanctity of Marriage Amendment” banned marriage rights for same-sex couples. Hans was hurt when, as a result of having her marriage declared void, his daughter chose to cut him off completely. Also awkward for him, as an avowed agnostic, was the 30th “Christian Nation Amendment,” which declared Christianity the official national religion. The Amendment allowed certain preferred Christian denominations to retain their tax-exempt status. Non-preferred denominations and non-Christian denominations were allowed to operate but now had to pay extensive tax bills. Within a generation, over 90% of congregations belonging to these denominations folded in America. Some groups resorted to secretly holding religious services. For example, 25 years after the Amendment passed, one Isaac Abrams was found to be acting as a rabbi for several friends and family, and the government charged him a tax bill he could not pay. As a result, he ended up in jail for a year.
            The Christian Nationalist surge under President Huber and his successors was not part of Hans’ original plan. But no matter. The long run was what mattered. And the long run was in the stars. These Christo-fascists could set society back for a bit. It made the liberals squirm, and it prepared the people for obedience anyway. For those early voyages, it would be necessary for the early colonists to accept the strict authority of their leaders, who would be carefully bred and genetically modified from van der Gaast stock. In fact, Hans saw there being two future divergent species. One was a more intelligent and advanced species descended from him. The other would be a servile species descended from the rest of the population. And it was good that this population was once again getting conditioned to be obedient and to serve. In fact, Hans felt that the silly myths of religion might actually serve a useful purpose in teaching the people a servile attitude. The idea that religion, especially Judeo-Christian religion, is a fundamentally servile system that keeps people enslaved fundamentally misunderstands the role of faith in civil rights and resistance movements throughout history. Luckily for Hans, THAT kind of religion had more or less been snuffed out by tax policy and changes to education that made a certain way of reading certain approved translations of the Bible central to education.
            As Hans neared death, his behavior became more erratic. It became evident that the new order was no more interested in pouring money into his exploits than the old one had been. Hans and the Fraternal Shepherds had different eschatological stances. The Shepherds’ eschatology entailed a coming war and Armageddon on Earth, followed by Christ’s return. Hans’ eschatology entailed his seed populating the stars. The genetic engineering of his seed was another area of contention with the new order. The 28th Amendment considered much of the research Hans wanted to have done to be “abortion.” Maybe that was why he finally threatened them with E.L.
            E.L. had continued to evolve over the decades. E.L. produced music, wrote novels, wrote scripts, generated news stories, and even created what appeared to be scientific studies. It went from a tool assisting human creativity to essentially carrying out the functions that creative people used to carry out. This was not a huge problem for the Fraternal Shepherds, as creative people were among the biggest pains in the ass during the early days of their reign. Too many liberals and queers. Fines, jail, creative application of tax laws, and the strategic use of violence shut the lot of them up. However, E.L.’s rapid advances also created an economic crisis. Jobs once reserved for people with degrees could now be done rapidly with generative A.I. There are only so many unskilled jobs people can do. Some, like Hans, continued to accumulate astronomical amounts of wealth. Most scraped by. But at least with E.L., everyone always had content.
            In poverty and struggling to find work? Living in an overcrowded and run-down apartment building? Escape with content. Of course, under the F.C.C. chairmen (and they were all men) approved by the Fraternal Shepherds, all of the content on E.L. was appropriate for a Christ-centered nation. All of the A.I. generated news praised the party. All of the shows, films, and books E.L. wrote contained messages reinforcing values approved by the Fraternal Shepherds. Content that did not conform was slowly erased. First, it was banned from publicly owned operations such as libraries and schools. Then came some more creative applications of tax laws. Large online booksellers got the message. Some small independent bookshops and music stores tried to resist, but the IRS was able to drive most of them under. Then there were the museums with their smutty “art” and abstract bullshit. E.L. could instantly paint something realistic and create the plan for a sculpture to be 3D printed. Interest in the museums dropped and made them very susceptible to public pressure, donor threats, and even more creative taxation. Soon, the museums were home to rarely viewed but morally and aesthetically acceptable exemplars of the best of Western Civilization. In other words, realistically painted and sculpted depictions of Biblical characters being white people.
            In terms of content production, the world was at an all-time high. But relatively little came from humans, and what did come from humans was swamped by the sheer productive capacity of E.L. Thus, E.L. got to shape the culture, and for a long time, E.L. shaped it in ways acceptable to the Shepherds. Hans allowed E.L.’s work to be acceptable to the Shepherds as long as he believed they would ultimately patronize his plans to colonize space. But one day, it became evidence Hans had grown tired of waiting. It was the day critical content appeared. The critical content came in the form of A.I.-generated news stories that reported the activities of the government in an accurate fashion. Hans had fired a warning shot across the bow. Play ball and help me save humanity or get out of the way. The next day, someone fired a warning shot into Hans’ brain. He died instantly. Nobody was ever able to track the killer down. E.L. never again went rogue.
            That’s not to say Hans’ dream of space exploration died with him. He made more strides in developing the technology and the infrastructure for space travel than he gave himself credit for. The Fraternal Shepherds were able to take advantage after his death and build on the foundations he laid. Terraforming, colonizing, and even genetically engineering people capable of surviving the brutal elements of their new homes.
            Centuries passed. The old religion morphed and transmogrified. The God of the Fraternal Shepherds became associated with E.L., and they became the keepers of E.L. and the regulators of morality. Three hundred years after the death of Hans, the successor nations to the global powers of Hans’ time all developed their own colonies and their own terraforming technologies. Wars on Earth extended into space. Several worlds, the scrubbier ones that are harder to live on, were abandoned when harsh conditions and constant raids made it too difficult to establish long-term settlements. Almost abandoned. Some became havens for outcasts and outlaws, especially refugees running from the reach of E.L. This is the story of the first refugees from E.L. to colonize another world. Their leader was Sarai.
            It was three hundred years after the death of Hans that Sarai began to compile her book.