To all the white Republican professed Christians across this country:

To hell with you.

To hell with you, as you have the unmitigated audacity to fill churches throughout this nation on Sunday, after celebrating the silencing of your black and brown neighbors all week, as you’ve applauded the erasure of six decades of civil rights progress.

To hell with you as you stand before the Cross, singing songs of adoration to a non-white Jesus who you’d have complete contempt for were he to make his home in your neighborhoods or your voting districts.

To hell with you as you sit in pews, pretending for an hour that you give a damn about the teachings of Christ, while spending the other 167 hours falling prostrate before a sneering, racist, amoral creature who is their very antithesis.

To hell with you and your performative social media displays of showy piety, posting scriptures about love for neighbor, care for the least of these, and a God who so loves the world that you’ve obviously never read a f*ckin’ word of.

To hell with you for collectively selling your souls to a monstrous rapist-felon, all for a few Supreme Court seats, Republican majorities, and a less-diverse community.

To hell with you disregarding Jesus’ mandates; for refusing to protect the stranger in your midst, for letting masked thugs brutalize foreigners, for partnering in the character assassination of entire communities who do not share your pigmentation.

To hell with you for not standing with the Birmingham protestors, the Selma marchers, the lunch counter sitters, and the underground railroaders, aligning instead with the cross burners and the Jim Crowers and the lynch mobs and the men who turned firehoses on children.

For all of these things, to hell with you, figuratively, but literally as well.

Because if the hell you incessantly preach, the hell that you threaten the entire world with, the hell you wield like a hammer against the vulnerable and hurting in your path—if that hell exists, you will certainly find yourselves there.

There would be no human beings on the planet more deserving of merciless eternal torment than you, who have so betrayed your faith’s namesake, violated human beings made in God’s image, and participated in the silencing and erasing of black people in this nation.

In your breathless zeal to create your heaven on earth of a white gated community where no one’s humanity but your own is honored, you’ve made it hell for so many, and done it all with perverse joy.

You have desecrated your faith tradition, turned generations away from the Church, and done it all in the name of a God whose love you are bereft of.

As a former pastor who stood before many of you on Sunday mornings, I grieve who you have become. I regret that I was not clearer from the pulpit on the sins of our traditions’ racist past. I deeply lament that I did not do enough to prevent you from finding yourself on the side of such brutality.

For the rest of this life, other grieving, sickened, and ashamed white people of faith and I are going to confront you, oppose you, and make you into the pariahs you deserve to be.

We’re going to call you out every single time you try to pass the buck to God for your ignorance, hatred, greed, and white supremacy.

We’re going to continue to hold the teachings of Jesus up to your face to reveal you as the frauds and charlatans you are.

And we are going to find our place in the disparate congregation of humanity who will not give your hatred a home.

So, enjoy the blasphemous farce of your worship services, Bible studies, and prayer gatherings. Revel in the phony theatre of your whitewashed, cosplay Christianity. And savor the cheap high of your perceived victory at the expense of people of color.

May you meet your Maker one day, who will certainly not be white, and may you get what you deserve.

The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe