Will We Kiss the Ring?
Mercy is not lukewarm, moderate, or neutered.
If you like Bitter Scroll — where we decode the culture swaying American Christian identity — please become a paid subscriber. Your support makes the work I do here possible and encourages me to keep going. Thank you!
In my decades of hiding, the lukewarm Bible verses always stung. My 20s and 30s were spent as a half-Christian, and my interior formation was the thing that suffered. Eventually, something has to give when we’re holding two identities, and managing them like a job.
The ironic twist in my story, of course, is that I was hiding my majority religious status living in America. I was trying to manage what is central to me because the idea of explaining why I went to church in a broken Christian culture was daunting. I wanted to be liked, received, and relevant. This all seems like a joke to me now. I am kind and tender toward my younger self, but the stakes are graver today. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.
This inauguration week, I wondered if it would have been easier to stay hidden about my belief in Jesus. It was a passing thought and not a serious one. But the clarity of this moment — the sharpened knife of division and the cultural ascendency of the kind of Christianity I’ve been resisting publically since the last Trump administration — has again left me disoriented. I know it’s not just me.
My husband Drew has a healthy working knowledge of church history, and in our conversations, he often brings context and nuance that draws me back to the broader story of the last 2,000 years of the church. He is better able to sit with ambiguity and take a long view. Drew is, in a word, non-plussed. He’s sick about the cooption of the church in America to politics and deeply worried about the safety of vulnerable people, just like me. We have the luxury of processing what’s happening in safety. But we do not have our heads in the sand.
This season is another notch in a belt of injustice and oppression done in the name of Christ. His reminders of the Christian arc — that history is moving towards a great day of renewal — calm me down, especially when I’d like to put my head back down in the sand.
Church Energy
Bishop Mariann Budde delivered her call for mercy to the 47th president in a sermon at the Washington National Cathedral on inauguration day. She also spoke on MLK Day, from the same pulpit Dr. King stood at to deliver his final Sunday message before he was assassinated.
Raḥam, the word for mercy, is related to the word for womb in Hebrew. I watched Budde speak and wondered: Why does mercy get no respect? Why does mercy evoke jaded annoyance? Why is mercy treated with contempt? Why does care, still, in 2025, read as a feminine virtue?
This administration represents a kind of masculinity that treats mercy with disdain and as a weakness. Especially when the message is delivered by a woman.
Mercy is such a high value to God.
Instead, this administration is driven by a different value: The belief that people should get what they deserve, relative to where their loyalty lies.
White Energy
The day after the inauguration and MLK Day, a friend wondered aloud if we were in a new era of the white moderate. I had the chance to moderate a group discussion about Letter to Birmingham Jail last year and learned a bit about its context and history I’d missed in school. King was writing to pastors, to the very people who should have been leading marches alongside him but instead were largely ambivalent:
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Most of us can see clearly in reverse, the contrast of evil is plain. King carried a moral clarity that did not need the benefit of hindsight. Maybe some of us are waiting for another MLK, for a movement or new energy around renewal in the church and America. But there are voices we should listen to and take seriously now like Budde’s, who say what needs to be said in the presence of online and real-life ambivalence and vitriol. Take this powerful word from Chicago pastor Charlie Dates, which I’ve watched multiple times.
Mercy is such a high value to God.
Instead, this administration is driven by a different value: The belief that God has ordained the 47th president to bring America to a renewed destiny of white domestic and global dominance.
Masculine Energy
Also this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke on Joe Rogan’s podcast about inclusivity in the workplace.
“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. It’s one thing to create an environment that’s welcoming for everyone, but it’s another to suggest that masculinity is inherently bad. I think embracing aggression has merits that are really positive.”
Maybe Zuckerberg feels a sort of liberation, finally saying out loud what he may be thinking. Maybe to him, the “neutering” of the corporate world sounds level-setting. But any non-majority worker can read between the lines. Racial, sexual, and gender minorities will again be tempted to be silenced, retract, and recoil in a “merit-based” system.
Efforts of the last number of years to make workplaces open to people with different lived experiences moved us closer to the reality where we can all flourish. The dismantling of equity and inclusion programs by the new administration, and the approaching mass deportation of undocumented people who are the backbone of the American labor force, will continue to erase and silence millions.
Mercy is such a high value to God.
Instead, this administration is driven by a different value: The belief that one group’s thriving must come at the expense of everyone else’s.
Hands and Feet
Drew and our teenage kid spent the morning of the inauguration at a community p-patch for refugees operated by a resettlement agency. Some of the folks who grow greens and spices in these plots are threatened with deportation. I imagine the cilantro growing wild to coriander seed, untended.
I think a lot about the gap between ideas — the white moderate, resistance, dissent — with daily life: weeding a p-patch, dishing bowls of rice for a volunteer lunch after the work day.
It takes more work to choose to stand in the light of the truth. It can be accomplished by using our voice, but it also happens by using our hands. This kind of solidarity work is quiet. Serving as the hands and feet of Jesus is not conceptual, it is formative.
*
As the week went on, Bishop Budde was canceled and commended. Both sides, all sides, were slandering and lauding. MAGA folks predictably said vitriolic things about her remarks; several are documented at
.“I decided to ask him as gently as I could to have mercy,” Budde said in an NPR interview this week. The thing I sense in her words at the pulpit and in interviews is a quiet and steady posture. She models a non-anxious presence, speaking true things on behalf of people who are unseen and without platform. Budde acted as a bridge between politics and real people.
Jesus critiqued the Pharisees, and in that spirit of accountability and truth, we can use our voice to criticize the powers of our day—and pair words with showing up in our local spheres of influence. Especially now, in dark days, there is an invitation for Christians and the church to be shaped by Jesus, precisely so we can serve our neighbors.
Mercy is not lukewarm, moderate, or neutered. Mercy is hidden, active, burning, living love. After this week, if nothing else, I’m holding onto hope because we co-labor with leaders like Budde and Dates, and plead together for mercy.
Join Me This Tuesday…
I’ve found Substack to be the space where I can write in my clearest, truest voice and it’s been a pleasure to grow here as a writer and digital citizen. I’ve been hard at work with my friend
at Slow Faith to create a workshop we’re offering this Tuesday, Jan 28, about growing on Substack. There will be plenty of practical pieces — including what mistakes we made and wish we’d avoided while growing here — and Q+A.We’ll also get at the why. Why write on Substack? Especially for aspiring authors searching for a way to build a platform that isn’t, honestly, gross, we’ll share a bit of our story and prompts to help you consider the bigger reason why this space may, or may not, be appealing. The live event will be recorded and we’ll send it after for folks with a scheduling conflict.
Tickets are here along with more info. An offer only for Bitter Scroll readers! Enter SAVE20 for 20% off your ticket.
I’d love to see friendly faces this Tuesday and am eager to host anyone who would like to be there. If you’re interested in the workshop but finances are a barrier, please email me at sara@sarabillups.com and I’ll send you a code to attend for free—no questions asked!
I deleted all of my Meta accounts after I heard what Zuckerberg said about corporations needing more masculine energy and that they need to be aggressive. It's clear that he's kissing up to the powers that be. But my bigger issue is that as a male, I don't agree with their redefinition of what masculinity is to be (aggressive, unmerciful). We've had other, better role models: Fred Rogers, Jimmy Carter, and Jesus himself who compared himself to a mother hen. But these guys (Zuck and the bros)want to go back to normalizing thuggishness. And it's all because they want to please the Thug in Chief, the thuggiest one of all.
Appreciate your writing!