No Brett, These Two Christianity's Are Not Two Sides of the Same Coin

Brett,

I reactivated my social media accounts and rebooted my website to write this, impassioned as I currently am. After finally getting around to watching it, I recently read your Gospel Coalition review of Wake Up, Dead Man. The film contrasts a Trumpian, culture‑war Christianity with a warm, inclusive one. You conclude that both are "errors." Both Equally “toothless” distortions of the Gospel.

I want to say, plainly and pastorally: that conclusion is morally and spiritually dangerous.

One of these is a rotten apple. The other (to strain the analogy) is more an unripe durian. One breeds fear, loyalty to power, and selective empathy. The other may be naïve, under‑theologized, and unfinished, but it is rooted in love, service, and the recognizable posture of Jesus. One is spoiled to the core. The other is underdeveloped and needs time, heat, and wisdom. 

If you cannot tell the difference, something in your moral palate has gone numb. (Matthew 7:16–20)

For me, this is anything but abstract. When Mr. Kirk was shot, I watched the right‑wing Christian ecosystem erupt. Prayer chains. Pulpit tears. Prophetic language. Churches found their courage overnight. But when the Evergreen shooting happened here in Colorado, when kids and teachers bled in my own state, there was silence. When Melissa Hortman was shot, there was silence. No prayer vigils. No thunderous sermons about the sanctity of life. No collective grief.

That silence taught me something. In certain churches, empathy is not a Christian reflex. It is instead restrained as partisan instinct, sinfully so, I argue (James 2:1).

I have also watched churches pray loudly and repeatedly for Donald Trump, by name, from pulpits, asking God to protect him, bless him, vindicate him. I have never, not once, heard those same churches pray publicly for Joe Biden.

Not when he was grieving his son.

Not when he was mocked as weak.

Not when Scripture explicitly commands prayer for rulers regardless of alignment. (1 Timothy 2:1–2)

Apparently "love your neighbor" now comes with a footnote. Apparently it means "Unless your neighbor is a dirty progressive socialist." 

I have been that neighbor. I have felt the room shift. I have watched Christian concern evaporate in real time because I didn’t vote correctly. So forgive me if I refuse to treat this as a neat exercise in balance.

You correctly note how, in the film, Monsignor Wicks’s preaching is blatantly Trumpian. He preaches fiery, politicized sermons designed to keep his flock "hardened, angry, and in fear." He shouts slogans like "Racism does not exist in God’s Kingdom (USA)" and rejects anyone with "a shred of woke sympathies"—a single mom, a gay couple, even a masked woman.

Faith weaponized for politics. We know the men.

Wicks’s congregation is taught that the world is the enemy, that winsomeness is weakness, and that loyalty matters more than repentance. When Wicks’s moral failures are exposed, faithful followers respond, "What is truth?" and "Doesn't matter what you do or say," and "I don’t need you to be a saint."

Those lines should chill us. American Christians have seen this in real life. Pew Research found that roughly 8 in 10 White evangelical Protestants voted for Trump in 2020. Many evangelical leaders openly boast that Trump has delivered more for the "Christian agenda" than any previous president. 

The pattern is clear: sin is excused if it wins power. Grace is cheapened. Forgiveness without repentance. Christ without the cross. A deformation of Christianity. (John 18:36)  The conservative Christianity portrayed in the film (and far more importantly, embodied in large swaths of American Christianity today) is spiritually deformed. It preaches Christ weaponized, not crucified. It baptizes cruelty as courage. Fear as faithfulness. Dominance as discipleship. It demands loyalty, not repentance. (2 Corinthians 4:5) It protects abusers and excuses tyrants.

A Christianity that overwhelmingly aligned itself with Donald Trump—again and again and again—is morally bankrupt, not merely "misguided." You do not get to preach the Sermon on the Mount on Sunday and cheer cruelty on Monday without something snapping in your soul. Jesus was not ambiguous about this. Nor was Paul. Nor were the prophets. When Christianity becomes a shelter for contempt, it has ceased to be Christian.

By contrast, Father Jud’s faith in the film looks nothing like that. Jud is a rough‑around‑the‑edges, ex‑boxer‑turned‑priest who wants to break down walls between people and God, not rally them against imagined enemies (hence supposedly why he punches an "a--hole deacon" at the beginning of the film in a moment of weakness). He prays with hurting people and insists, "Christ came to heal the world, not to fight it." In the end, he remarks on the power of faith, where "Some got their miracle. Not being cured or fixed, but finding the sustaining power to wake up every day and do what we're here to do in spite of the pain. Daily bread,"

As the true main character of this film, Jud explicitly rejects the idea that "the world is a wolf." "You start fighting wolves," he says, "and soon everyone you don’t understand is a wolf." Instead, he declares his mission is "not to fight the wicked…but to serve the wicked and bring them to Christ." His church sign simply reads: All are welcome.

Is any of this perfect theology? No. 

Jud often uses the language of "brokenness" rather than "sin," and I share your concern that genuine repentance matters. We’re always right to warn against grace that never transforms. The progressive church in the film (and irl) can be thin where it should be thick. Evasive where it should be bold. Too quick to rename sin as "brokenness" without ever asking who broke it or why. Yes. All true.

But here’s the difference that matters:

It is trying to love.

It is trying—sometimes clumsily, sometimes inadequately—to shelter the wounded, welcome the outcast, and reflect something recognizably Jesus-shaped in a world addicted to violence.

That matters.

And in the film, Jud confronts where it counts. He rebukes greed. He names misplaced allegiance. He confesses his own faults. That’s pretty darn good shepherding. (Matthew 9:36) To the point that I’d argue Father Jud is about as Christlike as some of us ministers get this side of heaven. Jud's ministering to Mr. Blanc towards the beginning resonates well with my own work, dodging Blanc's spiritual cynicism and remarking on how our storytelling points to something profoundly true. His conversation with Louise (which pointedly interrupts the movie!) where he consoles her regarding her mother in hospice and the complications of family? Phenomenal! The following prayer scene truly touched my wife and I. It was refreshing to see priests being priests. They swear, mess up, and fumble through life imperfectly, just like we do. What a delight to enjoy a film where priests feel (controversially) human.

I recognize myself in Jud. I have stood with people whose lives were in pieces and chosen presence over performance. I have prayed with people who didn’t yet have the language for repentance but desperately needed to know God was not done with them.

You can argue it’s toothless Christianity.

I argue it’s pastoral faithfulness.

And here's where we truly diverge and why I felt so fired up as to write this post. There is a particular kind of error that dresses itself up as wisdom. It sounds measured. Reasonable. Adult. It’s found in a deep temptation among thoughtful Christians to position ourselves above the fray and to critique everyone equally, to keep our hands clean by never choosing sides.

"Both sides are wrong."

Sometimes that’s true. But oftentimes "both sides" language isn’t wisdom at all. I find it's often cowardice that sounds responsible until you notice who it consistently refuses to grieve, and who it instinctively rushes to defend. What struck me was not your theological concern, but the insistence on moral equivalence: the devastatingly ignorant claim that these "versions" of Christianity are equally distorted, equally dangerous, equally in need of rebuke.

They are not. 

To pretend they are is negligence that teaches the Church who is worth praying for, which deaths demand lament, and which injustices can be quietly filed under "both sides." Does Mr. Blanc come to Christ? No, but he still leaves the film changed, learning to show "Grace for my enemy. Grace for the broken. Grace for those who... deserve it the least, but who need it the most. For the guilty."

A seed has been undeniably sown.

Father Jud’s leading may lack doctrinal precision, but people can survive naïveté if they have a transparently human priest hell-bent on "serving people and bringing them to Christ!" Wicks’s church actively destroys lives. It drives the poor and the outcast away. It traffics in denial and conspiracy. It baptizes fear and calls it faith. 

One of these faiths bears fruit unfit to eat. Once you bite into the rotten apple, you taste decay all the way through. The other is strange, unfinished, and maybe off‑putting, but it can ripen! You essentially say, "A faithful Christianity must hold truth and love together," and I say, "Yes! A thousand times yes!" But you missed that Jud has a posture of love and is actively learning holiness. Wicks obsesses over holiness while completely perverting love, missing both. The Church was meant to be a new family, multiethnic, courageous for the voiceless, generous to the poor. Jud gestures toward that vision. Wicks’s church shrinks from it in fear.

So tell me honestly, which of these faiths look more like the Kingdom Jesus described? The one obsessed with enemies, borders, and dominance? Or the one fumbling toward hospitality, healing, and forgiveness? The one that holds the dying murderer in its arms while offering overwhelming grace and absolution? (Luke 10:33–34)

It's reprehensible to pretend that a misguided kindness‑centered Christianity and a hate‑drunk, power‑obsessed pseudo‑Christianity are equally corrupted. It's reprehensible to pretend the ones that are angry, nationalist, paranoid, and intoxicated by power are the just as bad as messy, soft-edged, perhaps naïve, and stubbornly committed to mercy. Your review insists we see them as two mirror-image heresies. Two flavors of the same poison. 

No.

One can be discipled.

The other must repent.

The Gospel does not ask us to flatten moral distinctions. It asks us to tell the truth. (Isaiah 5:20) And the truth, right now, is this: One side is (as I said before) trying imperfectly to love its neighbor. The other has resolutely decided its neighbor is the enemy.

Jesus was very clear about which of those paths leads to life.

And so should we be.

A Brother in Christ,

RJ