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August 12, 2026

Hello, fellow wayfarers … How some "Christian America" ideas require a soul-killing doublespeak … How the "dopamine-driven" self is changing your life and mine … What I learned in talking theology with Marilynne Robinson … If Dallas were in Tennessee, we could listen to this Desert Island Playlist in real time … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy

Around 60 years ago, a young, recently fired Old Testament professor received a scolding from his mentor, the man who had supervised his dissertation. The younger man had gone sideways from more conservative people in his denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, for writing a commentary on Genesis that questioned the factual reliability of the Bible’s first book. His mentor was furious, the younger man reflected later, that he had written the book—but not for the same reasons pastors were outraged.

The old professor told his protégé, Ralph Elliott, that the controversy was his own fault, that he should have finessed the issues better. The mentor said the controversy was due to Elliott’s failure to communicate well. Elliott responded that, actually, the problem had been his ability to communicate all too well: He had stated directly what was usually coded in "doublespeak."

Elliott said his liberal professors knew how not to run afoul of the more conservative base by knowing just how to speak: one way in the doctoral seminar, another at a revival meeting. I once heard one professor of this generation speak, a biblical scholar who taught his graduate students the then-standard historical-critical view that the Book of Isaiah was written by two or three or many people, centuries apart, one of whom may have been the actual Isaiah.

In the pulpit, though, this scholar said, "Some people get all sidetracked over whether there was one Isaiah or more. I say, if one Isaiah is good, two’s better! Amen! And if two Isaiahs are good, then three’s better! Amen! In this fallen world in need of Jesus, we need every Isaiah we can get." The crowd roared in approval, none the wiser that they had just amen-ed modernist biblical criticism.

Some were particularly good at doublespeak, Elliott reflected. One was so good at the game, Elliott said, that "if the Southern Baptist Convention should split, he would be the first speaker at both new conventions." Elliott concluded the doublespeak was about power, not truth. People employed theological jargon precisely because it enabled them to camouflage what really mattered to them: organizational power.

Elliott saw that doublespeak in his own life when—even in the controversy over his employment—"people changed sides again and again, depending on where they thought the winning side lay." But he went to seminary because he wanted to find out what was true, not to play a game. It left him broken, all because he couldn’t use doublespeak.

In my younger days, I spent a lot of time blasting that doublespeak, and only with age did I come to see that it is not the trademarked strategy of liberals. Anywhere there was power to protect, doublespeak was, sooner or later, right there in the midst of it. As the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing put it, one realizes that "they are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game."

Elliott’s opponents in the pews had legitimate concerns—ones I would share—about what his viewpoint would do to the next generation of preachers and missionaries. But Elliott’s powerful friends-turned-opponents cared nothing about what he believed—only how his saying what they all internally believed would jeopardize their own security. Elliott’s mentors said they wanted truth; they really wanted doublespeak. And they were not alone.

I write all that not because old denominational skirmishes matter all that much to the people outside them, but because the question of doublespeak is an ever-present reality, and it’s about more than language games. It’s about what happens when people—in their hearts, no matter what they say—believe that tribes create truth rather than the other way around. And some people want an entire church of doublespeakers in a nation made up of the same.

Someone asked me this week, after reading some online kerfuffle among "Christian nationalists," what I thought about the possibility of blasphemy laws. At first, I thought he was joking since, first of all, blasphemy laws are specifically excluded by the Constitution of the United States and, second of all, my Baptist ancestors went to jail to make sure the Constitution would exclude just that.

"Yes, but if we were starting all over again, with a new constitution," he said, "some people think we should have laws against really extreme forms of blasphemy, and that we should require people to acknowledge, at least formally, that the country is built on allegiance to Jesus Christ."

And of course, that’s what blasphemy laws do. They cannot change what people actually believe, only what is safe for them to say out loud. The threat of punishment doesn’t have to be a concentration camp or execution. It can be more civilized: exclusion from the tribe, whatever that is defined to be. Blasphemy laws—of the hard or soft kind—require people to be doublespeakers.

Laws like this would be wrong in any case, but at least theoretically you can see how certain sects of some world religions could get there. In a religious system where what’s important is not personal, internal new birth but submission to an external law, a blasphemy law makes logical if not moral sense, because it can be enforced. A judge or a jury or a chieftain or a bureaucrat can see into whatever external law to which a person conforms. A political leader cannot see what internal reality a person loves.

The problem with blasphemy laws is not just James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, although it certainly is that. The problem with blasphemy laws is Jesus.

Jesus is the one who denounced "practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them" (Matt. 6:1, ESV throughout). Jesus said, "But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you" (v. 6).

Against external conformity without inner transformation, Jesus quoted Isaiah: "You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you, when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me’" (15:7).

Jesus said the problem is not what goes into a person from the outside but what comes out from the inside (vv. 10–20). And all the apostles after him said the same thing: A Christian must both confess with the mouth that "Jesus is Lord" and believe in the heart that God raised him from the dead (Rom. 10:9–10). A law could force someone to do the first part but not the second. For that, a person must be born again. If blasphemy laws can really stop blasphemy, there’s nothing to blaspheme. If they can’t, they are themselves blasphemous.

Laws that would establish Christianity as an "official religion" or that would punish people for their religious opinions or convictions give the game away. What the people pushing for these laws want is doublespeak, not the gospel. What they want is for people to say one thing—even if they believe another—because they want to stay on the right side of power. If someone’s conscience has already adjusted to saying what he or she has to say to get or keep power—or to stay one step ahead of the mob—I suppose, again, that makes logical but not moral sense.

But that’s doublespeak. It’s not Christianity. If all that matters is who people deem the winner in a culture war, I guess that’s enough.

But if Jesus is really raised from the grave and is really coming to judge the living and the dead, it is not. Doublespeak tells people to let their no be yes and their yes be no—to disconnect the heart from the mouth, believing from professing. People who speak in such a way should really hope Jesus is not alive enough to ask what they are saying in his name.

Blasphemy laws exist in some Middle Eastern theocracies, and they are not likely to ever exist in the United States. But just because something is not likely to happen doesn’t mean the conversation about it isn’t important. Slavery is not likely to be reinstated in the United States, but if your friend tells you, "If we ever have a different constitution, we really ought to reconsider those 13th and 14th Amendments," that friend is telling you something important about himself. That’s true even if you know it’s doublespeak and your friend doesn’t really believe it but is trying to appeal to people who do. In fact, that might be even worse.

A state that can define who is in or out of the kingdom of God is a state that has the power to do anything. And eventually, it will. A church that is willing to give the state that kind of power has proven its gospel is, in fact, political power. When a culture war is worth giving up the gospel for, the culture war itself has become the gospel.

If the Word of God is just doublespeak, that doesn’t really matter. If it’s the power of God unto salvation, it really, really does.

The Problem of the Dopamine-Driven Self

Luke Burgis’s book The One and the Ninety Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion is well worth your time. I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now, here’s one important point about how smartphones and algorithms are just symptoms of a bigger problem.

Burgis writes about how all of us are driven along in ways we can’t even see by the little hits of brain chemistry we get when we doomscroll through our social media feeds or when we get a response to the family vacation photo we just posted or when we angrily denounce those people who got something wrong on the internet.

"American culture today is driven by dopamine, a neurotransmitter that reinforces behaviors by making us seek rewarding stimuli," he writes.

Burgis argues we will never know the interplay we are meant to have, of being both within a community and differentiated individuals in it, if we don’t see what that’s doing to us. He writes,

In a dopamine-driven culture, you get dopamine-driven selves. Personalities are shaped by the applause of the crowd—likes, reshares, comments: "engagement." What keeps us hooked is the mimetic pull of others—what they’re watching, buying, celebrating, canceling. The algorithms work because they amplify this social layer. We’re not addicted to our phones; we’re addicted to the people inside of the phones.

Again, I’ll write more about this later, but read the book. It’s important.

My Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

If you walk down the steps into my library, you can see a set of shelves with books by five authors, each of whom has written in at least two of the four categories: novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction essays. Wendell Berry is there. So is Walker Percy. So is Frederick Buechner and Czeslaw Milosz. And right there in the midst of them is Marilynne Robinson. Her books—both fiction and nonfiction—have shaped me more than I probably even know.

That’s why a few years ago, when I sat down to interview her for the first time, I was elated and terrified.

In thinking through a "best of" series for the dog days of summer, I decided to play for you a conversation I had with Robinson several years ago—back when the podcast still had the (better but, I know, less searchable and findable) name Signposts. The occasion was her then-new book in the Gilead series, Jack. I wanted to talk theology, and we did. We talked about Calvinism, grace, sin and evil, Creation and Fall—all kinds of things.

I especially liked talking to her about how a Jonathan Edwards meditation on how God "holds together" moonlight changed her way of thinking right to the core.

As always, she was thoughtful and substantive. I think you will like it.

You can listen to our conversation here.