Churches fill this month. Candles glow. Choirs rise to the rafters. Families who haven’t darkened the door since Easter crowd into pews for carols and communion. On Sunday I slipped into the back row, the same as I did years ago, and watched the room take comfort in old songs.
The service opened soft — hymns, prayers, readings from Isaiah. But halfway through, the sermon bent sideways. The pastor warned of “godless elites.” He railed against masks, praised “freedom,” and thundered that America was in danger of collapse if people did not “stand strong.” Applause erupted. Amens scattered like gunfire. The scripture became garnish for the speech, arranged to make the politics go down easier.
I’ve seen pulpits politicized before. But lately the ratio has tipped. What used to be faith laced with politics has become politics draped in the cloth of faith. The hymns felt like placeholders between talking points. A woman in front of me dabbed her eyes during “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” then stood to clap for a line about “taking our country back.”
What chilled me most wasn’t the preacher’s fury. It was the silence afterward. Silence from congregants who know better but won’t say so. Silence from leaders who’d rather hold full pews than face empty ones. Silence from neighbors who hum along instead of confronting lies. Outside on the sidewalk, the small talk was careful and bright, like Christmas lights strung over a cracked fascia board. Everybody could see the damage. Nobody would say it out loud.
There’s a verse about truth setting people free. Freedom isn’t the buzzword I heard shouted from the pulpit. Freedom is the room you create when you refuse to repeat what you know is false. December used to make that room. This year, the room felt smaller, the air thinner, the silence heavier — not peace, but complicity in soft shoes.
In the parking lot, a deacon asked if I was visiting family. I said I lived nearby. He nodded at my mask and told me “real faith casts out fear.” I thought of the book of James — faith without works is dead — and of the elderly woman I’d seen steadying herself on the pew, and of the church pantry that had quietly doubled its hours this year because groceries cost more for everyone. Casting out fear looks less like speech and more like care: leave politics out of the pulpit, fill the pantry, and tell the truth even when it trims the crowd.
If the season means anything, it should mean that. Not the war for a greeting at a checkout line, not theater about who is under attack. Just the stubborn, unglamorous work of honesty and mercy. The choir can keep singing; I hope they do. But if the words don’t make us braver about truth on Monday morning, the candles are only mood lighting for a story we no longer intend to live.