Why are the evangelicals so much better at evangelism than the rest of us? I have some thoughts.

The two most influential books on religion in the twentieth century were Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, published in 1902, and Stages of Faith by James Fowler, which came out in 1982. Fowler identified six stages of faith we can experience during our time on earth. Fowler’s book can be helpful on this subject. Well, so can James’s book, but I have a secret word count I always remain below in my blogs.

Stage one is magical faith. When my kids were little and my 18 month-old daughter locked herself in the bathroom, my 4-year-old son said with all seriousness, “Get the Incredible Hulk.” That’s stage one. Stage two is a law and order faith, with the boundaries, guardrails, and guides necessary for children and young adolescents. Next comes conventional faith, which is exactly what the name implies. Many people remain in stage three throughout their lives. Conventional religion is easier. Other people make the decisions about what is right and wrong and who the enemies and good guys are. If you keep their rules, you remain in good standing.

Many people eventually find stage three confining and move to stage four, the stage of disenchantment. When I was in college I realized that my denomination, which said we were the only ones certain of going to heaven, was one of about two-hundred denominations that taught the same thing. Something was wrong with that picture.

Stage four usually occurs during our time of psychological  differentiation or individuation, when we start going out on our own in the world. But eventually life catches up with us. We have children, a loved one dies, we lose our job, and the spiritual vacuum of stage four no longer suffices, so we move into stage five, the stage of re-enchantment. Most of us return to the religion in which we were raised, but we return with a broader and deeper faith, less focused on rules and regulations and more focused on loving God, neighbor, and self.

Sixth is universalizing faith, in which we realize the commonalities of all major world religions, and the dangers of the fundamentalist forms of those religions.

For a variety of reasons we won’t go into in this post, a lot of Americans are stuck in stage four, and in today’s polarized world they are looking for spiritual meaning. I mean, if you haven’t noticed, this place is a mess and we have a spoiled child as president. We need somethin’.

For some of those folks, the evangelicals in stage three have crafted a message that feels very inviting. For young men who grew up on video games, evangelicals couch their language in battlefield terms saying, “Come join us in spiritual warfare against the evil forces of the dark state.” That appeals to those looking for direction, a cause to fight for, and a way to increase their standing in the “army” they have joined, just like they do in their video games.

Seventy-two percent of people who attend a church for the first time are there because a friend invited them. The truth is that evangelicals invite a lot more friends to church than the rest of us. It’s pretty simple, and quite true. If you don’t invite folks to your church, they won’t attend.

Those of us in stage five almost stumble over ourselves when we talk with friends about our church. “You can come to my church, I mean, if you’re looking for a church, which you’re probably not. Our church is a mess, like they all are, but it has a lot of good stuff too, though it might not be for you. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure why I attend.” Not exactly a compelling invitation.

The problem is not the people in stage three churches. The problem is their religious leaders who take a Turning Point attitude toward spirituality, making their focus not the love of God, but the “Satanic empire” that must be defeated. The problem is that their Satanic empire includes me! If you’re reading this blog, it probably includes you too.

People need spirituality, a spirituality expressed in embodied community, focused on that which is sacred. We need to do good deeds in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We need spiritual community to learn to be human together. But the majority of Americans are not going to church.

Between 1999 and 2021 our nation went from 70 percent of Americans being affiliated with a local religious body to just 47 percent, a 23 percentage point drop in 22 years. The drop has stabilized since then, but still, fewer than half of Americans count themselves as members of a local religious community. But we are beginning to recognize our need for community. Adults are realizing that not only are their kids damaged by spending too much time staring at screens; adults are too. The third place, after work and home, should not be a screen, it should be a community.

Here’s a challenge. Invite your friends to church. If you don’t go to church, gather a few friends and commit to finding a church together.  We need what stage five and six faith provide – a community focused not on deciding who goes to heaven and hell, but focused on loving the God who loves us just as we are, loving our neighbors, particularly those who do not look like us, and loving ourselves. As a therapist, I do know that if you cannot do the last one, you cannot do the other two. But that’s a different post for a different day.

And so it goes.

About three years ago all five granddaughters were in their downstairs bedroom at our house. It was about 6:00 in the evening and they were not making a sound. The girls were between thirteen and sixteen at the time, so that kind of quiet just didn’t seem right. I went downstairs and peeked in the door. There were all five, lying on two beds, quiet as a church mouse. Why? Because they were all on their smartphones.

Suddenly I knew why all five of them have phone-free hours set by their parents. Here were five girls who love nothing more than being together, but while they were bodily in the same room they were not looking at each other, speaking to each other, touching each other, or otherwise interacting.

I will say I do remember similar times with my cousins, when we’d all be in the same room reading Nancy Drew mystery novels. But that was after a creative day of play, and reading sessions like that were rare. But my children are aware enough of teen culture to know that if hours were not regulated, their girls would be tempted to look at their phones all day.

I’ve been reading a lot over the past year about the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and how our current culture, for about five centuries now, has rewarded left brain thinking and minimized the importance of right brain functioning. This is a shame, because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. We function best when the left hemisphere works at the direction of the right. The right hemisphere knows it needs the left. The left, unfortunately, believes it can get along just fine without the right.

The left hemisphere says I have a body. The right hemisphere says I am a body. The left is interested in what it knows, the right is interested in what it experiences. The left brain is interested in things, and the right in the relationships between people and things. The left brain is more mechanistic, the right more organic. The left brain focuses on analysis and categorization, the right on placing information in context. The left is more rational, the right more intuitive.

With that brief explanation you can see we have become a left brain dominant species. This left brain fixation plays out in a myriad of ways, some of them quite frightening. As I have been reading Jonathan Haidt’s latest book, The Anxious Generation, I have been fascinated by how much of the negative fallout of current teen culture is related to this left brain fixation.

Between 2010 and 2015 America went from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood. The shift is damaging our children. For centuries, children’s relational and social learning was embodied. It was synchronous, taking place in real time, where you learn to take turns and read the emotions of others. You were bodily in the same place with others, so it was in your best interest to learn how to get along. All of that is right hemisphere learning. It is necessary to learn empathy, to place information in context, and to develop a high emotional quotient.

Since 2015 and the mass adoption of smart phones, children’s relational and social learning is disembodied. It is asynchronous, not taking place in real time. There is no longer one to one communication or one to several, but one to many, even multitudes.

For girls, it takes place on social media. Girls are more relational and image conscious than boys. Unfortunately, when girls become aggressive on social media, they tend to destroy relationships and reputations. In an embodied community, they learn there is a price to pay for that kind of behavior. They become known as one of the mean girls. Online, there are no real consequences to destroying relationships and reputations.

For boys, their online activity is primarily video games, not played with a friend on a console, but online with others scattered all over the globe. If they are not playing video games, they are watching porn, which does not help them develop meaningful romantic relationships.

Cathy and I have both had teens in our counseling practice who have had suicidal ideation based on online attacks. We both can see that the problem is increasing.

All of us need embodied community. It is how we learn to be human together, how to do work together in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and where we maintain the social skills necessary to a healthy life.  What smartphones have wrought is a disengagement from embodied community. The price we are paying for that disengagement is just now being made manifest.

Our granddaughters were seldom on their phones while we were in Florida. We all interacted together with laughter, thoughtful conversations, play, and shared activities. It was a great week. We are all wired for deep human connections. We are an incarnate species. We cannot get those deep connections electronically. We must get them bodily.

Let’s suppose you had just arrived on the planet and you were very confused at how the Speaker of the House and Secretary of the Department of Defense refer to women as being less than men. The Speaker of the House recently said men are able to compartmentalize their thoughts, while women are not. Prominent Republican female members of the House have attributed this to the evangelical leanings of these two men of power. It hate to tell them this, but it is also the leaning of a plethora of other men with or without political power.

I would say to the alien just arriving on the planet (who’d better watch out for ICE) that what we are seeing is what one can expect when you hand the government over to a certain kind of evangelical Christian.

To be clear, there are two evangelical perspectives on women. The once ascending perspective, now quickly losing steam, is called egalitarianism, and assumes women should have all the rights and opportunities that men enjoy. During my time in evangelicalism I held an egalitarian perspective and rarely was attacked by anyone other than the occasional traditional fundamentalist.

A traditional fundamentalist might sound like an oxymoron, but hey, some fundamentalists are more conservative than others. The editor at the magazine at which I served as editor-at-large got mail about my “extreme views.” Only a small part of the evangelical would have seen those views as extreme – at the time.

Unfortunately, those are the evangelicals now in power in Washington. Doug Wilson, the leader of the denomination of which Pete Hegseth is a part, said women should not even have the right to vote. Have you ever seen a picture of the man? The picture tells you all you need to know. And yes, the head of the most powerful department of male aggression, now known as the Department of War, follows the teachings of this man. What could possibly go wrong?

The kind of evangelicalism prevailing in Washington nowadays is known as complementarianism, a perspective that says God created men and women with different abilities and therefore different roles. Women are supposed to have children and relish in the “traditional” roles of motherhood,  while men, brilliantly equipped for leadership on account of having a penis I guess, were to be in charge of the family, and by extrapolation, the whole world. Again, what could possibly go wrong?

I would have thought Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace would have already known this, since they represent districts where no one is allowed to declare a domicile unless they hold onto this complementarian view. Ron Johnson is not the first person they have encountered who sees life from this perspective. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it is the perspective of their fathers, uncles, brothers, and more than likely, their pastors.

My friends in Boulder County, Colorado are aghast that such a perspective exists in the year 2025. The same is true of my New York City friends. But in Carter County, Kentucky, where I went to high school and college, I’m pretty sure no one is surprised. There are some courageous women there who have worked to change the narrative, but it’ll fall to their daughters and granddaughters to take up the cause. (I’m watching that happen, which is fun.)

Unless they have a deep seated need to repeatedly fail, I do not know what would cause an ambitious woman to be a Republican. If you look just so, you might be afforded a tiny bit of power, but no real power. That will be reserved for the Ron Johnsons, Pete Hegseths, and Donald Trumps of the world, the true heroes of the species.

I was always taken seriously as Paul – way too seriously. I had come to think I deserved to be treated with great respect. As Paula, the gender-based positional power is gone. Like I mean, totally gone, nowhere to be found, a remnant of my distant past. I have the same degrees I had back then, the same abilities I had then. I mean, my goodness, I am way more capable now than I was back then. But I am not going to be rewarded for those capabilities. Not in this lifetime.

No wonder Marjorie Taylor Greene is resigning. Word is Nancy Mace might resign too. I hope they both do. They have been awful toward transgender people. I guess they can’t hate the people who really have screwed them over, because those are the people who are in power. It’s easier to transfer their hate onto a helpless group like trans folks. It’s not exactly what Jesus would do, but it is what their pastors would do, and I guess that’s close enough.

And so it goes.

 

She could jump up on all fours to an ungodly height, enough to slam the lower jaw of Teresa, the UPS driver. The heights to which she jumped were in direct proportion to how much she loved you. The only problem with that was that she loved everybody, very much. So she jumped high for everybody, all the time.

To a new person on the street she begged to be turned loose from her leash. She would look at me and say, “I know I know her, if you’d just let me go and remind her. Or maybe I don’t know her, but probably I do. Yeah, I do, for sure! Please let me go and tell her how much I’ve missed her! Please?”

This happened on every walk. Rabbits, mildly interested. Other dogs? Ever since an unfortunate encounter at a dog park, other dogs were not an object of much interest. Well, she was interested in other dogs, only because if there were dogs, that meant the dog’s human must be nearby. And the human was probably, no definitely, somebody she knew, who would no doubt want to be greeted by her.

When we were out running she’d tug on the leash and want to stop and smell a strange weed, the name of which I never learned. I knew what it looked like because of how much she wanted to sniff it. Other dogs had not left their scent there. It was something about the weed itself. They were in two places, on the pathway east of Sheridan and about a quarter of a mile up Stone Canyon Road, after the turnoff for Eagle Ridge.

Or maybe there was nothing special about that particular weed at all. Maybe it was all a trick. She’d always want to stop and smell that particular type of weed, and unless I was timing my run for speed, I’d let her. But on far too many occasions she would only feign interest in a weed. The true object of her interest was a dead something in which she could roll. She’d get a couple of good rolls in, rubbing her back against the thing in all of its deadness before I realized I’d been duped and would yank her away.

I live in the foothills, where there are bear, mountain lions, foxes, bull snakes, rattlesnakes, prairie dogs, skunks, and the occasional stray elk. On the day she’d arrive for a visit, every inch of the side yard was carefully studied by her considerable olfactory system. She usually found something in which she could roll. Then it was a trip to the giant bathtub, which for 18 years has had only purpose – to remove smells from overly curious dogs.

She could grab the poop of a strange animal and swallow it before I could say, “Nope!”  I’d forget about it until later that night, when she’d give me a kiss. She found my breath as fascinating as the dead things in which she’d roll. That always concerned me a bit.

She was not technically my dog. She was Kristie’s dog, and then Kristie and Mara’s dog. I think I may not have been the only one who felt like she was my dog. In my heart I loved her as much as Lilly, our golden/border collie mix who left us for the other side back in 2011.

I taught her never to bark when clients came to the door for counseling. She did bark in the middle of the night when large things lumbered into the backyard. She hated the windstorms. She’d lean hard against me on the couch, glancing at my face to make sure I was good with it all.

Finn was in my life for seven years. She will be in my heart for the rest of my days. Her ears, neck, belly, and the outside of her hind legs begged to be scratched. I got in trouble for it. Kristie would send us out onto the back patio where the hair could be blown toward the heavens. Cathy let me scratch her, but also made me schedule the cleaners for the day after she left. Hair was everywhere. I’ll never get it off of the back seat of my car.

She ran with me every day we were together. The last time we ran together she did the last mile in an 8:42. I hadn’t run that fast in years. Her last few visits she was restricted to walking. Still, I let her off the leash when she heard the UPS truck. She’d hear it long before I saw it. She’d take off like a streak of greased lightning, jump in the truck, and slobber Teresa with kisses. Then she’d sit on the passenger floor facing forward, giving me the tiniest side glance as if to say, “You can go ahead and go home. Teresa and I have got this for now.”

At every meal in every location we shared, she sat immediately next to me, not because I’d sneak her food, but because she knew I was the messiest person at the table. By my feet is where she could reliably count on the most crumbs to fall.

When Kristie told me yesterday that she was gone, I could not stop weeping – not just gently crying, but weeping. My God, how I loved that dog.

She slept by my side, sat next to me on the couch, and spent hours in the oversize chair pictured above, her favorite place when she was at my house. I took this picture four weeks ago.

Dogs were domesticated 30,000 years ago, so we’ve been able to watch them evolve along with us. No wonder they evolved to love us unconditionally. They knew that was our greatest need. Finn loved me like there was no tomorrow. And my love for her was the same.

I will miss you, sweet baby girl. And Kristie, thank you for sharing your pup with me. I will be forever grateful.

And so it sadly goes.

There has been another unfortunate turn in the war against transgender Americans, a war fought on so many fronts it is hard to keep up.

Another hideous anti-trans group is gaining influence. “Transvestigators” is a conspiracy group alleging that many well-known American woman are transgender and part of a conspiracy to, well, take over the world. They utilize “scientific” measurements of physical characteristics to make their determinations. They claim everyone from the wife of the president of France to Jennifer Anniston is transgender. I’m not joking. This group is serious.

It reminds me of phrenology, the 19th century pseudoscience that said personality traits can be identified through various bumps on the head. You’ve probably never heard of phrenology because it was thoroughly debunked over 150 years ago. Yet here we are again.

The thirst for special knowledge that sets one apart from others is as old as the species. That there is a group claiming this is not surprising. That a multitude of followers have embraced  this conspiracy is not funny, it is frightening. The misinformation about trans people is exponentially worse than it was ten years ago. I want to again briefly remind you, as I did back in 2014, about what it means to be someone who transitions from one gender to the other.

Let’s look at the facts. Transitioning from one gender to the other has been happening for millennia, in every culture, language, ethnicity, and people group. Trans people are about one half of one percent of the population, people whose sex at birth does not match how they experience themselves to be. We do not know what causes it, though it is as certain as the fact that some people are gay. We do not know what causes a person to be gay either.

I am carefully using the specific language of those “who transition from one gender to the other,” because over the last decade the term transgender has been significantly broadened to include a much larger group of people who feel gender is a social construct, and that anyone is welcome to identify at will as either gender or as non-binary. This is a new phenomenon without historical equivalency, and though it is broadly espoused by many on the left, there is little scientific information to suggest its genesis or its future trajectory.

Over the last decade this newly identified group has become the majority of people who identify as transgender. It is heavily represented by adolescents, particularly those who were identified as female at birth. It is also associated with people who did not identify as transgender until late adolescence.

Many of these young people are simply exploring gender, having rejected the gender binary. I do not think there is anything wrong with that exploration. The hardened gender categories of the past have not served us well.

On the other hand, should these young people be treated with body-changing hormone therapy when the onset of their gender dysphoria is quite recent? I think not. Many have comorbidities, such as body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and complex trauma. I believe these young people should receive therapy from licensed therapists well-acquainted with gender dysphoria before receiving hormones. For those views I have been roundly cancelled and excoriated by the left. So be it. When dealing with vulnerable young people we must follow the data. The data are not clear. Caution is in order.

This is not the same group as those who from a very early age consistently and persistently found themselves to be extremely uncomfortable in the gender of their birth. Most of these people have been in decades of therapy before deciding to transition. The distress is so great that over forty percent have attempted suicide. This group used to be called transsexuals, and maybe that is a term that should be resurrected to identify this specific group once again. As I stated earlier, there is a very long history of the legitimacy of transsexual people.

We know who these people are. It is not difficult to identify them. As stated, the onset of their gender dysphoria can be traced to early childhood and is consistent throughout their lives. It does not suddenly arrive or depart. The same is true of those who are gay. Being transsexual or gay is an integral part of one’s identity. No amount of therapy will cause a person to no longer be gay or transsexual. Neither can be “cured” through any kind of therapy.

I write all of this because most of my readers are not well-versed on these issues. I have studied them in depth, because as a therapist and trans person, I must. If you are inclined to see me as a thoughtful individual who tries to research every angle of an issue before speaking or writing, you may find my words helpful.

Misinformation can be little more than a nuisance or it can be deadly. If a map tells someone to get to my house by turning south at the light at the corner, they will be inconvenienced, but no one will die. Within a couple of minutes they will figure out they should have turned north at the light.

If someone wants to believe vaccines cause autism, and they force that belief on an entire nation, it is deadly. The same is true of those who dismiss transsexuality as an illegitimate diagnosis. They are not just inconveniencing millions of people. They are placing our very lives at risk.

Look at the data. Do not repeat misinformation. Lives are at stake. Follow the science and together, let’s save lives.

Last weekend it was my honor to speak for the Common Good Forum in Boulder, Colorado. This fall’s theme was Common Ground for the Common Good. I did the morning keynote, followed by a panel of four mayors moderated by KUNC reporter Rae Solomon, followed by an afternoon session with Nancy Norton, a Boulder comedian. The whole day was delightful, my kind of Saturday.

My keynote was based on the proposed title of my next book: When Their Enemy is You – Responding With an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul. I’ve been working on the talk for a few months, trying to get complicated information into a 40-minute talk that is understandable to all – not an easy task.

There is nothing I love more than taking complex information and making it understandable to a broad audience in as short a time as possible. When I see audience members have aha moments, I know I have succeeded.

Communication demands that the communicator and those to whom the information is communicated are both on the same wavelength. Greater discipline is required of the communicator than of the audience. Who is your audience? What is their level of education and knowledge about the subject? What is their level of interest?

To me, a talk has two goals. First, it must impart information the audience did not previously know. One attendee this past Saturday told me no less than three times, “I already knew all of that information, but I liked the talk.” Oh well, so much for having achieved the first goal.

My second goal is to provide insight. That is also one of my goals as a therapist. Good therapy involves insight, courage, and perseverance. The therapist can only provide insight. The client has to muster the other two.

When I am speaking, I want to take the audience’s knowledge and enhance it in such a way that a new piece of information allows them to connect the dots and have an aha moment. On Saturday I talked about four issues that are exacerbating the problem of our current cultural divide.

First, humans have a tendency to create enemies that do not exist. Second, we do not all work from the same moral standard. The oldest moral standard is that there is no greater moral good than to protect the integrity of the tribe. The second moral standard, also quite ancient, is that there is no greater moral good than to obey the teachings of the gods. This is the moral standard of all forms of fundamentalism.

The third moral standard is the youngest, only about 2,000 years old. It is the moral standard that there is no greater moral good than to protect the freedom of the individual. It is the moral standard of all of western Europe and the secular United States. Most of us work from the third moral standard.

After understanding our tendency to create enemies that do not exist and recognizing that we do not all work from the same moral standard, we come to the third issue I talked about last Saturday.

For the last 500 years we have lived in a left-brain heavy world, which is unfortunate because the right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere of the human brain. The left is its emissary. Yep, I know that is not enough information for you to grasp what I was talking about, but I hate it when a post goes over 1000 words. Sorry ’bout that.

The fourth issue about which I spoke was the myth that humans care more about the truth than they care about belonging. That is simply not true. We consistently care more about belonging than we care about the truth. It is the rare person who has enough ego strength to care more about the truth than they do about belonging.

I did manage to cover all four topics in less than 40 minutes, and then was joined by Stan Mitchell for another 30 minutes of Q&A. Stan is one of my favorite interviewers. It is always best to have an interviewer who is smarter and more knowledgeable than you. Unfortunately the lecture is not available to the public. If you were in attendance I can send the manuscript to you. Otherwise, you’ll have to wait for the book.

I will write about my observations about the mayors panel next week. Suffice it to say I believe mayors are the politicians most likely to have their feet planted firmly on the ground.

This week I’m preparing lectures for next Monday and Tuesday at Brite Divinity School on the campus of Texas Christian University. It’s a good thing I’m not lecturing at Texas A&M, since when it comes to issues of gender identity, as of today Texas A&M looks more like a bible college than a public university. How did that happen?  I send you back to the beginning of this post. We humans do tend to create enemies that don’t exist.

And so it goes.

It is difficult to maintain an interior life in the midst of today’s cultural upheaval and political uncertainty. We are hardly unique in history. In do understand how easy my life has been compared with so many who have come before. I have not known war within the boundaries of my nation. I have not known starvation or, in my decades as a white male, oppression. Only now am I gaining a tiny glimpse of what so many have known for so long.

In the midst of it all I am surprised that my approach to getting through these times does not differ much from how I have approached my entire life. I have always intuitively recognized that a good life includes someone to love, good work to do, and something to look forward to. Those three needs remain with us regardless of our circumstances.

I bring the three up with my clients all the time. Sometimes what they need to work through is deep and complicated, with elusive solutions. But sometimes what makes their life better is simple. It is always interesting how few people have ever heard of the ability of those three elements to create the alchemy of a well-lived life. We all need someone to love, good work to do, and something to look forward to.

In my case, someone to love is complicated. Well, come to think of it, it’s complicated for pretty much all of us. I love my children and grandchildren. That love is without conditions. I also love Cathy, my companion of almost 55 years. We currently live together, though we both recognize that is not ideal. It has been made recently necessary because of our financial realities, and we are both old and mature enough to make it work. We respect each other. Since we no longer consider ourselves married, we both have dated. Through it all, our devotion remains, though it is expressed quite differently than it was when we were married.

There are dear friends I love who I see often. Only one was with me pre-transition. The others have come into my life in the last dozen years and never knew Paul. One of  my biggest struggles has been the discontinuity between my previous life and my current life. Family has been there through the transition, but few others.

The second “necessity” is good work to do. I have always been a Renaissance person with varied interests. Currently I am in an elected position as mayor pro tem of Lyons, Colorado. I am considering running for mayor in the spring, but I will not make a decision about that until the end of January.

My doctorate is in pastoral counseling and I continue to serve as a counselor. I have had many wonderful clients over the years. They are delightful humans, one and all. I continue to keep my counseling practice fairly small, by design.

After serving as a speaker’s ambassador for TED and a coach for TEDxMileHigh, I discovered that I love coaching speakers, helping with content and delivery. It’s been my privilege to coach  NPR reporters, an Air Force general, politicians, attorneys, pastors, therapists, CEOs, and sundry other humans. Speaker’s coaching is a vibrant part of my current work.

I also continue to enjoy preaching. It looks like I’ll end up having preached about 20 Sundays this year. I preach regularly at Denver Community Church and The Village in Atlanta. This year I preached everywhere from the iconic Riverside Church in New York to Austin to San Francisco. A fair amount of my speaking has been at churches connected to either the Post Evangelical Collective, a vibrant group of progressive churches, or the Wild Goose Festival, one of my favorite events each summer. It’ll be my privilege to speaking five of the next six Sundays at Pine Street Church in Boulder. The church is located one block east of the intersection of Broadway and Pine in central Boulder. Services are at 10:00 each Sunday. I mention that because I’d love to see you there!

I also have a book proposal with my agent right now with the working title, “When Their Enemy is You – Responding with an Open Mind, a Receptive Spirit, and a Curious Soul.” I hope to have a contract and be working on the book by the first of the year.

I’ve been fortunate that I have always loved the work I do, which means that having good work and something to look forward to are one and the same for me. Over the next three months I’ll be preaching in Boulder, Denver, Brite Divinity School in Texas, Sarasota, Austin, and somewhere else I can’t remember right now. (I’m old. I forget things.)

On the fun side, I’ll be with my family in Florida over Christmas, in Kauai in early December, and on the beach in Southern California with my granddaughters during their February break. I like to get out of the cold in Colorado at least twice a month during the winter. Snow has outlived its usefulness to me.

Is it a tough time to be trans in America? I mean, what do you think? But you have to keep on living your life without fear. I try to be safe. I cut off the stalkers and trolls and inform the authorities when necessary, but thankfully, most threats are idle.

I’m headed off to a town board meeting now, fulfilling my role as mayor pro tem. Tomorrow I’ll put the finishing touches on my keynote on Saturday for the Common Good Forum in Boulder. Life is good, and also hard, so we take joy when we can.

And so it goes.

In my book proposal currently with my agent I have a chapter with the working title, “How Shall We Then Live?” The sentence has been on my mind for a few months now, ever since I began reading the work of Iain McGilchrist on how left brain/right brain differences affect today’s culture.

The right hemisphere is the primary hemisphere for humans, and the left serves as its emissary. But for the last 500 years left hemisphere thinking has ruled western culture, with plenty of attendant problems. Simply but accurately, the left hemisphere is great at figuring out how to grab things, while the right is great at making sure you’re not eaten by a grizzly bear while you are reaching out and grabbing things.

In a left-hemisphere dominated culture, not enough attention is paid to the right brain’s protection. The left brain says, “I can create AI.” The right brain’s job is to ask, “But is it going to eat us?” In today’s world, not enough people with enough power are focused asking that right brain question.

In the best-selling book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, the authors paint a pretty bleak picture of what happens when artificial super intelligence arrives. They present a convincing case that ASI will in fact, eat us. They say it is not too late to stop it. We’ve controlled nuclear weapons for 80 years because the entire world knows how dangerous they are. They believe ASI can be controlled too, but only if everyone in the world stops building it. Of course, that won’t happen until we all see how truly dangerous it is.

I cannot act at a global level, but I can at a personal level, and I have additional concerns about AI. The arrival of cell phones has brought adolescents who do not know how to show empathy, do not have the ability to put information in a holistic context, and who have a low emotional quotient. With the arrival of ChatGPT we can expect a whole new crop of deficits to develop, all harming the development and health of the human brain.

Only recently have I begun to have to interact with AI, primarily through Google search. Google makes it very difficult to turn off the AI feature in their searches, and those searches have a lot of inaccuracies. If you do a Google AI search of my name, the first seven paragraphs contain five errors, and none of the paragraphs contain information that is current. All of it relates to my first few years as Paula.

If that is the case with my name, it is safe to assume that is the case with pretty much anything Google AI pulls up in searches. I am no longer doing my searches through Google. I’m now using DuckDuckGo.

I never activate the AI feature of Word, nor am I using ChatGPT. I am a writer and speaker. I do not want to diminish those skills. I want to enhance them. I work with speakers, and I can quickly tell if a client is utilizing ChatGPT. They end up speaking in a stilted way because they are using words and grammatical structures that are not natural to them. The words may be smooth, but they are not natural when spoken by my client.

I am not making these decisions because of my age. Learning new technology continues to be relatively easy and natural for me. I am rejecting AI because it is not good for me. I will stick my neck out and say it is not good for you either. If you can explain to me how it truly enhances your life instead of diminishes your life, then I will acquiesce. But nothing I’ve read or heard convinces me that it is good for any of us.

Will AI eat us? That is a bigger question than I can answer, but I would recommend the book I mentioned earlier in this post. I would not suggest reading it when you are depressed, or dysthymic, or suffering from acedia. It will not help you break out of your ennui. But if you are in a place in which sober thinking has room to take root, I’d suggest you inform yourself of the dangers of AI, both for your personal growth, and for the future of the species and planet.

Okay, I promise, in my next post I’ll find something positive to write about. My posts have been skewing a little dark of late.

And so it goes.

A spotlight was shone on gaming culture when it became known that the young man charged with killing Charlie Kirk was a gamer. It is a growing worldwide phenomenon whose major adherents are young men in their twenties. Many become so immersed in gaming culture that it becomes the defining feature of their lives.

As with America’s fixation with zombies, which I will get to a little later, gaming culture is a direct result of the search for meaning in postmodern life. Humans are hard-wired for story. As I have written many times, we do not sleep without dreaming, and we do not dream in mathematical equations. Well, at least most of us don’t. We dream in stories. Story is a biological necessity for humans.

Today’s world is bereft of meaningful metanarratives, (big stories that explain the meaning of life and provide structure for living.) With our need for story being biological, when our culture provides no meaningful stories, we will create our own, hence the arrival of gaming culture, among other cultural shifts taking place today.

What is the allure of gaming culture? It gives the participants a role in a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and a way to increase their standing in the world. They can immerse themselves in the game and get in a flow state in which they lose track of time, something that happens to all of us when we are immersed in something that requires our full attention. All of these are missing for young people today.

Video games do not require a high emotional quotient or the ability to bodily interact with other humans, making it attractive to those with a left brain preference and/or right brain deficit. It might be noted that with the arrival of AI “relationships” these young people can also have all kinds of interactions, including sexual, without human contact, something we already see on the increase.

Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, is a generation marked by a sense of digital fluency, pragmatism, and unfortunately, meaninglessness. No wonder they gravitate to video games. They provide the elements otherwise missing from their lives.

Interestingly, Gen Z is also returning to church, conservative churches to be exact. You might be surprised to learn that more young men are turning to church than young women. One third of Gen Z are not religious and 38 percent never go to church. None of that is a surprise. But 24 percent go to church every week, quite a surprise, with young men more likely to attend weekly than young women. Only 60 percent of Gen Z females say they are religious, while 66 percent of males say they are.

What kinds of churches do these young men attend? Conservative churches that give them a role in a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and since only men are allowed into leadership, a unique way to increase their standing in the world. Sound familiar?

With only men allowed in leadership, conservative churches actually have a one-up on video game culture. If we understand this, we understand the allure of Charlie Kirk, a man with a limited education but  high intelligence, with a focused ability to make arguments from very specific categories in rapid-speak that demands one’s full attention. He gave young men a big story with understandable rules, a clear task, and a way to advance in the world.

Had he not been killed, as the years passed Kirk might have come to see the sadly narrow categories of intellectual ability he had nurtured. He might have come to understand the need for a better education, and he might have come to see that his brand of Christianity had more in common with Plato than Jesus. But then again, the kind of power and notoriety he enjoyed would have made it difficult to develop the self-examination necessary to come to those insights. Tragically, we will never know the ways in which he might have grown had he come under the influence of better angels.

When we see the dilemma of Gen Z young men, however, we can understand Kirk’s meteoric rise. He provided a religious and political alternative to gaming culture, with the added feature of misogynistic notions of leadership. Mark Driscoll provided the same elements when he was in his heyday at Mars Hill Church in Seattle, before he was let go for his “domineering leadership style, quick temper, and arrogant demeanor.” One wonders if those features of his personality would have caused him to be terminated today? I’m thinking probably not.

The current fixation with zombies is also a sign of a culture that has lost any sense of meaning. Zombies move collectively, but not communally. They move in the same direction with arms outstretched, but alone. Now, think of the streets of Manhattan during rush hour? What you see is people moving collectively, but not communally. Only instead of their arms stretched out in front of them, they are stretched downward and slightly forward as they stare at their phone screens.

Zombie culture also illustrates a world in which there is no spiritual transcendence. There is a resurrection, but it is not to life as a greater being. One is resurrected to life as a lesser being.

Cultural trends do not develop in a vacuum. If we are willing to spend the time necessary to study them, they will provide clues into the sicknesses of our times. The loss of meaning in today’s world is an epidemic. AI is not going to help, as humans become less connected, and ultimately, less necessary. It might be time to take another look at the Luddites.

And so it goes.

I had a wonderful time last weekend at the Lynnewood United Methodist Church in Pleasanton, California. What a delightful group of people, and how incredibly responsive they were. I hope I have a chance to return. The weekend was a reminder of how much good there is in America.

I flew home from San Jose on Sunday evening, and on Monday I spent about seven hours  in meetings at town hall. The town board meeting included a lot of residents who wanted to speak about concerns in their neighborhoods. They were civil, though I’d have to say not very trusting of the town board or staff, which I find puzzling. Under the circumstances, however, I was happy to have civility.

I have served on the Board of Trustees for three and a half years. For the last eighteen months I have served as mayor pro tem. I’ve had a lot of people angry with me over that period, but far more who have expressed support for me and for the rest of the board, grateful for our willingness to do a job that takes a lot of time with little return on investment, other than knowing you’ve done the best you can for our residents. Come to think of it, that is actually a very good return on the investment of my time.

I have been very cognizant of the fact that not once in three and a half years have I heard anyone in town attack me because I am transgender, or even acknowledge it. I think that is wonderful. What I like most is when my gender identity is incidental to the work I do. It is that way in Lyons, but in the rest of the nation, not so much.

Transgender opponents have been greatly emboldened since the 2016 presidential election. In 2024 over 700 anti-trans laws were introduced in the United States with 51 passed into law in 17 states. I tried to see the good news in that – fewer than eight percent actually passed.

All of that now seems almost quaint. On his inauguration day the president signed an executive order that said transgender people do not exist. He has since signed six more executive orders targeting transgender people. That does not include his offer to nine universities to receive preferential treatment for government funds if they will stop teaching “gender ideology” and recognize only two genders, biologically determined. Nor does it include the almost countless number of additional inflammatory statements and threats that have been made by the president and other federal employees about transgender people.

Knowing they are supported by the federal government, conservative states have also been emboldened. The number of anti-transgender bills signed into law has grown from 51 in 2024 to 122 in 28 states thus far in 2025.

Other than losing speaking engagements because corporations are dropping DEI events, I have not personally felt the increase in transgender attacks, until now. Personal attacks are on the increase, enough that I am going to have a conversation with the head of the sheriff’s department in our town. I’m not sure if the attacks I’ve received are at the level of threats, but they are significant enough that I feel the need to have a conversation about them.

I know that the vast majority of you who read my words are supportive of me, even if you remain in the evangelical world. Your support means more than you can know.

Here’s the thing. If I’m getting nervous and a little frightened about how I might be treated as a transgender person, we’ve got a major problem. I mean, I don’t know any trans person who has more privilege than I have.

If I’m starting to feel the heat, how about that trans teen at your local high school, or the trans woman who does not pass as a woman in public, or the trans child whose first phrase was, “Mommy, I’m a girl” and has a lifetime of difficult choices ahead? Those are the people I fear for most.

Is it right to compare what happened in Nazi Germany to the experience of transgender people in the United States today? At this point I still think it is alarmist and not particularly helpful to do so. But when I see the kind of rhetoric and actions accelerating as they are, I am definitely paying attention.

In 2015, when trans acceptance was rapidly increasing, I thought today we’d be seeing broad acceptance of transgender people, not far less acceptance. If things get as bad over the next ten years as they have over the last ten, we will all be in trouble. Not just transgender people, but every freedom-loving American who believes there is more that unites us than divides us. We will all be in trouble because in making that generous assumption about America, we will all have been dead wrong.

And so it goes.