- Adam Serwer on how conservatives want an Antebellum Constitution;
- David French on why Christianity is a dangerous faith;
- Nicholas Kristof and Bart Ehrman on what Jesus would think of Christmas 2025.
Undoing progress and dragging us back to the past.
The Atlantic, Adam Serwer, 21 Dec 2025: Conservatives Want the Antebellum Constitution Back, subtitled “The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments are in trouble.”
Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up in a cell. Retes was detained overnight without any opportunity to call a lawyer or his family.
This is where we are now: living in a police state run by white supremacist xenophobes, using ICE operatives drawn from the most thuggish elements of society.
Across the country, federal agents are flagrantly and casually disregarding Americans’ due-process rights. And they have been remarkably forthright about how they choose their victims. As Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol commander, told a white reporter: Agents were arresting people based on “the particular characteristics of an individual—how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”
And laying the blame on the current Supreme Court.
The Constitution of the Roberts Court is not color-blind. It is a Constitution that permits discrimination on the basis of race, but forbids alleviating discrimination on the basis of race. And over the next year, the Court will face more cases that could further erode both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pushing America back toward what some on the right believe is the true, Antebellum Constitution.
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments make up the Civil War and Reconstruction amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, but America needed to do more to prevent the resurgence of the slave-owning South’s caste-based society. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enshrined in the Constitution principles of universal male suffrage, nondiscrimination, and nonracial (birthright) citizenship. Although imperfect—the vote for women was not included—they were a crucial first step toward ensuring that the rights conferred by American citizenship would remain inviolate no matter where you were, and no matter who you were.
The article goes on: conservatives have fought back, all the way up to Charlie Kirk.
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A remarkably frank essay from David French.
NY Times, David French, 21 Dec 2025: Christianity Is a Dangerous Faith
Religion is one of the most dangerous forces on earth.
If you’ve ever encountered true fundamentalists, you know why. When you combine eternal stakes with absolute certainty, it produces the kind of people who are happy to be cruel in the name of God.
These two sentences sum it up. But of course there’s more.
In fact, they can view their cruelty as a form of kindness. If they treat you with decency, doesn’t that make you comfortable in your sin? It’s important for them to take opportunities to confront people when you can — in other words, to tell people that they’re wrong, often in the most strident of ways. How else will they understand the gravity of their own sin?
To the fundamentalist, disagreement is proof of apostasy. But it can be even worse than that — if you’re wrong, then you might lead other people into error, and that makes you dangerous.
That’s one reason fundamentalists of all stripes are often such zealous censors. A fundamentalist can see every person who’s wrong as a kind of Patient Zero in a potential pandemic of paganism. And don’t think for a moment that fellow believers are spared the fundamentalists’ ire. They’re a chief target. They have no excuse for their errors, and they receive the most vitriol of all.
He goes on to talk about the Christmas story. I’ve gift-linked the article; it’s worth reading. The implications of the Jesus story. And why religion is still dangerous.
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Here is Bart Ehrman, a “New Testament scholar” and author of many books, including a couple I’ve actually read. This goes to why so many people cling to the Jesus story, while acting in ways contrary to what Jesus said.
NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 20 Dec 2025: What Would Surprise Jesus About Christmas 2025?
[Kristof] You have a new book coming out soon, “Love Thy Stranger,” arguing that Jesus taught a revolutionary message that transformed Western moral thinking. What was that message?
[Ehrman] The heart of Jesus’ message is that loving “others” means caring not only for family and friends but even for strangers — whoever is in need, whether we know them or whether they are like us. This kind of altruism was not promoted — or even accepted — in the Greek and Roman worlds that Jesus came out of. But it is a view that completely transformed the thinking and ethical priorities of the Western world down till today.
And
If Jesus were to time-travel and show up for Christmas 2025, what would surprise him the most?
I don’t think Jesus would recognize Christianity today. The idea that he was a pre-existent divine being who came into the world as a newborn is not found in any of his own teachings in our earliest Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, and I think he would be flabbergasted to hear it.
Because stories aren’t about truth.
