Posted March 31, 2026
My wife and I drove past a “No Kings” rally in our city last Saturday, where we saw a sign that said, “Be kind!” Another announced in rainbow colors, “Love wins!” Next to them, paradoxically, a man was waving his hand-lettered whiteboard, “[expletive deleted] Trump!”
Not to be partisan, but signs using a euphemism for the same expletive abounded when Joe Biden was president.
This bipolarity is reflected and empowered by the media daily. If a new article in the Atlantic is to be believed, America under Donald Trump is now a “rogue superpower.” However, if a recent editorial in Fox News is correct, “Trump is breaking Middle East’s old power structure” in ways that will produce more positive geopolitical alignments in the future.
You can buy a yard sign displaying a MAGA acrostic, “Morons Are Governing America.” Or you can purchase one proclaiming, “TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING.”
If you’re somewhere in the middle, you’re out of yard sign luck.
Our constitutional democracy is built on dichotomies—church and state, executive and legislative, public and private. This ability to balance apparent contradictions in the service of the greater good finds intellectual roots in the thought of St. Augustine, who focused broadly on them. He saw humans as living in the two “cities” of God and Man, believed that God could be understood through rational categories but that biblical revelation is essential, and popularized the word “trinity” to describe the Lord’s three-in-oneness.
But living in tension is hard. It is easier to believe that something is completely true or completely false, that we should always vote for Democrats or for Republicans, that President Trump is always wrong or always right.
AI isn’t helping.
As the computer scientist Cal Newport notes, our attention spans are about one-third as long as they were in 2004. Shares of US adults who struggle with basic reading or math are rising markedly, as is the percentage of eighteen-year-olds who report difficulty thinking and concentrating. Newport writes that these cognitive declines started in the mid-2010s, “exactly the period when smartphones became ubiquitous and the digital attention economy exploded in size.”
Making things worse, we are increasingly dependent on the “thinking” of chatbots and other AI tools. But as Alexander Stern reminds us, computers don’t “think” as we do. They process data as it is available to them, collating and synthesizing information without the benefit of any lived experience. Neuroscientist Christof Koch adds that reflective self-consciousness is what separates us from intelligent machines; the more we depend on the latter, the more we atrophy the former.
In other words, when we delegate our thinking to machines, we become like them. We stop doing the hard work of seeking to understand the world and our place in it. We automate the procural of information through dependence on a slab of glass in our hand or a screen on our desk.
And we lose what it means to be made in the image of God—the feeling, relating personalism by which we love our Lord and our neighbor as our created and creative purpose in the world.
Today is Tuesday of Holy Week. Jesus spent this day in rigorous debate with “the chief priests and the elders of the people” (Matthew 21:23). The Pharisees attempted to “entangle him in his words” by asking if they should pay taxes to Rome (Matthew 22:15–22); the Sadducees tried to trick him concerning the resurrection (vv. 23–33).
Like impassioned political partisans today, Jesus’ opponents abandoned dichotomous thinking for the certitude of their legalism, delegating their thinking to the authority of their authorities and viewing the world through the prism of their certainties. They were convinced that they alone were the right and righteous leaders of the Jewish people and that their leadership was indispensable to their nation’s future under Roman occupation.
When a Galilean rabbi questioned their cherished biases and, even worse, exposed their fallacies and self-righteous hypocrisy, rather than considering his contrary truth claims, they united in seeking his execution.
The bad news is that Christians can be as biased and close-minded as these opponents of Christ.
As history proves and contemporary culture shows, we can be as dogmatic in our politics and opinions, as self-reliant and self-righteous, as those with whom we fervently disagree. But when the salt loses its saltiness and the light hides under a basket, the world is impoverished (Matthew 5:13–16).
As my wife said in teaching our Bible study class last Sunday, “The problem is not the lost people who act lost. It’s the saved people who don’t act saved.”
The good news is that Christians can be as led by the Spirit as our Savior. When the Spirit came to indwell us at our salvation (1 Corinthians 3:16), we were given “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). The same Spirit who spoke to and through him will speak to and through us today (Mark 13:11).
If we seek to “set your minds on things that are above” (Colossians 3:2) and thus “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5), the Spirit will aid us. If we ask Jesus for wisdom, the One who was wiser than the wisest man who ever lived will lead us to his wisdom (1 Kings 3:12; Matthew 12:42).
But we must ask.
The theologian R. C. Sproul observed,
“The word of God can be in the mind without being in the heart, but it cannot be in the heart without first being in the mind.”
Whose “word” is in your mind today?
“To serve God well, we must think straight. Crooked thinking, intentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, it always costs lives.” —Dallas Willard, philosopher
The post “Morons Are Governing America” vs. “Trump Was Right About Everything” appeared first on Denison Forum.
