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July 8, 2026

This edition is sponsored by Cru

Hello, fellow wayfarers … What the Graham Platner scandal shows us about how a good comeback story can be dangerous … Why I was cheered to see a secular newspaper recognize a Baptist evangelist as a key pioneer of American freedom … How Beth Moore was right to put me in my place about procrastinating on a good book … A San Francisco Desert Island Playlist … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.

Graham Platner and the Problem of a Too-Tidy Redemption Arc

The Graham Platner story is one more example—among countless others—of a leader whose disqualifying character was obvious all along but became fatal to him only when one more revelation made it impossible to pretend anymore. The question, though, is why we keep doing this. At least one reason is the uncomfortable reality that something true and beautiful is now twisted and commodified: our longing for a redemption arc.

I don’t know what happened in a house in Maine in 2021. I do know what happens all the time in movements, parties, ministries, churches, and denominations. We find someone who seems to embody our cause—wounded but brave, flawed but authentic, angry at the right people, fluent in the right language—and we decide his story is his character. Then when warnings come, we tell ourselves the stakes are too high to ask the obvious questions. The Bible has a word for that sort of thinking, and it is not grace.

Platner’s previous supporters may point to the fact that, in the end, almost all of them did the right thing—and withdrew their support. They will also point out that many of those acting shocked on television are supporters of a president whom we have all heard on tape bragging about sexual assault ("When you’re a star, they let you do it") and then navigating civil litigation with yet another woman who said he had sexually abused her (a claim a jury found to be truthful). Yet we must ask why we keep allowing others to talk us into the idea that character is subordinate to policy when history has shown, over and over again, that is not true.

After all, in very few cases—in politics or religion or anywhere else—do these moral meltdowns come about without years, if not decades, of metaphorical warning lights flashing and emergency alarms wailing. In a few cases, we were genuinely shocked—for instance, when those of us who grew up with "America’s Dad," Bill Cosby, learned there were multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault against him. But those situations are few.

In Platner’s case, he had already survived reporting about his Nazi-themed tattoo; his misogynistic and violent Reddit posts; and more recently, his admission, when caught, that he had texted sexually explicit messages to multiple women besides his wife, some of whom he had met on dating apps. In a similar vein, a person who says he would rape an intruder in his home is not thereby guaranteed to be a rapist, but such comments certainly ought to indicate serious enough spiritual or mental problems to start asking questions.

The cynical answer in this case is, in many ways, the right one. Political operatives and polarized partisans want to win. As one commenter said on a live feed when some Platner supporters were withdrawing support for him, "Who cares about your souls? We have a country to save." Those of us on the more conservative side who have dissented all along from the Trump movement have heard the same—and were quickly branded the enemy the moment we raised questions.

Cynicism can explain motive, but it cannot explain effectiveness—why the cynical arguments work. Cynicism has to have a credulity to exploit. To wave away behavior they know to be morally disqualifying, at least some people need a story to explain how they can do so without becoming villains themselves.

One of those stories preys on an almost-universal longing to be amazed by grace. In previous scandals, Platner pointed to his trauma as a military veteran in overseas war. He said that he hadn’t returned as himself, that he’d lost his way, that it took him years to heal. He said he is not the same person he was when he came home from the Middle East feeling broken inside.

Change does happen, of course—all the time. People who have been through trauma are not trapped in the choices they make at their lowest moments. I know a war veteran who was so tortured by nightmares of the combat he faced that he sought relief in alcohol, prescription drugs, and sexual promiscuity for years until he found people who helped him walk away from all that and toward something better.

As a Christian—and not just a Christian but one of the evangelical, revivalist sort—I have no choice but to believe that can happen. It’s at the core of my faith. Plus, I’ve seen it over and over. The lines "I once was lost, but now am found, / was blind, but now I see" are not just hymn lyrics. They are the stories of some of the most compassionate and upstanding people in virtually every community in America.

We want to believe those stories. When they are real, there’s nothing more glorious. A year or so ago, I was transfixed at the Ryman Auditorium to hear a man who had been an addict, given up on by his family and friends, tell us how he found forgiveness and transformation. When he sang "Jesus Loves Me," I broke down weeping. We are meant to respond this way. These stories remind us of what has happened for us, even if our stories are more "boring." As another hymn put it, "I love to tell the story / because I know it’s true."

Precisely because grace and rebirth are true, they also have a shadow side that can be made into weapons-grade material.

This possibility for exploitation is not despite what the Bible teaches but because of it. From the very beginning, the apostles warned that some would equate forgiveness of sin with a license to exploit (Rom. 3:7–8). Every predatory pastor planning a comeback equates himself with David. He is almost always the first one to mention that, before the Damascus Road, Paul was complicit with murder.

And a predatory pastor can almost always find a group of people who will let him restart his predation in a whole new venue, not in spite of his past but because of it. He’s a wounded healer, we tell ourselves. Like a prosperity-gospel evangelist with a private jet, his story serves as a kind of exhibition-case model of what could happen for us if we just have enough faith to do what he tells us.

Against this very tendency, the New Testament articulates over and over again the character requirements for those in leadership: that they must be "above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money" (1 Tim. 3:2–3, ESV), that they must have a proven pattern of life and not be recent converts (v. 6).

The qualifications to hold public office, or to be an employee at a bank, are emphatically not the same as those for teachers and leaders within the church, but the way of discernment is. In most cases, character in the past foretells character in the future, unless a compelling intervention remolds it. Even when that intervention is sudden, it takes a long time to see it demonstrated.

Right now, though, our cynical age demands one of two perversions of the redemption arc. We hear either that a well-crafted comeback narrative is itself enough to prove character or that actual character is too much to ask because nobody has it. The vice president of the United States, promoting his book on his own testimony of returning to his faith, dismissed any critique of the president’s use of vile and degrading language—a subject the Scriptures and Jesus himself take as of utmost moral importance (Matt. 5:34–37; 12:34; James 1:19; 3:1–12)—as "policing working-class ways of communication and covering them in elite preferences."

Some on the left made similar arguments about Platner’s "authenticity," referring to his previous Reddit comments and allegations of sexting—as though oystermen or military veterans could not, bless their hearts, be expected to know how to be anything but morally wild. In both cases, elite condescension makes moral discernment out to be elite condescension.

An overly optimistic view of human nature assumes a well-told comeback story is all we need to prove someone’s character. An overly pessimistic view of human nature feeds a "whataboutism" cycle that claims the other side is so filled with reprehensible characters that our side can only succeed by dropping our "pearl-clutching" of moral norms to beat them. This dark, cynical view assures people who want virtue that the only way they can get to righteousness is by out-sinning the other side.

Eventually, adopting the right set of opinions or hating the right set of people eventually becomes what it means to have integrity, to exercise virtue. That’s easy to sell because it’s easy to achieve while remaining untransformed. But this way of thinking is not just un-American and dehumanizing. It’s also anti-Christ.

The question is not whether broken people can be forgiven. If not, none of us would have any hope. The question is whether we will let the God who forgives sinners also tell us the truth about sin and power: Persistently rotten fruit should tell us when a tree is diseased. Leaders and role models who are not narcissists or extortionists or rapists is not too much for a free people to expect.

We all want a redemption arc, a good comeback story. We want it because grace is amazing. But the gospel is not a reputation-management strategy, and its secular echoes shouldn’t be either.

Back When a Baptist Was Still a Baptist

As most of y’all know, I am a Baptist preacher serving in the ecclesial witness relocation program, gladly congregating and serving in a nondenominational church with folks from many different denominational backgrounds. I am still a Baptist, though, and always will be. The Baptist Faith and Message, the confession of faith of my ancestral communion, is fully consistent with every previous Baptist confession of faith when it says,

God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it. Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. In providing for such freedom no ecclesiastical group or denomination should be favored by the state more than others. Civil government being ordained of God, it is the duty of Christians to render loyal obedience thereto in all things not contrary to the revealed will of God. The church should not resort to the civil power to carry on its work. The gospel of Christ contemplates spiritual means alone for the pursuit of its ends. The state has no right to impose penalties for religious opinions of any kind. The state has no right to impose taxes for the support of any form of religion. A free church in a free state is the Christian ideal, and this implies the right of free and unhindered access to God on the part of all men, and the right to form and propagate opinions in the sphere of religion without interference by the civil power.

That’s a powerfully and beautifully crafted statement. And as Wendell Berry wrote of himself about a completely different matter, when I was "half as old and twice as illusional as I am now," I thought all of us meant it when we said confessional accountability was crucial for cooperation. Over the years, though, I’ve learned that, for some, this matters not on minor questions such as the Trinity but only on major ones such as what one calls the children’s director at the church if she is a "she."

And nowhere is this flipped prioritizing more the case than with this Baptist distinctive of religious liberty and church/state separation. A person can now claim "Christian nationalism" and insist the state use civil power to maintain religious identity and practice, that the state ought to proclaim itself "Christian" and favor certain religions over others, and that we should applaud other such things that every Baptist since John would have recognized as wrong.

But here we are. And almost no one remembers that religious liberty for everyone—not just whoever has a plurality of voters—is essential to the American order, and that this recognition was due to the persistent agitation of Baptists who insisted that it be written down and guaranteed.

I was therefore cheered this week to see a major section of The New York Times Magazine, of all outlets, recognize a Baptist hero of mine since childhood, to whom, in large part, we owe the impetus for the First Amendment. John Leland was a "New Light" Baptist preacher—a fiery revivalist and steadfast Biblicist—who was imprisoned and persecuted by Anglican state churches but kept preaching anyway and was willing to work with James Madison and Thomas Jefferson to codify this freedom of conscience.

The Times piece accurately tells Leland’s story, up to and including the massive cheese wheel he presented to newly elected president Thomas Jefferson, decorated with the words "Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God." The piece quotes Leland as saying, "Let Christianity operate in its own natural channel … and it is a blessing of immense worth, but turn it into a principle of state policy, it fosters pride, hypocrisy and the worst kind of cruelty."