A future retrospective on the moment ‘polite religion’ died, and why the bishop’s advice to write a will is the most honest spiritual guidance of the decade.
The Great Sifting of 2025
I am writing this from a mental projection of the year 2075. When we look back at history, we often look for the battles, the elections, the signing of treaties. But I suspect that when the history of our current era is written, the turning point won’t be found in the Oval Office, but in a bishop’s office in New England. We are living through ‘The Great Sifting.’ It is the moment when the luxury of neutral faith is being revoked. The collision in Minneapolis between federal power and spiritual conviction is not just a news story; it is a signal that the era of low-cost morality is over. We are returning to a time where belief has a body count.
When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
The Bishop’s Decree
There is something chillingly practical about Bishop Rob Hirschfeld’s advice to his clergy: ‘get your wills and affairs in order.’ It cuts through the fog of modern rhetoric. We are used to religious leaders speaking in metaphors—of spiritual warfare, of struggle, of sacrifice. But Hirschfeld was speaking of probate courts and executors. He was acknowledging that the state’s patience with dissent had run out. True faith is not an insurance policy against chaos; it is a permission slip to enter it. By linking the act of protest with the preparation for death, he stripped away the illusion that we can challenge the machinery of power without risking our own machinery—our bodies, our safety, our futures.
The Collapse of ‘Polite’ Faith
I find the pushback against Hirschfeld—the complaints that his words were a ‘war cry’—to be deeply revealing. We have become addicted to the aesthetic of moderation. We want the moral high ground without the climb. But as we saw in the tear gas of Minneapolis, the middle ground is disappearing. You cannot be ‘moderately’ opposed to what you believe is a violation of human dignity. The ‘polite Episcopalian’ is a relic of a time when the state and the church were playing for the same team. That game is over. The future belongs to those who are willing to be impolite, inconvenient, and unsafe.
A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed—what gospel is that?
– Óscar Romero
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The Inheritance of Courage
From our vantage point in the future, we will see that this fear—the fear that drove clergy to prepare their wills—was actually the beginning of our freedom. It was the moment we realized that safety is not the highest good. If we want to preserve a society where the human person is sacred, we have to be willing to stand in the way of the tank, the tear gas, and the deportation order. The legacy of 2025 isn’t just about immigration policy; it’s about the rediscovery of the spine. We are learning, once again, that the only thing the authoritarian truly fears is a person who has already settled their accounts with death.