Read Matthew 23 sometime when you’re feeling brave.
Jesus is in the temple. He’s surrounded by the religious leaders of his day — the Pharisees, the scribes, the teachers of the law. These were his people. The Bible-reading crowd. The serious-about-God crowd. The ones who showed up. The ones who tithed. The ones who would have called themselves the faithful remnant.
And Jesus absolutely lights them up.
“Woe to you. Hypocrites. Blind guides. Whitewashed tombs. Snakes. Brood of vipers. How will you escape being condemned to hell?”
Read it cold and you’d think Jesus was talking to his enemies. He wasn’t. He was talking to his team. The people who shared his religious framework, his Scripture, his ethnic heritage, his temple. The ones who, on paper, were on the same side.
Jesus saved his sharpest words for his own side.
Most of us do the exact opposite.
Most American Christians are brutal with the other tribe and protective of their own. Jesus was protective of the other tribe and brutal with his own.
That’s not a small inversion. That’s the whole gospel flipped upside down.
The prophets did the same thing
This isn’t just a Jesus quirk. It’s the whole prophetic tradition.
Open Amos. The book starts with God thundering judgment against Israel’s enemies — Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Moab. The home crowd would have been cheering. “Yes, Lord! Get them!” And then, right in the middle of the cheering, Amos turns the spotlight around: “Thus says the Lord — for three transgressions of Israel, and for four…”
The prophet’s job is to call out his own people first.
Isaiah did it. Jeremiah did it. Micah did it. John the Baptist did it. Jesus did it. Paul did it.
The biblical pattern is overwhelming and unmistakable: the people of God are most dangerous to themselves, and the prophet’s first responsibility is to name what’s broken at home.
So why is the modern American church almost entirely organized around the opposite reflex?
The Right’s tribe problem
Let me say what I actually think, because dancing around it would prove the point of this whole series.
If you call yourself a follower of Jesus and you can’t bring yourself to name the way Christian Nationalism has corrupted the American church, you have a tribe problem. Wrapping the cross in a flag is not patriotism — it’s idolatry, and the prophets had a particular kind of fury reserved for it. When we treat any earthly nation as essentially Christian and any opposing political movement as essentially demonic, we have stopped being Christians and started being a tribe with religious branding.
If you can excuse moral failure in your own political leaders that you would have crucified the other side for, you have a tribe problem.
If your faith has more energy for “owning the libs” than for naming the sin in your own house, you have a tribe problem.
I say this as someone who lives in the American South, pastors a church in the South, and loves my country. I am not anti-conservative. I am anti-idol. And the idol of country-as-faith has hollowed out more pulpits than any progressive influence I can name.
The Left’s tribe problem
And lest the progressive Christians reading this think they got off easy — you didn’t.
If you call yourself a follower of Jesus and you’ve quietly traded the offense of the cross for cultural respectability, you have a tribe problem. Progressive Christianity that explains away the resurrection, the divinity of Christ, the reality of sin, the exclusivity of Jesus, and the authority of Scripture isn’t a more enlightened Christianity. It’s a Christianity that has lost its nerve and called the loss “growth.”
If “love” has become the word you use to silence anyone who calls out genuine sin, you have a tribe problem.
If your faith has more energy for deconstructing what evangelicals taught you than for actually following the Jesus they pointed you to — even imperfectly — you have a tribe problem.
The right has turned the gospel into a culture war. The left has turned the gospel into therapy. Both have lost it.
If your faith never costs you anything inside your own tribe, you don’t have a faith. You have a costume.
Why it’s so hard
Calling out your own team is brutal. I won’t pretend it isn’t. There’s a real cost.
You will lose people. People who agreed with you when you only criticized the other side will suddenly find you insufficiently committed. You’ll get called soft. You’ll get called compromised. You’ll get accused of helping the enemy. You’ll get the side-eye in the lobby and the unfollow on social media and the awkward text from the friend who used to call.
This is the cost of refusing the jersey.
It’s also exactly what Jesus said it would be. Read Matthew 10. Read John 15. Read Galatians 1. Following Jesus has always meant being willing to be misunderstood by your own people first.
The good news is you’re in the best company in human history. Every prophet. Every apostle. Jesus himself. The faithful have always been called traitors by their own tribe before they were vindicated by God.
A question to sit with
Here’s the test for this week. It’s brutal, but if you’ve followed me this far, you can take it.
Name one specific thing your political or cultural tribe is currently doing that grieves the heart of Jesus. Name it out loud. Tell a friend on your team you see it.
If you can’t think of anything — if your tribe seems basically fine and the other tribe seems basically wicked — you are almost certainly the one who can’t see clearly. Nobody’s tribe is fine. Mine isn’t. Yours isn’t. And the inability to see the rot in your own house is the very thing Jesus said would condemn the Pharisees.
Next week: Compassion Without Compromise. How Jesus held love and truth together when both sides keep insisting we have to pick one.
Comments are open and I want to hear from you. What did this stir up? Where did it land hard? Where do you push back? Tell me — even if you think I’m wrong.
Forward this to someone in your tribe who needs it. (Including yourself.)
