Good Trouble Protest in DC celebrating the spirit of John Lewis, 17 July 2025. Photo by Geoff Livingston, Wiki Commons
Good Trouble Protest in DC celebrating the spirit of John Lewis, 17 July 2025. Photo by Geoff Livingston, Wiki Commons
Republicans could have single-handedly emancipated this nation from a ten-year Constitutional crisis, but they chose to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and give a middle finger to our forbears and to the entire planet.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
There would be no rest, no reprieve, no end. There would only be their continuous anguished cries and the assurance that no one was coming to rescue them.
As I got older, I began to see the idea of a destination of unending suffering as incompatible with a God who was love, and I discarded the idea as a reality.
But lately, I have grown to hope and pray I was wrong and that Hell does indeed exist, because if that were true, I’d at least know that this entire Republican Congress will find themselves there as they move from here to hereafter.
Watching these putrid frauds bring generational sorrow and suffering to hundreds of millions of human beings in poverty and lack while further elevating the wealthy, I cling to the hope that somewhere beyond this life, there is a place where horrible people pay for their earthly brutality.
My mind contemplates an afterworld where the despair that human beings have unleashed upon others in this world is returned to them in kind, a place where they feel the pain they have inflicted while here.
If there’s a hell, it will be filled with people who claimed faith in Jesus, while trying to strip the sick of care, the terrified of refuge, and the vulnerable of protection, and reveled in it as if it were a righteous victory.
If eternal damnation exists, it should be the wages of men and women who coordinated, participated in, and applauded the vilifications of immigrants and refugees, whose only crime was their nation of birth or the color of their skin.
If there’s a forever place of suffering saved for people with cancerous hearts, it will surely house those who crucified strangers for their sexuality, who persecuted them over pronouns, who willfully trafficked in a dehumanization that was deadly.
And if there’s a hell, it’s going to be packed to the brimstone-scorched rafters with professed Christians who chose to celebrate, turn the other way, or be silent as they watched it all happen.
This isn’t about Trump.
He is a walking moral cesspool; a lumbering, empty, loveless husk of a human being, but he has never been anything else. He has existed so long in a cloistered, gold-plated palace of privilege where no accountability has ever truly come that his mind has become so corroded that the question of right or wrong no longer exists. His only impulse is self-preservation.
The Republicans in Congress (and in the Supreme Court) who have enabled, defended, and preserved his ascension are far worse.
They know better.
They know he’s a pedophile and a rapist.
They know he’s committed (and is still committing) high crimes against this nation. They know what he is doing with ICE is illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional.
They know he is cognitively compromised and mentally unwell.
They know that he is fully beholden to hostile foreign powers.
They know every vile, grotesque, and illegal atrocity he has authored—and none of it matters.
Congressional Republicans could have prevented this thousands of times over the last decade.
They could have removed him, rejected him, defied him, but their own craven lust for power would not permit such nobility.
They have had every opportunity to cut ties with him and to spare countless people so much unnecessary suffering, such needless violence, such emotional and physical trauma.
They could have single-handedly emancipated this nation from a ten-year Constitutional crisis, but they chose to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and give a middle finger to our forbears and to the entire planet.
And despite all of that, they could end this sickening scourge upon our nation today if they had the simple courage to defend the Constitution they forever claim to revere, to embody the teachings of a Jesus whose name they incessantly broadcast.
This malignant, Democracy-crushing disgrace would all be over if they simply remembered their oaths—but that isn’t something they’re interested in.
Tomorrow I’ll be standing again in the trenches alongside my like-hearted brothers and sisters who believe that good people can alter the planet, but today that doesn’t feel like enough. That doesn’t feel like the story unfolding.
The story unfolding is that hateful people do hateful things to other people, and they do it all believing God is good with it.
The story unfolding is that people of unthinkable cruelty and malice seem to be rewarded for it.
The story unfolding is that the sick and the poor and the different and the vulnerable are being trodden upon.
And I hate this story, because too many innocent people are suffering in real time because of it. Too many people are enduring a living hell in their earthly lives.
And so yes, right now I look at this day and this life and this world, and it feels like the bad people are winning, and I want those people to understand how much hurt they are causing. And since they don’t seem to care very much at all, I want to believe that they will one day face their Maker and the mirror and the blood upon their hands.
And so as much as it pains me to say it, today I’m kinda hoping there is a hell.
That may be the only way these Republicans will pay for their sins against all of us.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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