Dear friend,
I want to talk to you today about a sin that nobody names from the pulpit anymore.
Not because it is rare. Because it is everywhere. Because the people who should be naming it are too busy committing it to notice it has a name.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. I have watched this sin spread slowly and quietly through congregations across this country like water getting into the walls of a house. You cannot see it from the outside. But it is rotting everything from the inside.
And I believe it is doing more damage to America right now than anything you will see on the evening news.
Here is what it is.
Cowardice dressed as wisdom.
I want to show you where this sin appears in Scripture. Because it is not new. And the Bible does not treat it gently.
In John chapter 12, verse 42, there is a verse that I have returned to more times than almost any other in fifty years of ministry.
Many even among the leaders believed in him. But because of the Pharisees they would not openly acknowledge their faith for fear they would be put out of the synagogue.
Read that again.
Many even among the leaders believed. They knew the truth. They had seen the evidence. They had arrived at the correct conclusion. And they stayed silent because they were afraid of what it would cost them socially.
Fear of being put out of the synagogue.
What is the synagogue today? It is the dinner party. It is the family gathering. It is the workplace and the neighborhood and the social circle of people whose approval feels necessary and whose disapproval feels unbearable.
People are choosing that approval over the truth every single Sunday morning in churches across this country. And they have convinced themselves it is wisdom. That it is maturity. That it is knowing your audience.
God sees through the language. He always has.
In Revelation chapter 21, verse 8, there is a list of the people who will not inherit the kingdom. It is a sobering list. It includes murderers and the sexually immoral and liars and idolaters.
And it begins with the cowardly.
The cowardly are listed first. Before the murderers. Before the liars. Before anyone else.
I do not think that is an accident.
I think God understands something about cowardice that we have been too polite to say out loud. That cowardice is not a personality trait or a temperament or a reasonable response to social pressure. It is a choice. A repeated, daily, deliberate choice to protect yourself at the expense of the truth.
And that choice has consequences for more than just the person making it.
Here is what cowardice costs a nation.
When the people who know the truth stay silent, the people who do not know the truth fill the silence. That is not a political observation. It is a law of how information moves through a society.
The lies do not wait for the truth to find its courage. The lies move immediately. Loudly. Confidently. Into every space the cowardly have vacated.
And after enough years of this a nation finds itself in a place where things that were universally understood a generation ago are now treated as controversial. Where things that were obviously wrong a generation ago are now celebrated. Where the people who still believe what everyone once believed are treated as the strange ones.
That is not something that happened to America from the outside.
It grew from the inside. From the silence of people who knew better and chose their comfort over their conviction.
I want to be careful here because I know some of you are reading this and feeling something uncomfortable.
Not because you disagree. Because you recognize yourself.
I am not writing this to condemn you. I have been with the Church for fifty years and I have had my own seasons of staying quiet about things I should have said. I know what it feels like to calculate the cost of speaking and decide the price is too high today. I know what it feels like to tell yourself you will say it next time and then watch next time come and go the same way.
I am writing this because I believe the hour is too late for that calculation to continue.
The cost of speaking has never felt higher. I understand that. But the cost of staying silent has never been higher either. And one of those costs is paid by you. The other is paid by everyone who needed you to speak and found only silence where your voice should have been.
That is exactly why I wrote They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump.
Not because it was comfortable to write. It was not. I held it back for a long time for the same reasons I just described. The same calculations. The same hesitations. The same question of whether saying it clearly was worth what it might cost.
And then I decided that cowardice dressed as wisdom was still cowardice. And I wrote it.
It is the most direct thing I have written. It says plainly what I believe Scripture says about this moment and the man at the centre of it. No qualifications. No careful language designed to offend no one. Just the truth as I understand it from fifty years of reading this Book.
If what I wrote today convicted you — if you recognized the sin I described in yourself and you want something to help you find your voice again — read that guide this week. It gave me my voice on this specific subject. I believe it will do the same for you. You can find it by clicking on the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with the man I started with.
The one who has been in your congregation for thirty years. The one who knows the truth and has not said it in fifteen years. The one who calls his silence wisdom.
I want to say something directly to him tonight.
God did not give you clarity so you could keep it to yourself. He did not let you see what you see so you could protect your seat at the table. He gave it to you because the people around you need someone who will say the thing that costs something to say.
You are not being wise. You are being comfortable. And there is a difference between those two things that Revelation chapter 21 makes uncomfortably clear.
The time for comfort is over.
Say the thing.
God bless you, friend. Say the thing.
With you in prayer,
Father Thomas
This week I want you to do three things:
One. Read John chapter 12, verses 37 through 43. Read the whole section. Pay attention to verse 43 — they loved human praise more than the praise of God. Ask yourself honestly which one you have been choosing in the conversations you have been avoiding.
Two. Identify one specific thing you have been meaning to say — to a family member, a friend, someone at church — that you have kept quiet about. Not loudly. Not aggressively. Just clearly and honestly. Say it this week. Once. See what happens.
Three. Read They Tried To Stop Him this week:https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it as an act of refusing to stay quiet about something I believed needed to be said. Read it as someone who is deciding whether to do the same.
P.S. If you want to go deeper on anything Father Thomas has written, everything is available at fatherthomasletters.com/products — including The Signs Are Here and the Father Thomas Prayer Card Collection.