When Walter Ciszek was a young Jesuit, he got his wish to go to Russia to minister to the spiritually starved people there suffering under an atheist communist regime. But when he was imprisoned on false charges of being a Vatican spy in 1941, he got a rude awakening. Some people desperately wanted to receive the sacraments and were glad he was there, but a lot more hated him on sight, just because he was a priest. Decades of propaganda had taught them that priests were parasites, oppressors and perverts. 

It was, of course, the government that had taught the Russian people to think this way. That is how oppressive governments often work: They don’t just openly present themselves as the enemy whose goal it is to make the masses miserable. What they do is much more effective and harder to undo: They make the masses complicit. They get people to spy on each other; they get people to mistrust each other. They tell disgusting lies about large groups of people, and they get them to wish evil upon each other. 

You probably think I am talking about the Trump administration. Well, I am, because they have managed to get a lot of American citizens to become complicit in our own country’s degradation. People in my generation grew up reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which ends “with liberty and justice for all,” but now half the people I went to school with gleefully wave the flag over developments like beating and arresting peaceful protestors, threatening the free press and forcing the church underground. The Bill of Rights? What’s that?

This degradation has also affected American Christianity. One of my kids recently told me that when she sees someone wearing a cross, her first thought is “Oh, no,” because in 2025 America, the bigger the fuss you make about being a Christian in public (especially on TV or online), the more likely you are to be cruel. This is the experience she had going to Catholic school: Many of the kids who came from those wholesome, upstanding families that were the backbone of the community were often the same ones who doodled swastikas, mocked people with foreign accents and yapped about women being servants and incubators. Some of the teachers pushed back, but some of them didn’t. The Beatitudes? What’s that? 

This was our experience. Not all schools are like this. But a concerning number are. Just a few weeks ago, a Catholic school was represented with a float featuring the clearly recognizable gate of Auschwitz. Black Catholic students report systemic racist treatment and outrage when they push back. And several of my friends in states around the country say that, at otherwise excellent schools, their kids’ classmates reflexively identify Catholicism with conservatism, and conservatism with carte blanche to be cruel to marginalized people. 

You can talk to your kids about giving their peers the benefit of the doubt, especially when they’re still growing in maturity. You can counsel them about how to avoid being self-righteous, and you can remind them that we are all sinners and need constant conversion of heart. But you don’t have to let them spend their formative years learning to associate Christianity with open sin. 

The public school kids also say and do many of these same awful things, but at least my kids won’t see it coming from classmates who are also writing persuasive essays about the sanctity of life. Hypocrisy is corrosive, especially to people who are just beginning to form their identities, and constant exposure starts to eat away at your worldview like acid on flesh. Even if you see it for what it is, it leaves a mark. 

But taking my kids out of that milieu was not enough; I needed to address this problem directly. So here is what I told them:

Don’t let them have it. Don’t let the cross become a MAGA thing. Don’t let them be the only public face of Christianity, while you retract your faith into privacy, hoping to avoid being associated with MAGA. And definitely don’t let them convince you that this is what Christianity is. Do not become complicit in the hijacking of Christianity. Do not become part of the propaganda. 

I grew up imagining I might someday be called upon to stand up for my faith against a government that openly hated Christianity. Instead, we’re fighting a battle more subtle and more perverse: having to stand up for our Christian faith against a government that openly sins but calls its sins Christianity. Let’s not underestimate how corrosive this can be. Let’s not become complicit in the degradation of our own faith. 

There have always been people who wave a Bible with one hand and crush the widow and the orphan with the other. If we readily recognize this as a scandal, then our duty is threefold: to fight for the oppressed, to fight for the good name of our faith and to fight for our own souls. 

It helps to state plainly what our path is. Goodness, truth and beauty are still theological virtues, and we cannot afford to jettison them just because things are messy right now. We do not lie, even if we think our lie would do some good, and even if the other guys are telling worse lies. We do not murder (or wink or laugh at it), even if we think it will strike fear into the hearts of people committing evil. We do not dehumanize, even if we see people acting in ways that are not worthy of their humanity. 

We do not flout just laws, even if everyone around us is flouting them as fast as they can. We do not give ourselves a pass from self-examination, and we do not wallow in self-righteousness and call it virtue. We admit our mistakes, and we ask for forgiveness. We want redemption for everyone. And we know that Jesus died for everyone. Everyone. 

If we still want the cross to belong to us, then we are called to do more. It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing. There isn’t a 2025 exception to the Beatitudes. 

Our Christian identity is worth fighting for, not because it’s a powerful way to make a rhetorical point and not because it’s gratifying to rub the truth in hypocrites’ faces, but because it is our life in Christ that will save us, and we do need saving. Have the courage to cling to Jesus in public, and if people misunderstand you and your sympathies, then let them. The cross is still ours. Or, better: The cross is still Jesus’, and we are still His.