The American experiment has been sustained not by flawless execution of its founding ideals but by the moral imagination of people who refused to surrender hope. From abolitionists to suffragists to the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement, generations have insisted that the Republic live up to its creed. Yet today that hope feels imperiled. Coarsened public discourse, the normalization of cruelty in policy, and the corrosion of democratic trust signal more than political dysfunction—they expose a crisis of meaning.
Naming that crisis is not enough. What we need, I argue, is a recovered ethic of humaneness—a civic imagination rooted in empathy, dignity, and shared responsibility. Eric Liu, through Citizens University and his "Civic Saturday" fellows and gatherings, proposes that democracy requires a "civic religion," a shared set of stories and rituals that remind us who we are and what we owe one another. I find deep resonance between that vision and what I call humane theology. That is, a belief and moral framework that insists public life cannot flourish when empathy is starved.
Our national debates and divisions are often described as policy disputes, but the deeper wound is ontological. Contests over the very meaning of the human. We are witnessing the erosion of empathy itself, the corrosion of what makes politics possible. From algorithmic outrage to legislative indifference, the language of our everyday life has grown punitive and performative. Power has become spectacle.
Jim Wallis and others have long warned that when moral truth is privatized, public life devolves into tribal combat. Eddie Glaude Jr. names our current malaise "the value gap," the stubborn belief that some lives matter more than others. The late bell hooks, speaking of love as an ethic of freedom, reminds us that domination cannot produce community. Together they point toward a humanistic core that today’s politics has neglected—the conviction that civility is not etiquette but courage, the refusal to let contempt be our lingua franca.
Conversations with Liu have often centered on the practice of civic faith, focusing on a shared question: What rituals keep democracy alive? Civic Saturday's liturgies—songs, readings, moral reflection—translate faith's communal grammar into public form. Similarly, humane theology balances civic practice with spiritual depth without collapsing the two. It asks how empathy might become not sentiment but structure—how we design policies, schools, and neighborhoods that embody what Howard Thurman called "the growing edge" of human fellowship.
Constructive humane practice contends that sanity and civility are not niceties; they are democratic disciplines. Listening truly to those who differ is not appeasement; it is stewardship of the public square. Protest, likewise, is not disruption but prophetic maintenance, the labor of keeping moral imagination alive. To practice democracy is to practice empathy in motion. Interestingly, If empathy is scarce at home, it is nearly absent abroad. America's global posture has too often traded moral leadership for transactional might. A humane geopolitics would remember that security built on fear breeds neither peace nor respect. Reinhold Niebuhr cautioned that love must find form in justice; a humane theological and political construction extends that maxim to foreign and domestic policy alike, insisting that the sacred is never confined to one nation or creed.
I remain convinced that democracy's renewal will not come from pundits or platforms but from the daily disciplines of citizens, faithful and secular, who refuse despair. We rebuild civility through the mundane miracles of teaching, mentoring, organizing, and voting. We sustain sanity by choosing cooperation over contempt. And we recover humaneness when we risk our comfort for another's dignity.
Humaneness is less a doctrine than a disposition: a willingness to see every policy debate as a moral conversation about how we treat one another. It invites what Liu calls "the practice of powerful citizenship" and what I would name the practice of faithful humanity. Our challenge is not merely to save democracy but to deserve it. And that, finally, is a theological task.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.