Day: December 21, 2025
The Standard Christmas Message
It’s the Fourth Sunday of Advent, “Love” Sunday, Christmas Sunday. There is a standard sermon for this occasion I have heard countless time in my life – that Christmas is about Jesus, not presents – that Christmas is a spiritual event, not a temporal one. It’s a prescription against materialism. So common is this sermon that it defined my knee-jerk reaction to this piece about the return of Christmas time tourism to Nazareth in Israel after the cease fire. “How crass,” I thought, “that’s a very holy place – it should be about something more uplifting at Christmas than mere commerce.” But then, as I sat here preparing to roll out the standard Christmas message, I thought again.
The post The Standard Christmas Message appeared first on The Hugh Hewitt Show.
The algorithm sells despair. Christmas tells the truth.
I recently did something that I usually avoid. I stayed up too late and wandered into the digital sewer we politely call “the conversation.” X, feeds, clips, comments, rage-bait. I knew it would not end well, but I kept scrolling anyway. By the time I finally shut it off, it was clear that the despair and resentment social media produces are not a bug — they are the feature.
The world you see online is a world stripped of context and proportion. Everything is framed as an emergency, everything demands outrage, nothing asks for wisdom. Human suffering is turned into ammunition, children are turned into slogans, and hatred is dressed up as moral clarity. If you sit with it long enough, you begin to feel foolish for believing in decency at all.
God is not dead. He is not asleep. And the story is not finished, no matter how much the algorithm wants you to believe otherwise.
It made me think of a poem I had not thought about for some time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells” is often quoted for its opening lines about peace on earth and goodwill toward men. That is usually where people stop.
But Longfellow wrote the poem in the middle of the Civil War. His country was fractured, his own son a casualty of the fighting, and his wife killed in a tragic accident. The poem is an honest look into the mind of a man laid low.
In the early stanzas, Longfellow describes hearing church bells repeat the old promise of peace. Then reality intrudes, cannons thunder, violence drowns out the song. He writes that it felt “as if an earthquake rent the hearthstones of a continent.” That is what civil war feels like from the inside.
That line has stayed with me for a very long time.
We are not there yet, but the pressure is mounting. Anti-Semitism has returned openly, not whispered, but justified. The Jewish people — history’s most reliable early warning system — are being threatened again, and too many voices respond with silence, excuses, or applause. We swore we would never allow this again. Now it is happening all over the West.
At the same time, the world is edging toward wider conflict. Alliances are hardening, borders matter again. But this time, there is no obvious force capable of stabilizing the chaos. America is busy devouring itself. Europe is exhausted. The rest of the world is watching to see what happens next.
This is the part of the poem most people skip.
Longfellow does not rush to hope. He admits his despair. “There is no peace on earth,” he writes, “for hate is strong, and mocks the song.” Honesty is not weakness. Pretending everything is fine when it is not is how civilizations collapse quietly.
But the poem does not end there.
The final stanza matters because it follows despair instead of denying it. Longfellow writes:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
That is not cheap optimism promising a quick end to suffering. It is a conviction insisting that evil does not get the last word.
That distinction matters a lot right now.
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Hope is not pretending the algorithm is wrong. It is recognizing that what trends is rarely what endures. The quiet courage that holds families together, the decency that stops violence when no camera is present, the faith that steadies people when institutions fail — those things do not go viral, but they do prevail. History does not turn on outrage. It turns on character.
Every civilization that survives a moment like this does so because enough people refuse to surrender their moral bearings. They do not deny the danger or excuse the evil. They do not outsource conscience to crowds or machines. They decide, quietly and stubbornly, to let their lives reflect the fact that truth still matters.
Longfellow had not yet seen the end of the war when he wrote that poem. He wrote it because despair was real and hope was necessary anyway. The bells did not silence the cannons overnight. But they reminded him — and us — that order is not an illusion and truth is not negotiable.
God is not dead. He is not asleep. And the story is not finished, no matter how much the algorithm wants you to believe otherwise.
Why the ‘Christian’ Democrat is more dangerous than the loud one
The Democratic Party has been wandering the wilderness for years, somehow discovering new ways to alienate large portions of the country. And it still isn’t finished.
Rock bottom, it turns out, has a basement — and Texas has the keys.
Earlier this month, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D), a congresswoman who treats every disagreement like a full-contact sport, announced her Senate bid. Waiting for her in March is state Rep. James Talarico (D), a former teacher and pastor-in-training with a very different style.
Neither is good news. But from a Christian perspective, one is far worse.
Crockett is impossible to miss. She’s volume without thought, performance without a functioning pause button. Trump derangement syndrome has long since replaced reason, and nuance never survived the encounter. She seems to measure success by how many people she can irritate before lunch. Her politics are blunt, her tone brittle, her intellectual range roughly comparable to a Roomba. You always know where she stands because she’s standing on the table, yelling.
Talarico, by contrast, operates on an entirely different frequency. He lowers his voice, quotes scripture, and speaks with the gentle cadence of a youth pastor wrapping up a weekend retreat just before the acoustic guitar comes out. He talks about compassion, dignity, and the moral duty to protect the vulnerable. He wants to heal divides, soothe tensions, and “bring people together.”
If Crockett feels like a bar fight, Talarico feels like “Kumbaya” by candlelight with everyone instructed to hold hands.
And that is precisely the problem.
Crockett’s politics are abrasive but obvious. She makes no effort to hide what she believes or where she wants to take the country. There is something almost refreshing about her lack of disguise. You may not like the message, but it’s unmistakable. She offends openly and moves on.
But Talarico offends in a very different manner. He has mastered the art of wrapping progressive politics in pastoral language. What he offers is standard Democratic doctrine: sexual ideology backed by law, borders treated as optional, and a growing state taking over matters once settled by family, church, and conscience.
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Mark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Talarico insists that faith and today’s Democratic Party can walk hand in hand. Perhaps this was plausible once, back when Democrats still shared a basic moral grammar with the rest of the country. In the 1990s, disagreement existed, but reality was still shared. Marriage meant something fixed. Biological sex wasn’t up for debate. Free speech had limits, but truth still mattered. You could argue policy without arguing over whether biology or basic reality still mattered.
That world is gone.
The modern Democratic project is built on ideas fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching: the self treated as sovereign, identity treated as sacred, desire elevated to authority, and socialism presented as the only workable future.
Sin is renamed “harm.” Redemption is replaced with affirmation. Judgment is reserved only for those who dissent. Christianity, meanwhile, insists on restraint, repentance, and allegiance to something beyond the individual.
Talarico tries to solve this puzzle by watering down Christianity until it feels more like a mood than a creed. He does this because he has no other choice. In today’s Democratic Party, a Christian who speaks plainly about restraint and repentance simply cannot survive. He is summoned, sidelined, and eventually expelled. To remain welcome, faith must be dumbed down and rendered harmless.
So Talarico treats Christianity like a buffet. He keeps the language of love and mercy, the parts that flatter modern sensibilities, and quietly discards the parts that demand obedience, self-denial, or radical honesty.
This is not faith guiding politics but politics reshaping faith.
And that is where the charge sticks. This is not a good-faith disagreement or a sincere wrestling with belief but a distortion carried out for political survival. If Talarico spoke the full truth of Christianity as it has been taught for centuries, he would be politically homeless by morning. Rather than risk that, he trims the gospel until it fits the party line.
This is where the real danger lies. He speaks like a shepherd but votes like an activist, borrowing Christianity’s authority to push policies that weaken what faith seeks to strengthen — specifically the nuclear family and ordered community.
Crockett does her damage loudly, like a bull in a china shop. Talarico, on the other hand, is more woodworm than wrecking ball, smiling as he eats through the beams.
There’s something faintly comic about watching Democrats embrace Talarico. This is a party that spent decades treating Christianity like a vestigial organ, now swooning over a Sunday-school version of Pete Buttigieg.
But there’s nothing funny about what the Texan stands for.
Talarico offers a faith that never says “no,” never draws lines, and never makes anyone uncomfortable except those stubborn enough to insist that limits must be imposed. Love is endlessly elastic. Compassion is permanently undefined. Everything bends; nothing breaks — except, eventually, the foundation.
Crockett, for all her theatrics, doesn’t pretend to share a Christian worldview. Talarico does. He doesn’t attack Christian beliefs outright. Instead he sands them down, slowly, patiently, until they no longer support much of anything.
For Texans, come March, both options are bad. This isn’t a choice so much as a coordinated assault: one, a knee to the groin, the other, a roundhouse to the ribs. Crockett does her damage loudly, like a bull in a china shop. Talarico, on the other hand, is more woodworm than wrecking ball, smiling as he eats through the beams.
Neither deserves trust. But only one dresses his agenda in sacred language.
Texas Democrats may think they are choosing between bedlam and bland reassurance. Christians should recognize the choice for what it is: between open hostility and sneaky subversion, between a politics that attacks faith from the outside and one that reshapes it from within.
Both are bad. But only one pretends to be good. And that, from a Christian point of view, makes all the difference.
PBA: Barangay Ginebra squeaks past Munzon, Titan Ultra to wrap up Philippine Cup elims
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Barangay Ginebra squeaked past Titan Ultra and a late charge led by Joshua Munzon, 108-105, to wrap up the elimination round of the PBA Philippine Cup on Sunday at the Smart Araneta Coliseum.
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Australian Prime Minister booed as Bondi Beach attack victims honoured
SYDNEY – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was booed by an angry crowd gathered at the famous Bondi beach on Sunday to honour the victims of a gun attack a week earlier that targeted a seaside Jewish Hanukkah festival event. The nation marked a day of reflection on Sunday to honour the 15 people killed and the dozens wounded in the attack by two gunmen. With security tight and flags at half-staff on government buildings, a minute of silence was held at 6:47 p.m. (0747 GMT), the time the attack began.
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Kremlin says peace prospects not improved by Europe, Ukraine changes to US proposals
MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin”s top foreign policy aide said on Sunday that changes made by the Europeans and Ukraine to U.S. proposals for an end to the war in Ukraine did not improve prospects for peace. The U.S.-drafted proposals for an end to the nearly four-year-old war, leaked to the media last month, raised European and Ukrainian concerns that they were tilted too far in Russia’s favour and that U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration could push Kyiv into conceding too much.
