Have mercy.

I’m not religious. But I did (barely) successfully major in religious studies.

For better and often for worse, the history of faith and organized religion has been the backbone of human history, political science, culture, wars, sexual ethics, and more.

Subtle or not, religion and faith are most often the answer to why people do what they do, and to how we got here, even now as the west barrels towards majority secularism.

And despite, you know, everything, I’m really fine with the whole thing, as long as you’re not using it to oppress or harm others.

Which…is definitely some of the time.

“Have mercy” is religion’s version of “all men are created equal”. Easy to say or throw around or write into the bible 400 years after the fact or into, say, a constitution, but more complicated when you’re a mascot for the Crusades, abusing a million little boys, cutting young girls, splitting up the sub-continent, and/or enslaving your own children, Thomas Jefferson.

Religion, faith, politics, institutions, society, welfare, pro-life, technology, even education — these words, these ideas, are what we make them. It’s the fundamentalism, it’s the guns, it’s the greed, but it’s also the very human guardrails we know we need around these, for a lack of better angels.

As David Brooks wrote last year:

Of course it’s entirely possible to develop good character without participating in any kind of organized religion, but on the other hand, it’s also very, very interesting that one of the most forsaken tenets of most of them is to, simply, have mercy.

Trump, Elon, Mike Johnson, Dana White, and most recently, Mark Zuckerberg aren’t going to read this, because whatever their faith, they have no mercy to give.

This isn’t for them. It’s for you.

Have mercy.

Two years after The Heritage Foundation published Project 2025…

Six months after his god saved him from assassination…

Two weeks after Right Rev. Mariann Budde asked Trump to his face to pay it forward and have mercy for the scared among us, after he demanded an apology…

After he and his apostles, sycophants, and oligarchs sought to tear her down, after they immediately dominated our institutions, from the media to the Treasury, and after they immediately dismantled others, from USAID to the CDC…

After they immediately dominated culture, immediately dominated attention —

— even if they barely won the election, even if the courts have actually stepped up (so far) to stop their orders in their tracks…

— even if we — everyone else who doesn’t want this — have done little to recover ground from November.

…after all of this, I only have good news for you.

Whatever your religious journey or belief system, if any, there is so much room for mercy. The bar is lower than ever, the gaps wider than ever, the need more than ever.

However large and heterogeneous our party, on whatever issue, no matter who is affected, we must and can be exactly two things at once, and nothing more:

Merciful, as we continuously paint a loud, vivid picture of a better way of living and governing, brought forth by actually listening to people. Not the actual white supremacists, but the other folks who are actually struggling, who were misinformed, or both.

Merciful to everyone on the frontlines and even ourselves, earnestly communicating real but inevitably flawed ideas, as real people with real flaws, by building new, flawed, well-meaning institutions and well-funded but imperfect, informal media in 2025 and 2030 terms, not 2008.

And absolutely merciless, as we simultaneously force Trump and Elon and Mike Johnson and every complicit billionaire and everyone up for election in 2025 and 2026 own every tariff, every single order, every single life they put in harm’s way, here and abroad.

Have mercy.

But you cannot simply hold it in your heart. You have to fucking show it.

Don’t have hope. Be hope. Embody it, with conviction.

You — we — have to reach down deep inside our tattered husks to enlist an ambition we buried a long time ago, a wild ambition for a merciful world where everyone has bootstraps, where young people whose parents didn’t have bootstraps — bartenders with economic degrees and barely any savings, nurses, teachers, renters, young parents — are not only elected, but chairing committees.

Despair isn’t an option but neither is neutrality. Never has, never will. You have to hang in there, to stay in the game. You have to carry the fire. Chop wood, carry water, whatever the metaphor or cat poster or song lyric, make it your fucking mantra, your operating instructions, write it on your bathroom mirror.

I have even better news: like garlic, mercy pairs well with anything, and you can really never have enough of it. Take the recipe and double it.

Rage and mercy? Sure, let’s fucking do this.

Petty and mercy? Plug it into my veins.

Let’s try some:

The same businesses who put black squares in their Instagram profiles four years ago are cutting DEI programs as fast as they can and trying to figure out how the fuck they’re going to rationalize with on and off again 25% tariffs without the pitchforks coming for them, too.

You wanted inequality? Just wait until Social Security stops working like next week and it’s all because blessed 47 doesn’t give a shit if the richest Nazi that’s ever lived and his white supremacist little bronies plug directly into the Treasury terminal and put Medicaid and millions of the poorest kids in the world’s futures “into the wood chipper.”

You manifested your little business-friendly cosplay KKK tax cut culture war into a Blitzkrieg of immoral but actually legal executive orders; completely illegal ones that could devastate lives and public services; a full-on, devastating administrative coup; and a variety pack constitutional crisis.

Sure, maybe we’ve actually missed the opportunity to put everyone into the grinder, because who knows what public services will be left at the end of this, but that doesn’t mean we can’t look up from paying off kids lunch debt to say “best of luck, motherfuckers” to the ones that really, really deserve it. ‘

You wanted the immigrants out? Good luck getting any service of any kind anywhere.

I’m so glad you’re excited about supersonic flight again. Best wishes with those air traffic controllers.

Best wishes with those factory farms.

Have no doubt, we’re feeding people tonight. More than ever.

But if we’re going down, we’re taking you down with us.

Have mercy.

Is Bishop Budde “satan”, “exhibit A for why women should not be pastors, priests, or bishops”, an incubator for the “woke virus”, megaphone for “fear mongering and division”?

Let’s find out who’s behind door number one:

One of the people cited above, who celebrated Trump opening a concentration camp?

Or Budde?

Or is it any one of the pro-life “family and friends” hosts?

Is it the administration absolutely stacked with sexual predators and domestic abusers?

Have mercy.

Be pro-life. Guaranteed another meal, another day, another night of shelter for someone else.

You have life, this day, at least guaranteed. To whom must is given, much is expected.

Let me ask you this: is a concentration camp pro-life?

Is cutting the ACA pro-life? Is confirming an anti-vaxxer pro-life? Is ignoring bird flu pro-life?

Is bringing measles back loving thy neighbor?

But we all know what “pro-life is”, they’ll tell you.

Fuck them, I’m taking it back.

Say, “Show me one thing you’ve done this week to measurably extend the healthspan of someone with fewer resources than you, including and especially a child”, and I’ll call you pro-life.

Tell them: “Disprove for me Matthew Desmond’s theory that so many Americans live in poverty because so many rich people benefit from it.” Show me the receipts.

Prove to me that America First works. Prove to me that pulling out of the WHO and Paris Agreement again and shutting down PEPFAR will improve Americans’ life expectancy, that cutting the corporate tax rate will make eggs cheaper, that firing NSF researchers and removing CDC datasets will build tens of millions of new houses, improve maternal health, or polluted air, or heart disease.

Prove to me that shutting down the imperfect USAID won’t only endanger millions, including people currently in clinical trials who no longer can access treatment, jesus fucking christ, but also cripple American soft power all over the globe.

Tell me again what mercy is.

Tell me what pro-life is, and I’ll tell you what I think it is.

Pro-life is acknowledging that without bootstraps, children and parents and everyone else simply cannot ever get on their feet, reliably.

Pro-life is acknowledging we have double the child-poverty rate of Germany and South Korea and then attacking the system to build something better, that doesn’t just tolerate child poverty but seeks to eliminate it now and seven generations down the line.

Pro-life is acknowledging your house value went up because there aren’t enough houses and that’s been the plan to build — and restrict — wealth in America for a very, very long time — and then demanding your city and state build more of it, everywhere, but especially near public transportation and electricity transmission.

Pro-life is fighting for measurable, repeatable policies like housing vouchers, rent control and stabilization, land banks, just so much permanently affordable public housing.

Pro-life is acknowledging that Hitler salutes are still not allowed on Inauguration Day or any day.

Pro-life is acknowledging that when there is no paid leave requirement, when childcare is least affordable and accessible and reading scores are still cratering, that cutting federal funding for Head Start is monstrous.

Pro-life is acknowledging that Medicaid work requirements have never held up, and fighting to abolish them.

Pro-life is acknowledging that we have — massive fucking understatement coming — vilified Black people every day since at least 1619 and that no, hiring Black people did. not. make. the. planes. crash.

Pro-life is acknowledging that no, DOGE shouldn’t have access to the NOAA, because isn’t it great knowing when hurricanes are coming?

Pro-life is acknowledging that this assault on the 1% kids of college athletes that are trans is an assault on every trans kid is an assault on every Black and queer kid and the only thing that unifies all of this is it’s been the same antagonists all this time.

Pro-life is acknowledging, like Raj Patel in his book, that “our food system allows a few to eat healthily, many to eat unhealthily, and many more not to eat at all.”

Pro-life is acknowledging that environmental justice workers should be the first ones taken care of and the last ones to go.

Pro-life is simply standing in the way of some inevitable destruction of imperfect guardrails and institutions, seeking to build anew and better, because — like Paul Farmer showed us, like the starfish — every life matters. 
The mercy you go out of your way to show today and tomorrow matters just as making a daily commitment to burying these bastards in their choices.

Have mercy.

I do not believe in god, or that there’s anyone minding the shop, or the stove, or behind the wheel. That may differentiate me and you and that’s totally, totally ok.

The real-world implications of my belief system are inevitable then: there is no one coming to save us.

We are the only ones who can take care of each other. We are the only ones who can feed each other, who can make kids cancer and TB and malaria and air pollution a thing of the past, who can clean up after the fires, who can build computers to track hurricanes, who can build homes and schools and safe streets and vaccines that don't require cold storage. No one will do it for us.

I am aware that my tone here, or at least half of it, skips right over the “look with compassion on the whole human family” into what Rt. Reverend Budde calls a “culture of contempt.” And that is because I am angry.

I am angry because a fascist few are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I understand her plea for dignity: “If common ground is not possible, dignity demands that we remain true to our convictions without contempt for those who hold convictions of their own. ”

I hear her call for honesty: I struggle so much with those who would so consciously and willingly and even proactively make action of their convictions with the explicit intention of hurting the marginalized.

And I understand the need for humility. I’m not a journalist, an aid worker, an attorney, a scientist, a policymaker, billionaire, or a lot of other things, either. We are all capable of good and bad, and to me — that is exactly the point.

Because, as Indigenous poet Karim Wafa Al-Hussaini, said: “If you believe that fighting for your freedom means denying someone else theirs, then you are not fighting for freedom. You are fighting for supremacy.”

— Quinn