Episode 13: What We've Done with the Time

On April 14, 2026, the Vice President of the United States stood on a Turning Point USA stage and lectured the Vatican on just-war theology. In the country I grew up in, that would have been a constitutional crisis. In the country I’ve been describing across this series, it was a Tuesday. This is the finale, and it’s where the argument reaches its destination — because the manufacturing of certainty is no longer happening at the edges of our politics. It has moved into the core.

I lay out the pattern plainly: a Secretary of Defense opening a Pentagon briefing with a prayer on his knees; a Supreme Court opinion citing a seventeenth-century judge who sent women to die in witch trials; the Ten Commandments ordered into Louisiana classrooms. None of it sold as religious imposition — all of it sold as the restoration of a tradition. But the mechanism, every time, is the same: theology, installed as the operating system of the government. It is the oldest pattern we have, and the founders wrote the First Amendment specifically to keep it from being imported here.

Then I take on Pope Leo himself. In May 2026, the Vatican released a forty-two-thousand-word encyclical on artificial intelligence — Magnifica Humanitas — in which the Pope called, among other things, for students to be taught to think critically about the technology. I take that instruction seriously, and apply it where it matters most: to the institution doing the asking. The Catholic Church teaches its own foundational claims as beyond critical inquiry. It is the same closed framework that produced every prior decision the Church has made against a category of human beings — from the African slave trade to the doctrine that still calls LGBTQ relationships “intrinsically disordered.” And it is the framework behind Dignitas Infinita, the 2024 Vatican Declaration that places gender theory and sex change on a formal list of grave violations of human dignity alongside abortion, euthanasia, and human trafficking. Pope Leo has not retracted it. Perhaps someday he or his successor will write the apology. I am not willing to sacrifice another generation of trans lives — including my own son’s — hoping for that to happen.

I explain why this is the closing argument of a series about my son. It is the same mechanism. The certainty that the state knows better than a transgender teenager what to do with his own body is the same certainty that has women hemorrhaging in hospital parking lots while doctors call lawyers. There is real resistance, too — a bishop asking a president for mercy, judges still striking these laws down — and what those institutions need now is us.

So I end where the book ends: with a bridge. A stone skew arch near my home in Dexter, Michigan, designed by Frederick Pelham, the first African-American to earn a civil engineering degree from the University of Michigan — whose name was left off the commemorative plaque. My son studied that bridge in the fourth grade, and his class decided the erasure was a wrong that needed righting. They got the approvals, raised the money, and in 2018 put Pelham’s name at his bridge at last. That is the entire argument of this series, performed by children. 

Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid. And I’m done waiting. 

Are you?

Transcript

Episode 13: What We’ve Done with the Time

On April 14, 2026, the Vice President of the United States stood on a stage at the University of Georgia and corrected the Pope.

The setting was a Turning Point USA event. The Vice President was JD Vance, a Catholic convert. The Pope he was correcting was Leo the Fourteenth. The subject was just-war theory — the question of whether God approves of the wars a nation fights. Vance, invoking Saint Augustine, told the crowd that the Pope should “be careful” when he talks about theology.

Sit with that for a second. A sitting Vice President, on a stage built to mobilize young Americans, on national television, lecturing the Pope of Rome about whether God is on his country’s side.

In the country I grew up in, that would have been a constitutional crisis. In the country I have been describing across this series, it was a Tuesday. The news treated it as a story about one man’s audacity, and the cycle moved on inside seventy-two hours.

It is in the audacity that we have failed to notice the substance. And the substance is the reason for this episode — the finale of this series — so let me say it plainly.

Across these episodes I have been making one argument: that the fights tearing this country apart are not, at bottom, honest disagreements about facts. They are the product of manufactured certainty — fear, engineered and sold by people who profit from it. This is the episode where that argument reaches its destination. Because the manufacturing is no longer happening only at the edges of our politics. It has moved into the core.

The United States was founded, explicitly, to escape a particular kind of regime: one in which decisions about war, about the bodies of women, about what children are taught, are made on theological grounds. The First Amendment exists because the founders had read enough European history to know exactly what that produces. And what we have been watching, in the eighteen months since the 2024 election, is the operational undoing of that escape — a country being converted, in plain sight, into one where a particular reading of a particular religious tradition is treated as the equal of logic, of reason, of facts, and of evidence.

It is not subtle, and it is not isolated. In March of 2026, the Secretary of Defense opened a Pentagon press event — an event announcing American airstrikes — with a prayer, on his knees, into the cameras, in the name of Jesus Christ. The Supreme Court opinion that ended the constitutional right to abortion cited, as legal authority, a seventeenth-century English judge who sent women to die in witch trials. Louisiana ordered the Ten Commandments into every public-school classroom in the state. Oklahoma’s governor issued an executive order that opens with the words “every square inch of Oklahoma for Jesus.” A seventy-year-old rule keeping tax-exempt churches out of partisan campaigns was quietly rewritten after two pastors lobbied the President over dinner.

None of this was sold to the public as religious imposition. All of it was sold as the restoration of a tradition. But the mechanism, every time, is the same: theology, installed as the operating system of the government.

If that pattern feels old, it is because it is the oldest one we have. In 1452, a Pope issued a decree granting Christian kings the right to conquer and enslave non-Christian peoples and seize their land — the document that underwrote five centuries of colonization and slavery. There was the Inquisition. The witch trials, which killed tens of thousands of people across Europe, overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly poor. The wars of religion.

There was Galileo, forced to his knees for saying what anyone could confirm with a telescope — and the Catholic Church did not formally concede that trial had been a mistake until 1992. Twenty-three years after a human being walked on the moon.

The men who founded this republic had read that history. Most of them were not anti-religious. But they had seen what theological certainty does once you hand it the power of the state, and they wrote the First Amendment specifically to keep that regime from being imported here. For two centuries, with serious lapses, the safety held. What we are watching now is that safety system being removed — and the structure being installed in its place is not merely similar to the one that produced the Crusades and the Inquisition. It is that structure. We are inside it now, watching it run.

There is one feature the modern version has that the medieval one did not. The medieval version was financed by kings. This one is financed by private individuals whose wealth exceeds that of most kings who ever lived — the one percent of the one percent, who have rediscovered that the exploitation of religious tradition is the most durable instrument of political power ever devised. Theology places authority beyond question, and beyond evidence. They are pulling that lever again, deliberately, and spending enormous sums to do it.

And it is not abstract. The denomination the current Secretary of Defense attends was founded by a pastor in Idaho who will, on the record, use the word theocracy for what he is building. He has written that homosexuality should be re-criminalized, and that women’s suffrage was a mistake. Asked by a reporter whether the Christian nation he envisions would arrive without violence, he answered: well, that depends on the bad guys. That is not a man shouting into the void. That is the pastor of the man who runs the largest military on earth.

You might expect the Pope to be the hero of this story, and the press has badly wanted him to be. Pope Leo has, on a handful of visible occasions, pushed back — he has quoted Isaiah at the American government, said plainly that God rejects the prayers of those who wage war. Those were good moments. But they are not the antidote to what I am describing.

Then, on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo issued an encyclical. An encyclical is the most authoritative form of papal teaching — an open letter meant to direct the conscience of the entire Church. This one ran to forty-two thousand words. Its subject was artificial intelligence.

It was a serious document. It warned that the technology threatens human dignity and human work. It called for regulation of the companies building it, for protection of workers whose jobs are at risk, for safeguards to keep humans, not machines, responsible for decisions about weapons. It urged education that would teach the young to think critically about the technology. And it included a personal apology for the papacy’s centuries-long failure to condemn slavery.

Now think for a moment about that call for critical thinking. It is the right instruction. It is also an extraordinary one to come from an institution whose own authority is built on the opposite principle. The Catholic Church teaches its foundational claims — scripture as the Word of God, dogma as binding revelation, Canon Law as carrying divine authority — as beyond the reach of critical inquiry. Critical thinking, in this Church, is to be aimed outward, at the secular subject of the moment. It is never to be aimed inward, at the institution doing the asking.

And that framework is precisely what produced every prior decision the Church has made against a category of human beings — the African slave trade, the dispossession of the Indigenous, the women burned in the witch trials, the women still kept from the altar today, the LGBTQ people whose relationships the same Church still calls “intrinsically disordered.” None of those decisions came from evidence. If the institution had been willing, even now, to apply critical thinking honestly to its own foundations, Pope Leo would not still be apologizing for the residential schools in Canada. But that is precisely the place the institution has never been willing to apply it.

And the pattern is not historical. It is operating now, and it has a name. In April 2024, the Vatican issued a formal Declaration called Dignitas Infinita. Pope Francis approved it. Pope Leo has not retracted it. It names a list of practices it categorizes as grave violations of human dignity: war, poverty, human trafficking, sexual abuse, violence against women, abortion, surrogacy, euthanasia. Onto that list, the document places gender theory and sex change. The case it builds against transgender lives rests on Genesis read as natural-law charter, the doctrine of the complementarity of the sexes, and the authority of the magisterium to make that reading binding. The medical evidence on the lives of transgender people plays no operative role. Dignitas Infinita states, in writing, in the formal teaching voice of the Holy See, that the lives transgender people are leading are, in themselves, a violation of human dignity.

Perhaps someday Pope Leo or his successor will write another encyclical that includes an apology to transgender people. I am not willing to sacrifice another generation of trans lives — including my own son’s — hoping for that to happen. Unless the Church is held accountable and begins applying critical thinking inward, the cycle of abuse and oppression, of weaponized manufactured certainty, will continue. And I have to ask: are we not complicit in that cycle, if we continue to support, financially or otherwise, the institutions responsible?

I want to be clear about why this is the closing argument of a series about my son. It is because it is the same mechanism. The certainty that the state knows better than a transgender teenager what to do with his own body, against the evidence of his actual life, is the same certainty that, in 2026, has women hemorrhaging in hospital parking lots while doctors call lawyers.

In the first year after Texas effectively banned abortion, maternal deaths in that state rose by fifty-six percent. Fifty-six percent. That is not an opinion. It is the measured, documented cost of a policy enacted on grounds its own defenders do not claim are evidence-based. It is the same disease, run by the same coalitions. Watching those two threads converge over the last eighteen months did not change the argument of this series. It only confirmed it.

None of that is the whole picture. There is resistance, and it is real. A bishop who looked the President in the eye at the National Cathedral and asked him, simply, to have mercy. A Texas minister, running for the Senate, who calls Christian nationalism what it is — a heresy. Judges, at the district level, still striking these laws down. The institutions the founders built have been tested hard. They have not all broken. What they need now is us.

So let me end this series where the book ends. With a bridge.

There is a bridge near my home. It carries a railroad over a road that leads out of Dexter, Michigan — the town where my son, and now my grandkids, go to school. It is a stone arch. A skew arch, specifically — the kind an engineer has to design when the rail line crosses the road at an angle instead of straight on, which is a far harder problem than it sounds. It was built around 1890. It has stood for more than a hundred and thirty years. And it was designed by a young Black man named Frederick Pelham.

Pelham was the first African-American to earn a civil engineering degree from the University of Michigan — the same college of engineering that, a century later, trained me. He was born in 1864, the year the Civil War ended, the son of free Black parents who had fled Virginia because Virginia had made it a crime to teach a Black child to read. His father was a stonemason, and Frederick learned the craft at his side before being accepted to the University of Michigan, where he graduated at the top of his class. 

In a brief career — pneumonia killed Frederick at thirty — he designed roughly twenty bridges for the Michigan Central Railroad. His designs were known for their elegant functionality and strength. Most of them are still standing. 

There is an old commemorative plaque near the bridge. It carries the names of the railroad officials connected to the project. Pelham’s name is not on it. The historians who have studied the bridge believe his name was left off because he was Black — because the manufactured certainty of that era held that a Black man could not really be an engineer.

Pelham was likely one of only a dozen or fewer Black students attending university across the entire state. He grew up in a time marked by a furious backlash against Black lives following the Reconstruction Era. The backlash and manufactured certainty it spawned would end up haunting Black communities for more than a century afterward.

Yet the evidence against that manufactured certainty is hiding in plain sight: it is the bridge itself, one structure of stone. 

A bridge does not care what you believe. It carries the load, or it does not.

The certainty that tried to erase Frederick Pelham was strong enough to keep his name off a plaque. It was not strong enough to bring down his bridge. For more than a hundred and thirty years that arch has carried the weight of every train that crossed it — doing its job, unheralded, exactly like the man who designed it. The evidence outlasts the erasure. It always has. It always will.

My son studied that bridge in the fourth grade. His class — a room of nine- and ten-year-olds at a public elementary school in Dexter — explored not only the science and engineering behind bridge designs, but how those designs impacted their own community. His teachers empowered them to ask questions and to follow where the evidence led. And in the process, the Pelham bridge would end up taking them on a journey no one quite anticipated.

In the course of their exploration, the students learned about the uniqueness of Pelham’s skew arch design, which then led them to ask why his name did not even appear on the plaque honoring other railroad officials. They concluded that the absence of his name was a wrong that needed to be righted, and with the guidance of their teachers, set out to do just that.

The students researched alternatives and came up with a solution in the form of an interpretive sign. They quickly discovered it would need approvals from the city and the county, and they got them. They raised the money. And in May of 2018, the sign went up — Frederick Pelham’s name, at last, at the bridge he designed.

Let that sink in for a moment. A class of fourth graders looked at a hundred-and-thirty-year-old act of erasure, checked it against the evidence, and decided the evidence required them to act. That is the entire argument of this series — performed by children.

I look at my son today. He has known who he is since before he could write his own name. And no amount of manufactured certainty, no amount of calculated erasure — not the President’s, not the Vice President’s, not the Secretary of War’s, not the Vatican’s — can change that.

If a child can hold that conviction in the face of everything arrayed against him — if a room of nine- and ten-year-olds can right a century-old wrong armed with nothing more than curiosity and the willingness to follow the evidence — then I have to ask what is holding the rest of us back. What are we waiting for?

Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid. And I’m done waiting.

Are you?