Letters—May 2026

We welcome letters to the­ editor. Letters appear two issues after the article to which they are responding. Letters under three hundred words are preferred, and they may be edited for length and clarity.

Letters responding to ­articles published in this issue should be received by June 3 for publication in the August/September issue. Send them to submissions@firstthings.com.

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Toward Virtue

Gratitude to Samuel D. James for his nuanced retrospective on purity culture, and especially for his closing admonition for the Church to cultivate a robust marriage culture (“A New Purity Culture,” March 2026).

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, my wife and I were volunteer purity culture activists. As small-town family physicians, we developed a “Love, Marriage, and Sexuality” curriculum that we presented to public school health classes and church youth groups for nearly two decades. Our efforts, like those of the entire movement, were sincere and heartfelt. Our goal was to protect children we loved from harm and to give the next generation the best chance to enter adulthood ­f­lourishing: spiritually, emotionally, physically, and maritally. We worked to emphasize grace, hope, and promise over guilt and shame. But time marches on, and the same approach today would be dated, possibly incomprehensible to the TikTok generation, and likely not permitted in any public school.

The practice of medicine daily validates how a biblical sexual ethic remains an incalculable blessing, while pornography and promis­cuity are fraught with tragedy, pain, and impoverishment. We need a purity culture now as badly as we did in 1990, and grounding the purity call in a message to reclaim the marriage culture is the correct and scripturally faithful approach. But we have serious preliminary work to do.

A captivating marriage vision cannot be cast to youth lacking authentic relationships with adults modeling healthy marriages. The youth pastor movement of the 1970s restructured church life for the young to mirror a secular youth culture, making mentorship contact now near impossible in most churches of any size. Age sorting is initiated at the front door, and it is quite possible for teenagers who are faithful to weekly youth group gatherings to graduate from high school as strangers to all non-parental adults beyond the youth pastor. Parents teaching weekly Bible classes, Sunday afternoon softball games, and shared outdoor meals commingling every age stratum in the congregation may be a nostalgic thing of bygone times, but nothing has taken its place.

If the local church is indeed the best hope for the world, we must recognize that organic mentorship for healthy, youthful marriages—or for any facet of mature discipleship—will remain elusive until we call for an end to the age quarantines and reassemble the full body of Christ.

Bruce D. Woodall
athens, texas

Samuel D. James makes a thoughtful case for the revitalization of purity culture, and I find his critiques insightful. At the same time, I believe that, in a few key places, his prescription falls short of what is truly necessary to really make something like “purity ­culture” a successful and attractive part of public life, not just for Christians but for all who encounter the concept.

He writes that a new purity culture must captivate, not condemn, and make chastity and faithfulness feel good, true, and beautiful. He is on the right track here, but I think his argument misses an even larger point. In order to present Christianity as the most attractive and obvious option for a philosophy of life, we need to present our pursuit of the virtue of chastity as moving toward something—love/charity, the root of all virtue—as opposed to running away from something: fear, the death of all virtue. Love is always more attractive than fear, and fear cannot coexist with a total reliance on God’s love and grace, save that most holy fear which we reserve for God alone.

Rather than hyperfocusing on specific virtues by name as a way of attacking particular sins piecemeal, virtues should be presented as habits that we ought to desire to build in ourselves in order to make resisting temptation more natural. A virtuous life is not merely a life of purity—it is a life of faith, hope, charity, temperance, justice, prudence, fortitude, and more. Virtue is an imperative concept that we must elevate and present as something absolutely integral to the universal human call to the imitation of Christ.

Thomas Schumann
merion village, ohio

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Avoidable Tragedy

Liel Leibovitz’s essay concerning the shooting of Alex Pretti reflects moral vacuity (“Madness in Minneapolis,” March 2026). He is correct that there was madness in much of the response. But contrary to what he wrote, Pretti was not “trying to subvert” anyone’s arrest. ICE’s target, Jose Huerta-Chuma, had evaded capture before Pretti started filming ICE agents. More importantly, Leibovitz has to be morally obtuse not even to note the madness, the insanity, of five or more federal law enforcement officers surrounding an unarmed person lying face down on the ground and two of those officers proceeding to kill that person by shooting ten or more bullets into his back. Leibovitz is correct that describing the lawful attempt to capture and deport a criminal as “a crime comparable to those of the Gestapo” is “lunacy.” But shooting ten bullets into the back of a man lying face down on the ground is nonetheless a crime displaying moral depravity. And Leibovitz’s failure to recognize this is worse than insanity.

Jeffrey I. Zuckerman
silver spring, maryland

I was disappointed with Liel Leibovitz’s article about recent events in Minneapolis. Placing several thousand masked agents in a midsize city was bound to cause a reaction. It was a poor decision. The operation was poorly planned and led. And the deaths of Good and Pretti were tragedies. So was the seizure of five-year-old Liam Ramos on his way home from school. The federal judge who ordered his release issued a fiery opinion which criticized the federal government for pursuing daily deportation quotas “even if it requires traumatizing children.”

Edward Kreuser
carlisle, pennsylvania

Having rationalized the homicide of Alex Pretti, will First Things editors now be among the Trump supporters who will back him when he stands in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoots somebody? Many of us have opposed the MAGA Right precisely for tendencies that recent First Things articles locate only on the left: It has assaulted the ­covenant—the Constitution—that holds Americans together (Leibovitz), and it has used propaganda and accommodated vice (R. R. Reno, “The Case for Christian Nationalism,” March 2026). As a resident of the Twin Cities, I see firsthand the brutality, incompetence, and insouciant disregard of the Constitution that these two articles passed over. As a reader of First Things from its inception, I couldn’t be more ­disappointed.

Daniel E. Ritchie
bethel university
st. paul, minnesota

Liel Leibovitz replies:

As an army veteran, I am always amused when civilians, snug at home, comment disparagingly on the split-second decisions made in the line of duty by the men and women we trust to put themselves in harm’s way in order to keep us all safe. As a student of morality, I am terrified by anyone arguing that laws should be abandoned if their application happens to cause some discomfort. And as a writer, I am easily bored by reductio ad absurdum arguments.

I will therefore let Jeffrey ­Zuckerman have his opinionated analysis of what armed officers, facing a coordinated mob of agitators paid for and organized by powerful NGOs, should have done when surrounded and disrupted. I will forgive Edward Kreuser his apparent assertion that traumatizing a single child isn’t worth the effort to remove millions of ­un­documented migrants, including dangerous criminals, and uphold our sovereign borders. And I will get out of Daniel Ritchie’s way as he continues to slide down the slippery slope he’s erected in his own mind, the one that leads from the unfortunate shooting of a likely armed protester hampering a law enforcement operation to the president of the United States massacring people in midtown Manhattan. To each his own.

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Closer to Home

Thanks to Matthew B. Crawford for a thought-provoking article distinguishing between the Christian aspirational and personal love of individual people, even—­especially!—our neighbors, and the establishment of distinct nations with borders that cannot be crossed without consequence (“Love in the Time of Mass Migration,” March 2026). 

Unfortunately, in his oblique references to what was happening in Minnesota, he completely missed what would have been a shining example of his point. Maybe he assumed that the tens of thousands of ordinary Minnesotans who took to the streets to observe and record the deportation of individuals (who were, in fact, their neighbors) were uniformly against national borders. In fact, during the “surge,” supposed enforcers of the law repeatedly broke it in violent and vicious ways. Every person in our country has human rights, and due process is one such right that inspired many of our immigrants to undergo the lengthy journey of being naturalized here. What moved my brother-­in-law to take action when he heard about the arrest of his neighbor’s son—an immigrant who served time for a criminal offense more than thirty years ago and then went on to get a degree, marry, and father a son who is now in the Air Force? Last we heard, the man was sitting in a cell in Texas, waiting to be “returned” to Laos, where he has neither family nor citizenship. I dare to think that if many critics of the Minnesota protests experienced this kind of draconian suffering so close to home, they, too, would be moved to “seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God” (Mic. 6:8) in a more direct and sacrificial way, while also working toward coherent and functional immigration policies.

Katya Gordon
two harbors, minnesota

Matthew B. Crawford criticizes the tendency to treat moral questions in the abstract. His observation that the immigrant can become an object of costless empathy, “one that happens to bathe me in the flattering light of empathy and hospitality while asking little of me,” is especially well put. Moral imagination formed at a distance is rarely demanding. Where ­Crawford’s analysis seems incomplete, however, is in his account of Christian political thought. Christianity does not ignore the political realm so much as it recognizes another. For the Christian, the Kingdom of God is a real claim of allegiance. This means that Christians inevitably live in tension with the geopolitical world that they inhabit. Our primary loyalty lies elsewhere.

Because of this, Jesus’s command to love our neighbor and our enemy cannot be confined to purely individual relationships. The ancient world of the Gospels did not think in modern, individualized terms, but in communal ones. When Jesus speaks of loving enemies, turning the cheek, and going the extra mile, it is difficult to imagine that his listeners were not also thinking about Romans and their collaborators. This perspective runs through the Christian tradition, beginning with the New Testament’s description of the Church as a “holy nation.” The Church is both universal and particular. It is the new nation of God scattered among the nations. As such, Christians do not simply affirm the structures of their host nation, including its borders and laws, but also speak prophetically to them.

To understand Jesus’s teaching, we must begin not with Homer, Socrates, or Polemarchus, but with the biblical prophets, who consistently held nations accountable for how they treated the vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. The Church inherits this task. Christians must therefore begin with the concrete and the particular, as Crawford urges. Yet the universal claims of Christ ensure that such concreteness cannot remain confined to private life.

Matthew Hansen
austin, texas

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Flailing Irish

Thank you not only to Christian Smith for writing but also to First Things for publishing “Why I’m Done with Notre Dame” (March 2026). I am done with Notre Dame as well, but I am not a tenured faculty member—rather I am the mother of two graduates who matriculated in the early nineties. I write from the perspective of a family that paid full freight for room, board, and tuition—a hefty sum even then—and also that of a veteran volunteer who gave thousands of hours to the university. Like Smith, I also believed the university was serious about its Catholic mission. In fact, there is almost nothing with which I disagree in Smith’s article. I have my own lengthy list of anecdotes from the thirty years in which I was either a parent, a volunteer, or an attendee at innumerable lectures and presentations. There is only one small example of Smith’s disappointment that I would like to note here, and that is the Notre Dame bookstore.

When I first visited the campus in 1996, I was so excited to go to the bookstore—a Catholic bookstore! Yet when I went to the magazine rack I found Mademoiselle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan—but not Commonweal, ­America, or . . . FirstThings. Yes, I spoke up about this and many other issues of importance. I hope I was always polite. Nevertheless, I was generally patronized by the powers that be. “There, there now.” After a time, as Smith writes, one simply leaves, moves on.

Losing Christian Smith is a huge and unnecessary loss. It saddens me. Losing Catholic parents who send their precious sons and daughters to be intellectually formed in the Catholic faith is another loss. It also saddens me. Years later, I am aware that if one knows the ropes, one can navigate the system and steer one’s children toward excellent professors, Catholic and otherwise. However, I was naive, unconnected, and uninitiated. I trusted the high-flown mission statements. I am a realist now. If you are an insider or very assiduous, and/or lucky, you can find the Catholic college within Notre Dame.

Sidney Andrée Blanchet
south bend, indiana

Competing Kingdoms

R. R. Reno’s “The Case for Christian Nationalism” depends on a useful ambiguity (March 2026). At some moments, “Christian nationalism” seems to mean little more than Christian moral renewal in public life: stronger civic culture, greater social confidence, and resistance to progressive deracination. At other moments, however, the phrase draws its force from the harder and more controversial meaning of nationalism itself. As one edition of the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes it, nationalism is advocacy of one’s own nation’s interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of other nations. That is the sense that makes the term morally and politically charged.

Yet Reno never squarely defends that harder claim. Instead, he seems to borrow its energy while advancing something considerably milder. If his real argument is that Christianity supplies a moral inheritance necessary for civic health, that is a serious and familiar claim. But it is not the same thing as nationalism. If, on the other hand, he means to defend a thicker national solidarity and a more pointed national partiality, then he owes readers a more direct argument than the essay provides.

The difficulty is that the weaker claim is easier to defend but too thin to do the work Reno wants, while the stronger claim can do that work only by raising the very worries his essay leaves unaddressed. Christians should not be asked to accept a provocative label based on a gentler argument than the label itself implies.

Ryan Quandt
buda, texas

The mere mention of Christian nationalism in the public square inevitably brings charges of “­theocracy” and “establishment of religion.” After reading R. R. Reno’s essay, I was reassured that he explicitly rejects theocracy and confessional establishment. I should have known. His project is not the city of God but the city of man under Christian moral influence. How is this to be achieved in a society that is religiously plural and increasingly secular?

Reno’s solution is prudential and cultural, not juridical. He sees the rise of nationalism as a societal attempt to restore the solidarity and cohesion the old liberal order once sustained. To avoid nationalism’s well-known dangers, he envisions a renewal of national solidarity shaped by Christian moral realism—the doctrine of original sin, the limits of politics, and the reminder that political order is never salvific—working through families, churches, and civic life. Christianity, in this account, disciplines nationalism rather than divinizes it. It provides restraint from above and formation from below, encouraging a decent society rather than a sacral state. If Christianity is to discipline nationalism rather than sanctify it, we must remember that earthly peace, however precious, is always provisional. Political renewal may be necessary, but it must never be mistaken for redemption.

David Thomas
dayton, ohio

The Bible begins with the story of the creation, which is then referenced and reiterated throughout to ram home a fundamental theological proposition: that though the world is fallen, it remains the property of God, and he retains all the rights of ownership so that there is no aspect of cultural, social, or philosophical development that can break away a portion of this earth so that it is no longer subject to the law of God. The doctrine of final judgment emphasizes this; we (“all nations,” Matt. 25:31) will be judged at the end based not on our conformance to the mores of the cultures within which we live, but by our conformance to the law of God.

In a fallen world, of course, this unavoidably produces some sort of a cleavage between those who do choose to subject themselves to the law of God and those who do not; our natural desire to avoid such cleavage does not, however, grant us the liberty to dispense with any of the principles of the law of God or to make them subservient to any other system of ethics, since the abandonment of the law of God is both what destroyed the beauty of the primeval world and created the varied crises of ours. It is, then, at least a rather inappropriate phrasing when, in Reno’s essay, we read, “The main problem facing America is not a lack of faith in Jesus Christ.” Nihilism is a problem, of course, but given God’s rights to this world, are wrong faiths really any sort of solution to the problem at all? Would the problems of our society actually be improved if it were, say, dominated by committed Buddhists or Hindus instead of by nihilists?

Of course that kind of compromise is necessary in the Greek polis or its Roman counterpart, since there the political good is considered the ultimate good, and religious practice is only a means to that end. But in the New Testament the health of the polis is barely a matter of concern, and regardless of how one interprets the Sermon on the Mount, its reinterpretation and reformulation of God’s law in terms that, in contrast to the Tanakh’s formulation, do not reference the polis at all, represent something of a retreat from the public square. As much as we believe that we can prioritize everything at once, the truth is that we can’t; essentially all historical formulations of Christianity have either prioritized the polis (and hence been willing to compromise the exclusiveness of Christian commitment to gain political power) or prioritized God’s law in the life of the individual (and hence been willing to compromise their participation and power in the polis). The New Testament rests on the latter side of this spectrum, and I do not think it is proper for us who claim to model our lives by it to do otherwise.

Jonathan Tiffany
gleason, wisconsin