Cosplaying Courage

Reckoning with the Truth of Our Historical Alignment

This essay began as a question I could not shake: ‘Where do we actually belong in the stories we tell about ourselves?’

It is an attempt to look honestly at how we inherit memory, how we misremember our past, and how easily we place ourselves among the heroes rather than reckoning with who our words, instincts, and alignments most resemble.

Nothing here is written from a place of certainty or moral distance. It is written out of concern for the stories we are telling ourselves now, and the stories that will one day be told about us.

There is a tendency many of us share, especially those shaped by Scripture or by the stories of our people. When history is read, the question is rarely where we would have stood. The assumption is already settled. The imagination casts itself as prophetic rather than as the people who strayed and required prophets to call them back. As resisters, not collaborators or enablers. As the brave few who would have spoken up when others stayed silent.

History, however, is rarely judged by what people imagined themselves to be. It is judged by who benefited from their choices, who was cast as the threat, and who paid the price.

The question is not who we would like to identify with in the story. The question is where our words, positions, and actions actually place us.

Every generation inserts itself into the stories that formed it. Bible readers do this with Scripture. Americans do this with the Founders, the Civil War, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement. Almost never do we read ourselves as the people clinging to power, even when power is exactly what is being protected.

An encounter a few years ago made this painfully clear.

One of the teachers from the school my kids attended, Trinity Classical Academy, struck up a conversation. A nice enough young man. Very earnest. Thoughtful in the way people often are when they believe they are taking a stand against cultural collapse. Trinity is part of the Classical Christian Education movement. For a long time, that label sounded appealing as I took the branding at face value. It took years to understand what it actually represented.

What emerged was not simply an educational philosophy, but a socio-political project. A movement organized around resistance to perceived threats to American Christian culture. Secularism. Climate alarmism. The so-called queer agenda. Anti-racist radicalism. These were not peripheral concerns. They were the animating ones.

Where it was thought the kids were being signed up to learn through the grammar, rhetoric, and logic trivium, a framework for education, the school itself was primarily concerned with these cultural and political obsessions.

In the course of the conversation, this teacher identified himself, and by implication his community, with figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church.

That self placement was jarring.

Bonhoeffer was not defined by grievance or by the fear of being ‘replaced.’ He was not driven by the desire to cling to his position, his authority, or his cultural standing. He was not animated by slogans of embattlement. The Confessing Church emerged not because Christians were under threat, but because the institutional church had largely accommodated an authoritarian political project and baptized it with religious legitimacy.

Bonhoeffer understood that the central moral question was not how to protect those who already held social power or reassure them of their place in the cultural hierarchy. The question was whether a sense of threatened status was being used to justify the marginalization and dehumanization of others who were facing real and escalating harm.

That distinction matters. Jews in 1930s Germany did not merely feel threatened. They were threatened. Roma, homosexuals, the disabled, and others were being targeted by the state for removal, imprisonment, and death. Bonhoeffer’s moral indictment was aimed elsewhere. It was aimed at those whose social standing remained largely intact, yet who interpreted the loss of cultural dominance as persecution and allowed that interpretation to justify atrocities.

That is what made the young faculty member’s identification so dissonant. Because whenever fissures have opened up that echo or rhyme with that moment in history, this same cultural ecosystem has reliably chosen institutional protection over truth telling.

There is language for what is happening here. Maurice Halbwachs, the sociologist who developed the idea of collective memory, argued that groups remember the past in ways that allow them to recognize themselves across time. Memory is not simply recall. It is the way a people takes inventory of itself across time. It is how a group lays claim to who it believes itself to be in the larger story, positioning itself as righteous, admirable, even heroic, long after its words, actions, and alignments have told a far more complicated story.

The danger is not that a group forgets its past, but that it remembers selectively. Resemblances are emphasized. Ruptures are smoothed over. Contradictions are ignored. The story is arranged so that the group can say, we have always stood for this, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

This is how movements end up claiming moral ancestors they do not resemble. It would be as absurd as fascists imagining themselves the inheritors of Wilberforce. And yet the same inversion happens whenever power hijacks fragments of Scripture and repurposes them as moral cover, insulating itself from accountability.

Recent history within American evangelicalism offers a painful illustration. When Russell Moore called for accountability within the Southern Baptist Convention as evidence mounted of widespread sexual abuse, the energy of the institution turned not toward reckoning, but toward expulsion. Moore was treated as the problem. When voices like Dr. Moore, Pete Wehner, and David French raised concerns about character, power, and the danger of overtly aligning Christian witness with Donald Trump, those voices were marginalized and removed rather than heeded.

Again and again, the instinct was the same. Close ranks. Preserve influence. Silence inconvenient conscience. The depth of this instinct was laid bare in the 2022 Guidepost Solutions report, which revealed that the institution had maintained a list of over 700 accused abusers for years while prioritizing liability over protection of the vulnerable.

That is why the appropriation of Bonhoeffer rings hollow. Not because admiration is wrong, but because admiration without alignment is self deception. Bonhoeffer did not place himself on the righteous side of history. History placed him there because of what he was willing to risk, who he refused to dehumanize, and which costs he accepted rather than pass on to others.

History does not care which heroes we identify with.

What is being witnessed now looks less like moral courage and more like grown men cosplaying their own Rambo fantasies or auditioning for a bad Van Dam movie. Chests out like overgrown peacocks. Grievance on full display. Reality warped into a cheap action script where force is mistaken for virtue and posturing passes for courage. This is not an argument about individual motives. It is an indictment of a culture that rewards spectacle over restraint and confuses domination with moral courage.

One hopes history will be able to chuckle at such foolishness. More likely, the judgment will be far less charitable.

Because history does not evaluate self descriptions. It evaluates alignment. It looks at what was normalized, what was excused, and what harm was justified while people insisted they were on the right side of the story.

That is why the question cannot be who we see ourselves as. The question is where our alignment places us once the costumes come off.

When Christians hear about figures such as the Sadducees, the tendency is to identify with Jesus and the disciples. But does that reckon with who we are as a people? With who the American church has been in recent history? After all, the Sadducees, as depicted in the gospel accounts, were protecting stability, status, and religious authority, often at the expense of integrity.

The Sadducees were not the enemies of the faith; they were the managers of its survival. They chose the stability of the institution over the disruption of the Truth. This is a choice that looks remarkably similar to the ‘common sense’ pragmatism of the modern American church.

When the slaveholding South is considered, it is natural to want to distance ourselves from America’s original sin. But for many, it was a matter of what they called ‘our way of life.’ A way of life defended more fiercely than human dignity. They did not see themselves as villains; they saw themselves as stewards of an inheritance. This is the great deception of the ‘way of life’ defense: it allows us to baptize our comfort as a conviction.

In more recent history, segregationists went to violent means for decades to preserve what they called self determination.

Every one of these moments featured people convinced they were guarding against attacks on their way of life and preserving something sacred.

Alignment is not abstract. It shows up in what a society tolerates being done in its name. It shows up in which rights are treated as foundational and which become conditional. It shows up most clearly when power decides who counts as fully protected and who does not.

Bonhoeffer’s concern was not whether Christians could quote the right verses, but whether injustice would be recognized when it was happening. The Confessing Church did not emerge because of abstract doctrine. It emerged because state power was being normalized, excused, and baptized by hijacking selectively extracted bits of Scripture and co-opting religious symbols, while vulnerable people paid the cost.

And the same selective memory that distorts our theology does not stop at the church door. It carries over into our laws, our institutions, and our courts.

This is why the question of rights matters. Rights are where stories stop being symbolic and start being real.

Consider the Second Amendment. Alex Pretti was a lawful gun owner. Video and witness accounts contradicted early claims that he brandished a firearm. Even an internal federal review did not confirm that allegation. Yet senior officials publicly suggested he should not have been carrying at all.

Compare that posture with the folk hero treatment given to Kyle Rittenhouse in parts of the same political ecosystem. Standing ovations. Celebrity status. The language of courage and defenders.

So which is it? Is the right to bear arms a principle, or a permission slip issued only for the right tribe?

The erosion of principle is rarely confined to a single amendment. When rights become tribal permissions for the armed, they inevitably become discretionary for the accused. The same selective blindness that validates a 'hero' with a rifle is used to excuse a state agent without a warrant.

The same pattern appears when due process and equal protection are considered. The Fourth Amendment is not complicated. Houses. Papers. Effects. No unreasonable searches or seizures. Warrants require probable cause and specificity. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments are no more complex. Due process is not discretionary. Equal protection is not selective.

And yet what has been put in front of the public is difficult to ignore. A United States citizen in Minnesota was detained at gunpoint without a warrant and led from his home in subfreezing weather. A five year old boy was taken by federal agents and described by witnesses as being used as bait. A family was forced from their vehicle after tear gas was deployed directly into it while children were inside.

These are not fringe rumors. These are reported events, many accompanied by photographic and video evidence. And they raise the same constitutional question.

If a movement claims to be constitutionally conservative, one test is whether those commitments apply when the person in question is inconvenient, unfamiliar, foreign sounding, or politically disfavored.

Rights that apply only to a favored tribe are not rights. They are privileges. And privileges are exactly what constitutional government was designed to restrain.

There is one way to test all of this that feels uncomfortably simple. Imagine the story being told forward.

Imagine children explaining to their children what their parents were doing during this moment. Not what was posted. Not what was claimed to be believed. But where people stood when it mattered.

That thought is not abstract.

We often talk about rights as if they are lines on a page. In reality, they are the only things standing between a person and a mob. And whatever we choose to call our politics, the consequences of our alignment are already being felt.

I learned this not from a textbook, but in Alabama.

My wife Lisa is from Oxford, Alabama, just outside Anniston. In that part of the country, the past is not distant. Stories about the bus bombing in the early 1960s are still told aloud. In one kitchen where I was sitting, a neighbor spoke loudly about his own father being one of the men who bombed the bus filled with civil rights volunteers.

His volume was impossible to miss. And it was difficult to tell whether it came from shame trying to outrun itself, or something closer to pride. Either way, the moment landed with force. Because that story was not being told as ancient history. It was being told as inheritance.

That is how this works.

Time does not erase alignment. It clarifies it.

Every generation places itself somewhere in the story. The danger is not moral failure alone, but misidentification. History does not ask who we admired. It asks who we resembled.

Bonhoeffer is not relevant because of Nazism. He is relevant because he refused to spiritualize away concrete harm done by the state, especially to people deemed other.

The uncomfortable possibility is not that history will misunderstand us. It is that we have misunderstood ourselves. That grievance has been mistaken for resistance. That power has been mistaken for principle. That tribal loyalty has been mistaken for faithfulness.

And when the story is told forward, it will be clear that many who claimed Bonhoeffer were not resisting power at all. They were blessing it.

If there is any way through the mess we are in, it begins with stopping our habit of placing ourselves in the wrong part of the story and reckoning honestly with who we most resemble.