📧 to George Kalantzis

George,

When you came on my show, you said that civilians, like you, “should go into a period of public lament as a church asking for forgiveness from” military communities, that civilians are “complicit” in sending people to unjust wars. Those words matter. They name a truth that few in the church are willing to confront: the betrayal military families have endured at the hands of both state and church.

And yet, after speaking those words, you chose to hide that conversation. You did not share the interview. You did not point your audience to God Is a Grunt, the book we had just discussed. Instead, you doubled down on toxic pacifist writers whose work perpetuates the very dismissal you yourself condemned. If pastoral care means anything in our tradition, then you owe more to my community than public erasure and retreat into safe abstractions.

That is why I broke off our Facebook connection. This is not a trivial disagreement.The theology you have publicly performed is a lethal poison to my community,one from which I am responsible for protecting my friends and family. Italso violates the logic of your own public argument on First Formation. 

If I deserve a public lament, then so do veterans like Pete Hegseth. His toxic public theology appeals to military families because we know the same truth you named: civilians have broken trust with us. You confessed that betrayal, then retreated into privilege. Whose spent blood do you think secured your "freedom" to speak your mind in public, your πολιτείαν? Or do you think you were born to consume the fruit of our labor while watching us starve?

If you think I am any different than Hegseth, then your faith is no better than this, xenophobia wrapped in cherry-picked scriptures. Either you believe in a God who recognizes the cry of the oppressed, the humiliated, and the suicidal, or you worship a false god of your own making. Your actions disclose a heart no softer than his, and I must protect my community from the kind of person you both seem to represent—not professionals engaging in a craft, but ordinary ὑποκριταί looking out for themselves and the social structures they can control.

If Matthew 18 is determinative for both your public and private encounters, then I come to you now directly, before I say anything publicly. But if the gospel is not y/our guiding light, then a private god is at the helm, one I will not worship with you. I am giving you the opportunity to respond here, privately, before I make any public statement. But understand: this is not simply about me. It is about your public witness and the ἐκκλησίαν it assumes, whether your words to me were truthful or merely a performance, a δρᾶμα. It is about whether your god is one you’ve fashioned with power lent by other creatures, or whether you worship the only truly public God, who empowered humanity without relying on corrupting self-interest. 

In the power and love of Christ,

Logan M. Isaac, HoSM