The Fire Is Here: White Men, Power, and the Illusion of Accountability
This morning, I saw a picture of one of the leaders I had in Kansas City. In my TikTok videos, I once said he was a great leader of mine. But something about seeing him smiling, bragging about the Gulf of America—while Gaza is burning, and mothers hold decapated babies, while the world is unraveling and poor people are in danger of losing healthcare —sent a shiver down my spine.
Because I now question wether he’s a safe leader. Not because he was resting and enjoying time with friends but because he thought it would either be funny or believed it was right to call it the Gulf of America. And that means he can’t tell the truth about reality.
A response from another person in the picture noted-this is “just the way it is” and “I have to call it that”. That shiver. That response and the picture that goes with it unsettled me this morning and it turned into this Substack post.
The Distinction Between Boundaries and Cancel Culture
Before I go further, I want to make something clear: not being a safe leader does not mean being a bad human.
I don’t think he deserves to be canceled. I’ve known him. He seems like a great dad, a great husband, and someone who has built strong relationships. I’ve seen his kindness, his care, his ability to show up for the people in his life.
But being a good person in your relationships is not the same as being a safe leader in the world any more than adopting a black child is the same as being in a community with black people.
The same distinction can be made between cancel culture and boundaries. I’m not saying he should be discarded. I am saying he cannot and should not be trusted to lead people through this moment because leadership requires being able to tell the truth about reality.
The reality is it doesn’t matter what justification you make for the audacity, the presence of it proves the point. Leaven cannot lead us—not this time.
Luke 6:39 If the blind lead the blind we will not both fall into a pit?
And leadership that is leavened is dangerous.
It elected this three times and because it cannot bear to look at itself it drags the country and the witness of Christianity with it. It will even scapegoat nationalism, anything not to deal with the reflection of the deranged logic of supremacy.
What is happening in America is not just political chaos—it is the testing and uprooting of caste and supremacy itself. Because those who don’t unleaven have nothing else to root down in besides mammon they cling to it—not always in overtly hateful ways, but in the subtle, insidious ways that make it so dangerous.
Clinging to whiteness as an identity is what is destroying the country. White supremacy is not safe for anyone. It is a fallacy. It distorts reality. It convinces people that power, control, and dominance in the hands of one type of person are the natural and divine order of things. It convinces people that god would ever will a thing so heinous as Project 2025 or a government as ruthless and uncivilized as this place we called the bastion of democracy.
Whiteness turns God into a weapon that causes harm.
And I have real problems with that.
The Privilege of Avoidance
White men in America are given the privilege of avoidance—the ability to move through the world without ever being forced to confront themselves. In the church, in institutions, in politics, they sit at the top of the hierarchy. And that means they are rarely held accountable in any way that actually costs them.
They can lead entire movements, build massive platforms, shape the minds of thousands—all while never doing the inner work that every other marginalized group is required to do just to survive.
Being a “successful or notable” evangelical minister, progressive influence, politician or even commander in chief requires:
No work on anger management
No work on internal narratives
No work on assumption and bias
No work on race, caste, or homophobia
No work on empathy
No work on co-regulation
No work on attachment
And yet, they still rise to power.
Because the system is rigged to reward them whether they’ve done the work or not.
This is how we keep ending up here.
This is how we keep getting leaders who look like they’ve changed—because when they finally are forced to deal with themselves, if they have enough power, they can manufacture the appearance of transformation without ever actually transforming.
They release a statement.
They take a short-lived sabbatical.
They pivot into new language.
They rebrand their failure.
They dictate the terms of their reckoning.
And because white men still hold the most power in our society, they rarely face real consequences. Even when exposed, they are still given the benefit of the doubt, the grace to be “figuring it out,” and another one takes their place. It doesn’t have to be that way.
White men can and must do real inner work—not just a performance of growth, not just a curated apology tour, not just a temporary act of self-reflection that positions them as both the problem and the solution.
Real work means surrendering power.
Real work listening without controlling the conversation.
Real work means letting go of the illusion that they are uniquely suited to lead every movement, every room, every transformation.
My traveling and speaking puts me in front of a lot of white people.
And I love them.
None of us had a choice about the skin we are in.
We have a choice about what it means.
That’s why I call them and everyone to do the work of unleavening.
Different talking points are not the same as safe leadership and avoidance just perpetuates the problem. If this work is left undone and unchecked?
It becomes Mike Bickle.
It becomes Carl Lentz.
It becomes Robert Morris.
It becomes Jerry Farwell Junior.
It becomes Mark Driscoll.
It becomes another fallen leader.
It becomes another cycle of harm, another story of abuse, another reckoning that never actually reckons.
The Fire Is Here
“We played the flute for you, but you did not dance; we sang a dirge, but you did not mourn.” (Matthew 11:17)
The call has gone out. The truth is loud. The moment is demanding something real.
And now, while the world burns, the very same men who seemed so righteous in handling Jane Doe’s case—who called out Mike Bickle because they knew her personally—are posting smiling vacation photos from the Gulf of America, carrying on as if their hands are clean.
But they have not renounced the man or the theology that put you-know-who in office. They have not acknowledged the harm they enabled. They have not reckoned with how their leavened influence shaped the minds and votes of thousands.
I’ve learned that safe leadership isn’t about standing up only when harm reaches your doorstep. It’s about recognizing the roots of harm so we can stop it before it happens—before it destroys lives, before it becomes a headline before it costs you something more than you can afford, before it costs me my life.
And the times we are living in? They are testing the safety of everyone’s leadership.
The fire is here. It is doing the work of exposure.
It’s testing every structure, every ideology, every leader, every movement. Spiritually. Politically. Collectively. What is real will remain, and what is hollow will burn.
There are no excuses anymore. Who we are is being put on display—in the microcosm of your daily life and in the macrocosm of the worlds we are shaping and destroying. We still have a choice as long as we have breath about the work we will and won’t give ourselves to.
“We played the flute for you, but you did not dance.”
The invitation is here.
The warning was sounded.
The white identity crisis has global ramifications.
In the words of Kendrick-this is a long life battle with the self.
The Work Before Us Is White Work
The work ahead isn’t for Black people to keep explaining. It isn’t for marginalized communities to keep laboring under the weight of exposing systems they never built.
The work before us is white work.
It is white people learning their history.
It is white people marching.
It is white people standing up, out in front, for our shared humanity.
Because it is that aesthetic—white faces rejecting white supremacy—that will be the most confusing to those hell-bent on harm.
The call is to do the work of unleavening and examining—to interrogate the narratives that have made white supremacy seem like the natural order of things. To resist the false stories driving homogenous, hell-bent regimes across the globe.
Because the resistance is deep when there is no aesthetic “otherness” to scapegoat.
And in the absence of an easy enemy, the real question remains: How are you using your power?
That is what will be tested.
That is what will be revealed.
That is what will burn or remain.