New series at The Green Room on theologies of public life:

The slow pace and painful process of change, in the face of a wide agreement about the problem, call for an explanation. Such an explanation might be the key to unlocking much faster progress, getting us to the critical tipping point we have not yet reached.

I don’t have a single, magic-bullet explanation (well, okay, actually I totally do, but I’m holding out for a better book deal before I reveal it). In this series of posts, I want to explore what I think is one key factor in slowing down the progress of the movement.

Stay tuned!

Third and final installment of my deconstruction of UBI at TGR:

We are already moving rapidly in the direction of a future in which large, impersonal bureaucracies control our lives and make our decisions for us based on quantitative, standardized data, without knowing who we are or what we really need. Call it “the Gattaca future.” UBI would accelerate our embrace of that future by creating a key tool bureaucracies need to take their control over our lives to the next level.

Looking forward to getting back to faith and work core issues now that I’ve gotten this policy stuff off my chest.

TGR carries the second installment of my series on UBI. I favor high levels of immigration and the existence of a government safety net, but there are policy tradeoffs that we cannot excuse ourselves from thinking about:

The hard reality is that if we create a UBI, that is the end – permanently, I would expect – of high levels of immigration. Whatever you may think about the potential immigrants is beside the point. American voters are not going to vote to tax their own salaries to provide free money for everyone in the community, and then keep the golden doors open so anyone, anywhere can join the community at any time. If the UBI passes Congress on Monday, billions for the Wall will pass on Tuesday – and we’ll be lucky if it stops with that.

The underlying difficulty is that, for all our talk about community, we continue to approach social ethics as if particular communities were irrelevant. We love community in the abstract, but we hate and fear actual communities when they make demands upon us that interfere with our “Imagine”-style fantasies. Yet it is the “Imagine”-style fantasies of a nationless world that will destroy us in the end if we cling to them:

We have no right to think about social ethics as if humanity were just a huge, undifferentiated mass, every individual perfectly interchangeable with every other individual. That is not humanity, that is cogs in a machine. All ethical schools attempting to treat humanity as a single, undifferentiated mass dehumanize us, whether they are of the liberal (utilitarian) or illiberal (Marxist) variety.

I usually avoid policy in my faith and work writing, because these arguments are going to make some people uncomfortable. But UBI got some very uncritical advocacy at the Faith at Work Summit, and I think someone ought to make it clear there’s another side of the ledger.

Behold the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement: Even the highly responsible, intellectual Never Trump conservatives have built their new website not around a coherent set of ideas but around their desire to destroy their enemies. I thought their critics were exaggerating, but that actually seems to be their own articulation of their mission. (Update: Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes are passing on the link and discussing the article without challenging it, so that confirms the article’s depiction of their vindictive motives is accurate.)

Predictably, they are already going after not just the grifters, but a lot of people who don’t deserve to be gone after. That is how movements motivated by resentment work.

Seth Mandel, a Never Trump conservative who is the editor of the new magazine that was created via the destruction of the Weekly Standard, sums it up: “Imagine thinking Hank Olsen is the villain.”

Full disclosure: Olsen is a friend. More full disclosure: If it takes a friend of Olsen’s to tell you that Olsen is not the problem, you are as small-minded as Trump’s supporters and you are not fighting for ideas or moral virtues. You, also, are grifting.

I cannot wish success for the magazine built out of the bones of the murdered Weekly Standard, nor for a website built out of pure spite by its refugees.

I’ve written a bunch of posts under variations on the title “Death of Conservatism Watch.” I think the watch is over.

TGC has a new regular feature, an advice column on work called Thorns and Thistles. In today’s edition, I was invited to field a question from someone who changed jobs to seek evangelistic opportunities:

People don’t like to be condescended to or manipulated. If you are only in that workplace to get a conversion out of people, they will know it and they will resent it. Excellent performance in the work itself, for its own sake, along with humane treatment of customers and coworkers, will earn you the right to be heard. Paul’s tent-making wouldn’t have been a viable evangelism strategy if he made lousy tents. The fact is that you have not left full-time ministry. The word “ministry” simply means “service.” All Christians, without exception, are in full-time service to Jesus Christ, and to the world he cares so much about. Whatever a Christian does—writing reports, driving trucks, sweeping floors—is ministry to God and neighbor. When it is done in a God-honoring way, it is a powerful witness that draws people toward the verbal witness.

Send your work-related advice questions to ask@tgc.org!