To Roy Moore

Mr. Moore — I have a hard time calling you "Judge", for reasons that will become clear — you have spent most of your adult life, so far as I can tell, lecturing others on God's will, which happens to dovetail neatly with your own.

I'm sure you believe you're concurring with God, as a faithful believer should. But has it ever occurred to you that your certitude may have blinded you to your own shortcomings?

You're obviously intent on converting this nation — fallen, in your eyes, from grace — to one that accords with your view of God's will.

How has your effort been going?

Are you reaching anybody who didn't already agree with you?

Have you had any success at bringing the nation closer to God?

I'd say you're not as successful as you'd like to be, with the latest evidence being your defeat in your race for Senate. (By the way, what did you expect to accomplish as a Senator, one of a hundred in a body that is but one of two legislative arms in a government that has two other branches?)

Obviously you're up against a formidable foe — but do you know who that foe is?

I won't assume you think you're up against Satan. However, I do think you think you're up against wickedness.

I think the truth is a good deal more discomfiting. You're up against not just a more generous, more open view of what the United States can be, but a more generous, more open view of Christianity.

You want the rest of us to turn to God but you want that the same way a bad teacher wants students to embrace his subject. You scold. You ominously warn of terrible consequences for ignoring your will. The difference is that a bad teacher can assign grades that actually have consequences.

Your eagerness to find fault with everyone else renders you not just unpalatable, but untrustworthy. I, for one, learned the hard way not to trust the judgment of coworkers who never found fault with their own work. They have the largest of blind spots and their work cannot be trusted. Hence my inability to call you "Judge": though you've made judging others your life's work, you cannot bear to be corrected and that's the sign of an untrustworthy arbiter.

If you had a trace of humility, a scintilla of awareness of the possibility you could be wrong — if, in short, you recognized that you, too, are human and therefore fallible — you might have reconsidered your judgmentalism a long time ago. It's still not too late to ask yourself how well, or even whether, you're really serving God's will.

I doubt you will. I'm afraid you're too invested in the certainty of your own righteousness, and the equal certainty of the wrongness and wickedness of everyone who doesn't agree with you.

Wouldn't it be delightful if you proved me wrong on this score?