I respect talk walking or “walk the talk.” I admire more someone who speaks less and acts more. Fans of an athlete are full of words. Good on them. Without fans the athlete might still compete, but he’d do it without the spotlight. Fans and athletes alike aren’t worth 1500 words of my time or yours. If you like being an athlete or a fan of one, good on you.
My target is familiar. It’s the shiny‑toothed, glad‑handing, altar‑call regulars who make sure everyone knows they love Cheeezus more than the rest of the world. The ones who treat devotion like a performance review, who believe volume is virtue and believe God is grading them on enthusiasm.
I’m a fan of the Desert Fathers — men who wrote sparingly about the long, quiet grind of living their discipleship alone in the Egyptian desert. They didn’t advertise holiness, curate a brand or chase a spotlight. Their silence had more weight than the loudest worship set. People who are loud about their faith make me wonder what it is they’re trying to drown out.
The Wrong Way to Walk the Talk
Cool, cool. The talk walking I’m writing about is healthy. I’m writing this post on Monday, 2026-04-27. Last Saturday, an assassin attempted a mass shooting at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. The suspect walked his talk. And gave me a bad ass pucker. This piece is inspired by yesterday’s sermon at church. It is not in praise of an attempt to murder Administration Officials (the suspect’s words). Thank you, Allen, for shoving my plans for this piece off the page. 😑😒
Sasha Stone’s piece on Substack, “There is no saving the Left.” From CoPilot, “What she’s describing—sometimes clearly, sometimes through her own emotional fog—is the moment when political identity stops being a lens and becomes a self. Once that happens, every disagreement becomes existential, every opponent becomes a threat, and every narrative becomes a survival story. You’ve been circling this same terrain for months: the way grievance‑rooted eschatology burns itself out, the way movements built on perpetual emergency eventually lose the ability to distinguish between rhetoric and reality.
Stone’s piece is one long howl from someone who believes she watched a political tribe slide from metaphorical warfare into something closer to literal. Whether she’s right in her specifics is almost beside the point. What she’s really saying is: I thought we were arguing about politics, but they were fighting a holy war.“
No, Cole Allen, your walk is wrong. LARPing Call of Duty, Assassin Hero Edition, isn’t heroic or noble. It is evil. And now you are in custody because you shot a Secret Service Agent. Wrong life changing choices my man.
Use Better Words
Words are ephemera until they are acted upon. Before that they are ephemera with influence. The shooter at the White House Correspondence Dinner took the wrong step. Mouthing off on social media about a pathological train of thought regarding our President is one thing. It’s another very bad thing to decide that the move is to act on the words and/or thoughts.
The words of James, in the Bible, are the talk walk evangelized here, James 1:22-25 ESV “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”
“It’s just politics”. We can say whatever we want and nothing bad will happen. For most of us that is true. For prominent leaders or voices on social media with a wide audience, not so much. Odds that none of 340 million people won’t act out because of the rhetoric of a foolish voice gone viral on social media aren’t good. With that many people the odds are that someone will. It’s one thing to mouth off on social media about a pathological train of thought regarding our President. It’s another very bad thing to decide that the move is to act on the words and/or thoughts.
We Need Jesus
We need Jesus. More broadly, we need a healthier deity to fill the God‑sized hole in our hearts. One of the great sadnesses of grievance‑rooted ideology is that believing in God became heresy. People will worship something. Remove God and these fill the empty space—grievance rooted ideology that becomes identity and politics organized around resentment. A worldview built on perpetual offense cannot tolerate a God who commands forgiveness. So, belief in God becomes heresy.
When God is removed, people don’t stop worshipping. They just worship smaller, angrier gods. And some conclude that all this buzzing cloud of angst can’t just stay ephemeral. It needs an agent to actualize it. Enter Allen, who believes he is the hero who answered the call. So wrong.
My peers love to ruminate on why this is so. Why, if God is a loving god, does shit like this happen? I don’t have space in this post to open that can of worms. My favorite answer is from C.S. Lewis in, “The Problem of Pain.” That word, “why” kept me circling a spiritual sewer drain. I found my healthier way with the word “how?”
Spiritual Diets
“It’s just politics” is naive to the extreme. The words we ingest don’t evaporate. They sink into the spirit and shape the imagination. They influence what we believe is possible, permissible, or even righteous. When someone lives inside a steady diet of dehumanizing rhetoric, conspiracy‑shaped narratives, or grievance‑rooted fantasies, those words can become a call to action. Cole Allen answered that call.
Instead, John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Next, this from James, the brother of Jesus James 3:5-12,
“How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire! And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell . . . With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God . . . My brothers, these things ought not to be so.
Words, then, have the power of creation. Also to set ablaze our lives. That isn’t all. Words, like fire, can bring beauty as can fire. Humans are the only thing in creation that mastered fire. Fire is a tool for us we use to prepare food, as an example. Words can create as well as destroy. It isn’t words by themselves that is problematic. It is how we use them.
Also, how we live them. What is our Way, our guiding words that influence our behavior? Cole Allen acted in good faith what he believed was a moral necessity. He thought of himself as the conquering hero who would win a boss battle against penultimate evil. Dude! You idiot! You ate the lies and discovered villainy. Congratulations!
Forgiveness
First, Allen is about to learn that mercy doesn’t obviate justice. Choices have consequences. He made some very bad choices that have life changing consequences. I don’t believe his choices Saturday are worth the consequences. Forgiveness is for us, for the victims, so we can restore our right relationship to God.
Forgiveness because failure is not optional. Failure is always part of faith. We do not measure up. We could be better. That’s not a reason to quit, though. It’s opposite. Failure is a reason to keep going.
Keep going the attempts to overthrow the government? NO! Hell No! Allen planted his flag in history and thank God, failed. His legacy is written. Keep improving our discipleship in Christ. The gap between who we are and who we are called to be is an invitation. Faith is embodied through practice, through continuous improvement. The rhythm is to try, to fall short, discover what could be better, then follow through on the discovery. It is tedious repetition repeated through a lifetime.
Fruity Fruit
We will follow a way, a 道. It’s built into us. So, the question is, what 道 will you follow? What Talk Walking will take root? I’m supposed to make a pitch for answering an altar call and joining us Cheeeezuss Peeepul. It’s a good answer I recommend. It’s not the only answer, though. Pick one. When you do, ask what the fruits of that way are. Good things? 😎 Trouble? 😬🚫 Funny thing about Socialism and its fellow travelers. It hasn’t gone well. Secular Humanism scrambles for meaning that isn’t rooted in grievance. That heretical Nazarene stone mason’s old ideas have a multi-generational record of success. Maybe His Way?
Last, this quote from James, JAS 4:1-10,
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
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