We are living in a moment of widespread moral confusion, and yet we have no shortage of people claiming to speak with moral and even prophetic authority.
Everyone seems certain. Everyone seems outraged. Everyone seems convinced God is on their side — the right and the left. The word “prophetic” is everywhere in our public discourse, but genuine prophetic vision is increasingly rare.
The prophetic has been reduced to a linguistic and moral weapon in partisan struggles for power in what feels, to many, like a chaotic and collapsing empire. The prophetic is no longer primarily used to illuminate truth and expose injustice, but to secure advantage. Spiritual rhetoric is no longer meant to call a people to repentance, but to harden them in their loyalties.
Lewis Brogdon
The result is not prophecy, but noise. Not revelation, but reinforcement.
This raises a pressing question for the nation and its churches: Do we know the difference between the prophetic and the partisan? Or have we so thoroughly confused the two that we now mistake political loyalty for spiritual faithfulness?
If a real word from the Lord were spoken today, would we recognize it or would we reject it for failing to confirm what we already believe? If God raised up a prophet not endorsed by any popular or prestigious entity to speak to the nation, would we listen?
History suggests God’s true prophets are rarely welcomed and almost never are useful to those in power. Which should make us cautious of religious speech that is too confident, too aligned, too convenient.
Why our vision is so distorted
One of the most revealing features of our moral discourse today is how consistently our analysis begins with what is wrong with others. When asked what is wrong with the country, or with the church, or with our politics, the answers come quickly and they are almost always external. The problem is them. The failure is over there. The blindness belongs to the other side.
“There is very little moral memory and almost no practiced repentance in our public life, only accusation.”
What we rarely hear is a serious reckoning with what we have gotten wrong, what we have failed to see, or how many times we have been mistaken in ways that might now instruct our judgment. There is very little moral memory and almost no practiced repentance in our public life, only accusation.
Jesus’ words in Matthew 7 about the log and the speck are usually read as a warning against hypocrisy. They are that, but they also are something more: They are a warning about moral perception.
“How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?” The issue is not merely moral inconsistency; it is distorted vision. Jesus is exposing the obvious. You cannot see clearly when you refuse to examine yourself.
This means something deeply unsettling for our current moment: A people who cannot critically and honestly examine themselves cannot be trusted to speak for God. This presumption, rooted in pride, is both dangerous and destructive. If our moral vision is always turned outward and never inward, our prophetic claims already are compromised. What passes for prophecy in such a context is often nothing more than sanctified accusation, truth-telling aimed safely away from ourselves.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Court prophets: When religion serves power
The Old Testament has a name for this kind of religious speech: court prophecy. Court prophets are not secular figures. They are religious professionals. They speak in God’s name. They occupy respected positions. They often are numerous. And they almost always tell the king what the king wants to hear.
In Jeremiah 14, the prophet complains to God that other prophets are telling the people, “All is well — no war or famine will come.” God’s response is chilling: “I did not send them. … They are prophesying lies in my name. … They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the Lord.”
These prophets are not merely mistaken. They are religiously useful and therefore spiritually dangerous.
The same pattern appears in 1 Kings 22. King Ahab gathers about 400 prophets who unanimously promise him victory in battle. Only one man, Micaiah, refuses to join the chorus. He is hated precisely because he does not tell the king what he wants to hear.
The pressure is explicit: “Be sure that you agree with them.”
And when Micaiah finally speaks the truth, he is dismissed, imprisoned and ignored. The story’s most terrifying moment comes when Micaiah describes a vision in which a lying spirit is sent to deceive the king through his own prophets. It is a picture not just of deception, but of judgment through deception, of a people so committed to hearing what they want that God gives them over to it, something the New Testament also mentions in 2 Thessalonians 2:9-11.
“The most dangerous prophets are not the ones outside the system, but the ones institutionally protected by it.”
This raises a challenging point for religious and political “insiders” trafficking in the language of the prophetic. And the point is this: The most dangerous prophets are not the ones outside the system, but the ones institutionally protected by it. These stories in Jeremiah and 1 Kings are a microcosm of the problems confronting us today. Many of us are court prophets, not to a king, but to partisan and tribal groups, not the God of Creation and all nations. Sadly, we don’t see it. We don’t see it because we don’t understand what it means to really be prophetic.
What the prophetic actually is
Much of our confusion today comes from the fact that we no longer have a clear sense of what it actually means to be prophetic. We use the word constantly, but we rarely stop to ask what kind of speech, what kind of posture, what kind of faithfulness the prophetic truly requires.
At its core, the prophetic names the relationship between the living God and the social, political, economic and religious systems human beings build. That relationship never is neutral. It always is evaluative. The prophet stands as a divinely appointed check on human power, a witness that no institution, no nation, no economy, no ideology, no church stands above God’s vision and judgment.
This is why the prophetic never has been safe for any palace, temple or modern equivalent of either. The prophetic is not the servant of the state, the chaplain of a party or the spiritual wing of any movement. It is the critic and guide of them all. And because of that, it is always inconvenient, often unwelcome and frequently resisted.
Abraham Heschel captured something essential about this in his classic work The Prophets. He described prophets as iconoclasts, not because they despised religion, but because they understood how easily religion could be bent into the service of injustice. The prophet, Heschel wrote, challenges “beliefs cherished as certain” and exposes “institutions endowed with supreme sanctity” as potential scandal and pretension.
In other words, the prophet knows even the holy can become a cover for unholiness. Heschel also reminds us that prophets are not triumphant figures. They are not celebrated. They are not comfortable. They often are lonely, miserable and tolerated rather than welcomed.
To be a prophet is both a distinction and an affliction. It is to be called to a task that is distasteful to oneself and deeply unwelcome to others. And that is precisely because the prophetic refuses to be loyal to socio-political or religious arrangements that have made their peace with power.
This is what makes the prophetic so difficult to counterfeit and so easy to avoid. True prophecy is never one-sided. It does not only speak to “them.” It speaks first to us. It does not simply confirm the righteousness of one camp over another. It unsettles every camp.
“If a so-called prophetic voice never threatens its own community, … it is not prophetic.”
Which gives us a simple but searching test: If a so-called prophetic voice never threatens its own community, never unsettles its own loyalties, and never risks its own status or influence, it is not prophetic. It is court prophecy. It is false prophecy.
A captive moral imagination
The truth is, neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party would love the prophets. Neither the right nor the left would. And for good reason. Prophets are equal-opportunity critics of every social vision and every political agenda.
We have grown accustomed to partisan prophets, religious voices who explain with great confidence why the people in the other party are the real problem and why their failures are the ones that threaten the nation. And to some extent, a true prophet would indeed speak truth to beliefs, values and actions that do not align with God’s vision of the world. But a prophet also would turn that same searching judgment toward the very people trying to use the prophetic as a weapon against others.
When is the last time you have seen a prophet rebuke their own group for its sin? And what does that say about our so-called prophets today?
The crisis we are facing is not simply a crisis of leadership. It is a crisis of formation. Not only our rulers, but vast portions of the population are being shaped, often unconsciously, by political, economic, technological and media systems that reward conformity, outrage, tribal loyalty and simplification. We are far less independent in our thinking than we imagine.
Our moral and political imaginations are being curated. Our fears are being cultivated. Our resentments are being monetized. Our certainties are being reinforced. What we often call “analysis” is, in fact, repetition. What we call “conviction” is frequently just loyalty to a narrative that already has chosen our enemies and supplied our talking points.
In such a context, it is not surprising that what passes for prophetic speech is so often predictable. It is aligned with one tribe or another. It is reinforced by applause or algorithm. It rarely surprises anyone. And it almost never unsettles the community from which it comes.
This is not merely a political problem. It is a spiritual problem. It is a problem of formation, allegiance and ultimately worship. When entire communities are habituated to see reality through lenses crafted by power, it becomes exceedingly difficult to recognize a word that does not serve that power.
This also illumines another important and often overlooked point — how power works to co-opt prophetic voices and influence. Whose voices are privileged in public discourse? Who gets invited to speak on major news networks, at national conferences and in elite institutions? Who is given the seats of influence at prestigious universities and colleges? These are not neutral questions. They are part of how the boundaries of acceptable speech are quietly policed.
Social, political and religious platforms now shape and constrain prophetic speech in pervasive ways. In many cases, they no longer merely amplify prophetic voices, they select them. Which raises a disturbing question: Does God call prophets, or do political parties, media outlets and prestigious institutions?
“Does God call prophets, or do political parties, media outlets and prestigious institutions?”
For court prophets, your security, income and livelihood are tied to institutions and media platforms. The incentives are clear. The costs of dissent are real. And so a vested interest emerges, not necessarily in lying, but in not saying too much, not saying it too clearly and not saying it in ways that would threaten access, status or stability.
This is another way captivity works. It does not only silence. It disciplines. It teaches court prophets on the left and right what can and cannot be said. And in doing so, it makes truly independent and prophetic speech exceedingly rare.
The church and the state: King’s warning
In the modern American context, few figures embody the prophetic vocation more clearly than Martin Luther King Jr. In his life, his ministry and ultimately his death, King fits the profile of the biblical prophets: a spokesperson for the Holy One, a representative of the oppressed, a discerning interpreter of his times. He stood both inside and outside the institutions of church and state, drawing deeply from the Christian tradition while refusing to allow that tradition to be domesticated by the nation’s comfort or ambitions. Like the prophets before him, he spoke truth to power, not as an abstraction, but as a lived, costly vocation.
“He watched a country celebrate his dream while ignoring his indictment.”
King also understood with painful clarity how fragile and how easily corrupted the relationship between the vision of God and a powerful nation can be. He watched a country celebrate his dream while ignoring his indictment. He saw how readily a society could embrace prophetic language while resisting prophetic demands.
And he warned, again and again, that the church must never confuse access to power with faithfulness to God: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
King understood something every generation must relearn: The moment the church becomes useful to power, it ceases to be faithful to God. When the church begins to see its role as protecting a nation, defending a party or stabilizing a social order rather than telling the truth about them, it already has surrendered its prophetic vocation.
The prophetic never can allow itself to be co-opted or domesticated by any empire, party or religious establishment. Its loyalty lies first with the Holy One who calls, who judges and who sends. Like Jeremiah, it carries a word that is “like fire shut up in the bones.”
Prophetic leaders are not servants of the palace or the temple. They exist to hold all human systems accountable to God and to summon them toward justice, mercy and truth.
We are in desperate need of such voices. The future of this nation may well hinge on whether we can still hear a genuine word from the Lord.
Which brings us to the unavoidable question: What does a nation do when the prophetic has been compromised, marginalized or replaced with its counterfeit? At the very least, three things.
We must recover a truthful understanding of what the prophetic actually is. We must begin the difficult work of recalibrating our allegiances. And we must learn again to listen for voices rising not from the centers of comfort and power, but from the margins where prophets have always been found.
This is the hard and honest work we must take up in the days ahead that we may have “ears to hear what the Spirit” would say to us.
Lewis Brogdon serves as executive director of Just Faith Ministries in Louisville, Ky.