The Frequency

Notes on the screen as altar, a good heart’s corruption, and the twenty-mile drive that changed everything twice

The Ask

My neighbor’s car had died again. Could I drive her to church? Twenty miles through the canyon, along the river, the same river that runs through every story I’ve told from this valley. The one that catches the light and throws it back. The one that doesn’t care about theology.

It was early spring, that week when the canyon decides to forgive winter. Cottonwoods budding along the water, the rock faces still dark with snowmelt, the air carrying that cold-river smell that makes you breathe deeper than you mean to. Eagles working the thermals above the rimrock. The kind of morning that makes you embarrassed you ever complained about anything.

She sat in the passenger seat with her Bible on her lap and her purse held close and told me about the sermon series they’d been doing. Something about the end times. I made the appropriate sounds. The river kept sparkling.

I hadn’t been inside a church since I was under three feet tall. My folks weren’t religious, but whenever they needed a kid-free day, we’d get dropped at Sunday school. It never went well. I was usually asked to leave. But one Sunday a few of us snuck into the back and raided the snack cupboard. The cookies were thin as a dime and tasted like cardboard’s apology for existing. The red Kool-Aid had the flavor of something that had died in it and been left to steep.

That was my entire history with organized Christianity. Bland cookies and suspect Kool-Aid.

I figured the worst that could happen was boredom.

I was wrong about everything.

The Sermon

The church was a low-slung building at the edge of town, the kind of architecture that says nothing about God and everything about a budget. Folding chairs, not pews. A sound system that buzzed. The congregation filed in with coffee cups and the particular warmth of people who see each other every week and mean it.

They were kind to me. The visitor. Handshakes, smiles, the offer of a donut. A man with hands like shovels said he’d heard I had sheep and wanted to know what breed. A woman asked if I was new to the area, which in a town this size meant she already knew the answer but was being polite.

Then the man of the cloth took the front of the room.

It took me less than five minutes to understand where I was.

He wasn’t preaching the Bible. He was preaching the broadcast. The sermon was a recitation of talking points I recognized from the screen—the border, the threat, the enemies within, the persecution of the faithful, the coming judgment. Scripture was deployed the way a lawyer deploys precedent: selectively, strategically, in service of a verdict already reached. A verse from Revelation here. A fragment of Matthew there. The spaces between the verses filled not with exegesis but with Fox News.

But it wasn’t just the talking points. It was the temperature.

He talked about institutions the way you talk about a tumor. The courts. The schools. The agencies that regulate water and air and food. The whole apparatus of democratic governance built, imperfectly and often badly, to put ordinary people between themselves and the appetites of power. He talked about these things as infections in the body of the nation, as obstacles to the restoration of a godly order that never actually existed but whose nostalgia is strong enough to fundraise on.

And then—and this is the part that made the folding chair feel very hard beneath me—he talked about what happens to people who resist. Not in the language of Revelation, not as end-times prophecy. In the language of now. The language of consequence. People who stand against the movement will be dealt with. People who dissent will learn. People who persist in opposing God’s plan for the nation will find out what happens when the faithful stop being patient.

He didn’t use the word violence. He didn’t have to. The congregation knew the grammar. They’d learned it from the same screen he had. Retribution wrapped in righteousness. Punishment dressed as prophecy. The threat delivered with a pastoral smile and a Bible in the hand.

I looked at my neighbor. She was nodding.

This was not a room full of stupid people. This was a room full of people who had been given a single channel for understanding the world, and the channel was on, and the signal was strong, and the frequency was fear. But fear was just the carrier wave. The payload was permission. Permission to see the dismantling of democratic institutions not as loss but as liberation. Permission to see cruelty as correction. Permission to see violence—when it comes, and it is coming, and some of it is already here—not as a failure of Christianity but as its fulfillment.

Not everyone in that room believes in the rapture. But they all believe in the enemy. And when you believe in the enemy, the rest follows with the logic of gravity.

The Merch Table

On the way out, I passed the table. I almost missed it—or rather, I almost mistook it for the kind of thing churches do: pamphlets, sign-up sheets, maybe a bake sale for the roof fund.

It was a merchandise table. Political merchandise. Hats, shirts, flags, a doll. And a watch—gold-toned, branded, five hundred dollars. In a church attended by people who drive trucks with two hundred thousand miles on them and heat their homes with wood because propane costs too much.

Five hundred dollars. For a watch that tells the same time as every other watch. But this one tells you who you are. This one tells you which tribe you belong to. This one says you’re on the right side, you’re in the number, you’re among the saved.

My neighbor lingered at the table. She didn’t buy anything—not today. But she touched the watch the way you touch something in a store window that you’re already saving for. The way you touch a future version of yourself.

Her car doesn’t run. Her kids have moved away because there’s nothing for them here. Her husband is dead. Her health care is being dismantled by the same people on the hats.

She’s saving for the watch.

The Shrine

I’d been in her house before. Dropping off eggs, picking up a casserole dish she’d filled because she’d heard I was out haying. She feeds people. That’s who she is. Grew up on a farm, worked her hands raw raising kids and getting them educated, the kind of woman who measures love in portions.

But I hadn’t really looked until now.

The television was enormous. Disproportionate. The biggest object in the room by a factor that made everything else—the worn sofa, the family photos, the afghan her mother had crocheted—look like set dressing for the main event. The screen was on when I arrived. The screen was on when I left. I’m not sure the screen is ever off.

Fox News. All day. The scroll at the bottom, the outrage of the hour, the faces that project authority and confirm fear, the rhythm of alarm that never resolves because resolution would lose the audience.

Around the television, arranged with the care of devotional objects: the merchandise. A hat on the shelf. A flag on the wall. Shirts folded on a chair. A coffee mug with a slogan. The accumulation of belonging, purchased at prices she can’t afford, displayed with the pride of relics.

This is not a living room. This is a chapel. And the screen is the altar. And the broadcast is the liturgy. And the merch is the tithe. And the satellite dish on the roof is the steeple, pulling the signal from the sky and pouring it into a house where a good woman sits alone and learns, hour by hour, day by day, who to fear.

She didn’t used to hate anyone. I believe her when she says this. I’ve seen the way she feeds whoever shows up at her door—no questions about politics, no litmus test for the casserole. Her hands know something her screen is trying to make her forget.

But the screen is patient. The screen is on eighteen hours a day. The screen never tires, never contradicts itself in ways she’d notice, never stops delivering the signal. And the signal says: those people are not like you. Those people want to destroy what you love. Those people are not fully human.

She says she doesn’t hate anyone. And then she says something about the border that she didn’t know how to say five years ago, using language that didn’t live in her mouth until the satellite dish put it there.

The Machine

Here’s what the screen knows that she doesn’t:

She is not the congregation. She is the product.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans who most trust far-right news outlets are Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers. That’s not a demographic accident. That’s a business plan. If your audience has fused political identity with spiritual identity—if changing the channel feels not like a preference but like apostasy—then you have the most loyal consumer base in the history of media. Loyalty that doesn’t waver when the facts change. Loyalty that deepens when challenged. Loyalty that experiences criticism of the product as persecution of the faith.

But the business model is only the visible machinery. Follow the money past the networks, past the ad revenue and the subscription fees, and you reach the tier that doesn’t appear on screen. The architects.

They don’t go to my neighbor’s church. Some of them don’t go to church at all. They don’t need the rapture, don’t need the end times, don’t need the watch or the flag or the folding chairs. What they need is the congregation’s obedience—and they’re willing to pay billions to secure it.

The funding infrastructure behind Christian nationalism is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a tax filing. Foundations and donor networks that have spent decades building the pipeline: the think tanks that draft the legislation, the legal organizations that challenge the precedents, the media outlets that frame the narrative, the PACs that fund the candidates, the candidates who appoint the judges. A machine so well-engineered it makes the broadcast look like the amateur hour it is. The screen is just the retail end of a wholesale operation. The product isn’t news. It isn’t even ideology. The product is a population conditioned to cheer for its own dispossession.

And this is the part that takes it past sadness into danger: the movement doesn’t need the theology to be true. It needs the theology to be useful. Not everyone pulling the strings believes the world is ending. But everyone pulling the strings understands that people who believe the world is ending will consent to anything done in the name of saving it. They’ll consent to the gutting of public schools because the schools are godless. The dismantling of environmental protections because the earth is temporary. The erosion of voting rights because democracy was never the point—dominion was. The acceptance of political violence because you can’t make a theocracy without breaking a few democratic norms.

My neighbor doesn’t know about the donor networks. She’s never heard of the Council for National Policy or the Alliance Defending Freedom or the constellation of dark money groups that treat her sincerity like a natural resource to be extracted. She just knows what the screen tells her: that the institutions designed to protect her are actually oppressing her, and the people dismantling those institutions are her saviors. The people raising her grocery prices are her champions. The people cutting her health care are fighting for her freedom.

The cynicism is so complete it becomes a kind of artistry. The faith is real. Her faith is real. But the exploitation of her faith is also real. And she cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, because the machine depends on her not being able to tell.

What Gets Normalized

Here is what I heard in that church, underneath the scripture and the smiles: violence has become the water they swim in.

Not just the threat of divine judgment. Not just Revelation’s horsemen or the tribulation’s fire. I mean the operational violence of the present tense. The congressman who jokes about nooses. The rally where the crowd chants about punishment. The social media posts celebrating when someone on the other side gets hurt. The neighbor who says, over the fence, with the casual certainty of weather, that some people just need to learn the hard way.

Christian nationalism has achieved something that would have been unthinkable in the churches of my neighbor’s childhood: it has made revenge a Christian value. Not forgiveness. Not turning the other cheek. Not loving your enemy, which is the hardest teaching in the book and the one most inconvenient to the movement. Revenge. Retribution. The righteous satisfaction of watching your enemies suffer.

If you don’t parrot the party line, you become the enemy. And the enemy is not a fellow citizen with a different opinion. The enemy is a threat to God’s plan. And threats to God’s plan deserve whatever comes to them.

This is how democratic institutions die. Not in a single dramatic collapse—not the tanks-in-the-streets scenario the movies prepared us for—but in the slow normalization of the idea that those institutions deserve to die. That the courts are corrupt, the agencies are tyrannical, the schools are indoctrination centers, the press is the enemy of the people, the elections are rigged, and the only legitimate authority is the one that shares your faith and punishes your enemies. Once that’s normalized—and in that church, on that Sunday, it was more than normalized, it was liturgy—the actual dismantling is just paperwork.

The people behind the machine know this. The billionaire donors, the think tank architects, the political operatives who have never lost a minute of sleep over my neighbor’s propane bill. They don’t need the violence to be explicitly commanded. They just need it to be permitted. Theologically permitted. Culturally permitted. Permitted by a population so saturated in the narrative of existential threat that when the institutions fall, the congregation doesn’t mourn them. They celebrate. They call it revival.

My neighbor is lined up for communion. But the wafer is self-destruction, and the wine is someone else’s profit, and the body being consumed is her own.

What It Costs

Today, gas was up a dollar a gallon from two weeks ago. I got a yogurt and some salad mix for twenty dollars. Sheep grain has doubled since the tariffs.

My neighbor pays the same prices I do. Stands in the same checkout line. Drives past the same gas station sign with the numbers that keep climbing. Her fixed income doesn’t adjust for the talking points.

But she watches the screen, and the screen says the prices are someone else’s fault. Not the people she voted for. Not the tariffs she cheered. Someone else. Always someone else. The screen is a machine for redirecting consequences, and it runs on the oldest fuel there is: the need to believe that your suffering has a villain, and the villain is not the person you trusted.

Who is zooming who here?

The donors who fund the machine made six billion dollars last quarter. The policies the screen told her to support are the policies that doubled her flour prices and tripled her prescription costs. The people she waves flags for will never know her name, will never see her church, will never sit in her living room with the enormous screen and the merchandise arranged like votives. She is useful to them in exactly the way a fuel source is useful: consumed in the process of generating someone else’s power.

But here’s what makes this essay impossible to write from the outside: she’s not a fool. She’s not a caricature. She worked a farm for forty years. She raised children who went to college. She can read weather and soil and the health of a calf from across a field. She possesses a practical intelligence that would embarrass most of the people writing think pieces about her.

What she doesn’t possess is a counter-narrative. Another signal. Another frequency. The satellite dish on her roof pulls from one direction, and the church on Sunday confirms the signal, and the merch on her shelves proves she belongs, and the loop closes, and the loop is warm. And the library in town — the one place where a different frequency might have lived on a shelf, where doubt could have been borrowed for free and returned without consequence — is having its shelves cleared of anything that might complicate the signal. And outside the loop is nothing but the loneliness of a woman whose husband is dead and whose kids have gone and whose body is getting tired and whose heart — that enormous, meal-making, anyone-who’s-hungry heart — is slowly, slowly being tuned to a frequency that teaches her the world is full of enemies.

The Other Hand

But here’s the thing I keep circling back to, the thing compassion wants me to skip past and honesty won’t let me:

She has a remote control.

It’s right there on the armrest, next to the tissues and the reading glasses she uses for her crossword. She could pick it up. She could change the channel. She could turn the screen off entirely and sit in the silence of her own house and hear what her own mind thinks without the scroll at the bottom telling her what to fear next.

She doesn’t. And I need to be honest about what that means.

It doesn’t mean she’s stupid. I’ve already said she’s not stupid, and I mean it. A woman who can read the weather in a cloud formation and the health of a calf from fifty yards is not a woman who lacks the capacity for critical thought. She has it. She’s choosing not to use it. Or she’s choosing to use it selectively—applied to soil and animals and the price of feed, withheld from the screen that’s telling her the people dismantling her health care are her champions.

That’s not helplessness. That’s a decision. Maybe it’s a decision made in exhaustion, in loneliness, in the gravitational pull of belonging. But it’s a decision. And to pretend otherwise—to file her under victim and close the drawer—is its own kind of label. Its own reduction. The same violence of simplification I’ve spent three essays writing against.

She lives in a democracy. Or what’s left of one. The roads she drives to church were built by the government the screen tells her is tyranny. The Medicare that pays for her prescriptions exists because someone, decades ago, decided that old people shouldn’t have to choose between medicine and food—and other people voted to make it happen. The clean water in her tap, the rural electricity in her walls, the postal service that delivers her seed catalogues—none of these are natural phenomena. They are the product of collective effort. Democratic effort. The kind of effort that requires people to care about strangers they’ll never meet.

She benefits from all of it. Every day. And she’s nodding along while it’s dismantled. Cheering, even, because the screen told her the dismantling is freedom and the people doing it are on God’s side.

I don’t say this with contempt. I say it because seeing her clearly is the only form of respect that matters now. The bodhisattva’s job is not to look away from the parts of the picture that complicate the compassion. The bodhisattva’s job is to see the whole person—the enormous heart and the hand that won’t change the channel. The practical intelligence and the places where she’s chosen not to apply it. The genuine faith and the refusal to ask whether the people selling her that faith have earned it.

Democracy is not a service she subscribes to. It’s a relationship. It asks something back. It asks that you question the sermon when the sermon tells you your neighbors are enemies. It asks that you notice when the policies you’re cheering for are the ones raising your grocery bill. It asks, at minimum, that you take the same intelligence you bring to reading a heifer’s gait and apply it to the man on the screen telling you the courts are your enemy.

She’s not doing that. And the machine is counting on her not doing it. But the machine’s existence doesn’t erase her choice. Both things are true at once: she is being exploited, and she is consenting to the exploitation. She is being lied to, and she is choosing the lie over the harder work of doubt. The signal is loud, yes. But the remote is within reach.

This is what makes the whole thing so heartbreaking. Not that she’s been captured—though she has. But that somewhere inside the capture is a choice she keeps making. A choice to stay inside the loop because the loop is warm and the silence outside it is terrifying. Because doubt means loneliness, and loneliness in a valley where your husband is dead and your kids are gone is not an abstraction. It’s Tuesday night with no one to call.

I understand the choice. I have compassion for it. But I won’t call it anything other than what it is.

She is not a child. She is a citizen. And citizens don’t get a free pass on the democracy they’re burning down just because someone handed them the match and told them it was a candle.

The Drive Home

Twenty miles back through the canyon. Same road. Same river. Same spring light doing its ancient work on the water.

But the drive home was not the drive there.

The canyon walls, which two hours ago had been beautiful in their severity, now looked like they were leaning in. The rock faces seemed ready to calve, to send a slab across the road and bury us in geological indifference. The deer in the brush weren’t picturesque; they were threats, coiled to leap into the windshield. The eagles were gone from the thermals, or I couldn’t find them, or I’d stopped looking up.

The landscape hadn’t changed. I was seeing it through her eyes now.

This is what the signal does. This is the product, the deliverable, the thing being manufactured in that church and on that screen and in that living room shrine with its branded merchandise and its enormous television and its eighteen hours a day of curated fear. It doesn’t just change what you think. It changes what you see. The canyon becomes a threat. The stranger becomes an enemy. The morning becomes a minefield. And the only safe place—the only place the signal promises rest—is inside the loop. In front of the screen. In the folding chair. Nodding.

I drove her home. She thanked me. She asked if I’d come again next Sunday.

I said maybe. I meant no. Then I went home and sat with the sheep for a long time, saying nothing, watching them do what sheep do, which is eat and stand near each other and occasionally look up at a sound and then go back to eating. No screen. No signal. No frequency but the wind and the river and the blackbirds beginning their spring campaign.

The Responsibility

What is my responsibility here?

I can’t change her. I’ve known this since the first time she said something about the border that didn’t sound like her. You don’t deprogram a person over coffee. You don’t undo eighteen hours a day of signal with a conversation. The machine is bigger than both of us, and it doesn’t sleep, and it never takes a day off, and it has billions of dollars a year to ensure it keeps running.

I can’t save her. The Buddhist in me knows this word is a trap anyway—the same trap the screen uses, just wearing different clothes. Save her from what? From belief? From belonging? From the only community that calls her by name since her husband died?

But I also can’t pretend this is merely a difference of opinion. That was the lie I told myself for years—the comfortable Buddhist neutrality, the strategic vagueness, the diplomatic silence that lets the machine run unchallenged. This is not a disagreement about tax policy or zoning laws. This is a movement that has normalized political violence, targeted democratic institutions for destruction, and trained a population to see their neighbors as enemies—and it has done this deliberately, with enormous funding, for the profit and power of people who will never sit in a folding chair.

The think pieces want a program. Seven steps to deradicalize your neighbor. I don’t have a program. The bodhisattva vow doesn’t come with a program. It comes with a promise: all beings. Including the ones in the folding chairs. Including the ones building the machine. Including the ones profiting from the destruction of the woman who feeds everyone who walks through her door.

Compassion for all beings does not mean silence in the presence of the machine. The bodhisattva doesn’t nod along while the sermon teaches hate. The bodhisattva sees clearly—sees the fear, the loneliness, the sincere faith, and also sees the exploitation, the billions, the calculated destruction of democratic life—and refuses to pretend that seeing one excuses ignoring the other.

Maybe responsibility looks like this: writing it down. Saying what the machine is and who it serves. Naming the distance between my neighbor’s faith and the purposes to which her faith is being put. Not to shame her—she’d recognize herself and feel betrayed, and the machine has already taught her that betrayal is what the others do—but to say, clearly, to anyone still listening: this is what is happening. This is what it costs. This is who pays. And this is who profits while the pews fill and the screen glows and a good woman saves her pennies for a watch she’ll wear to the end of the democracy that was supposed to protect her.

Still Tuesday

The sheep are fed. The river is still there, running its ancient argument against permanence. The eagles will be back on the thermals by afternoon. Spring doesn’t care about the signal.

My neighbor is in her living room right now. I can see the blue glow from her window if I walk to the edge of my property and look across the field. The screen is on. The screen is always on. And somewhere between the scroll at the bottom and the outrage at the top, her heart—that huge, casserole-making, feed-whoever-shows-up heart—is learning a new word for the people it used to welcome without question.

I can’t turn off the screen. I can’t change the frequency. I can’t compete with a machine that spends billions a year and has a satellite dish on every roof in this valley and a merch table in every church and a preacher at every pulpit who has traded the Gospel for a broadcast schedule.

But I can see it. I can say what it is. I can call the machine a machine and the product a product and the profit a profit and the violence a violence.

And tomorrow, when her car still doesn’t run, I can drive her wherever she needs to go. Even to church. Even into the room where the signal is loudest and the nodding is synchronized and the watch gleams on the table like a promise that was never meant to be kept.

I can sit in the folding chair and refuse to nod.

I learned that in a backseat, years ago. The river taught me.

The river is still teaching.

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©2026 Gael MacLean