Rick Warren stepped in it, and now he’s scrambling to clean up the mess. A few days ago, he tweeted out a mind-numbingly shallow take, twisting John 19:18 into a ham-fisted political metaphor, suggesting that the “real Jesus,” because he was crucified between two thieves, isn’t on either side politically, but, rather, in “the middle.”

It was the kind of lukewarm, fence-sitting drivel that modern evangelicalism loves—Jesus as a milquetoast, non-threatening moderate who refuses to take a stand on anything substantial. Predictably, the backlash was swift.

Because, of course, Scripture doesn’t present Christ as a centrist referee between two equally corrupt teams—it presents Him as the King of Kings, whose authority shatters both the schemes of the wicked and the delusions of the self-righteous.

So now, Warren has come back with an “apology.” But this isn’t an apology—it’s a cowardly dodge. “I wrote poorly,” he says, as if the problem was merely bad wording rather than the fundamentally false premise of his original statement. Then comes the real escape hatch, “I don’t believe Jesus was a centrist. He stands far above it all.”

Oh, okay. There it is—the theological equivalent of an emergency eject button. Instead of acknowledging that Christ is not neutral in the moral battles of our time, Warren retreats into abstraction, claiming Jesus is “above” politics. It’s the classic move of a squishy preacher who wants to appear deep without actually saying anything at all.

Let’s cut through the fog. Warren’s new position isn’t a correction—it’s just another layer of evasion. What does it mean to say that Jesus “stands above it all”? It means Warren gets to avoid answering the hard questions.

It means he doesn’t have to admit that one side of the political spectrum is actively championing every abomination listed in Romans 1:24-32.

It means he gets to pretend that a political party whose two central religious rites are homosexuality and the mass murder of unborn children isn’t, in fact, the party of Hell.

Because make no mistake—that’s exactly what it is.

The Democratic Party has built its foundation on the rejection of God’s moral order and its platform essentially reads as the antithesis to the Ten Commandments. It celebrates perversion, erases gender distinctions, wages war on the family, and ensures that innocent babies are butchered in the womb at industrial scale.

And yet, Warren is still out here playing word games, pretending that Jesus is equally distant from both sides, that the GOP’s failures—and there are many—somehow cancel out the reality that the modern left is defined by its absolute hostility to Jesus.

Jesus doesn’t “stand above” the slaughter of children and the mutilation of bodies—He stands against it. He doesn’t sit passively in some imagined neutral zone between righteousness and wickedness—He calls His followers to take up the sword of truth and fight.

Warren’s attempt at damage control falls flat because it’s still rooted in the same basic cowardice that defines modern evangelical leadership. The real Jesus—the Jesus of Scripture—doesn’t straddle the fence between moral clarity and compromise. He doesn’t shrink back from calling evil by its name. And He certainly isn’t some political Rorschach test for spineless pastors to project their neutrality onto.

If Warren had any real conviction, he’d renounce his nonsense entirely, name the enemy outright, and stop pretending that Christ’s Kingdom is somehow indifferent to the moral cesspool that the left has become. But that would require courage. And that’s something Rick Warren has never had.

Oh yeah, and as I said in the last article, it wouldn’t sell as many books, either.