There was a man at a church I used to attend who could pray the roof off that building. I am not exaggerating. When he got going, grown men would start wiping their faces, and the organ player would find a chord to lay up under him.

He knew where to pause. He knew when to drop his voice down to almost nothing so you had to lean in. If you had wandered in off the street in the middle of one of his prayers, you would have walked out certain you had just heard from a man who had been somewhere with God.

He was also stealing. Not a little, either. And there were other things I am not going to put in writing.

When it finally came apart, the part that stayed with me was not what he did. It was what we did. We defended him. For a long time.

People who had known the truth for months sat on it, because the man could pray, and because saying anything out loud would have made them the problem instead of him. The few who tried to speak up early got handled.

They got called bitter. They got told they were touching God’s anointed. By the time the whole thing collapsed under its own weight, the people who had been right the longest had already been run out of the building.

I have been thinking about that man a lot lately.

If you believe the narrative that Charlie Kirk was killed, then the day and a half that followed was one of the more remarkable things I have witnessed in the church in my lifetime. For about thirty-six hours, it was revival. Real revival. People were posting testimonies.

People were calling family members they had not spoken to in years. Men who had not darkened a church door since they were teenagers were asking somebody, anybody, how to get right with God. Churches were filling up. The stories coming out were the kind of stories you pray for and rarely get to watch happen in real time.

Thirty-six hours. That is about what we got.

Then all of it got erased.

Do you remember how this started? When Candace Owens first set this whole thing in motion, she made a tremendous deal out of a claim that Charlie Kirk had secretly been saying he was going to walk away from his faith. He was going to become Catholic, according to her.

That was the opening move. That was the stone that got thrown into the water, and everything since has been the ripples.

And from that day forward, it has been one long campaign against a woman of God and against everybody standing anywhere near her. Her name gets dragged. Her grief gets treated as performance. The people in her orbit get picked off one at a time, and every week there is a new angle, a new insinuation, a new thing we are all supposed to be suspicious about.

Here is the part I cannot get past. The church went along with it.

Not the world. The world is going to do what the world does. I am talking about believers. People with Scripture in their profile.

People who were weeping with joy on a Tuesday about souls being saved, and by Thursday were sharing a thread picking apart a widow. Same accounts. Same week.

That is what tells me something, and it is not about Candace Owens. It is about us.

Somewhere along the way, we lost the ability to recognize a spiritual attack when one is happening right in front of us. We have been trained to evaluate everything as content. Is this interesting? Is this a good point?

Does this creator make sense? We will sit and weigh an argument for twenty minutes and never once stop and ask the only question that actually matters, which is: what is this doing? What is it building? Who does it serve?

Because the enemy does not usually show up as something obviously evil. He shows up as something reasonable. He shows up as a question.

He has been doing it that way since the garden, and the first words out of his mouth were not a lie. They were a question. Did God really say?

Look at the timing, and tell me it does not fit a pattern. The church is awake. Souls are coming in. People are getting saved in real numbers for the first time in years.

And within thirty-six hours, the conversation is no longer about any of that. It is about whether a man really believed what he said he believed. It is about whether his widow is who she says she is. Every bit of that momentum, every one of those new believers who was still shaky and still deciding whether these church people were for real, got handed a front-row seat to Christians tearing into each other.

I do not know how anyone looks at that sequence and sees a coincidence.

And this is where I am going to say the hard thing, because I have watched it long enough now to be convinced of it. A lot of the people leading this charge are not believers.

They are wearing it. They have the vocabulary. They can quote the verse. They know how to say “I am just asking questions” in a tone that sounds like discernment instead of what it actually is.

But Jesus told us this would happen and told us exactly what to look for. He said they would come to us in sheep’s clothing, and He did not tell us to judge them by their doctrine or their reach or how well they argue. He said by their fruits you will know them.

So look at the fruit. Not the follower count. Not how satisfying it feels when they say the thing you have been thinking.

The fruit. What has this season of accusation actually produced?

Has one person been saved by it? Has one marriage been healed? Has one wayward son come home? Or has it produced suspicion, division, a thousand Christians at each other’s throats, and a watching world that now has one more reason to believe we are no different from anybody else?

A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit. That is not my opinion. That is Him.

What grieves me most is how easy it was. Thirty-six hours of the real thing, and we traded it for a storyline. We let somebody hand us a question, and we picked it up and carried it for them, and we have been carrying it ever since.

I keep coming back to that man who could pray. What he taught me was not that there are frauds in the church. Everybody knows there are frauds in the church.

What he taught me is that a fraud does not survive on his own. He survives because the rest of us would rather be entertained than discerning, and because it costs something to be the one who says out loud that this is not of God.

It still costs something. Say it anyway.