The Python Is Awake

Trump, the SBC, the Epstein Files, and the ancient spirit that connects them all

There is a Greek word in Acts 16 that most people read right past.

Pneuma pythona. The spirit of the Python. A young girl in Philippi, described by Luke with almost clinical detachment, carries this python spirit. She is economically productive. Her bondage has become lucrative, her captivity is organized, and her suffering is monetized. Her owners don’t want her to be healed, they would rather have her useful.

The Python, in ancient mythology, was the great serpent coiled around the oracle at Delphi, the keeper of secrets, the guardian of prophetic access. Slain by Apollo but never fully gone, some say the Python’s spirit lingered, its primary function to speak on behalf of the powerful and silence everyone else.

To be wrapped by the Python was to have your voice strangled from the inside out.

I’d like to suggest to you that we are living in a Python moment.

---

“Quiet. Quiet, Piggy.”

Last week, President Donald Trump walked off the set of a Meet the Press interview with Kristen Welker, calling her “either crooked or stupid” before leaving mid-conversation. It was a spectacle. It was also a normal pattern.

In November 2025, Trump told Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey to stop talking, calling her “piggy.” He told ABC’s Rachel Scott she was “the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place.” He called a Black female reporter “a dumb person” for pointing out that a White House renovation project had doubled in cost.

He has attacked women journalists by name, by demeanor, by perceived smile (or lack thereof). There is no way around, POTUS has shown a pattern of silencing women who ask questions of him.

(Now…hold tight and remember the Python spirit as we talk empire for a hot sec.)

Empire, and make no mistake, what we are watching is the operating logic of empire, runs on controlled narrative. The first casualty of every consolidating power is not the opposition party. It is an interrogatory question. The inconvenient, persistent, expensive question that is asked by someone who was not supposed to speak.

When a president calls a female reporter “piggy” and tells her to be quiet, he is not just being rude. He is showing whose voice matters. He is enforcing a hierarchy. He is saying, I will decide who speaks, and about what, and for how long. (Big Python vibes here)

The girl in Philippi didn’t choose her condition. She was in it, and her captors had dressed her suffering up as some type of spiritual significance. When Paul finally sets her free, the text states, her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone.

This wasn’t about a theology or worldview. The trigger for a chain of events that would lead to Paul and Silas’ imprisonment was profit margin.

It’s always the profit margin. It’s always about the power.

---

Now on to the Epstein Files

The House of Representatives voted 427–1 to release all documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. That is as close to unanimous as American governance gets.

And yet, the files have been delayed, redacted, slow-walked, and selectively released in ways that have protected the powerful at every turn. Three million documents were released in January 2026. Already released emails include Epstein referencing Trump and writing of him: “Of course he knew about the gir—” The sentence trails off in the document. The redactions seem to hold.

(More python vibes)

What is the Epstein case? It is the story of powerful men, Democrats and Republicans alike, financiers, royalty, and celebrities, who built a system that trafficked in the bodies of young women and girls (just like the one in Acts 16), who used money and access and silence as the operating mechanism, who found that every institution meant to expose them could also be leveraged to protect them.

This is the Python’s most sophisticated form. This Spirit is not about some crude and overt street-corner silencing. But instead the systemic kind, where silence is baked into the architecture. Where NDAs replace open conversations, and where money replaces accountability.

Willie James Jennings, writing about the book of Acts, says something that has stuck with me for years: “Acts is not primarily a manual for church growth, it is a story about the Spirit of God moving through Empire, exposing what empire needs to stay intact. And what empire always needs is someone to exploit.”

Egypt needed it. Rome needed it. The Spanish Crown needed it. The antebellum South needed it.

Every empire needs a group of people whose suffering funds the comfort and power of everyone above them, and a Python-like spirit to ensure that this group cannot speak coherently or in unity about what is happening to them.

The Epstein files reveal the shape of a system designed to coil around the most vulnerable, extract from them, and silence anyone who tries to name it.

---

And now, let’s talk about the Southern Baptist Convention

This week, in Orlando, Florida, the Southern Baptist Convention voted 6,028 to 2,026, a 3-to-1 margin, to advance a formal constitutional ban on women serving as pastors. The amendment would expel any church that affirms, appoints, or endorses a woman “serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, specifically preaching to the assembled congregation.”

To understand this moment, you have to understand the history.

The SBC was founded in 1845. The reason it split from Northern Baptists was not a polite theological disagreement. It was slavery. The SBC broke away to defend the right of slaveholders to be missionaries. This is the institution’s origin story.

In 1995, the SBC formally apologized for its role in supporting slavery and racial segregation. That was 150 years after the founding. (Yes, Church folk are slow sometimes).

But let’s name the pattern once again. The Spirit of the Python seems to be moving these days.

The Python’s method is always the same: identify the voice that threatens the arrangement. Give that silencing theological language. Build it into the constitution so that it is no longer a preference but a requirement. Then enforce it with exclusion.

The SBC has, in recent years, also been rocked by devastating sexual abuse scandals, a years-long investigation revealed that hundreds of church leaders had been accused of abuse, and that SBC leadership had, for decades, actively worked to protect the institution rather than the victims. (That is some python work right there).

Many of those victims were women. Many of the voices calling for accountability were women. Many of the people the SBC has expelled have been churches that allowed women to preach.

I am asking you to sit with that architecture.

In a denomination still reckoning with the systemic silencing of abused women, the convention this week voted, overwhelmingly, to constitutionally prohibit women from speaking from the front of the room.

A system where the people most harmed are also the people most officially silenced is not a theological position. It is the Philippian ownership structure.

It is that python once again.

---

Why Is the Python Stirring?

Here is a question I have been sitting with for the past year: why now?

Why does the silencing seem to be getting louder? Why is the suppression so aggressive? Why does it feel like every institution political, religious, financial is working overtime to keep certain voices from being heard?

Because the Python stirs when the Spirit is moving.

That is the logic of Acts 16. Paul and Silas didn’t set out to cause a riot, they set out to pray and announce the Kingdom of Jesus. It was the gospel itself alive, disruptive, economically inconvenient that created the crisis. The Python doesn’t coil tighter around silence that isn’t threatening. It coils tighter because something is trying to get free from its grip.

In the antebellum South, slaveholders did not become more violent and more elaborate in their defenses of slavery when abolition was losing. They became more violent when it was gaining. The Python tightens when the ground shakes!!

We are living in a shaking moment.

Women are speaking. Survivors are naming. Journalists are pressing. The documents are trickling out despite the redactions. The questions are being asked despite the walkouts, the insults, the “quiet, piggy.” And every time the Python tightens, it is also ( if you have eyes to see it ), revealing itself.

A system confident in its permanence does not need to silence its critics. A system that is afraid must.

---

What Gets You Arrested

The gospel Paul and Silas were carrying didn’t get them in trouble because they said it wrong. It got them in trouble because of what it was. It was the content that disrupted. This is what the liberating gospel of Jesus does.

It freed a girl from a Python. It disrupted a profit margin. It converted a jailer, a man who was Roman infrastructure in human form , and gave him new hands. Hands that hours before had locked them in stocks. Now washing their wounds.

Here is the uncomfortable question I am sitting with this week, watching a president tell women reporters to be quiet, watching a denomination constitutionally silence women’s voices, watching powerful men delay documents that name what happened to powerless girls:

Whose interests does my Christianity serve?

Not my theology. My embodied Christianity. The practiced, economic, social, political shape of how my faith actually moves through the world. Whose interests does it protect?

Because the Python doesn’t mind a Christianity that stays in the head. It doesn’t mind a Christianity that governs private morality and shows up on Sunday to church service. It doesn’t mind a Christianity that talks about heaven as long as it doesn’t talk about this.

It only minds a Christianity that threatens the arrangement the powerful have made to accrue more power and more profit.

The girl in Philippi was set free. Her owners were furious. Her freedom was expensive to the people who had built their lives on her captivity.

The question is not whether you believe in the Python spirit. You can see it this week in the news cycle.

The question is whether the Jesus you follow is the kind who walks into Philippi and, knowing exactly what it will cost, knowing the arrest is coming , says the words anyway.

“Come out of her”.