The snake is back. The wolf in sheep’s clothing is telling the story.
Jesus did not tell his followers that such wolves do not exist. He told them how to recognize them.
“Beware of false prophets,” he says, because they arrive “in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Then comes the test: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:15–20).
The instruction is evidential: do not judge the organism by its camouflage. Observe what it repeatedly produces. A claim to holiness is not evidence of holiness.
This matters because there is a strange mutation of Christianity in which discernment becomes unchristian while loyalty to predatory people becomes evidence of faith. Wealth gets mistaken for blessing; power for moral authority. The carnival barker announces himself as God’s instrument, and his audience forgets to check whether the bearded lady ever showed up.
Jesus says: check the fruit.
Paul is even less polite. Writing to Christians in Corinth—a prosperous Roman commercial city where patronage and public status mattered—he mocks people who imagine themselves sophisticated while submitting to exploitation: “ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise.” They tolerate people who enslave them, “devour” them, take from them, exalt themselves, even strike them (2 Corinthians 11:19–20).
There is contempt for the predator, certainly. But also exasperation with the mark.
Jeremiah supplies the economic mechanism. He describes wicked men setting traps for other human beings until their houses are “full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich” (Jeremiah 5:26–31). His ministry unfolded in Judah’s final decades before the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. These are warnings about a society’s direction, not merely somebody’s private failings.
The remarkable word is therefore. Wealth is not the offense. The causal vector is: deceit → enrichment.
Moral geometry gives us another way to examine that distinction. Money is stored agency: it expands the futures a person can reach and can insulate them from costs that constrain everyone else. Philanthropy and noblesse oblige express an answer, however imperfectly honored: extraordinary advantage should bring obligations to others, including higher standards of public conduct. Greater power should increase responsibility, not purchase exemption from it.
But generosity cannot retroactively make exploitation innocent. The question is not simply how much wealth gets given away. It is also how that wealth was accumulated, who paid for it, and whether they have been made whole.
At the lightward apex, accumulated capacity bends outward into generosity, restraint and stewardship. In my white-hole/black-hole model, one orientation releases resources, agency and possibility into the surrounding field. The other draws people’s labor, attention and suffering—and eventually institutions themselves—inward toward the self.
One produces ripples. The other consumes the horizon.
Invent something wonderful and become fabulously wealthy? Good. Build houses. Cure leukemia. Write novels. Make better batteries. But if your fortune depends upon concealing risks or transferring costs onto people unable to refuse them, Scripture has categories for that too.
It does not call it winning.
Paul offers another diagnostic in Galatians: love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance—the “fruit of the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22–23). Character becomes visible because an orientation repeatedly leaves traces in the world. Fruit accumulates. So do cruelty and generosity, dishonesty and fidelity. Eventually anecdotes become a data set.
That is moral geometry: not a label attached to a person, but the direction in which a life bends relationships around itself. The ripples are what we leave behind, waves propagating through a veiled horizon. I have written about those ripples before, when restarting Gator Freethought continued producing consequences for people and institutions years after I left Gainesville. Good and evil share this property: neither necessarily terminates at the person who initiates it.
No community can prevent every predator from entering. The deeper failure comes when the sheep surrender their powers of discernment—when they let the wolf drape itself in wool, put on a trucker hat, declare itself the authentic voice of the flock, and point toward some frightened lamb at the edge of the field: There. That’s the predator.
This is counterfeit identity as a technology of power. The wolf wants more than access. It wants the flock’s trust and, eventually, the authority to decide who belongs inside the fence.
Which brings us back to the snake.
TЯ*mp has spent years performing “The Snake,” the song about a woman who rescues a freezing snake, nurses it back to health, and is rewarded by being bitten. When she protests, its answer is essentially that she knew what she was taking in. TЯ*mp has used the story to warn against immigrants.
After his hundred-day rally in 2017, I wrote that the story was really about him, not immigrants. I returned to the point in 2018: the con man, liar and self-promoter was not hiding beneath elaborate camouflage. I tagged it #TrumpIsTheSnake.
It may be the most accidentally autobiographical thing he has ever performed. He tells a cheering crowd to believe the evidence about a predator’s nature, then persuades them that the snake is somebody else.
In Sketching the Lines of Conscience, I argued that corruption is an orientation, not merely a collection of isolated scandals. A sufficiently long record reveals the direction of travel. The costume does not erase the record.
Matthew records another instruction: “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Wisdom does not require becoming the predator. Harmlessness does not require volunteering as prey.
There will always be con men, opportunists and false prophets. Civilization does not require making them extinct. It requires learning not to invite them into the pantry, the pulpit—and for fuck’s sake, not the presidency.
The other sheep are not your enemy because the wolf says they are. You do not have to hate the wolf. You can admire its power and beauty while recognizing its danger to your family.
Loving your neighbor does not mean spending every conversation pointing out the rotten, wormy fruit they insist on eating. But it cannot mean helping the wolf at the flock’s expense.
And when the snake keeps telling you what snakes do, perhaps believe him.
Related Posts
Dimensional Reduction in Moral Space
How relationships make it possible for suffering, responsibility and consequences to be shared, concealed or displaced.
Backlash at Haggard’s Church — When Giants Fall, Ripple Effects
An earlier examination of the damage a religious leader’s misconduct can inflict on the community that trusted him.
Snake Handling
The circular logic of protecting a belief by treating its failures as evidence against the believer.
Feedback Must Bite (Neural & Social Friction)
Why detecting an error is not enough when correction cannot change behavior or impose consequences.
The Veil Is the Enemy, Not the End
Unveiling as a moral task: making relationships, costs and orientations legible beneath the stories that conceal them.
