In three separate Father's Day services on 2021-06-20, the Crossroads megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio presented a moral lesson they called "Wild Ride." This sermon illustrated the soul's subjugation to God by means of bringing a "wild" horse into a ring at the center of the church. Over the course of an hour, the congregation watched as the professional rider Todd Pierce systematically abused ("broke") the animal. Four horses were subjected to this treatment, three across the 08:30, 10:30, and 12:00 services, and one as part of a separately filmed version intended for the church's website.

What makes this video more troubling than many of its kind are the statements Pierce makes during the successive "stages" of the breaking, in the persona of God the Father. Early on, and while he is chasing the frightened horse around the ring with his lasso, Pierce states: "I am powerful. I could hurt you. I could dominate you. I am love." And later, "Do you know that I'm powerful? Will you let me touch you where it hurts?" It is perfectly fitting that such a service was timed for Father's Day, for there is nothing more distinctly paternal than physical violence masked as discipline. In this sense, Pierce conducts himself expertly, phasing between a father's roles as tyrant, abuser, and lawgiver.

It is natural to want to ascribe this event to mere "toxic" American masculinity, but a closer look will be instructive. In one of the first and most significant discursive points in the sermon, Pierce states: "This horse is dead in its sin. Its sin isn't something that it's doing wrong. Its sin is the fact that it's got an instinct, a nature, that it's born into." This is a telling remark, and crucial to understanding the mentality of the one who made it. To the extent that a being can exist independently of human domination, it is sinful, and quite literally, evil. Yet more than this: it is dead.

Using the domestication of a horse as a metaphor for the discipline of one's soul is at least as old as Plato's Phaedrus (246a–254e). Yet there are crucial differences between the allegory given by Plato and the one staged by Crossroads. Plato takes care in showing that his horses are mythical: for not only are they driven in a merely spiritual sense, by the immortal soul of a god or human being, but "winged" (ὑποπτέρου) is one of the first words used to describe them. The four horses brought to Crossroads were not mythical, but terrified beings of flesh and blood. They were on display for an audience, and their abuse was scored by a live band.

The only true religious sentiment is that which encourages an empathy with living beings: a radical empathy, one developed through extreme self-abnegation. The Christian should know this better than anyone, for such is the meaning of the Incarnation. Christ, "though existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something desirable (οὐχ ἁρπαγμὸν ἡγήσατο τὸ εἶναι ἴσα Θεῷ¹)." What was desirable was taking his boundless esteem (ἀγάπη) for other beings to the furthest limit. For as St. Paul continues, and in the supreme response to human suffering, he "emptied himself (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν)." At the moment his fullness was drained into nothingness, he took on human form. Yet still more than this: the form of a slave (μορφὴν δούλου).

We find the converse of this sentiment at work in the Crossroads sermon. Here we find the self glorified, and human beings worshiped in the place of the divine. More specifically, we find the worship of the human family. For if the watchword of the Christian is "he must increase while I must decrease²," the watchword of those whose religion is to "focus on the family" is "he must decrease while I must increase." He must decrease, so that I can be the king of my home, the ruler of my wife, and the master of my children. Christ's command to "call no man on earth father³" becomes "call no One in heaven your father: only me." For in his role qua father, every father supposes himself to be the one true God. Last Sunday, such a delusion occupied a ring in the center of a church turned stadium. A lone man with a lasso declared himself to the god of nature as well as the god of the family, and demonstrated this by means of pseudo-biblical ramblings and a riding crop. While Pierce lorded over one terrified horse, his acolytes sat in rapt attention. As strange and barbarous as this seems, it should not surprise us. Christian theology has long had a term for the worship of perverse human behavior. That term is idolatry.

In a blessing he gave to the crowd shortly before tying a rope around the horse's neck, Pierce mentioned that there are "a lot of men making babies, but we fathers are a dying breed." Let us hope this is the case.