WHO IS THE PSALMIST? A response to Adam Joyce

I submitted this piece to Sojourners on May 13, 2026, as a direct response to Adam Joyce’s essay published there. After receiving no response for five days, I escalated to the editor in chief. On May 19, Betsy Shirley replied that they “receive a large number of pitches” and “regret we are unable to use this one.” No editorial reason was given. I asked for one. I am still waiting. Draw your own conclusions about what Sojourners believes the imprecatory psalms are for, and who gets to pray them.

Adam Joyce is right that Pete Hegseth doesn't own the psalms. He is right that imprecatory prayer is legitimate Christian practice. He is right that rightly ordered rage is part of the life of faith, and that the full emotional vocabulary of the Psalter belongs to those who pray against injustice, not to those who pray for conquest. These are not small concessions. They matter.

But I want to press a question Adam's essay doesn't ask: Who is the psalmist?

Adam writes as a taxpaying citizen, angry that his money funds death. That is a real and legitimate grief. But the imprecatory psalms don't emerge from that location. They emerge from the martial margins — from bodies already conscripted into the violence, already expendable to the administrative center, already paying a cost the center will never acknowledge. David, a former foot soldier, writes his cursing psalms not from the position of the prophet watching the war machine from a distance. He writes them from inside it, as someone whose body the machine has already used.

This matters because the biblical tradition Adam invokes is more complicated than his essay allows. The anti-imperial sentiment he rightly names has a genealogy that runs straight through one of Israel's most painful internal conflicts: the rupture between the Davidic south and the northern tribes who bore the weight of Solomon's consolidation program. The northern tribes were not pacifists who lost. They were the pugnatious rural population (agrarian, armed, and, ultimately, disposable) on whose labor and bodies the pax Solomonica was built. Solomon's program centralized taxation, conscripted labor, and cultic authority in Jerusalem. It purchased peace for the administrative center by extracting everything from the margins. When the northern tribes revolted, it was not because they loved war. It was because the peace of the center had been built on their backs, and then their concerns were managed rather than heard.

This is not ancient history. It is the template.

Adam's call for Christians “to gut military budgets” and “decrease military personnel” is framed as the imprecatory psalms' demand. But I'd suggest it more closely resembles Solomonic entitlement: a program decided at the administrative center, imposed on the martial margins, in the name of peace. The singular Christian calling Adam announces, of "defeating fascism at home and undoing the American empire abroad," is announced from a position that has not had to pay the costs the margins pay. It is proclaimed from the same kind of institutional perch the northern tribes recognized and resented.

There is a further complication. Adam invokes Jeremiah Wright as the prophetic voice for this moment, and rightly so — Wright's "God damn America" is among the most theologically serious statements of the last half century. But Wright was a Navy corpsman before he was a prophet. He served in the Johnson administration's medical unit. His prophetic rage against American imperial violence was earned from within the machine, not simply announced from afar. When Adam recruits Wright's words without Wright's embodied experience, something essential is lost. The imprecatory tradition in Black church life runs through military service, not around it. That's not incidental to Wright's authority. It is the source of it. And the left has been erasing the fatigued founders from the civil rights movement for years.

Jesus does not resolve this conflict by validating the civilian protest tradition. He enters a situation in which even the temple, the ostensible symbol of Solomonic-Davidic resistance to empire, has been quietly captured. Herod's massive renovation of the Second Temple was not a restoration. When a Roman puppet “took away the old foundations,” the rural poor recognized the pattern; imperial revisionism dressed in sacred architecture. It was “bread and circuses” before the Colosseum even began construction: the building was shinier than ever, and nobody was supposed to notice what had been lost in the demolition. The institution Jesus disrupts is not authentically itself, and hasn’t been for at least a generation. It is a Roman-Idumean fusion project wearing the face of inherited Israelite legitimacy.

The disruption Jesus enacts by his earthly ministry is not a protest from outside. It is a confrontation from within, by someone whose body is already positioned inside the immoral and extractive cost of empire, at personal and, potentially, “ultimate” expense. That is the model the imprecatory psalms anticipate. Not the managed rage of the administrative center (re)directed against some external war machine, but the embodied, costly, credibility-bearing voice of those the machine has already chewed up and spit out. 

Adam wants the same future I want: aircraft carriers into housing, rifles into gardening tools. I am not his opponent. But if the peace tradition wants to pray the imprecatory psalms with integrity, if it wants its rage to be righteous rather than merely rhetorical, it has to reckon with who has earned the right to lead the congregation in singing them. The singular, inescapable calling Adam announces lands differently upon the new recruit at Fort Cavazos trying to live faithfully inside the institution than it does on the civilian who has only ever watched that institution from outside. Both soldier and civilian may feel the same way, but only one has the scars showing they’re capable of bearing the painful weight of the labor to come. 

You cannot pray the psalms of the martial margins against them and call it prophetic. You can only pray them with those margins, from inside the cost they bear. That is where the psalmist stands; not above the muddied assembly, but diffuse somewhere within its rank and file members. Because that is where credibility lives, where the heart of a people dwells. And that is where, if the peace tradition is willing to go, the nonviolent, spiritual battles might actually be won.

Logan M. Isaac is a combat veteran, professed monk, and author of God is a Grunt (Hachette, 2022). He is the plaintiff in Isaac v. Manning (6:25-cv-01159), a federal civil rights seeking enforcement of the Ku Klux Klan Act, and was arrested April 1, 2026, while advocating for military families in the middle of Holy Week; learn more at gijustice.com/isaac-v-oregon. Follow him on Bluesky @loganmartinisaac.com