Before he became one of the 20th century’s most influential Christian writers, C.S. Lewis was a committed atheist who regarded religion with suspicion, irritation, and eventually contempt.

Christianity seemed to him a relic of humanity’s intellectual childhood — a comforting story for people unable to face reality without divine reassurance.

‘Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about “man’s search for God.” … To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.’

Return to sender

Lewis’ loss of faith began early. Though raised in a nominally Christian household in Belfast, his childhood belief collapsed after the death of his mother from cancer when he was just 9 years old.

“With my mother’s death,” he later wrote in his memoir, “Surprised by Joy,” “all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.”

Prayer seemed useless. God, if He existed at all, appeared absent and indifferent. Lewis later compared the experience to writing letters to someone who never replied.

As he grew older, his atheism hardened. Immersed in classical literature, philosophy, and modern rationalism, Lewis came to regard Christianity as one mythology among many — no more objectively true than the pagan stories he admired in ancient texts.

At Oxford, he became known among friends as a “foul-mouthed and riotously amusing atheist.” The horrors of the First World War only deepened his disbelief. After surviving trench warfare and seeing death at close range, Lewis later remarked with grim pride: “I never sank so low as to pray.”

Yet even at the height of his atheism, cracks had begun to appear.

Deeper longing

Lewis found himself haunted by experiences that materialism could not easily explain: sudden moments of longing triggered by music, poetry, memory, or beauty. Reading certain books or encountering particular images awakened in him what he later described as an intense, almost painful desire for something beyond ordinary experience.

“An unsatisfied desire,” he wrote, “which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. I call it Joy.”

If human beings consistently longed for something no earthly experience could fully satisfy, what did that suggest? Hunger points to food. Thirst points to water. Why should this deeper longing exist at all if reality were ultimately meaningless?

Lewis slowly began to suspect that the longing was not accidental. Just as hunger points to food and thirst to water, this deeper want revealed something essential about human beings. As he would write in “Mere Christianity,” “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

He also found that his outrage at injustice itself suggested a moral framework that preceded humanity.

“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?”

RELATED: Chuck Colson: Nixon loyalist who found hope in true obedience

Washington Post/Getty Images

Kicking and screaming

Lewis did not move suddenly from atheism to Christianity. He resisted all the way, considering himself “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”

“Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God,’” he wrote. “To me, as I then was, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat.”

Eventually, the chase ended. But having acknowledged God’s existence, Christianity itself remained a stumbling block.

Lewis loved mythology deeply and still regarded the Gospels as one myth among many. The breakthrough came largely through conversations with friends, including J.R.R. Tolkien, who challenged his assumption that myth and truth were opposites.

Christianity, Tolkien argued, was the “true myth”: the story toward which humanity’s myths and legends had always pointed, but one that had entered actual history.

The truth of myth

The idea struck Lewis with enormous force.

Themes that echoed through pagan mythology — sacrifice, death, resurrection, redemption — were not evidence that Christianity was fabricated, Lewis came to believe. They were signs that humanity had been reaching toward the same truth all along.

Soon afterward, while riding in the sidecar of his brother’s motorcycle on the way to a zoo, Lewis realized the final barrier had fallen. “When we set out,” he wrote in “Surprised by Joy,” “I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”

That belief shaped the rest of his life, which he would devote to helping make Christianity intellectually serious and imaginatively alive for millions of readers.

​Faith, Christianity, Lifestyle, Conversion, Cs lewis 

AI is infiltrating the church, and most Christians have no idea.

A recent Barna study found that while only 1 in 10 pastors (12%) were comfortable using AI to write sermons, 2 in 5 (43%) believed it was OK to use AI to research and prepare for a sermon.

The study also found that 3 in 4 U.S. pastors (77%) agree that “God can work through AI,” and 58% said they “are comfortable using AI to assist in some form of communication.”

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey is horrified.

“Spiritual maturity is not going to happen through telling ChatGPT, ‘Write me a three-part sermon on gratitude,’ and then reading that off to the congregation,” she comments.

“Plus, using ChatGPT or any AI to write your sermon is dishonest because everyone is assuming that that’s something that you wrote that God revealed to you through his word and through prayer,” she says. “But it’s not. It’s not revelation from God, a special revelation that we find in Scripture.”

“It is something that was summarized by a computer, and it is also taking someone else’s work. Again, all of these artificial intelligence machines are just taking ideas that have already been iterated by someone else,” she continues.

“It also bypasses the pastor’s own engagement with Scripture and the work of preparing the sermon himself. You want your pastor to be sanctified and washed in the word. You want him to be engaging with Scripture. … You want him to be further ahead spiritually than you are,” she adds. “And that cannot happen if he is outsourcing that sanctifying act to AI.”

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Allie beth stuckey, Pastor, The bible, Artificial intelligence, Scripture, Christianity, Relatable with allie beth stuckey 

Cities are starting to reject the idea of having surveillance cameras that promise to curb crime, but there’s a long way to go.

In fact, the largest surveillance company in the United States says it’s under attack from activists who want to defund the police.

‘Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack.’

Citizens can now view a comprehensive map of Automated License Plate Recognition cameras that are popping up in cities all along the coastline and the Great Lakes region.

As it stands, there are almost 100,000 of these cameras in place in the United States. According to DeFlock Maps, the exact number is just north of 97,000, with a vast majority of them (80,000+) coming from one company: Flock Safety.

This tech and surveillance company out of Atlanta has about 1,500 employees and has been steadily building its network that promises a decrease in crime in communities that implement its systems.

On its website, Flock cites that it is trusted by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, providing examples like a 56% reduction in year-over-year crime in one California city and a 52% reduction in robberies in Cobb County, Georgia.

These solar-powered, AI-backed cameras are meant to operate as part of a complex grid of connected devices that allow police agencies to tap into surveillance inside stores, parking lots, and city streets to identify suspects and the cars they are driving; all to allegedly solve crimes.

However, some cities have rejected the service on grounds of citizen privacy.

RELATED: Meta’s Ray-Bans allegedly record your private moments — as contractors watch it all

Hyoung Chang/Denver Post

In addition to Bend, Oregon, where a comprehensive report about the surveillance capabilities appeared on CNet, Charlottesville and Staunton, Virginia, both ended their contracts with Flock and both received an email from the company that was described as “pouting.”

“That email was sent to every client that they had, including us,” Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis said. “I looked at it and just, honestly, chalked it up to an unprofessional email from a venting CEO. I just ignored it, I’ll be honest,” he told Cville Right Now.

Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams shared the email he received from Flock CEO Garrett Langley, which claimed the company was under “attack” from activists.

“Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack. The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this for forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding,” Langley wrote.

The CEO continued, saying the same activist groups “who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness” were behind critical YouTube videos and misleading headlines.

The letter, dated December 8, 2025, received a response from Williams four days later, which read:

“As far as your assertion that we are current[y under attack, I do not believe that this is so. … What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents, and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes.”

Just a week later, Staunton announced it was terminating its contract with Flock.

RELATED: ‘Everything on the internet is fake’: Social media marketers reveal that most online trends are fabricated

One of the organizations Langley may be referring to is the ACLU, which said last August that Flock was building a “dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.”

However, the ACLU’s main concern was that the resources were being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement against illegal immigrants.

Still, Langley is consistently stating that voting Flock out of jurisdictions will hinder the prevention of gun crime. The CEO cited a Mississippi city that allegedly saw violent crime decrease by 79% and homicide by 90% in one year.

Langley wrote on X, “When the loudest voices tell you to vote Flock out of your community, ask yourself: are they also the ones outraged by gun violence when a shooting occurs, or in this case 12?”

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

​Ai, Charlottesville, Return, Surveillance, Tech, Immigration and customs enforcement 

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American founding, it’s important to point out that the Declaration of Independence does not begin with politics. Before it speaks of rights, consent, or government, it makes a claim about the structure of reality itself.

The rights it asserts are not the product of historical circumstance or collective will. They are grounded in a prior truth: that human beings are created by God.

The Declaration’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” is not ornamental or rhetorical — it is the foundation on which its entire argument rests. The founders believed they were obligated to explain to mankind the reasons for their separation, and those reasons started with God and His law.

The Declaration of Independence is precisely that: a declaration of independence. It is not a confession of faith, a catechism, or a constitution.

With this foundation, we can then proceed to the Declaration’s most famous sentence — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Though it is often treated as a moral flourish or a proto-democratic slogan, it is in fact a tightly ordered philosophical claim that proceeds in three stages, each dependent on the one before it.

First, it makes an epistemological assertion: These truths are “self-evident.” They are not established by deduction, tradition, or positive law, but are known by reflecting on the observable world. Truths about God, human beings, and the good must be knowable if human beings are to be responsible for ordering their lives and laws accordingly.

To deny that such truths can be known is not merely to revise political theory, but to undermine moral accountability itself.

Second, the Declaration makes a metaphysical claim: Human beings are created and therefore possess a given nature. Equality is not asserted as a political preference but affirmed as a consequence of creation. It follows from the reality of a shared human nature, which exists because God created it. Human equality is intelligible only if there is something real that human beings equally are.

Third, the Declaration draws an ethical conclusion: Because human beings are created in this way, they are endowed with rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) that no just government may rightly violate. To say that human beings are created by God is to say that they possess a given nature grounded in divine intention, not in change, appetite, or contingency.

This sequence is as decisive as it is brilliant. Remove any part of it and the argument collapses. Without a grounding in self-evident truths, claims about rights become matters of opinion or will. Without creation, equality loses its grounding in nature and becomes a political assertion to be enforced rather than an a priori truth. Without both, liberty ceases to be a moral claim and becomes a grant of the state for licentiousness. What remains is a thinner conception of freedom — one incapable of sustaining either justice or joy.

The assumptions that creation is intelligible, that God is knowable, and that human beings are responsible for acknowledging both stand at the foundation of the American experiment. They are the stress points at which its coherence either holds or fails.

RELATED: Trump’s Supreme Court keeps finding ways to fail his voters

OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP/Getty Images

At this point, the Christian reader may be tempted to object that the Declaration does not go far enough. It speaks of God as Creator but says nothing of Christ. It appeals to natural theology but makes no reference to revealed religion. Does it leave us stranded with a Deistic account of God or a thin moralism that cannot sustain the claims it makes?

The concern is understandable, especially when the Declaration is contrasted with documents such as the Solemn League and Covenant that explicitly confessed allegiance to Christ the King. Yet this objection rests on a misunderstanding of both the Declaration’s purpose and the relation between natural and revealed religion.

The Declaration of Independence is precisely that: a declaration of independence. It is not a confession of faith, a catechism, or a constitution.

It has a specific and limited purpose: to justify political separation from Great Britain by appealing to truths binding on all human beings as such. The absence of explicit Christological language does not indicate theological indifference, but a focus on the specific political question at hand.

It is also worth remembering that many of the founders likely assumed that explicitly Christian commitments would find expression elsewhere. Nearly every state constitution in the founding era contained explicit Christian language, often including affirmations of Christianity or requirements that officeholders affirm specific Protestant beliefs.

The Declaration was never intended to bear the full theological weight of American public life on its own. It establishes a common foundation; it does not exhaust the moral or religious commitments of the people who affirmed it.

Just as Romans 1 demonstrates there is a clear general revelation that shows the reality of universal sin and then explains our need for Christ, the Declaration’s three-fold assertion of knowability, God, and what is good provides a basis for the path to salvation.

This points to a second consideration: The Declaration’s appeal to natural theology is not compatible with every religious or philosophical system. The Declaration’s affirmation of God the Creator excludes belief systems that deny God the Creator.

It presupposes that God is distinct from the world, that the world is created rather than eternal, and that human beings possess a knowable nature grounded in that act of creation. Natural theology, in this view, is neither trivial nor thin; it is full and clear. It tells us a great deal about God, about ourselves, and about the moral order.

RELATED: How to fix the woke teacher problem

H. Rick Bamman/Pioneer Press/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

At the same time, natural theology is not redemptive revelation. Scripture does not merely restate natural truths more clearly or add moral instruction where reason falters. It answers a question that natural theology cannot answer on its own: how a just and holy God redeems sinners who suppress the truth they ought to know.

The founders were well aware of this distinction. The Bible was the most frequently cited book in their writings, and most took for granted that Christianity answered the question of redemption. Yet they also recognized that this answer could not be imposed by civil authority without corrupting both church and state.

They had no interest in adjudicating disputes among Protestants, much less between Protestants and Roman Catholics. The Declaration’s silence on these matters reflects not skepticism about Christian truth, but a judgment about political competence.

In this light, the Declaration’s appeal to natural theology appears not as a theological retreat, but as a principled boundary. It affirms all that reason can and must know about God and human nature, while leaving the work of redemption where it belongs: in the proclamation of the gospel and the ministry of the church.

The coherence of the American experiment depends on honoring both truths. Confuse them, and politics becomes a counterfeit religion. Separate them rightly, and both church and state are free to pursue their proper ends. This can serve as a call back to American Christians to remember the need for evangelical work if they hope for lasting positive change in America.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the American Mind.

​Declaration of independence, Human nature, Natural theology, America 250, Founding fathers, American founding, Constitution, Opinion & analysis 

BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey grew up listening to the Christian music group Avalon, whose song “Testify to Love” had become an anthem for Christians all over the country.

However, not even religious music is safe from the LGBTQ community.

“Here’s some bad news. Now, we are being told retroactively that ‘Testify to Love’ by the CCM band Avalon is actually an anthem of queer love,” Stuckey explains.

“I am not joking that this is now an LGBTQ-affirming anthem,” she says.

Former member Melissa Greene wrote in a substack post on the topic: “’Testify to Love’ drops today, originally recorded by Avalon, re-recorded by Michael Passons, Ty Herndon, and me. On Wednesday, we shot the music video. At the end of it, the three of us looked at each other, proud, and ultimately saying LOVE is for everyone.”

“She went on to talk about, in her Substack, her collaborator on the track, Passons, another former Avalon member who was removed from the group after he identified as gay many years ago,” Stuckey explains.

“In 2020, Passons appeared on an episode of a podcast and said that his bandmates visited his home and told him he was no longer allowed to be in the group because he was homosexual,” she continues.

While Greene now regrets viewing “some love as acceptable” and others as not acceptable, Stuckey explains that actually, some love is unacceptable.

“If you are talking about a grown-up loving a child in a way that is inappropriate, that kind of love is unacceptable. I’m not even making the comparison of pedophilia to LGBTQ right now. That’s not the point. I’m just saying that in principle, like you understand, the logic that some love isn’t acceptable actually does hold water,” she says.

Greene also wrote that Passons “never needed to be redeemed.”

“Uh-oh,” Stuckey comments.

“This phenomenon of believing that we are actually nicer than God, that we’re wiser than God, that we’re more compassionate than Him, that Romans 1 is too mean, that Genesis 1:27 is too cruel, that 1 Corinthians 6 is just too harsh, that passages that positively affirm the holiness of marriage between one man and one woman and the exclusive holiness of sexual activity within that marriage between one man and one woman,” she says, “it’s just too much to bear.”

“The truth is that we are not nicer than God. We don’t know better than Him. We’re not more compassionate than Him. And if something to us seems wrong or seems cruel or seems confusing when we go to the word of God, the problem is not with God,” she continues.

“It’s not with His word. It’s with us,” she adds.

Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?

To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Relatable with allie beth stuckey, Avalon, Testify to love, Michael passons, Ty herndon, Melissa greene, Christianity, Lgbtq 

In the past, assassination attempts against a president were fairly simple, Glenn Beck says.

“It looked like one guy, one gun.”

But those days, he argues, are “absolutely gone.”

Today, assassination attempts — especially those against President Trump — look “really different.”

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck program,” Glenn exposes a terrifying pattern behind the numerous attempts on Donald Trump’s life.

The first attempt to assassinate Trump occurred in 2016 at a rally in Las Vegas when a young man tried to grab a police officer’s gun with the stated intention of shooting and killing Trump.

“That’s the old model,” Glenn says.

But in 2017, things began to take a darker turn.

In September of that year, during President Trump’s visit to a refinery in Mandan, North Dakota, a man stole a forklift and tried to enter the presidential motorcade route with the intent to flip Trump’s limousine and kill him.

“To me, this is the difference between planting a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center and then that not working, and then trying to fly airplanes into the side of the building five years later,” Glenn says, highlighting the growing desire for “spectacle.”

In 2020, things progressed again when a Canadian woman mailed a letter containing homemade ricin (a highly toxic poison) addressed to then-President Trump at the White House.

“Distance now is entering the picture,” Glenn says. “You don’t need access; you just need to find a way to get proximity.”

Then came the closest attempt in 2024, when at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire from a rooftop with an AR-15-style rifle, grazing President Trump in the ear.

“This is no longer chaotic. This is … well-planned and calculated,” Glenn says, drawing attention to all the “warnings” leading up to Crooks’ attempt, most notably the numerous sightings of Crooks on a strangely unguarded rooftop.

Two months later at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, 58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh hid in bushes along the course with an AK-47-style rifle and a scope, lying in wait to shoot President Trump while he was golfing, but was spotted by Secret Service agents before Trump arrived at that hole.

“This is not anger anymore. Now they’re stalking him,” Glenn says.

“Behind the scenes, federal prosecutors uncover a plot tied to individuals linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. … Not just Trump, but several U.S. leaders are targeted,” he continues.

“Now, that’s a different category. … That’s geopolitical; that’s foreign terrorism.”

And finally, the latest attempt on President Trump’s life occurred just last month when armed gunman Cole Tomas Allen allegedly tried to storm the security perimeter at the Washington Hilton where President Trump was hosting the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He allegedly fired multiple shots in an attempt to kill Trump and other Cabinet officials, but Secret Service tackled and arrested him, preventing any casualties.

“I want you to think about the target. It’s not a rally; it’s not a golf course. It’s a room full of the leadership of the United States,” Glenn says. “That’s not an assassination. That’s destabilization. … That is the constitutional order being disrupted.”

Why have these assassination attempts become more organized and common?

Glenn answers that question by recapping three stories just from this month:

During a CNN interview, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow (Mich.) drew parallels between Nazi Germany and what’s happening under the Trump administration, citing an “authoritarian slide.” Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Raymond Chandler (Penn.) was arrested after allegedly leaving voicemails threatening to slit the throats of a Republican congressman and his young daughter, and making threats against President Trump.Mohamed Abdou, a former Columbia University professor who was fired in 2024 after publicly praising Hamas, Hezbollah, and the October 7 attacks, spoke at Virginia Tech as part of his “Death to the Akademy” tour. During the event, he openly declared support for Hamas/“Palestinian resistance”and explained the slogan “Death to America” as meaning a total end to the U.S. empire and the destruction of America as a “settler-colonial” project.

“What’s happening here, America? What’s changed?” Glenn asks.

“Everything,” he answers.

“It used to be one guy walking in behind President Lincoln and shooting him. … Now it’s layered. You have the lone actors; you also have the ideological extremists; you have the distance attacks, the mail, the surveillance, the infiltration,” he explains.

“But you also have something else. You have the failure points; you have the security gaps; you have the missed warnings; you have systems that don’t seem to be adapting, or at least not fast enough. But you also have, on top of that, foreign intelligence plots,” he continues.

But the media is silent on these matters.

Glenn pleads with his audience to “connect the dots.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​Glenn beck, The glenn beck program, Donald trump, Assassination attempts 

Whenever I see or hear the phrase “customer service,” I have to roll my eyes. Customer service? In the United States? No such thing.

There used to be. I remember it because I experienced it as a customer and I practiced it as a retail staffer.

The unspoken but obvious ethos is: ‘The customer is always wrong, and also he is oppressing me, a poor proletariat worker.’

We can get it back, but that requires understanding how we lost it. It also requires laying out the unspoken assumptions that drive the current “the customer is always wrong” attitude.

McDonald’s, Best Buy, Home Depot — sub in your favorite — all of them operate on these unspoken assumptions, and that’s why the “service” at all these places is nonexistent at best and hostile too often.

Service with a stare

First, let’s describe the problem with two anecdotes.

1. I walked into Tractor Supply. I asked the 19-year-old girl slouching against the counter where the kerosene was kept. “If we had any it would be, like … over on one of those aisles,” she said, waving her hand in a direction.

I said, “Are you able to check your system to find out where and if you have any in stock?”

She responded: “I can’t leave the register.”

That’s not what I asked. A second employee walked me to the aisle after (wait for it) logging into the register and checking the stock list. When I told him about the lazy response from his front-counter worker, he immediately defended her, with no apology: “Yeah, but she’s new.”

2. I went to a “casual dining” restaurant. It was the kind of local place that sells burgers for $19 along with local beer on tap. The waitress took our order, dropped the food on the table, and walked away. There was no silverware. No napkins. No salt and pepper. No plates for the shared dishes. It didn’t even occur to her.

When I asked, “May we have some silverware, please?” she stared at me with that blank look, turned around, got the silverware, and set it down. Yes, I’m saying she gave me the silent treatment; it’s common these days.

Communicating contempt

I’m going to stop at those two stories; they stand in for hundreds of similar transactions over the past 10 years or so. It doesn’t matter if it’s a chain restaurant or a corporate outlet store. Any time the staff are younger than about 40, this is what happens.

Several decades ago, I was a young staffer in my teens and 20s. I worked mall retail, then spent about a dozen years as a busboy, waiter, and barback. From my first job at 15 to my last retail job at 28, I would have been fired on the spot if I had behaved the way those employees did.

Why? Because it’s incompetent. It’s lazy. It’s not doing your job; it’s standing there getting paid while neglecting your work. And worst of all, it communicates contempt for the customer.

How did we get here?

I suspect we got here by the same means that brought us young adults who can’t do arithmetic, can’t write a topic sentence for a paragraph, and can’t sound out the word silhouette. That route can be called “lack of parenting” and “lack of teaching in public school.” Examining that is for a different article.

Whatever the reason, this is where we are today. It’s something we need to fix — and can fix, if we decide to.

Workers of the world … be polite!

When I was in retail, there was a too-hard bias toward the idea that “the customer is always right.” Too often, staff were expected to tolerate abusive behavior from customers — name-calling, lying to get free food, and so on — while the manager handed them their order for free.

But over the past decade or so, the pendulum hasn’t merely swung back toward protecting workers from abuse. It has swung toward a deeper assumption: that the customer himself is the problem.

Now we’ve reversed it in the other direction. The unspoken but obvious ethos is: “The customer is always wrong, and also he is oppressing me, a poor proletariat worker.”

The Marxist lens of “oppressed/oppressor” has seeped so far into our cultural fabric that restaurants openly admit they pay waiters low wages, then guilt customers into “remembering” to tip. If I had even hinted at that message when I was a waiter, I would have been clocked out and sent home permanently.

RELATED: The four Americans who just restored my faith in ‘customer service’

Bloomberg/Getty Images

Going off-script

Along with the customer-hostile attitude, modern retail tries to lock down employees’ actions with rigid steps. Maybe it’s fear of liability; maybe it’s not wanting to pay competent managers; maybe it’s something else. But the reason every customer-staffer transaction feels robotic is because it is. Businesses no longer allow staff to exercise judgment. You can hear it when the cashier works hard to recite the script verbatim. You can tell they’re not allowed to think, because if you ask a question the script hasn’t anticipated, they get flustered — and that part isn’t their fault.

Compare today with this McDonald’s training video from 1992.

– YouTube

First, marvel at how much emphasis they put on making sure employees are pleasant to customers.

But more surprising, the trainer in the video explicitly encourages staff members to use their own judgment and alter what they say based on context. That happens around the 1:47 mark: “I was talking to [an employee] a little bit earlier, and he said that he was feeling really stiff having to say, ‘Welcome to McDonald’s, welcome to McDonald’s,’ over and over again,” she said. “So I told him what we tell our people all the time: Say what feels natural. But say it with a warm, sincere smile.”

Customer feedback

Sound crazy? It used to be normal. And we can bring it back if we make that choice. Customer-employee interactions don’t have to be fraught and robotic; the business world chose this.

Here are some guidelines every retail establishment should return to, none of which cost a single cent:

Make eye contact with every customer who approaches you. Greet every customer, and do it pleasantly. Prepare your workstation before customers arrive. Put down your phone; that’s not for work time. Think like a customer and figure out what they’ll need. Do not write verbatim scripts for employees. Walk them through customer service basics and answer their questions. Act it out. Role-play. Encourage employees to use reasonable discretion. Tone and personality vary from person to person; successful customer service depends on adapting to the person in front of you. If you don’t trust your staff to have the wiggle room to modify the exact words they use with customers, you’re either hiring bad people or you don’t know how to run a business. If that’s the case, find another trade.

This is a taller order for employers in 2026, because it’s sadly true that a large percentage of young staff today are badly socialized — or not socialized at all. Employers shouldn’t have to do what parents failed to do, but they’re going to have to if they care about the quality of their service. Good luck.

​Mcdonald’s, Culture, Customer service, Lifestyle, Manners, Marxism, Retail, Intervention