It’s been two months since I last posted one of these, and really since the site saw any activity. I’m sorry for that. Had some health stuff going on throughout June and most of July, and wasn’t in the headspace to care about working on the site like I would have liked to. It wasn’t and isn’t anything serious (a hernia, some pelvic floor issues, and nervous system stuff leading to anxiety), but I just wasn’t in the mood to work on the site. I’m doing much better now, so hoping to get back on track now and starting that with relaunching The Sunday Sermon.
This is the second of three Sunday Sermons on Red Dead Redemption 2, and this one is about the villain. Except Dutch van der Linde isn’t quite a villain, and that’s exactly the problem.
The easy read of Dutch is that he’s a charismatic con man who talked a group of vulnerable people into following him off a cliff while genuinely believing he was leading them to freedom. That read isn’t wrong. But it isn’t complete either. Dutch van der Linde spent years building something real. He took in people who had nowhere else to go (orphans, outcasts, people who had been chewed up by a society that didn’t have space for them), and he gave them a family and a philosophy and a reason to keep moving. Arthur Morgan, who was taken in by Dutch as a teenager after his parents died, owes Dutch his life in the most literal sense. John Marston does too. Most of the gang does.
Dutch wasn’t always what he becomes in the final chapters of the game. What he built started as something good and then curdled, slowly, over years, under the pressure of a world that kept closing in on him and a self-belief that never allowed him to acknowledge that he might be wrong.
By the end of the game, Dutch has a saying he repeats constantly: “I have a plan.” He says it when the plan is clearly falling apart. He says it when people are dying because of his decisions. He says it when Arthur and John are looking at him with the specific expression of men who stopped believing the plan a long time ago. “I have a plan. I just need more time. I just need one more score.” The plan was always the thing. The belief in the plan was the only religion Dutch had left.
That sent me to 1 John 5:21.
It is the very last verse of the letter, tacked on at the end like a final warning: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols.”
Just that. No elaboration. After a full letter about love and truth and knowing God, John closes with that single sentence. Keep yourselves from idols.
An idol in scripture isn’t necessarily a carved statue. The concept is broader than that. An idol is anything you put in the place of God; anything you trust and serve and build your life around that isn’t worthy of that kind of devotion. Money is an idol. Power is an idol. Your own reputation can be an idol. And a vision for your life, a philosophy you’ve built your identity around, can become an idol too. Especially when you’ve been right enough times that you’ve stopped being able to tell the difference between your own judgment and divine direction.
Dutch believed in freedom. He believed in a life outside the reach of civilization’s machinery, outside the banks and the railroads and the governments that were swallowing the frontier whole. There is something genuinely appealing about that vision, and the game is honest enough to let you feel the appeal before it shows you what the vision costs. Dutch wasn’t wrong that industrialization was grinding people up. He wasn’t wrong that the world the gang was riding away from was corrupt and cruel. He was right about the diagnosis. He was catastrophically wrong about the cure, which was apparently Dutch van der Linde leading a gang of outlaws into an increasingly desperate series of schemes while telling everyone who questioned him that they lacked faith.
That last part is the tell. When Dutch starts using the language of faith and loyalty interchangeably (when doubting his plan becomes the same thing as betraying the family), you are watching a man who has made himself the object of the devotion he’s asking for. He isn’t asking the gang to believe in freedom anymore. He’s asking them to believe in Dutch. The vision has collapsed into the visionary, and the visionary has become the idol.
Arthur watches this happen and can’t stop it because he spent his whole life inside it. The gang is the only family he has ever known. Dutch is as close to a father as Arthur has ever had. Leaving the faith, questioning the idol, means questioning everything Arthur has built his identity around, and it took a tuberculosis diagnosis and the slow accumulation of things he couldn’t unsee to finally make him do it.
The tragedy of Dutch isn’t that he was evil. It’s that he was sincere. He believed in his vision all the way to the end (to the cliff overlooking the valley where he makes his final stand in the first game), and the sincerity is what makes it so sad. A cynic knows when he’s lying. Dutch never knew. He was so deep inside the idol that he couldn’t see it from the outside anymore.
1 John 5:21 is just four words after the colon: keep yourselves from idols. Not other people’s idols. Your own. The ones that start as something true and worthy and then grow until they’re taking up the space where God is supposed to be. The ones that feel so right and so yours that you’ve stopped examining them. The ones you’ll defend past the point of reason, past the point of evidence, past the point of everyone you love telling you that something has gone badly wrong.
Dutch van der Linde died on that cliff still believing. That’s not a heroic ending. It’s a warning.
One More Thing Before I Go
The last couple of months weren’t a total loss.
While things were quiet around here, while things were quiet around here, I started working on something new called Stoic Harvest Press. A couple of days ago, I finally launched it. The idea behind it is simple: cultivate what matters. It’s a place for the things I’ve always cared about that don’t really fit on a site built around video games and wrestling: faith, philosophy, books, personal growth, trying to figure out how to actually live well in a world that’s working full time to keep you distracted from it.
If The Sunday Sermon has been your kind of thing, you’ll probably find something there worth reading. I’ve just started writing over at Stoic Harvest on Substack, so click the link if you’d like to follow along. There’s only one article there now, but I just launched it. I hope to do one a week.
I also used some of that time away to finish something I’ve been working on, off and on, for about three years. I wrote a book.
It’s called Needed by God, Wanted by God, Loved by God: Three Truths for Overcoming Shame, Finding Purpose, and Living in Grace. It’s a personal Christian book for anyone who has ever felt too broken, too far gone, too ashamed, or just quietly wondered whether any of it still matters for them. It’s being independently published through Stoic Harvest Press, and it should be available soon on Amazon. I’ll have more to say about it when the time comes.
For now I’m just glad to be writing again. And yeah, glad to be back here too.
See you next Sunday.
