I started with a joke. Late one night I floated a theory in a comment section, mostly to see who I’d offend. The theory was this: Your slot in Christianity — Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed, charismatic, whatever — might have less to do with your theology than with your personality. Put another way, maybe your Myers-Briggs type predicts your pew. So I built a grid. Sixteen types, sixteen streams. ENFJ, the one who thinks everyone can be reached, runs on mission and warmth. Methodist. INTJ loves Calvinism because the logic is airtight. Reformed, obviously — Jonathan Edwards with a study Bible and a spreadsheet. ENFP needs to feel it. Hands up, eyes closed, front row of the charismatic service. ISTJ wants order, duty, and a really good liturgy. Missouri Synod Lutheran. ESTP shows up to the megachurch, gets inspired, and is in the car before the closing song. I called it half-formed and possibly very wrong and invited the whole comment section to tell me I’d lost it. But it wasn’t only a bit. It started with something I’d been chewing on for a while. Why was everyone at my church so introverted? They liked me. They just seemed to want me to sit beside them in a class rather than actually talk, which, it turns out, is how introverts bond. I am not one. I have 4,000 names in my phone. We have never trusted personality tests more than we do right now. By the test maker’s own count, 88% of Fortune 500 companies have run their people through the Myers-Briggs. Around two million take it every year. McKinsey uses it. Federal agencies use it. Somewhere in your office, there’s a color-coded chart of everyone’s DiSC type taped to a wall. The church went all in too. Walk into a mid-sized church, and the leadership team has done StrengthsFinder. The small groups are working through Enneagram books. Some church-planting networks now fold personality tests into how they screen the guys they send out. We took a nine-pointed diagram a mystic named Gurdjieff brought west a century ago and dropped it into the new members’ class. None of it is settled science. Take the same test twic,e and you can come out a different letter. People admit this, cheerfully, and take it again anyway. We trust these things enough to hire with them, to build teams with them, and to plant churches with them. And we never once get mad about them. No one has ever said “screw that guy for being an ISTJ.” Nobody storms out over a DiSC profile. Your StrengthsFinder top five has never started a fight in a parking lot. Your Enneagram number is allowed to just be your number. Then we get to denomination, and the grace runs out. We’ll go to war over that one. Split churches. Write 4,000-word takedowns of men we’ve never met. “To hell with that guy,” as long as “that guy” is a Catholic. Or a Calvinist. Or a charismatic. This made me wonder if we’ve been aiming at the wrong target the whole time, if the tag we’re ready to damn each other over is sitting right on top of the one we’d never say a word about. So I went looking to see if anyone had actually studied it. Turns out someone spent 30 years on it. The professor who counted the pews His name is Leslie Francis. He’s a professor at the University of Warwick, an ordained minister, and the author of a small library of peer-reviewed studies on personality and religion. He took thousands of pastors and churchgoers, ran them through psychological type measures, and published his findings in journals with names like Mental Health and Religion & Culture. And the pattern he found is the one I was joking about. Churchgoers are not a random sample of humanity. They lean hard toward one temperament. Sensing and Judging: the SJ. The dutiful, the orderly, the people who show up early and bring the casserole. Among American Catholic priests, more than a quarter test as ISTJ. In the general male population, it’s about one in six. The people running to the altar are wired a certain way before they ever get there. And a lot of them are introverted, the ones who’d rather you take the seat beside them than start a conversation. My church wasn’t the weird one; I was. Same church. Same theology. Different brains. Here’s the part that stopped me. For his cleanest test, Francis used a big denomination that fits two very different churches under one roof. On one side, the sermon-first churches. Bible-centered, plain, practical. Give me the text and the application. On the other, the ritual-first churches. Ceremony, reverence, mystery, a service that carries you more than it explains things to you. If you grew up mainline Protestant in the Midwest, you already know this split. It’s the contemporary service and the traditional service. These services are in the same church, sometimes the same building. The sermon-first room has the drum kit, the lyrics on a screen, and a pastor in untucked flannel. The ritual-first room has the organ, the hymnal, and the order of worship your grandma would recognize. Then the researchers counted who sat in each. In the sermon-first churches, 83% tested as Sensing types. Concrete, literal, and practical. In the ritual-first churches, that dropped to 69%. The room filled up with Intuitives. The people who reach for symbol, mystery, the thing behind the thing. Same denomination. Two personalities, sorted by whether the church has an organ or a fog machine. And before you say it’s really just theology in disguise, they checked. In a follow-up study of more than a thousand pastors, the same split held up even after the researchers controlled for how conservative and how charismatic each person was. Strip out the theology, and the personality gap is still there. Their own conclusion was that it tracks a preference for a style of worship, not a doctrine. The organ people and the fog-machine people were sorting themselves by temperament. They just called it conviction. It keeps going Francis’s team has a profile for charismatics, too. Higher charismatic orientation lines up with Extraversion, Feeling, and Perceiving. The exact wiring of the person who wants to feel the room, follow the moment, and isn’t watching the clock. My ENFP card, more or less, sitting in a peer-reviewed table. Studies of brand-new churches, the kind meeting in a school gym or a movie theater, find they pull more Intuitives, more Extraverts, and more Perceivers than the established church down the road. The startup guy in the room, basically. The science is cleaner than my original joke. It doesn’t say INTJ equals Presbyterian. It says the sensing-intuition axis maps onto ritual-versus-sermon. It says the dutiful SJ fills the traditional pew. It says the feelers chase the charismatic moment. And nearly all of it is British data on Protestants, so stretching it over a Texas megachurch is my leap, not theirs. But the spine of the joke was right, and a British professor spent three decades proving it. So what do you do with a theory like this Here’s the uncomfortable part. If the stream you’re in is partly a function of how your brain came wired, a few of our favorite arguments look smaller. The Bible-church guy who thinks the liturgy crowd is soft is, in part, a Sensing preference sneering at an Intuitive one. The traditionalist who finds the megachurch shallow is, in part, an Intuitive wrinkling his nose at a room full of Sensors having a perfectly nice time. We dress our temperament up as discernment, and we call our comfort zone orthodoxy. None of this makes anybody’s theology wrong. Calvinism isn’t false because it flatters the INTJ. Beauty isn’t a gimmick because Intuitives can’t live without it. Whether a thing is true and who’s drawn to it are two different questions, and the studies don’t touch the first one. But it brings me back to where I started. We forgive each other every other label. The Enneagram four gets to be dramatic. The ISTJ gets to color-code the church directory, and we call it a spiritual gift. Denomination is the one tag we damn each other over, and it might be the one sitting closest to the wiring we already agreed to forgive. I’m not asking anyone to stop believing their tradition is the right one. I believe mine is. But it’s worth holding the possibility that the believer across town isn’t your enemy or your project. He might just be a different type, hearing the same gospel in a different key, sitting in the pew that fits how he was built. *** Seth Tower Hurd writes The Five, a twice-weekly newsletter covering the news and culture stories that don’t make the front page. Find it at sethtowerhurd.substack.com. This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

In a move that bore striking similarities to the 2024 emergency coronation of former Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrat Party bosses in Maine hand-selected a new nominee to replace disgraced former U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner: Troy Jackson. The party announced the decision on Saturday, saying that Jackson had been “formally” selected by the Maine Democratic State Committee — meaning that not a single Maine Democrat had cast a vote for him to be their nominee in that race. WATCH: Maine Democrats officially handpick socialist Troy Jackson to replace Graham Platner. “The Maine Democratic State Committee formally selects Troy Jackson as the replacement nominee for…U.S. Senate.” Troy Jackson received zero votes from Mainers. pic.twitter.com/x7ddUTQT8V — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 25, 2026 “The Maine Democratic State Committee formally selects Troy Jackson as the replacement nominee for the Maine Democratic Party’s candidate for U.S. Senate n the 2026 general election ballot.” Maine Democrats’ Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson praised the move, claiming that it was just one more example of “democracy” working exactly as it should. “Democracy, while sometimes really messy, is always, always worth fighting for…doing what is right is what us Maine Democrats will choose every damn time,” she said. Maine Democrats’ Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson: “Democracy, while sometimes really messy, is always, always worth fighting for…doing what is right is what us Maine Democrats will choose every damn time.” Not a single Mainer voted for Graham Platner’s replacement. pic.twitter.com/jgAoNJQcGG — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 25, 2026 A number of critics pointed out the similarities between Jackson’s rapid ascent and the vote-free installation of Harris as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, arguing that the party with an often-stated goal of “saving democracy” had very little interest in putting it into practice. The Republican Party’s New England communications director Kristen Cianci called them out on X, sharing a post from Thursday marking two years from the day from that Harris had been gifted the presidential nomination. “History is repeating itself in Maine. Troy Jackson will be crowned by @MaineDems this weekend without a single vote being cast. Just like Kamala, voters will reject him when they finally get their say in November,” she said. History is repeating itself in Maine. Troy Jackson will be crowned by @MaineDems this weekend without a single vote being cast. Just like Kamala, voters will reject him when they finally get their say in November. https://t.co/HcSEHJja12 — Kristen Cianci (@kristencianci) July 23, 2026 Others, like the National Democratic Senatorial Committee, argued that Jackson offered little to no substantive difference compared to Platner. “No tattoo. Same crazy,” the NRSC posted. No tattoo, same crazy. pic.twitter.com/jfgTxXUNO7 — Senate Republicans (@NRSC) July 25, 2026

SpaceX’s Starship Flight 13 successfully landed in the Indian Ocean with an intact heat shield, a major milestone for the company as it looks to put men back on the moon. Instead of hitting the water with a fireball, as in previous flights, the rocket flipped into its vertical landing position and touched down in the Indian Ocean before falling over and floating on top of the water. “That is a first,” Dan Huot, communications manager for SpaceX, said during the livestream. “That is the softest splashdown we have ever had with the Starship there in the Indian Ocean.” Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the 13th flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/g27YJCQgiN — SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 24, 2026 The July 24 flight was the second test of Starship’s V3 rocket and the first flight to deploy Starlink V3 satellites, according to SpaceX’s website. SpaceX originally planned the test flight for July 16 but aborted just before the launch after some of the engines failed to start. In the first test of the V3, the rocket hit the Indian Ocean with a planned explosion. This time, the rocket bobbed gently in the water while waiting for the recovery team. The landing was so successful that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said SpaceX might try to catch the rocket on the next test flight. “Unless we discover problems after mission data review, SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower on next flight,” Musk said on X. Cameras on Starship continued sending video of the rocket after landing and provided views of the rocket’s heat shield, which was mostly intact. “This is the first time we’ve put an intact Starship in the water,” Huot said on the livestream. “This is a dream scenario for the team that’s trying to get this heat shield data.” Musk highlighted an X post showing the progress the company has made with the heat shield in four test flights. “Latest heat shield design looks great!” Musk said on X. Latest heat shield design looks great! https://t.co/PitlHFwilp — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026 NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman celebrated Flight 13’s successful launch. “Excited for what will be learned from this mission,” Isaacman wrote on X. “When Starship comes online, its capabilities will be game-changing, not least of which will be ensuring we never give up the Moon again!” Pretty clear from this shot that @SpaceX knows where we are going! Congrats on getting Flight 13 underway. Excited for what will be learned from this mission. When Starship comes online, its capabilities will be game-changing, not least of which will be ensuring we never give up… https://t.co/aTSUCqUPcB — NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman (@NASAAdmin) July 24, 2026 The successful flight is a major milestone for SpaceX as it prepares for NASA’s Artemis III mission. NASA partnered with SpaceX to create a version of Starship to take astronauts from lunar orbit to the moon, according to NASA’s website. This was the first test flight since SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took the company public in the largest initial public offering in history. “Lucky Number 13,” Huot said. “Hell of a flight for Starship.”

An Illinois maintenance worker was trapped inside a gas station sign 130 feet in the air for over six hours on Tuesday. AJ Gow was doing repair work on a gas station sign near Interstate 55 right before 11:00 a.m. when his telescopic boom lift malfunctioned, leaving him 13 stories in the air. At around 2:00 p.m., the Wilmington Fire Protection District received a call about the stranded man. Its Technical Rescue Team, “specializing in confined space, collapse, and high angle rescue,” was sent to help.  The fire crew soon realized that their 100-foot ladders were not long enough to help Gow. “No ladders or stairs built into the sign pole were present eliminating the possibility of rescue team personnel ascending to the victim’s location as would normally occur in a high angle rescue,” the Wilmington Fire Protection District Deputy Chief Todd Friddle said. “The victim’s location was also beyond fire department ladder truck capabilities.” The Wilmington fire department found a boom lift in a town around 17 miles away that could ascend the distance and wheeled it to the site. In the meantime, an aerial drone monitored the man, who gave an optimistic thumbs-up. At around 4:00 p.m., the maintenance worker was lifted down and “returned to safety with no victim or rescuer injuries,” the report concluded. Gow thanked local officials for their help in saving him. “Thank you to every department that showed up for me today,” the maintenance worker posted on Facebook. “It was greatly appreciated! Seeing that lift roll up with police escorts was the highlight of my day for sure!!” Gow also posted a photo of himself standing inside the sign in the comments of one of his posts, telling one of his friends, “I was up there on this. [I] couldn’t fully stand either and it kept swaying with the wind. It was miserable.” Besides feeling severe dehydration and anxiety, Gow stated that he is fine. “My adrenaline was pumping once I saw that lift arriving and [it] gave me a 2nd wind. After the adrenaline crash, I felt like crap all night and still do.”

A black school board member supporting Michigan Democrat Haley Stevens told the congresswoman’s opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, to stop speaking and playing Arabic music on the campaign trail, inflaming racial tensions in one of the nation’s most contentious Senate primaries. In a viral video circulating on social media, Farmington school board member Angie Smith explained why she backs Stevens over El-Sayed. “We need someone that can represent all of us, not just one race, but all races,” Smith said at a campaign event. “I am supporting Haley Stevens because she’s that candidate.” The individual behind the camera pressed Smith, who was first elected to the school board in 2016, for clarification. “When you say you know not just for one, what do you mean by that?” he asked. Smith, a single mother of three daughters, doubled down. “The other candidate seems to be … doesn’t work a room. You have to know how to work the room. Don’t come out speaking only Arabic. Don’t come out with your Arabic music on,” Smith said. “Represent everyone.” “You know, I’m the mother of a lesbian. I’m Puerto Rican and Cherokee, with a grandfather that was a white man from Ireland. Represent us all. Don’t just represent one ethnicity or one race,” she added. Farmington school board member Angie Smith says she’s backing Stevens because she believes she will represent everyone, “not just one race… You have to know how to work the room, don’t just come in here speaking Arabic, don’t come out with your Arabic music on.” pic.twitter.com/L6VYip6Xft — Sam Robinson (@samueljrob) July 24, 2026 The criticism of El-Sayed — a Muslim Democratic socialist backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — infuriated leftists. “This is insanely racist,” left-wing commentator Mehdi Hasan wrote on X. “Not only should this Angie Smith be asked to apologize but @HaleyforMI should be asked to disown and condemn these racist remarks about @AbdulElSayed and Arab-Americans.” Leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who has said America “deserved” 9/11, also criticized the viral exchange. “This is not who we are as America. Especially sad to see it in the Democratic Party primary,” Piker said. The flareup comes as Stevens and El-Sayed barnstorm Michigan, competing for support from crucial Democratic voting blocs, including Black and Muslim voters. With the party’s far-left wing behind El-Sayed, establishment Democrats have increasingly consolidated behind Stevens in the campaign’s homestretch. On Friday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) endorsed Stevens. “Just like me, Haley will do whatever it takes to get things done for the people of Michigan, and we need her now more than ever,” Whitmer said in a video posted to X. The congresswoman, who recently went viral for her quirky “stick it to them” slogan, celebrated the endorsement, calling Whitmer “a champion for our state” who understands “the stakes of this race.” Following the high-profile endorsement, Stevens’s odds of winning the Democratic primary on prediction market Polymarket rose from 21% to 36%. Michigan’s Democratic primary is August 4.