Transforming America
First Overview Draft — edited from a conversation between Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez, September 23, 2026
Editor’s Note on This Draft
This manuscript is the backbone of the book, taken from a morning conversation between Thomas and Isak. At the end of the conversation Thomas said, “This one’s a book… just elaborate it. This is the backbone of the book. Transforming America. That’s the name of the book.”
The transcript has been edited for coherence: false starts, repetitions, and self-corrections have been removed, and sentences have been completed. No new argument has been added. The conversation has been kept in its original order and divided into chapters at its natural turning points.
Chapter 1 — A Young Man’s Questions
ISAK: I’ve been working on something on my own, for my own understanding. I’ve been trying to understand the forces at work in this country’s politics: socialism and capitalism, empires and rebellions. It’s been really interesting. It’s like trying to see how the world actually functions.
Then I started running it through Conscious Point Physics. I thought, if I run a list of ideals and ideologies through it, how does Conscious Point Physics respond? I don’t know that it’s fully ready, but I’ve been developing it as an article, or really a thought experiment, with Claude. How does the universe respond to cultural movement? How does consciousness, or group consciousness, respond to different cultural ideologies?
It isn’t done, and I don’t have all the answers. It compares different arrangements, like top-down government. We were looking at socialism: gathering power and resources for the people, then rationing them out so everybody is equal. That’s the ideology, the idealistic side of it.
I’m trying to do this in an unbiased way, bringing in everything I’ve learned over the years about capitalism and socialism, and everything I’ve had to unlearn about each. I was working with the actual political climate we’re in, the far right and the far left, and trying to break it down into a rational description. If I’m honest, I think the right and the left are both in chaos, and neither one is carrying out its agenda of service. They’re all part of the system. I tend to be really cynical about that. I think both parties need reform. There isn’t an obvious party where you can say, “This is going to be right for the country.” That’s where we find ourselves.
So I’ve been asking, What would God do with a group of people? What does God do with groups of people?
Here are the questions the framework raised:
Idealistically, if the universe self-organizes, why does it need a constitution at all? Conscious points don’t have a constitution; they have intrinsic rules. If humans are made of the same stuff, why can’t human society self-organize the same way? Why does it need an external document?
The answer might be that humans have something conscious points don’t: the ability to override their intrinsic rules. Particles can’t choose to ignore electromagnetism. Humans can choose to ignore their conscience.
The Constitution is the political version of the freezing mechanism: it selectively preserves good configurations against the thermal noise of human selfishness. That raises the next question: Who decides what gets frozen? God decides which molecular configurations to preserve. Who decides which social configurations to preserve? Thomas? The voters? The Supreme Court? The freezing mechanism in CPP is benevolent because God is good. The political version of it, the state deciding what to preserve and what to let thermal noise destroy, is the entire history of political abuse. Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good.
This is the question Isak asked on the call that didn’t get answered: What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law, and who decides what “Christianity done right” is?
This came out of our earlier conversation. It probably stems from my hesitation to see Christian nationalism as a positive. I’ve seen your point and the way you bring it up. I think it’s the wording. I’m so used to hearing “Christian nationalist this, Christian nationalist that” in such a negative context that I’m unlearning and relearning. So bear with me. I’m forming opinions and trying to form understanding most of all. I don’t want an opinion without knowing what I’m thinking. It isn’t really an opinion if it’s just something I read or something I was told. But I trust that if something is true, it will come up.
The next questions:
What does CPP say about property? Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. CPP has something to say here that nobody has explored. Conscious points occupy a specific position within the lattice. They have location. They have boundaries. The geometry constrains what interacts with what. Is there a physics-level argument for property, that having a defined place in the structure is intrinsic to existence? Or does CPP’s “it’s all God’s substance” point the other way, that ownership is an illusion because everything belongs to the Creator? Thomas’s theology would probably land on stewardship, that you manage what God owns, but the physics argument hasn’t been made.
I don’t know that the physics argument has to be made there. It’s trying to put physics on a lot of things where really we want a metaphor. It’s trying to explain each one, but it’s really interesting.
What about the failure modes of self-organization? CPP says order emerges without central command, but self-organizing systems also produce cancer: cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent. The critique of capitalism is essentially that self-organization produces tumors. What is CPP’s answer to that? Is cancer a violation of the intrinsic rules, or is it the intrinsic rules operating without moral alignment? If the latter, it maps directly onto capitalism without conscience.
What about people who never hear the message? CPP says moral law is real and discoverable. Thomas says Jesus in your heart is the alignment mechanism. But most humans who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The Muslim woman Thomas described, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to encounter Christianity to align. What about the billions who didn’t?
We’ve covered a lot of this.
Is democracy derivable from CPP, or is it just compatible? The essay draft would argue that a constitutional republic is the political form closest to CPP’s structure, but is that a derivation or a preference? A monarchy with a good king might also match the freezing mechanism: one wise sovereign preserving good configurations. Thomas’s own framework has God as a monarch, not a democratically elected president. Why should the political analog be democratic? The argument would need to come from something like this: because no human has God’s knowledge, distributed decision-making approximates omniscience better than centralized command.
I get that. Distributed decision-making approximates omniscience better than centralized command. But that’s an argument from human limitation, not from CPP directly.
What does CPP do with systemic injustice?
I think a lot of these are answered by “Jesus in your heart,” by the idea that if we’re hearing from the same God, from the same high command, so to speak, we can all move in organization and in harmony. But this was putting the CPP framework over the question. It was also a test: Can we scan an article through our GitHub repository and pull out answers, or is it still abstract? Is it still just questions? That’s what I was doing. I got a little stuck on the Walker, so I started working on this. It was after our conversation the other morning.
It just won’t leave me alone. What’s right and what’s wrong, Thomas? Every point you’ve made about God and the nature of the universe is well taken. I just find this troubling. I’m not sure about capitalism, and I feel like I sound like one of those woke idiots. But capitalism needs to move outward. It needs resources, and it seems to need to keep growing. A growing economy needs oil. We need to go and get resources. So it seems we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out opposing political cultures, or funding regimes on our side that squash their own country’s communism or socialism.
Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’m missing a lot, and I know there’s a lot of nuance to it: how much death happens under socialist regimes and communist governments, and how much “eat the rich” becomes part of the culture when the tide turns. Because there is so much nuance, I’m seeing all these different sides and trying to understand them. I want to have an opinion on all of this. Maybe I do, and that’s why I bring it up this way. If I were with somebody on the opposite side, I might argue more. But here I’m trying to understand, and I feel like you understand things well.
There seems to be so much nuance. How can things be black and white? Maybe I feel a responsibility to see the black and white of everything, but I only see gray. There are lighter and darker shades of it. I don’t see God as gray. But I see the world and humanity as an extension of God, and in that case, gray.
I don’t buy fully into the idea that we have the right to do anything we want in another country. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing. I’m just more cynical about the country’s history and its motivations. Yes, we get to live with gasoline and no wars at home, and that’s a really beautiful thing. But at what cost that I’m ignorant of? Are the good guys really the good guys? Are the bad guys really the bad guys? Or is it a bunch of civilians paying the price for a few bad guys at the top? That’s where my fever-ridden brain has been, trying to figure out socialism and capitalism and empires.
Chapter 2 — Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism and Communism
THOMAS: It’s a really good topic. Let me riff on the ideas you brought up. You raised a broad spectrum of issues, and they all need to be addressed in a holistic way.
Capitalism is important to look at first. All of these systems (capitalism, communism, monarchy) are each the equivalent of a single Conscious Point Physics rule. They have no nuance to them. Capitalism in its unnuanced form is this: whatever makes the most money, you invest in, and when it stops making money, you redeploy your resources to do something else that makes money. It is goal-driven. It has no particular concern for the environment unless you price in the cost of fixing the environment. When you do that, it actually becomes a moral system, and a quantifiable one. How much does it cost to care for the environment? This is how much we have to spend on cleanup, replanting, and so on.
The communist system has a different goal. In its pure form, everybody does everything he possibly can to produce, but there is no real means of distributing or pricing what is produced. So everybody has to use his own judgment, decide what is needed, and put a price on it, without any real idea what the price should be or how much he should make. There is no incentive to take risks and do all the optimization required to get the maximum production from the minimum work and cost. People are supposed to be altruistic saints who just do things for others and work their hardest, with no more reward than the man who stays home and eats bonbons.
So communism suffers greatly from the pricing problem, from the lack of any mechanism for determining need, and from a motivation problem. People don’t work, because there is no payoff for working or for excelling. It all pays the same. Everybody becomes a government worker, punching a clock and getting away with doing as little as he can, because nobody is supervising. It’s just “the people.”
And when you say, “But somebody will start poking you if you’re not working hard enough,” you have begun to incorporate elements of capitalism and fair play, and those are Christian values. So you have had to incorporate Christianity to overcome the deficits of communism. You have had to incorporate capitalism to make up for them.
Socialism is a stepping point toward the pole of communism. It still has some remnant of pricing in it, some element of management, some element of accountability.
At the other end, it’s every man for himself. We get individual rewards and payoffs. We have management. Everybody specializes. The market determines the price, how much we produce of something, how much people will pay for it, and whether a business survives at all, because there isn’t enough demand or its costs are too high. There is an element of automatic adjustment. There’s an internal governor inside capitalism. But the problem you mentioned was monopolies, cartels, and one other thing—
ISAK: Cults. It was talking about cancer: self-organizing systems also produce cancer cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent.
Addendum to Chapter 2 — Property: Owner, Steward, and the One Who Owns It All
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 2, “Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism and Communism,” after Thomas’s description of capitalism’s internal governor and before the turn to monopolies, cartels, and cults.]
THOMAS: Before we go on to the perversions of capitalism, I want to go back to one of the questions in your list, because it sits underneath everything I just said about pricing and motivation. Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. Your draft asked whether Conscious Point Physics has anything to say about that, and you said you weren’t sure the physics argument needed to be made at all. I think you were partly right, and I want to show you which part.
What the physics says, and what it doesn’t
Your draft posed the question as a choice between two pictures. In one, every conscious point has a definite place in the lattice, with boundaries, so perhaps having a place of one’s own is built into existence itself. In the other, everything is God’s substance, so perhaps ownership is an illusion because it all belongs to the Creator.
When I look at the actual picture, both are half right, and the two halves fit together.
Here is the picture. Each conscious point perceives what is within its own perceptual sphere. It computes, from what it perceives, where it should go. Then it displaces itself. Perceive, compute, displace. It acts on the grid point it occupies, and on nothing else directly. It does not perceive the whole universe, and it does not move anything but itself. So each point is a real, bounded locus of perception and action. It has its own viewpoint and its own move to make, and nobody makes that move for it. That much of your first picture is true: individuality is not an illusion. It is built into the lowest level of what exists.
But the conscious point does not own the grid point it sits on. The lattice is common. Points pass through the same locations, and even two can land on the same place for a moment before it resolves. And the point itself is not self-made. It is a point of God’s own consciousness. It exists because He is, and it acts by the rules He gave it. So your second picture is true too: in the ultimate sense, everything belongs to the Creator, the points included.
Put those together and you get neither absolute private ownership nor the abolition of the individual. You get stewardship. A real, bounded domain of agency, with real responsibility for one’s own move, inside a whole that belongs to Someone else.
[Editor’s note: This is a picture, not a derivation. CPP has no concept of “property,” and the argument for property below rests on Scripture and experience, not on the physics. The physics shows that the stewardship picture is consistent with the structure of reality as CPP describes it; it does not prove it. That was Isak’s instinct, and it is correct.]
So the physics does not settle the political question. What it does is dissolve a false choice. The communist says that because everything is common, nothing is yours. The libertarian says that because it’s yours, you answer to no one. The picture at the bottom of reality says both are wrong. You have a place and a move that are truly yours, and you answer for them to the One whose substance you are.
What Scripture says
Scripture says exactly the same thing, and it says it more plainly than the physics does.
On one side: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” God says of the land of Israel, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” The silver is His and the gold is His. Nothing we hold is ours in the final sense.
On the other side, the same Bible guards private property fiercely. “Thou shalt not steal” makes no sense unless some things are rightly yours and not your neighbor’s. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark,” the boundary stone of his field. The prophets’ picture of peace is “every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” not every man under the collective’s vine. And when King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard and Naboth would not sell his father’s inheritance, the king’s wife had Naboth killed and the king took the land. God sent Elijah to pronounce judgment on the king for it. The most powerful man in the nation could not rightly take a small farmer’s field.
And notice what happened in the early church, which people love to cite as Christian communism. In Jerusalem the believers sold their possessions and shared everything. But when Ananias sold his land and lied about the price, Peter said to him, “While it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” The sharing was voluntary. Ananias’s sin was not keeping part of the money. It was lying to God about it. The church held all things in common because hearts were given, not because property was abolished. That is the whole difference between the Kingdom and communism. The Kingdom produces generosity by changing hearts. Communism tries to produce it by taking the property, and it cannot, because you cannot confiscate a heart.
The parables complete the picture. In the parable of the talents, the master gives his servants real money and real authority over it, and then leaves. They are free to trade, invest, or bury it. When he returns, he holds each of them accountable for what he did with what was entrusted to him. That is stewardship: real property, real freedom, real accountability to the true owner.
Why a steward needs property
This isn’t only theology. It is how things work in practice, and it connects to what I said about communism’s pricing and motivation problems.
A steward needs a domain he answers for. If everything belongs to everyone, then nothing is anyone’s responsibility. The common pasture is overgrazed because every herdsman gains by adding one more cow and no herdsman bears the cost alone. The public restroom is dirtier than the one in your house. Nobody washes a rented car.
We have run this experiment many times, and it always comes out the same way. The Plymouth colonists began with a common store: everyone worked the common land and drew from the common supply. By Governor Bradford’s own account, it bred confusion and discontent, and the young men resented working for other men’s wives and children without recompense. In 1623 they assigned each family its own parcel, and the harvest improved so much that women who had pleaded weakness went willingly into the fields with their children. In the Soviet Union, the small private plots that collective farmers were allowed to keep made up a tiny share of the farmland and produced a disproportionately large share of the food.
This is also why property is inseparable from pricing. A price is what happens when owners say yes or no. When I own something, I decide what I’ll accept for it, and you decide what you’ll pay, and that exchange tells everyone what things are worth. Abolish the owners and you abolish the yes and the no, and then the planner has to guess. That is why the Soviet planner never knew how many shoelaces to make.
The limits on property
But property is not absolute either, and here I part company with the libertarian. God’s law placed duties on the owner.
The farmer was not to reap the corners of his field, or gather the gleanings, or strip his vineyard bare. Those were left for the poor and the stranger, who came and gathered them with their own hands. Notice the design. The owner was not taxed and the proceeds handed out by an official. He was required to leave room for the poor to work for their own bread on his land. The land rested every seventh year. And in the Jubilee, land returned to the families it had originally been given to, so that no family could be permanently dispossessed and no man could accumulate field after field forever. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”
So the steward’s property is bounded by two duties. The first is charity: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,” and what we do for the least of these, we do for Christ. The second is the duty not to use one’s property to destroy other men’s stewardship. That second duty connects directly to what I am about to say about monopolies and captains of industry. The man who buys up every mousetrap company so that no one else can build a better mousetrap is not exercising his property right. He is using it to abolish everyone else’s.
So the question to ask of any arrangement of property is this: Does it enable faithful stewardship, or does it concentrate control in ways that prevent stewardship by others? The communist arrangement fails that test by concentrating everything in the state. The monopoly fails it by concentrating everything in a company. The Jubilee passes it. So does the small farm, the family business, and the home a man owns outright.
Taxation, and the quieter kinds of theft
Where does taxation fit? Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The government has a legitimate claim to pay for the things it is actually for: the common defense, the courts, the good roads everybody wants. A just tax for the group good is not theft.
But when the government takes from one man in order to give to another, not because the second man is helpless but because he votes, that is the Pleasantville robbery done by proxy. The citizen hires the government to do the robbing he would be ashamed to do himself. The Bible’s corrective to greed is not confiscation. It is voluntary generosity, family obligation, and the gleaning principle.
There is a quieter theft as well. The Bible condemns “divers weights and divers measures,” the merchant with one weight for buying and another for selling. When a government expands the money supply faster than the goods it measures, every dollar a man has saved buys less. His property has been taken without a law being passed or a tax being levied. It is the ancient practice of clipping coins, done by a printing press. A steward cannot plan to be faithful if the measure itself is dishonest.
The answer to your question
So, is ownership an illusion because everything belongs to God? No. It is real, but it is delegated. The illusion is not that the field is yours. The illusion is that it is only yours, that you answer to no one for it, and that there is no poor man with a right to glean its corners.
And is property built into the structure of existence? In the sense that matters, yes. Each of us has a place and a move that are truly his, and no one can perceive, choose, and act for him. That is why the collective cannot replace the individual, and why a system that tries to abolish the individual’s domain ends in the planner’s guess, the empty shelf, and the gun. But the place is on loan, and so is the one who holds it.
Stewardship holds both halves together: the dignity of ownership and the humility of accountability. It is the same pattern we will keep finding. Every system without nuance takes one true thing and makes it the only thing. The communist takes “it all belongs to God” and gives it to the state. The libertarian takes “this is mine” and forgets Whose it is. Christ’s way keeps both.
References for the rewrite: Psalm 24:1; Leviticus 25:23; Haggai 2:8; Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 19:14; Micah 4:4; 1 Kings 21 (Naboth); Acts 2:44–45, 4:32–5:4 (Ananias); Matthew 25:14–30 (talents), 25:31–46; Leviticus 19:9–10, 25 (gleaning, sabbath year, Jubilee); Isaiah 5:8; 1 Timothy 5:8; Matthew 22:21; Deuteronomy 25:13–15, Proverbs 20:10 (divers weights). William Bradford, “Of Plymouth Plantation,” entry for 1623. On Soviet private plots: estimates vary by year and crop; the rewrite should cite a specific source and figure before giving a number.
Chapter 3 — The Perversion of Centralization: Cartels, Monopolies, Captains of Industry, Government, and Cults
THOMAS: Cults. I have a particular definition of a cult. I don’t know whether it’s the correct one, because it’s the definition we used when I was in a cult. We said we weren’t a cult because we didn’t have a guru over us; we were a religion. But we did have a man over us, and we were doing exactly what he wanted. In a sense it was a perversion of the religion as it was practiced in India, although in another sense it was more pure. We were actually doing the religion that the people who claimed to practice it were supposed to be doing. We weren’t reformed. We were unreformed purists. There was a battle cry: someone would call out “Bole So Nihal,” and everyone would reply “Sat Sri Akal.” I don’t even know what it meant, but we were gung-ho. We did everything perfectly. We were fanatic religionists, unreformed. The Indians had been doing it for three, four, five centuries, and their attitude was, “That didn’t do us much good. We’ll do it, sort of.”
[Editor’s note: The call-and-response is the Sikh jaikara, “Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal.”]
The cult was what Claude named as a pathology that develops out of capitalism. The essence of a cult, for me, is a single-minded idea of how things should be. In a healthy group, direction is homogenized because there are so many people. In a cult, there is a singularity of “do it this way.”
Because the metaphor switched, I would put the list a different way. A cartel is a group of companies all going in the same direction. A monopoly is one company making everybody go in one direction. And instead of “cult,” the third item should have been the captain of industry: the Carnegies, Mellons, Morgans, and Rockefellers. That was the equivalent. I had to figure out what the essence behind “cult” was, and “captain of industry” captures it better: a singularity of direction pushing people.
We should add one more pole to that list, and that is government. So we have government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry. Those are the four poles that people can be pulled toward. Communism is the pole where government takes over. Government directs how many shoelaces to make, how many ballpoint pens, how many computers, because it is in control.
The characteristic perversion in each of them is centralization. All of the poles you identified are centralization poles, and they are the opposite of capitalism. In each case—government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry—competition has in some way been suppressed. In the captain-of-industry case, you lowball, or you use force of personality, or contracts, or intimidation, or alliances. In some way you pervert the competitive market that would have let somebody else build a better mousetrap. You say, “I’ll just buy up your mousetrap company. Then I’ll keep jacking up the price of my mousetrap, because now I own yours, and I won’t sell yours. Or I’ll make yours and charge high prices for it.” So it is usually some perversion of the free market, carried out by a group or by one man.
There is another place for the cult as well: the eco-fascist cult. We will run all the water from the Sierra Nevada into the Pacific Ocean because the delta smelt might not have enough habitat to live in, and so there is no farming in the San Joaquin Valley because the water went out past Sacramento to keep the fish alive. The Northwest equivalent is the spotted owl. No logging. No forest maintenance. We will let everything grow wild, and the result is so much overgrowth that when there is a fire we lose millions of acres. We can’t stop it anywhere. There are no clear-cut firebreaks.
[Editor’s note: The fish at the center of the California water dispute is the delta smelt. The snail darter, which Thomas named, was the subject of the Tellico Dam dispute in Tennessee (TVA v. Hill, 1978).]
Eco-fascism is a cult, and it is completely unreformed. It has not incorporated the other aspects of reality: there is a time for growing and a time for harvesting, a time for clearing undergrowth, and places for leaving natural, full-spectrum growth. There should be islands of it, rather than an entire world of it.
All of these (captains of industry, monopolies, cartels, governments, and eco-cults or special-interest cults) pervert the market and do not allow competition. All of them say, “My way is the right way.” That is the realm of the religious cult, where acting one particular way is the only right way: an ideological cult.
The interesting thing is that there is a particular way to think that is right. I think it was Coolidge who said everybody wants good roads. That’s just a fact. Nobody wants a road with chasms in it, or boulders that fell across it from the cliff.
ISAK: Or a tree across it.
[Editor’s note: The attribution of “everybody wants good roads” to Coolidge has not been verified; the phrase was also the slogan of the Good Roads Movement of the 1880s–1910s.]
Addendum to Chapter 3 — The Cancer Question: Broken Rules, or Rules Without Alignment?
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 3, “The Perversion of Centralization,” after the “good roads” exchange and its editor’s note.]
THOMAS: I want to go back to the cancer metaphor in your list, because I answered it by changing the list, and I didn’t answer the question underneath it. Your draft asked this: self-organizing systems produce order without central command, but they also produce cancer, cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Is cancer a violation of the intrinsic rules, or is it the intrinsic rules operating without moral alignment? And if it’s the second, doesn’t that map directly onto capitalism without conscience?
It’s a good question. The answer is that it is both, at two different levels, and seeing the two levels answers the question about capitalism too.
Two levels of law
Start at the bottom. A conscious point cannot break its rules. It perceives, it computes, it displaces, every moment, exactly as it was made to. A particle cannot decide to ignore electromagnetism. At that level there is no such thing as a violation. Everything that happens, happens lawfully.
Now go up to the cell. A cancer cell doesn’t break chemistry either. Every reaction inside it obeys the same laws as the reactions inside a healthy cell. Nothing in a tumor violates physics. So at the lowest level, the answer to your question is the second one: cancer is the rules operating without alignment.
But the body has a second kind of law, the law of the whole. A healthy cell lives inside a web of signals from its neighbors and from the body. They tell it when to divide and when to stop, when to specialize, and when it is damaged beyond repair and should die for the body’s sake. A healthy cell is constantly listening to the whole and adjusting itself to it. That law is real. The body’s life depends on it. And a cancer cell breaks it. So at the level of the organism, the answer is the first one: cancer is a violation.
That is exactly the situation of a man in a society. The laws of economics work in him the way chemistry works in a cell. Supply and demand, incentive, scarcity: a monopolist obeys them perfectly. The captain of industry who buys up his competitors breaks no law of economics. But there is a second law over him, the moral law, the law of the whole: love your neighbor as yourself. That law he breaks.
So when your draft says “capitalism without conscience,” it has put its finger on the right thing. Capitalism is a set of rules like chemistry. It is lawful and powerful, and by itself it has no idea what the organism is for. It does not produce tumors because its rules are broken. It produces them because the men operating it have stopped listening to the law of the whole.
What a cancer cell actually does
Look at how cancer works, because the parallel is closer than a figure of speech. Cancer researchers describe a set of things a cell must do to become a tumor. I’ll give you the ones that matter here, with their social equivalents, and you will recognize every one of them from what we just discussed.
A healthy cell stops dividing when it touches its neighbors. This is called contact inhibition. The neighbor’s presence says “enough,” and the cell listens. A cancer cell ignores its neighbors and piles up on top of them. That is the man who hears his brother say “You’re getting out of line” and keeps going. It is “just a little more.”
A healthy cell that is badly damaged destroys itself for the sake of the body. A cancer cell refuses to die. In an economy, a business that fails is supposed to fail, and its people and capital go somewhere they are more useful. When a failing giant arranges to be kept alive at everyone else’s expense because it is too big to fail, it has done what the tumor does.
A tumor can’t grow beyond a small size on its own. To grow, it has to send out signals that make the body build new blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply and redirects it to itself. That is the cartel or the monopoly that lobbies for subsidies and favorable regulation, and the special interest that gets the water or the timber or the tax money routed to its cause.
The body has an immune system that patrols constantly and destroys aberrant cells, most of them long before anyone would ever know they existed. A successful tumor learns to hide from it. It displays the signals that say “I am self; leave me alone.” That is the cartel dressed up as free enterprise, and the zealot dressed up as the church. The disguise is always the same: the perversion wears the clothes of the healthy thing it is destroying.
And finally, a tumor spreads. It leaves its place and sets up colonies in other organs. That is the concentration that starts in one market and moves into the next, and into the press, and into the government.
Now notice what all of these have in common. Every one of them is centralization. The healthy body is made of trillions of cells, each in its place, each limited by its neighbors, and none of them in charge. A tumor is one line of cells that has decided to become the whole. That is what I was describing when I said the perversion in every case (government, cartel, monopoly, captain of industry) is centralization, the suppression of competition. Cancer is what a monopoly looks like in flesh.
The perception failure
There is one more connection to the physics, and I think it is the deepest one.
A conscious point computes its move from what it perceives. What it can perceive determines what it can take into account. Now think about what the cancer cell has lost. It has not lost its ability to act; it acts with enormous energy. It has lost its ability to perceive the whole. The signals from its neighbors are still arriving, but it no longer responds to them. It computes its move as if it were alone.
Greed is the same failure in a man. It is not mainly a failure of will. It is a narrowing of perception. The greedy man computes his next move from a sphere that has shrunk down to himself. His neighbor is still there, still sending signals: “I need to eat,” “You’re hurting me,” “That was mine.” He no longer takes them into account.
That is why the remedy cannot be only a set of external constraints. You can wall the tumor in, and cut it out, and poison it, and you should when you must. But health is a body whose cells are all listening to the whole. And that is what “love your neighbor as yourself” is. It is a command to widen the sphere of perception until your neighbor’s good is part of what you compute when you decide your move. The conscience is not a regulator bolted onto the economy from outside. It is the cell’s receptor for the signals of the body.
[Editor’s note: The link between the perceive–compute–displace cycle and moral perception is an analogy drawn from CPP, not a derivation within it.]
Where the analogy breaks, and why that matters
The analogy breaks at one point, and the break is important.
A cancer cell does not choose. It becomes cancerous through damage to its genes, by accident or by toxic exposure, not by a decision. A person with cancer has done nothing wrong by having it, and nothing I am saying suggests otherwise.
A man does choose. That is the one thing humans have that conscious points and cells do not: the ability to override the law of the whole, to ignore conscience. So the social tumor is worse than the biological one. The monopolist is not a victim of mutation. He knows his neighbor is there. He has decided not to count him. That is why we speak of greed as a sin and not as a disease, and why the remedy includes repentance and not only treatment.
It is also the answer to your constitutional question from the start of our conversation: why does a self-organizing universe need a written constitution when conscious points don’t? Because conscious points cannot defect, and cells defect only by damage. Men can defect on purpose. A people that can choose to stop listening to the whole needs the whole written down, and needs neighbors, juries, and courts that will say “enough” when the conscience fails.
How a body stays healthy
So how does a body keep cancer from taking over? Not mainly by chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is a necessary and sometimes lifesaving tool, but it is a blunt one. It attacks every rapidly dividing cell, healthy and sick alike, and the patient suffers for it. The main defense is the one that never stops: the immune system, distributed everywhere, recognizing the aberrant cell early, while it is small, and removing it before it becomes a tumor. The more modern cancer treatments increasingly work by stripping away the tumor’s disguise so that the body’s own immune system can see it and do its job.
Society works the same way. When the tumors are already large, the big central remedies have their place: antitrust law, breaking up the monopoly, prosecuting the fraud. But those remedies are chemotherapy. They are blunt, they harm the healthy along with the sick, and a government big enough to use them is itself at risk of becoming the largest tumor of all. That is what happened with the G-men.
The real health of a society is distributed. It is a market with many competitors, where no one gets large enough to capture the blood supply. It is neighbors who say “enough” early, while the problem is small. It is juries who can see through a disguise. It is churches and families that form men whose perception includes their neighbor. And it is a public that can recognize the tumor when it is wearing the clothes of healthy tissue, and name it.
“Growth for its own sake”
Last, your worry that capitalism has to keep growing, has to keep going out and getting more. The writer Edward Abbey said that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. He was right, but notice what he did not say. He did not say growth is cancerous. A child grows. A healthy body grows to its proper size, and then it keeps renewing itself: cells die and are replaced every day, and the body stays alive by constant, orderly production.
An economy is supposed to be like that: growth that serves real needs, and then steady, faithful production that maintains a good life. What makes growth cancerous is the same thing that makes a cell cancerous: when it no longer serves the whole and serves only itself. When “how much is enough?” gets the answer “just a little more.” That is not the free market. That is the free market with its conscience cut out.
So the answer to your question is this. Self-organization does not fail because its rules are bad. It fails when the beings operating within it stop perceiving the whole. For conscious points that can never happen. For cells it happens by accident. For men it happens by choice, and so for men there is a remedy that cells don’t have: they can repent, widen their sight, and choose again.
References for the rewrite: Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg, “The Hallmarks of Cancer” (Cell, 2000) and “Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation” (Cell, 2011), the source for contact inhibition, evasion of cell death, angiogenesis, immune evasion, and metastasis as the capabilities a tumor acquires. Edward Abbey’s line appears in One Life at a Time, Please (1988). The comparison of antitrust enforcement to chemotherapy and of distributed competition to immune surveillance is offered as an analogy, not as a medical claim.
Chapter 4 — Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and Order
THOMAS: Everybody wants good roads, and that phrase is the equivalent of absolute morality. Nobody wants bad roads. The only people who want bad roads are highway robbers. When the stagecoach comes up to the washed-out road, they say, “All right, everybody, hands up. Where’s the strongbox?”
ISAK: So his point was that it’s a moral good, a moral truth, an absolute morality, that the government should pay for roads. Is that a socialist concept you’re talking about, taxing groups for a common good? I’m sorry, I missed the point.
THOMAS: I didn’t address that, and it’s a really good point. What we’re talking about there is the communist element. We’re saying that in this particular area there is a group good, and that’s why we have government: to take care of the group good. The libertarians, and a group called the anarcho-capitalists, say that if you just put a price on everything, somebody will take care of it. No government whatsoever; the market will take care of everything. That one has its flaws too, but that’s a whole discussion.
It turns out there is a good argument for each of these systems. There is a place for anarchy. It lies in letting people experience their own lives and the things that go on in them. There is a level of anarchy that is absolutely irreducible. That’s thermal noise. At its smallest level nature is in a state of anarchy. But that anarchy is tempered by the environment. It only goes to a certain level, and then it suddenly passes into a realm where it is ordered. It gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and it turns into the sun. The sun is extremely chaotic, and yet it is a very ordered object. It holds itself together at a particular size boundary. So the question is: What is the size boundary at which anarchy passes into order?
ISAK: Interesting. Keep going.
THOMAS: Take the anarchy of an individual life. “I want to be free.” What do you want to be free to do? “I want to go to work when I want to go. I want to go play. I want to have a family. I want recreation. I want good roads and nice places to go on them.” Well, it sounds like you want a very ordered life.
ISAK: Yeah.
THOMAS: “Actually, I do. I want to be able to do all these things, but I want them in a very ordered way.” So an ordered life has many different parts, each with degrees of freedom inside it. When I get tired of one, I go to another place with its own degrees of freedom, and then to another. I’ve used five or ten of them. Well, how about if we just roll over it with a tornado? That’s a lot of randomness. You’d have a lot of freedom there. “No, I don’t want that. I want my good roads, my place for recreation, and my family.” After a while—
ISAK: Anarchy gets old.
THOMAS: Anarchy gets old really quickly if you get too much of it.
Addendum to Chapter 4 — The King and the Republic: Is Self-Government Derived or Merely Chosen?
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 4, “Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and Order,” after “Anarchy gets old really quickly if you get too much of it.” This section also answers the question Thomas raised in that chapter: “What is the size boundary at which anarchy passes into order?”]
THOMAS: I said a minute ago that the question is where anarchy passes into order, where the size boundary is. That connects to another of your questions, and it’s a sharp one, so I want to take it on directly.
Your draft said that if I argue a constitutional republic is the political form closest to the structure of reality, I have to say whether that’s a derivation or a preference. It pointed out that a monarchy with a good king might also fit the pattern: one wise sovereign preserving the good. And it pointed out that in my own framework God is a monarch, not an elected president. So why should the political version be democratic? The only answer it could find was that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions out approximates omniscience better than central command. Then you noticed that’s an argument from human limitation, not from the physics.
Here is my answer. It is not a derivation, and I won’t pretend it is. But I think the argument from limitation and the argument from the physics turn out to be the same argument. Let me show you why.
God is King, and the throne is taken
Start with the part your draft got exactly right. God is a monarch. The universe is not a democracy. The rules the conscious points follow were not voted on. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom, and its King is not up for re-election.
So I am not a democrat in the sense that I think the majority is the source of what is right. It isn’t. The majority chose Barabbas. A crowd that shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Crucify him” on Friday. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, and a system that treats it as the final authority is just another system without nuance, like the ones we talked about. Pure democracy is anarchy with a vote count. Fifty-one percent can rob forty-nine, and when they do it by ballot instead of by six-gun, it is still Pleasantville.
But notice what follows from God being King. If the throne belongs to Him, then no man can rightly sit on it. That is what the Christos Voting Network means when it says “No King but King Jesus.” It is not a slogan against monarchy as a form. It says the office of absolute sovereign is already filled. Every man who claims absolute power over other men is claiming a seat that is not vacant.
That is the Bible’s own verdict. When Israel asked Samuel for a king “like all the nations,” God told Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Then He had Samuel warn them what a king would do: take their sons for his chariots, their daughters for his kitchens, their fields for his servants, and a tenth of everything, until they cried out because of the king they had chosen. It is the most accurate description of centralized government ever written, and it was written three thousand years ago.
So, why not a monarchy with a good king? Because the question isn’t whether a good king would govern well. Some did. David was a man after God’s own heart. Hezekiah and Josiah led the nation back to God. The problem is what came after them. Hezekiah was followed by his son Manasseh, one of the most wicked kings Judah ever had. Solomon was followed by Rehoboam, who split the kingdom in two by promising to be harsher than his father. A monarchy is only as good as the next heir, and heirs are not chosen for their character. Even the good king has no one who can correct him when he goes wrong, except a prophet like Nathan, willing to risk his life to say “Thou art the man.” Monarchy puts the entire weight of the nation on one man’s heart, and no man’s heart can carry that.
What the physics actually shows
Now the physics. I don’t claim that CPP derives a constitutional republic. It doesn’t. There is no ballot box in the lattice. But look at how God actually governs the universe He made, because I think it tells us how He intends men to be governed.
God does not move each conscious point by direct command. He gave the points their rules, and each point perceives what is within its own sphere, computes its move from what it perceives, and moves itself. No point commands another point. No point perceives the whole universe. Every one of them sees only its neighborhood. And out of that, out of countless local perceptions and local moves all obeying the same law, comes everything: atoms, stars, living bodies. The order is not imposed from a central office. It emerges from local agents faithfully following a law that is above all of them.
So the structure of creation is not a monarchy of creatures and not a democracy of creatures. It is a Kingdom whose King wrote the law, and whose subjects govern their own moves, locally, under that law. Absolute sovereignty at the top belongs to God alone. Below it there is distributed, local agency, and no creature rules another by fiat.
[Editor’s note: This is an argument from pattern, not a derivation. CPP describes how conscious points behave; it does not contain a theory of government. The claim is that the constitutional-republic form is consistent with the way CPP describes God governing creation, and more consistent with it than a human monarchy is. The stronger claim, that CPP derives a republic, would be the more convenient one for the book, and it is not being made.]
And here is where your two arguments meet. Why is spreading decisions out better than central command? Because no human has God’s knowledge. But why doesn’t any human have God’s knowledge? Because every created thing perceives only within its own sphere. That limitation is not a defect of human nature that the physics knows nothing about. It is built into the structure of every created point. Only God perceives the whole. So the argument from human limitation is the argument from the physics. Every creature is finite in perception, and that is exactly why no creature may be trusted with the whole.
James Madison put it plainly: if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary. We are not angels, and we are not governed by angels. So the government has to control the governed, and then it has to be made to control itself.
Where anarchy passes into order
That brings me back to the size boundary.
I said earlier that anarchy is irreducible at the smallest scale, and that at some size it passes into order. In human life, the smallest scale is the individual and the family. There, government is mostly self-government: a man ruling his own appetites, a father and mother ordering their home. No state should reach into that more than it must.
The next boundary is about a hundred and fifty people. That’s roughly the number of people a man can actually know: know their names, their faces, their families, and how they live. Below that size, a community can govern itself largely by relationship. Everyone knows who is trustworthy. Accountability is personal. A brother can say “You’re getting out of line,” and it means something because he knows you. That is why I proposed the hundred-and-fifty-person cell as the building block of the Voting Network. At that size, it feels like a family.
Above that size, you can no longer know everyone, and something else is needed: representation. You choose someone you do know, whose character you have seen, to stand for you among people you don’t know. And that is exactly the structure Moses was given. When the work of judging the whole nation was crushing him, his father-in-law Jethro told him to choose able men who feared God, men of truth who hated covetousness, and make them rulers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. The small matters were judged at the smallest level. Only the great matters came up to Moses. And in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, “Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.” The people chose men known among them, and those men were set over them under God’s law.
That is a republic. It was in the Bible three thousand years before Philadelphia: a people choosing leaders they know, organized in nested levels from the smallest to the largest, every level bound by a law none of them wrote, with the King above them all. It is the same shape as the physics: local knowledge, local decisions, one law above everyone, and no creature on the throne.
The republic depends on the King
One more thing, and it is the most important. The republic works only if the law above it is real and the people submit to it.
John Adams said the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and that it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. He was right, and the physics shows why. Distributed agency produces order only when every agent follows the same law. Conscious points can’t help following theirs. Men can refuse. A republic of men who have rejected the law above them is not a republic. It is a crowd with a constitution, and a crowd will eventually vote itself whatever it wants, including a king. That is how republics have always died. Rome didn’t fall to a foreign conqueror first. It handed itself to Caesar.
So when someone asks whether I believe in democracy, my answer is this. I believe in the Kingdom of God, and I believe the best form of human government under that Kingdom is a constitutional republic: nested levels of self-government, beginning with the man who governs himself and the family that governs its home, rising through communities small enough to know each other, bound at every level by a moral law no majority can repeal, with every office held as a stewardship under God. That form is not derived from the physics. It is the form most in harmony with how God actually governs what He has made. It keeps the throne vacant for the only One who can fill it.
And it only works as long as the people keep the King. When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, someone asked what kind of government they had made. He said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” We keep it the same way a conscious point keeps its place in the order of things: by following the law we were given, in the place we were given, one move at a time.
References for the rewrite: 1 Samuel 8:5–18; Judges 21:25; Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (limits on the king); Exodus 18:13–26 (Jethro); Deuteronomy 1:13–15; Matthew 20:25–28; 2 Samuel 12:7 (Nathan); 2 Kings 21 (Manasseh after Hezekiah); 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam); Matthew 27:15–23 (Barabbas). James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788). John Adams, letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798. Franklin’s reply is recorded in the notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate. The 150 figure is Robin Dunbar’s estimate of the number of stable relationships a person can maintain, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point*; the cell model is from the Christos Voting Network materials.*
Chapter 5 — From Pleasantville to the G-Men: How Every Remedy Is Corrupted
THOMAS: It works the same way in the other direction. I’ve got my little bit of order here, and the government comes in and tells me what to do, and I don’t like it. “Fine, we’ll just let everybody do what he wants.” Nobody is watching anybody. Everybody has his own little area.
Then we have some people over here who don’t want to work that hard, and they say, “It’s a lot easier to take their stuff and make it my stuff.” So I ride into Pleasantville with my six-gun, line the people up against the wall, load my sack, ride out of town, and enjoy the stuff on my own until I need a refill, and then I go back to Pleasantville.
So the government comes in and says, “Al, the way you come in and take other people’s stuff, we’re going to send the G-men after you, and we won’t let you do it anymore.” Everybody says, “This is great. The disorder is under control.” Now there are G-men everywhere, and the G-men don’t have anything to do, and they need to get paid. So they say, “We’ll go into surveillance. We’ll watch everybody. Maybe we need a war, so we’ll have something to do. We’re bored.” So they monitor everybody and make up all the rules. And if people don’t like the rules, the G-men can be lenient by taking a little money on the side so they can keep doing business. There is corruption there.
So then we have a court to judge the G-men. The courts are good, but they get corrupted too. So we need a government that passes laws, and special agencies to watch the agencies.
Everybody has a little laziness in him. He doesn’t want to work that hard. Everybody has a little Al Capone in him, a little Dillinger. Everybody wants to take somebody else’s stuff. “I want the government to rob for me. I have this ailment, and I want to go to the doctor. So rob that guy, so you can pay my doctor bill.” So we vote for people who will bring home the goods. We vote for the robbers we like, so that we don’t have to do the dirty work of riding over to Pleasantville ourselves.
ISAK: So we don’t have to rob anyone ourselves.
THOMAS: We say, “Government, we want you to rob them for us, so we can get what we need without working that hard.” Every place ends up with a point of corruption in it. The problem is that we don’t know where the point is. We say we want a government, but we don’t want it too big. We want police, but we don’t want them getting bored and corrupt and making us pay for things they should be doing anyway.
Then the government says, “If we’re going to regulate you, you’re going to have to pay for our campaigns, so people can vote for us. Or we won’t regulate your business if you send us campaign contributions.” So we end up overlooking business because it gave us payoff money not to regulate it, and we call it campaign contributions. Government gets corrupted by democracy, by campaigns. We try to pass laws, but we make big loopholes: “Everybody has to report everything, except the people with lots of money. They can have super PACs and give huge contributions. Anybody small will be monitored to the max.” So you have to pay your politician, buy your politician, in order to have your needs met.
Everybody needs to survive. Either you take stuff or you work for stuff. Everybody is in the business of having somebody else take stuff for him, or having his own stuff taken, or working for it. And everybody is trying to regulate the perverted part, because it’s really bad. So we pass more laws, and corruption grows up to bypass those laws, and we pass more laws about the corruption, and none of it ever gets solved. At some point everybody wants free stuff. He wants the other guy to pay for it, and he doesn’t want to work for it. Or he wants to work, but he doesn’t want anybody to take his job, so he has to get rid of other people’s jobs so that he gets all the money himself.
So the problem is sloth and greed. Rather than saying, “I’m going to work hard for my money and get what I need,” people try to have everything, and do anything they possibly can to get their stuff and have more. When Rockefeller was asked how much is enough, he said—
ISAK: Just a little more.
THOMAS: Just a little more. There is no end. Proverbs talks about things that are never satisfied, the fire that is never quenched. Greed is one of them. It is never satisfied. There is no top to it. You can’t have enough power. You can’t have enough money. If you’re into destruction, there’s no end to that either. If you’re into the Jim Morrison life, the next whiskey bar, the next little girl, there’s never enough. There’s never an end. Morrison sang that if he didn’t find the next whiskey bar, he would have to die.
ISAK: That’s how it feels sometimes. If I don’t find it, I might as well be roadkill on the side of the road.
[Editor’s note: The “how much is enough” answer is usually attributed to John D. Rockefeller. The passage in Proverbs is 30:15–16, the things that “are never satisfied,” including the fire that never says “Enough.” The whiskey-bar song is “Alabama Song,” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1927) and recorded by The Doors.]
Chapter 6 — The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You
THOMAS: It isn’t how much we want it. It’s that there is no end to those hungers. That’s what this whole question of ideology comes down to: having a rule set for how to live right. If you don’t have a rule set for living right, and if everybody isn’t upholding that rule set with everybody else, then somebody will say, “Nobody’s watching. This is my chance to take a little more than I earned.”
So everybody has to be everybody else’s brother. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” As a matter of fact, you are. That is one of the rules. You watch out for yourself, and you watch out for your brother. If your brother comes along and says, “You’re getting out of line here,” you say, “Really? Am I? I’ll have to look at that.” And then, “Yes, you’re right,” and you throttle yourself. It’s like Archie Bunker telling Edith, “Stifle yourself.” At some point you have to say no. That’s the Nancy Reagan mantra: Just say no. Say no to greed. Say no to theft. Theft and greed are the two things. And you say yes to working hard, to serving your fellow man, to loving your country, to loving your fellow man, to loving God.
So the rule set that is the equivalent of CPP is this: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. And “a new commandment I give to you: love one another as I have loved you.” So: love God, love your neighbor, love self. How do you love as He has loved you? That gives us a calibration on love. We know what the love looks like, because “love as I have loved you” is really “What would Jesus do?” We are always asking what Jesus would do. That was really the only thing we needed to know in all of this. People considered it hackneyed or trite, but it was the truth. That was all that needed to be done. We take “What would Jesus do?” to every single part of life, and we live it. And that is the way it should be done in government. It should be done that way in industry, in religion, in relationships, in work, in child-rearing, and in children honoring their parents.
Your question yesterday was, “Can you have too much Christian nationalism?” The answer is no. The reason is that Christian nationalism has a definition. If you’re doing the Dillinger–Capone method of living, or the Carnegie–Rockefeller–Mellon method, you’re not doing Christian nationalism. You’re doing captain-of-industry-ism. You’re doing monopolism, cartelism, communism. You’re doing religious zealotry, a Handmaid’s Tale sort of thing, a Spanish Inquisition. That has to be one of the most horrible perversions of Christianity you can imagine: killing people for not being orthodox enough. Where did they get that idea?
[Editor’s note: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Genesis 4:9. The new commandment is John 13:34.]
ISAK: I think that’s the worry behind the Christian-nationalist rhetoric: the Handmaid’s Tale scenario. I know people who are concerned about that. What if rights are taken away from women? Any number of horrible outcomes could come from a group gaining power and deciding, “This is the way things are.”
Ideally, I think the same as you: acting as Christ wants you to act, “What would Jesus do?”, is the ultimate way to actually meet people, to know who they are, and to know your role in your community. The cartels and the captains of industry aren’t better than that pure connection between humans. But I think there probably are a lot of people who hold the Handmaid’s Tale ideal of an authoritarian group. I know that story is a caricature. But how would it play out? What does it look like when it’s done out of love, not out of control?
What we’re talking about is people changing: not forced change, but being shown the truth and living it. The forced route, the Inquisition and the rest, is actually the opposite of what God did when He gave us free choice and said, “You will love Me or not, but it’s up to you.” The other version says, “We as a group are all going to love God so that we succeed in our mission, and all of you will love God and serve God and do what we ask you to do.” That’s the authoritarian side that people are worried about. It’s also the authoritarian version we’re told about in other countries, like Sharia law: “You will obey by command, and if not, you’re done.” I don’t know what that looks like in reality. I haven’t been there. I only hear what I’m told, and I’m trying to be critical of what I hear, even though it may be true.
It’s the same evil behind each one. The man who claims to be in God’s army and leads it to kill a village has the same evil as the man in Islam who says, “Sacrifice your life for this cause and you’ll have seventy-two virgins.” The concern that always comes up for me is how we do this. I think it comes back to each individual and his level of influence: “This is how you live. This is what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to control anybody or force anybody into submission. We’re trying to show you that this is the way to live, that it is right and good, and that it will do good for you in many ways.” I think you’ve clarified that.
I don’t think Christian nationalism, at least the way you think of it, is wrong. But regularly evaluating the climate of Christian nationalism is valuable, because there are Christian nationalists who really want all the black and brown people out of the country. Those are real people. It isn’t just fake videos. There are people who believe in purity of race and purity of everything.
In a way, a country does require a purity of group and of mindset. Under the Constitution we’re all supposed to have an agreement, a shared belief. That’s what makes a country a country: a group of people with faith in something, a collective mission. We probably don’t have much national pride right now, because there is no collective mission. Everybody has his own mission, and we’re being destroyed by too many perspectives. Or maybe we’re not being destroyed by too many—
Addendum to Chapter 6 — Safeguards: Who Decides What “Christianity Done Right” Is?
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 6, “The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You,” after Isak’s words about purity of group and collective mission.]
THOMAS: You asked two questions at the start of our conversation that I haven’t answered yet, and they deserve an answer, because they are the first questions any honest person asks about what I’m proposing. What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law? And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?
I’ll begin by granting the full force of the fear, because if I don’t, nothing I say afterward is worth hearing.
The fear is justified by history
Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good. Your framework put it well: in the physics, God decides which configurations to freeze, and His freezing is benevolent because He is good. In politics, men decide, and the history of men deciding what to preserve and what to destroy is largely the history of political abuse.
It is worse than that, and I want to say the worst part myself. The juries in the South that acquitted lynchers for the better part of a century were not made up of atheists. Nearly every man on them was a professing, church-going Christian. Many of them believed they were defending a Christian social order. If I had stood at the courthouse door with a test that asked, “Do you hold the Bible as your moral standard?”, every one of them would have said yes, and every one of them would have been seated.
So the problem in those courtrooms was not the absence of the Bible. It was a people who held the Bible and read it in a way that permitted contempt for their neighbor. Profession is not discernment. Christ said so Himself: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven,” and “By their fruits ye shall know them.” A test can examine what a man professes. It cannot examine his fruit, and only God examines his heart.
That means there is no safeguard that works by checking labels. Any answer to your question that amounts to “put Christians in charge and trust them” is not an answer. It is exactly what the Inquisition’s defenders said.
So here is what I actually propose. There are safeguards at four levels: in the definition of the faith itself, in the limits on what the state may use its sword for, in the structure of the government, and in the character of the people who lead it. None of them is sufficient alone. All of them together can still fail. I’ll come to that at the end.
The first safeguard: the faith defines itself by its fruit, and its fruit cannot be coerced
Who decides what Christianity done right is? The first answer is that Christ already decided it, and He did not leave it vague. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you.” That is the calibration. We know what the love looks like because we have seen how He loved. He did not conscript anyone. He healed, He taught, He rebuked, He invited, and when the rich young ruler walked away, He let him go. He told Peter to put away his sword.
So the test of whether something done in Christ’s name is Christian is not whether the people doing it say so. The test is whether it looks like what He did. And the simplest form of that test, for anything done in the public square, is this: Would a neighbor on the receiving end of this act feel loved by it? Not flattered, not indulged, and not necessarily pleased, because correction is not always pleasant. But loved: treated as a child of God whose good is being sought.
A lynching fails that test instantly. So does the Inquisition. So does forced conversion, forced baptism, and the burning of heretics. None of them can be called Christian nationalism done badly. They were not Christian at all. They were the captain-of-industry spirit, the cartel spirit, the will to dominate, wearing the church’s clothes.
Coercion is ruled out for a deeper reason, built into the faith rather than bolted on from outside. God gave man free choice. He did not have to. He could have made beings that obeyed Him automatically, the way a conscious point obeys its rules. He made us able to refuse Him, because love that cannot refuse is not love. A forced conversion is no conversion. A man who bows because a gun is at his back has not repented; he has only been frightened. So a government that tries to compel faith is not merely cruel. It is working against the very thing it claims to want. The Christian standard carries its own brake.
That is not true of every creed. A creed whose founding texts command conquest has no brake of that kind; its zealots are being faithful to it. A creed whose founding text tells its followers to overcome evil with good, to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, and to forgive seventy times seven has a brake written into its first principles. When its followers become persecutors, they have to disobey their own book to do it. That is why the right response to Christian cruelty is not less Christianity. It is more of the real thing, and the first people who should stand up and say “That is not Christ” are Christians.
The second safeguard: the sword has a limited job
The second answer to your question is about what the state may do at all, whatever its majority believes.
I have never argued that the government should prosecute every sin. Thomas Aquinas argued centuries ago that human law should not try to prohibit every vice, because the attempt produces worse evils than it prevents. He was right. Most sin is the business of the sinner, his family, his church, his friends, and his God. It is not the business of the man with the badge.
Here is where I draw the line for the sword, and I’ll state it as precisely as I can.
First, the state punishes the sins that make victims: murder, rape, the abuse of children, theft, fraud, violence. The things that took my stuff or hurt my person. On these, as I said, the atheist and the priest agree.
Second, the state never compels a man to participate in what he believes is sin. A baker should not be forced to make the cake; a photographer should not be forced to photograph the wedding. When the state punishes a man for declining, it is enforcing a creed by law. That is wrong when the creed is secular, and it would be equally wrong if the creed were mine.
Third, the state judges men by their actions, never by their doctrine. A man’s view of baptism, of the end times, of which day is the Sabbath, whether he is Catholic or Baptist or neither, none of it should ever carry the force of law. The intra-Christian imposition of doctrine is as much a sign of immaturity as anything the secularists do. It is also what made the Founders nervous in the first place. The American founding’s reticence about religion was not mainly unbelievers against believers. It was Christians afraid of one another. Baptists and Quakers had been jailed by Christian magistrates, and they were among those who fought hardest for the separation of church and state.
Fourth, speech is free, and the state may regulate it only where it becomes action in embryo: a threat, an incitement, a fraud. A man advocating a way of life I think is wrong is not threatening me. Under my rule he is left alone.
So the answer to “Who decides what Christianity done right is?” has a second part: where Christians disagree, on doctrine, the state is silent. Where they agree, on the moral law, the commandments and the two great commandments on which they hang, the nation has a conscience. That is what John Adams meant when he told Jefferson that independence had been won on “the general principles of Christianity.” A Baptist and a Catholic can both stand under that. They cannot both stand under each other’s catechism, and the state should never ask them to.
The third safeguard: power is broken into pieces and handed to neighbors
The third answer is structural, and here the American founding did something remarkable. It did not trust anyone with all the power. Not the king, not the legislature, not the courts, not the majority.
Think back to your physics question. In the Conscious Point Physics, one Being freezes the configurations, and it works because that Being is omniscient and good. No man is either. So in politics, many hands have to do the freezing, and none can do it alone. The Constitution divides power among three branches that check each other. It divides it again between the nation and the states. It reserves a list of rights that no majority can vote away without an enormous effort. And it makes the Constitution itself very hard to change: two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. That high barrier is itself a safeguard. You do not freeze a configuration into the nation’s foundation unless nearly everyone agrees. It means the amendment I have argued for, declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible, will almost certainly not pass in my lifetime. I know that. The same barrier that keeps my amendment out keeps out the amendments of people who would do far worse.
[Editor’s note: The freezing-mechanism language is used here as an analogy to CPP, not as a physical derivation.]
Federalism is the second structural safeguard, and it is underrated. When power sits mostly in the states and the counties, a failure in one place does not become a failure everywhere. A man who cannot live under one state’s laws can move to another. And when a community proves unfit to govern itself in some matter, the discipline can be scaled to the failure. The county’s judgment can pass up to the state, or the state’s to the nation, for as long as the failure lasts. I agree with that kind of discipline. When the Southern juries would not convict lynchers, the nation was right to take those cases into federal court. That was a wider community’s conscience overruling a narrower one. My objection is only that the discipline was made permanent and universal. A father who takes the car keys from the son who drove drunk is right. A father who never gives the keys back, to any of his children, is no longer disciplining. He has decided his children are serfs.
The jury is the third structural safeguard, and I consider it the cornerstone. Every other check on the government runs through the government. Courts review legislatures, legislatures fund courts, the executive appoints judges. The jury is the one place where a neighbor sits in judgment on the law as applied to his neighbor, and where his acquittal cannot be appealed. If a Christian-majority legislature passed an unjust law, and some day one will, twelve citizens could still look at the man in the dock and say, “This law, applied to this man, is wrong, and we will not be the instrument of it.” John Adams said it was not only the juror’s right but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, even in direct opposition to the direction of the court.
That power still exists. No juror can be punished for an acquittal. What was taken away is the jury’s knowledge of it. Since Sparf v. United States in 1895, judges have not been required to tell juries they hold it, and a prospective juror who says honestly that he would use it is struck from the panel. I have friends who told the truth in jury selection and were sent home for it. So we are teaching our citizens that they may judge the law only if they hide that they would. I would restore the instruction and stop punishing candor. And I would do it knowing that the power can be abused, as it was in the South, because the alternative is a people with no hand on the law at all.
The last structural safeguard is the vote, and not only at elections. What I have called the Christos Voting Network is simply this: every citizen informed, every citizen voting, every citizen putting his argument into the public conversation with his name attached. Opinion begets consensus. A government that knows exactly what its people think, and why, is harder to capture than one that hears from them every two years.
The fourth safeguard: leaders who can be corrected
The fourth answer is about the men who lead. A leader who cannot be wrong cannot be corrected. So the manner in which a Christian holds public power is itself a safeguard, or its absence is a danger.
I have tried to practice what I am describing. I take positions, and I give my reasons, and I hold each position open to a better argument. I have said I cannot claim to speak for the Lord in every position; I can say I am trying to. That admission is not modesty for its own sake. It is structural. The man who claims to be God’s mouthpiece has put himself beyond correction, and the history of religious tyranny is largely the history of such men.
It is also why I describe my candidacy as a witness candidacy. I am not seeking power. I accept no donations, and I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win; otherwise, to vote for the best man on the ballot. That is not false humility. It is the only honest posture for a man whose platform is converting the nation’s heart, because that is not something an officeholder can do. If I cannot persuade, I have no business compelling. The yoke I am offering is imposed the way Christ imposed His: “Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” It is an argument and an invitation, not a decree.
And when all the safeguards fail
Now the hardest part. All of these safeguards can fail. They failed in the lynching South. The courts were there, the Constitution was there, the jury was there, the churches were there, and still innocent men died, and their killers walked free. Structure did not save them, because structure is only as good as the people who operate it.
So the final answer to your question is not an institution. It is the heart of the people. The jury box, the courthouse, the legislature, the amendment are all downstream of what the nation actually loves. A people whose hearts are right will operate even a poor structure justly, and a people whose hearts are wrong will corrupt the best structure ever devised. That is why the work I am calling for is not mainly political. It is the formation of men, by fathers, churches, teachers, and neighbors, one heart at a time. The government cannot do that work. It can only get out of its way, or stand in its way.
And when a nation will not listen to its prophets, God corrects it through its history. Every nation that walked the road of cruelty in His name eventually learned, at great cost, what it would not learn by persuasion. Spain learned it. The South learned it. That is not a comfort, but it is a safeguard of the last resort, and I believe it is real.
So, who decides what Christianity done right is? Christ decided it and showed us. The Bible states it, and every citizen must read it and judge for himself, with the humility to be corrected by his neighbors and by the facts. The state enforces only the small part of it on which all Christians agree and which protects victims. The rest is carried by persuasion and example. And the people who most need to say “That is not Christ” when Christians do evil are Christians, first and loudest.
That is the only Christian nationalism I have ever meant. If it turns into anything else, it has stopped being what I am describing, and I will be among the first to say so.
[Editor’s note for the chapter rewrite — decision needed]
This section states Thomas’s position as he set it out in the September 2026 dialogue “Whose Law?” The state punishes the sins that make victims, never compels participation in sin, and leaves most vice to family, church, and conscience. Chapter 15 contains a passage that points the other way. There, Thomas says the nation “could have made homosexuality illegal,” and speaks of fornication, adultery, and homosexuality being recognized “as sins against God and a threat to the state.” In the same passage, however, the Department of Morality’s role is to counsel and help.
Thomas: The intent is to declare sin by name officially. Sin is the polarity of the standards of moral excellence the nation aspires to. And yes, you have chosen my polarity and intention correctly.
The two can be reconciled in either of two ways, and the rewrite should choose one:
(a) The nation declares these acts to be wrong, in its laws’ preambles, its teaching, and its public speech, and offers help through counsel, but does not prosecute consensual adult conduct. This fits the safeguards above and “Whose Law?” as written.
(b) The nation criminalizes some consensual sexual conduct, as many states did before Lawrence v. Texas (2003). If this is the position, the safeguards section needs a paragraph explaining why these acts fall on the “victim” side of the line (for example, harm to children, to spouses, or to the social fabric as argued in Chapters 7–9), because otherwise a reader will see a contradiction and conclude that the limits on the sword are only rhetorical.
As drafted, the section follows (a). This is the more convenient reading for the drafter, because it matches the published dialogue, so it is flagged here rather than assumed.
Chapter 7 — Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality and the State
THOMAS: The place where all of this becomes really controversial is one area: sexuality. It really does come down to that. There isn’t much disagreement anywhere else.
We have the state, which makes laws about things that harm other people. You took my stuff; you hurt me. Property and person. As far as enforcement goes, that’s all the state is there for. Then comes the question: Should the state regulate who I copulate with, and how? That’s where people say, “You’re incorporating religion. You’re pushing religion on us.” The answer is, yes, there are religious concepts here, but there are also social concepts. If sexuality is violent, we say clearly that it is not allowed. But then there is consensual sexuality. Should it, in any of its forms, be a matter for the state or not?
That is exactly where you can determine whether a society is committed to living the law of God. Before that point, everybody agrees, from the atheist to the most devout priest. We don’t want people taking our stuff, and we don’t want people hurting us. Until we introduce sexuality, there is no disagreement. When we get to sexuality, people say, “My rights, my body. We agreed.” And those are principles one could make a case for: laissez-faire, the boundary the state doesn’t cross.
Or we could say no. The family is the foundation of the state. If families don’t stay together because of all the varieties of sexuality that are not procreative, or that disrupt stable, procreative family life, then we are looking at the foundation of society, and at whether the state should be concerned with it, because the group welfare falls apart if we don’t have family.
If babies come out at the end of a long tube, as in Brave New World, and we have no bonding, we’re all just feral cats. We’re all just Alphas, Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, and we all fit in. The texture of life becomes a caricature. We end up in a world that isn’t as warm, isn’t as meaningful. It’s just industrial, just functional, just convenience. Nothing means that much, and nothing costs that much. Sexuality intersects with meaning so deeply that if the state stays out and says everybody can do whatever he wants—don’t ask, don’t tell, laissez-faire sexuality—then it’s really just “whatever.”
ISAK: Anything’s good.
THOMAS: It’s all good. Was it Cream or Blind Faith that sang “Do What You Like”?
ISAK: Blind Faith. Ginger Baker.
THOMAS: That song is basically Aleister Crowley put to music: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” If sexuality had nothing to do with family, if it were simply a matter of getting off wherever you like and then going on to something else, it would have no significance. It would be like having an ice cream cone. You get a real thrill from the ice cream cone. And heroin is the ultimate ice cream cone. It’s an ice cream cone with a bad hangover, and you want another one really badly when you haven’t had one for a while.
ISAK: And eventually you can only eat ice cream, or you get sick.
THOMAS: That’s why drugs are regulated. People don’t control themselves well, and when they don’t, they don’t eat, they don’t work, and they take your stuff because they don’t have any. All of these things come down to this: you have to act right. Otherwise somebody is going to come along and put his thumb on you, because you’re not putting your thumb on yourself. You’re not stifling yourself. You’re just doing what you like. People don’t like that, because it interferes with their doing what they like in moderation.
There’s a lyric I’ve always wondered about, from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band. The singer didn’t mind chopping wood, and didn’t mind that the money was no good, but they never should have taken the very best.
The problem is that people have to choose to regulate themselves to act right. You can do what you like, but only to a certain level. You can’t take it too far. You have to say, “This is enough.” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line was “Stay hungry.” But the issue is greed: doing more than you need. There’s a Foreigner song with a line about never doing more than you really need. That was the key. But the song wasn’t really saying that. It was a double message, not properly calibrated. It was basically saying, “Do more than you need, because that’s where the real mojo is.”
ISAK: Do more than you need: drink too much, eat too much, have too much sex.
THOMAS: Too much. Shoot it, snort it, smoke it.
ISAK: So in this case it’s about personal temperance: the individual sustaining himself without ridiculous consumption. If we had a culture where people weren’t overconsuming, it would change the economy, but it would also feel less cancerous than using things we don’t need, spending money we don’t need to spend, wearing clothes we don’t need, and eating too much food. Just overindulgence. What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich? Would we be spending money on things that actually matter? How much is overindulgence part of the society we’re trying to protect, in ways other than sex and drugs? That leads to a lot of other questions, but your point is taken.
It’s really interesting to think about. “Don’t steal, don’t kill”—but then sexuality. I’ve heard people argue, I think on an episode of Subway Takes, that everything people do is for sex. It was a controversial take, and I had to think about it. You get a job so you can make money and support yourself, or you get a cool car so you can take the ladies out. We are driven. As you said, meaning and sexuality are intertwined, because we’re driven to keep the gene going, to let whatever consciousness is in us continue past our death. That biological urge to reproduce isn’t in everybody, but if it’s inherent in how people are supposed to be—be fruitful and multiply—then it makes sense that we have the urges and desires we have.
But is that the only meaning? Is that really the only thing we do anything for? I don’t think so. You can find so much gratitude, so much ability to appreciate everything in life, that it doesn’t come down to reproduction or sexual activity alone. But a lot of people do live that way. That’s what they live for, and they don’t realize there’s something beyond it. And the drugs just heighten the feeling. It’s a dopamine dependency, a dopamine craving. I think it’s the lazy side of us: you can’t commit to something, so you have the fling and never see the person again, and you go on to the next one. You never learn to do the work of connection and family, of embracing your responsibilities. You don’t grow, because you don’t have to. There’s a perfectly consenting person over there, so you break a couple of hearts and keep going.
There can be selfishness in every good thing. You can pervert everything. So, going back to what you said, do the country’s problems boil down to sexual immorality, aside from the stealing and the killing? Or is it greed?
THOMAS: No, that isn’t the place where it all breaks down, and everything isn’t about the rush of a sexual experience. But there isn’t anything that isn’t related to sex, because if there were no sex, there would be nothing to relate to.
ISAK: True.
THOMAS: What comes out of sex is all the bondedness: the shared experience of overcoming hard times, celebrating good times, nurturing growth in the right way, helping you when you went the wrong way and getting you back on track, and getting everybody else to do the same, so that it’s good for all of us because we’re all doing the right thing together.
Addendum to Chapter 7 — The Economics of Enough: What Would Happen If America Stopped Overindulging?
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 7, “Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality and the State,” after Thomas’s words about bondedness (“…because we’re all doing the right thing together.”). This answers the question Isak asked in that chapter: “What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich?”]
THOMAS: You asked a question a while ago that I passed over, and it deserves an answer, because it’s the question an economist would throw at everything we’ve been saying. You asked what would happen economically if overindulgence went away. If people stopped eating too much, drinking too much, buying clothes they don’t need, spending money they don’t have, would we be rich? Or would the whole thing fall apart?
Let me take the objection first, because it’s a serious one.
The objection: won’t the economy collapse?
Consumer spending is roughly two-thirds of the American economy. So the argument goes: if Americans stopped overconsuming, businesses would sell less, lay off workers, those workers would spend less, and the whole economy would spiral down. Economists even have a name for it: the paradox of thrift. What’s prudent for one family, saving instead of spending, becomes harmful when everyone does it at once, because one man’s spending is another man’s income.
There’s a real point in that. If every American suddenly stopped buying anything but necessities tomorrow morning, there would be a shock. Stores would close and people would lose jobs. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
But the argument has three weaknesses, and they’re fatal to it.
The first is that money not spent doesn’t disappear. It gets saved, and savings are what investment is built from. The dollar you don’t spend on a fourth pair of shoes goes into a bank, a business, a home, or a child’s education. It becomes a machine, a workshop, a house, a skilled worker. Consumption uses things up. Investment builds the capacity to make more things. The nations that rebuilt fastest after the Second World War, like Germany and Japan, and later South Korea, did it with very high rates of saving. Their people deferred consumption, and their savings built the factories.
The second is that the change we’re talking about isn’t sudden. It’s a change of culture, one heart and one household at a time, over a generation. An economy adjusts to that the way it adjusts to every other change in what people want. When people stopped buying typewriters, the economy didn’t collapse. It moved.
And the third, which Adam Smith put better than I can: what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If it’s wise for your household to live within its means, avoid debt, save for the future, and not waste, it can’t be foolish for the nation of which your household is a part. A nation is only its households added together.
What temperance doesn’t take away, it moves
Temperance doesn’t mean people stop spending. It means they spend differently. The ice cream becomes vegetables. The money doesn’t vanish from the economy; it changes what it’s spent on.
Think about what a temperate household spends its money on. It buys fewer things, but better ones: the tool that lasts thirty years instead of the one that breaks in three, which means more craftsmen and fewer landfills. It owns its home and fixes it instead of leasing everything. It gives more, because people who aren’t drowning in their own appetites have something left over for others. It invests in education and skills. And most of all, it has children and raises them. Family is the largest “consumer” of a temperate life: food, clothing, housing, schooling, time. A nation of intact, fruitful families does not lack for demand. It is building the next generation of workers, taxpayers, and parents, which is the one thing a nation cannot import or borrow.
And notice what happens to debt. American households owe more than a trillion dollars on credit cards alone. “The borrower is servant to the lender.” A nation of temperate households is a nation out of servitude. Every dollar not spent on interest is a dollar that can be spent on something real or saved for something that matters.
The ledger of intemperance
Now look at the other side of the ledger, which the objection never counts: what intemperance already costs us.
These are rough figures from government and research sources, and they come from different years. They should be checked before this goes to print. But the order of magnitude is what matters:
Excessive drinking has been estimated to cost the United States around 250 billion dollars a year in health care, lost productivity, crime, and car crashes. Smoking, more than 600 billion a year once lost productivity is included. Medical care for obesity-related illness, around 170 billion a year. Diabetes, most of it the type that is largely preventable through diet and activity, more than 400 billion a year in medical costs and lost work. The opioid epidemic has been estimated at well over a trillion dollars in a single year when lives lost are counted. New sexually transmitted infections cost billions in lifetime medical care every year. Family breakdown, meaning divorce and childbearing outside marriage, has been estimated to cost taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars a year through welfare, courts, and the other programs that step in when fathers leave. And something like a third of all the food produced in this country is wasted.
Add it up. Even allowing for overlap between those numbers, you are looking at well over a trillion dollars a year, every year, spent cleaning up the consequences of appetite that wasn’t controlled.
I’ve practiced as a naturopathic physician for many years, and I can tell you what those numbers look like from the inside. Most of the chronic disease I’ve treated came from how people ate, drank, smoked, slept, and moved. Much of it was preventable, and much of it was reversible when the patient was willing. The American health care system is mostly a system for managing the consequences of intemperance, and it is the largest single sector of the economy.
That’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and we pay for it whether or not we ever need it ourselves, in premiums, in taxes, and in the lost work of people who should have been healthy.
The broken window
This is where the objection turns inside out.
A French economist named Frédéric Bastiat told a story about a boy who breaks a shop window. The townspeople console the shopkeeper: at least the glazier will get work. The glazier spends his money, and so on, and the broken window looks like it has stimulated the economy. But Bastiat pointed out what isn’t seen: the shopkeeper was going to spend that money on a new pair of shoes. Now he has a window he already had, and no shoes. The town is poorer by one pair of shoes.
Intemperance is a nation breaking its own windows. The rehab clinic, the divorce lawyer, the prison, the dialysis unit, and the bariatric surgeon all show up in the national accounts as production. They count toward the economy’s size exactly the way the glazier’s work did. But they aren’t wealth. They are repairs. A nation that spent a trillion dollars less a year cleaning up after itself might even show a smaller economy on paper for a while, and be far richer in fact: more money in savings, more in real goods, more in children, more years of healthy working life, and more time on the porch.
It’s the same distinction we drew with cancer. A tumor grows fast. Growth is not the same thing as health. A temperate economy grows the way a healthy body does: to meet real needs, and then it maintains itself by steady, faithful production. It doesn’t need to keep swelling to stay alive.
Who would lose
If temperance spread, some businesses would shrink, and I think we should name them honestly. The businesses that depend on people not controlling themselves: the gambling apps designed to be addictive, the predatory lenders, the pornography industry, the makers of food engineered to be impossible to stop eating, and the marketers whose whole trade is making people feel they need what they don’t. A great deal of their profit comes from a small number of people who have lost control.
When those businesses shrink, that is the tumor shrinking. The people who work in them would need other work, and a healthy economy would have it for them, because the money their former customers are no longer losing would be spent and invested somewhere else. There would be real hardship in the transition, and a Christian nation should help people through it. But no one should mourn an industry whose profits depended on other people’s ruin.
What “rich” means
So would we be rich? Yes, but I want to be careful about what that word means.
We would be richer in money. The trillion dollars a year we spend cleaning up after ourselves would be saved, invested, given, or spent on things that last. Families would carry less debt and own more of what they use. Government would be smaller, because there would be fewer messes to clean up. That is the opposite of the G-men: a government that shrinks because there’s less wrongdoing.
But we would also be rich in the way that matters more. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Temperance is one of the fruits of the Spirit, listed with love, joy, and peace, and I don’t think that’s an accident. The man who can say “this is enough” is the only man who can ever be satisfied. The man who always needs “just a little more” is poor no matter what he owns.
God taught Israel this in the wilderness with the manna. Every family gathered what it needed for the day. “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” The ones who tried to hoard it found it rotten in the morning. And on the sixth day He gave them twice as much, so they could rest on the seventh. That was the first lesson in the economics of enough: gather what you need, trust God for tomorrow, and rest.
“There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.” That is the whole answer to your question. The temperate nation isn’t the one that has stopped enjoying life. It is the one that has something left over: money in the bank, oil in the lamp, time for its children, strength in its old age, and the peace to sit on the porch and say, “This is good. This is enough.”
References for the rewrite: Proverbs 21:20; Proverbs 22:7; 1 Timothy 6:6; Galatians 5:22–23; Exodus 16:16–30; 2 Corinthians 8:15. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, ch. 2. Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850). Cost estimates to verify before publication: CDC, excessive alcohol use (about $249 billion, 2010); CDC, smoking (more than $600 billion, 2018); CDC, obesity medical costs (about $173 billion, 2019); American Diabetes Association (about $413 billion, 2022); Joint Economic Committee, opioid epidemic (about $1.5 trillion, 2020, including value of lives lost); CDC, sexually transmitted infections (about $16 billion lifetime medical costs of 2018 infections); Institute for American Values, “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing” (about $112 billion a year, 2008); Federal Reserve Bank of New York, credit card balances (above $1 trillion since 2023); USDA, food waste (30–40 percent of the food supply). Overlap among these figures means they should not be summed exactly; the text says “well over a trillion dollars” for that reason.
Chapter 8 — Where Does God Get the Most Joy?
THOMAS: We’re trying to make life good. I brought up sexuality because we were talking about regulating the world so that everybody acts right: we punish people who do bad things, and we leave alone people who do good things. Doing good is its own reward, or we give each other pats on the back. We don’t have a government Department of Congratulation.
ISAK: They have that in schools: the little participation ribbon.
THOMAS: We don’t need a government Department of Applause. We have government controlling various things. Whether we need administrative bureaucracies to control energy, education, homeland security, commerce, agriculture, labor, and so on is another topic.
The issue of sexuality comes up because when a society is sexually unregulated, people aren’t faithful. They aren’t monogamous. They aren’t choosing the proper age lane, the proper gender lane, or the proper consent lane. If all of that is “do what you like,” you end up with a hugely heterogeneous population behaving in ways that are not part of the optimum way of relating. People in any of the alternate sexual experiences don’t create family. Or if they do, it’s a family bent in a certain way by the experiences of that orientation. So it changes society. It is a society-modifier, a society-biaser.
Then the question is: If it biases society, should we want a rainbow of biases? The answer is that all of them are sub-happiness. The people choosing them are eating ice cream all day. They aren’t eating their vegetables and fiber. They aren’t living a full-spectrum life. They’re living a life that is either immature or pathological.
I consider homosexuality a growth arrest. Of course, growing up, you’re attracted to boys. Of course you’re attracted to girls. That makes total sense. Now let’s grow up. People have their own particular way of needing to grow up, or a particular desire. You’ve got that; now let’s work on developing a taste for a different experience. That different experience includes children. It includes fidelity, hard work, long-term devotion, relationship, old age, sickness and health, better or worse, richer or poorer, all the things that make up life. Without fidelity, those things are missed.
If a society allows those alternate expressions, it has large colonies of people who have made that choice, and when there are large colonies of an alternate lifestyle, the society changes. The LGBT argument is that it’s a rainbow, and it’s all good. The fact is that having a group of people living in immaturity or pathology, unable to commit, unable to be faithful—breaking a few hearts, as you put it—changes the dynamic of society, and it ends up a less happy, less joyful society.
I put all of this under one question: Where does God get the most joy living in every single person? If there is one person who is not fully enjoying his life in the way that makes God happy, then there is one less experience of God being fully satisfied in this world. It shows up in people who are unsatisfied with their lives, and who go out and do things that are heinous, or irritating, or impoverishing in some way. There is a cost to not living the way God wants us to live. That is the bottom line. It diminishes life a little for all of us if any of us lives outside that perfection.
We are all pulled toward the animal expression of our sexuality, toward overconsumption of money, of control, of sensory satisfaction. All of those things are good in themselves. Control is very important. Sexuality is very important. Sensual experience is very important, and so is working for things and having the highs and the lows. But the drug experience makes it so clear: the high is higher than you would ever go without it, and the low is lower than you would ever go without it, and the in-between is a ho-hum place where you would normally live. So life is never satisfying with drugs, because you never get to live in “This is all right. This is good.” Like your experience on the porch the other day: “This is just good.”
ISAK: I was thinking about that while you were talking: the highs and the lows, and the thing I used to chase without consciously knowing it. “I need to feel good.” You’re like a fish chasing a hook. It’s over there; it’s going to be so good. You’re swimming against the current and you don’t know where it is, but you saw it in this water before. It becomes a chaotic service in and of itself, not to you, but an offering to the night. “I’ll give my time to the evening and let it take me.”
What I have now is the ability to sit back and say, “I’m bored. This is nice. I don’t have anything on my mind. I’m emptying out my mind. I’m interacting with the universe right now, and this is enough. This is peace.” It’s a momentary peace, and I know what to do with it. I can just sit here and be here. You don’t get that in a low or in a high.
In a high you may say, “I dedicate my life to this,” but it doesn’t stay unless it’s real. You quickly lose it. I do think spiritual things can happen in altered states, so I’m not talking about your experience. I mean that you think you know something, you feel amazing, you think this is the best, and then you come to and realize the toll it takes on you.
Sex is great until you find out it’s meaningless. The whole reason you go into it is “I don’t have to see this person ever again. It’s going to be fun.” Then you move on, and it isn’t an experience you wanted or feel joyful or good about. Obviously, if you don’t care, you can brag about it and add to your body count. But it won’t take you anywhere. If anything, you can get sick from it. It isn’t sustainable. It isn’t “the more sex, the better,” any more than “the more food, the better.” After a while you’ll be—
THOMAS: Fat or impotent.
ISAK: Fat from pleasure, or impotent. Exactly.
Chapter 9 — A Department of Morality: The State as a Church That Pulls for You
THOMAS: One of the things we’re missing as a society, in terms of government, is something we might call a Department of Morality, since we’re into having departments. Not something that goes around with a flashlight shining it into the backs of cars. It’s almost like church. We are encouraging people not to do these various things. The state is on your side if you’re trying to be good. If you’re not, we’re here to try to help you, even though you don’t want to be helped, and even though you don’t realize you need help. We’re not going to throw you in the pokey, but we are going to come by and talk, see how you’re doing, see if we can help, see where you are in your journey, and let you know we’re pulling for you.
What I’ve just described is what church is supposed to be, but it isn’t. Church isn’t that, but it should be. And the government has, in a way, allied itself with “do what you like.” “Do what you like” is not conducive to a stable social order.
If the purpose of the state is its own continued existence, and the purpose of its continued existence is to maximize the health and the general welfare of the people, then the state is not supporting the program of the general welfare. It is not promoting the common good. The Constitution speaks of providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. Punishment should really be in support of the social order, which is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which should have been property. So: life, liberty, happiness, and property.
[Editor’s note: The Preamble to the Constitution reads “provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare.” “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence; Locke’s earlier formula was “life, liberty, and estate.”]
We should be happy. If you’re having alternate sex, unfaithful sex, and so on, you are in some way not contributing to the group’s happiness. If nothing else, you broke a heart. If nothing else, you helped make another heart callous and hard. Do you want hard-hearted, callous people as part of an optimally growing society? We are trying to grow a nation with the optimal experience of life. Do you want people who don’t really connect with other people? “Whatever. I can use them or take them.” That is not the society that provides the most happiness. If everybody wants to be like that, it is not an optimally happy society. You could let people do that because it’s what they like. But those of us on the other side want people who actually care, rather than people who don’t.
ISAK: It’s like thinking about the country the way you think about your family. What do you want for the people in it? A hard-hearted person who shies away from the world won’t benefit anybody. You can’t send your son out to buy groceries if he’s too afraid of the world. Maybe that’s a bad example.
Think of it this way: everybody in the world you can treat well—treating him well is treating your own child well. It’s treating God well. They’re all interchangeable. Only the way you treat them differs. So how do you build a country where people are soft-hearted? It’s a country where people treat each other well and don’t expect to be stabbed in the back, or screwed over, or abandoned with a child. Those have become the expectations. Sometimes people take the risk and commit to somebody, and sometimes it works. Or they don’t think about it at all, and they’re left not knowing who the father is.
All of these things lend themselves to a decaying society, not by any one person’s choice, but by a way of life: “It’s okay to leave. Nobody’s shaming me for it. Or if they are, they’re in a different state, and I’ll get out of paying child support.” That’s the generational decay: of support, of confidence, of the ability to be open-hearted with each other. We really wrecked the family unit, didn’t we? It has to be restored. Is anybody really ignorant of how good it is to have a family together?
Of course there are complexities. The dad beats the mom and she has to leave, or he cheats, or she cheats. But in a Christian world, I always think of the story in the Bible about a man whose wife went off and prostituted herself. I don’t remember whether he was a king.
THOMAS: That was Hosea and Gomer.
[Editor’s note: In the recording Thomas said “Ezra”; the prophet is Hosea (Hosea 1–3).]
ISAK: He asks, “What do I do?” And God says, in effect, “Let her bathe and clean herself and wait a while, and then you must take her back, because I have done the same for you. I have done the same for this nation.” In my mind, that’s everybody. It’s just the nature of things: we act against what the high command would want, or what your wife would want.
That story always stood out to me because it bothered me as a child. I thought, “I would never take anybody back.” It’s the rational thing the world teaches: “This is a sin. Don’t take them back. They’re defiled now.” I think it really affected how I understood forgiveness. Being stabbed in the back by the person closest to you may be the worst pain. But that pain is not new. God has felt it in billions of iterations, and it’s okay. The only way forward is through forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance.
Keeping the family together, not mistreating people—I wonder whether we could change hearts in a generation or two. “This is how we should be treated. This is how we should treat other people. This is how we forgive, and how we ask for forgiveness.” How many times do you forgive somebody? Seventy times seven. It’s really about the heart. Seventy times seven is a ridiculous number on purpose. It means don’t stop.
[Editor’s note: Hosea 3:1–3 describes Hosea buying Gomer back and asking her to wait “many days”; the “bathe” detail is Isak’s paraphrase. Seventy times seven is Matthew 18:22.]
Addendum to Chapter 9 — The Department of Morality: How It Would Work, and What It Must Never Become
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 9, “A Department of Morality,” after Isak’s words on forgiveness (“Seventy times seven… It means don’t stop.”). The counseling method follows Thomas’s “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (RM, February 26, 2026). The design assumes option (a) in the decision note to Point 1: the nation declares and counsels; it does not prosecute consensual adult conduct.]
THOMAS: I threw out the phrase “Department of Morality,” and I said it isn’t a man with a flashlight shining into the backs of cars. But a phrase like that frightens people, and it should, until they see what it means. Orwell’s Ministry of Love was a torture chamber. The Soviet Union put dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and called their disagreement a mental illness. China today runs camps it calls re-education and vocational training. Every one of those regimes said it was helping people become better. So if I’m going to propose anything like this, I owe you a clear account of how it would work, and an even clearer account of what it could never be allowed to do.
What it is for
Start with the purpose. I said the state is supposed to promote the general welfare, and that “do what you like” is not conducive to a stable social order. I said hard hearts are a public cost: every broken marriage, every abandoned child, every addiction, every heart made callous by being used and discarded is paid for by all of us, in prisons, in welfare, in children who grow up without fathers and pass the wound on. The government spends enormous sums treating the results of moral collapse, and nothing at all encouraging the character that prevents it. It is the most expensive way possible to run a country: pay nothing for the fence at the top of the cliff and everything for the ambulance at the bottom.
So the purpose of the Department of Morality is simple. It is the nation saying, out loud and with its resources, “We are on your side if you’re trying to be good. And if you’re not, we’re still pulling for you, and there is help.”
We already have a model for this, and it works. The Surgeon General has no police. He can’t arrest a smoker or fine a restaurant that serves bacon. What he has is a voice, and the standing to use it. When the Surgeon General reported in 1964 that smoking causes cancer, and put a warning on every pack, nobody was jailed. But over the following decades the share of American adults who smoked fell by more than half. That happened by persuasion, by a nation telling the truth with one voice and making help available to anyone who wanted to quit. The Department of Morality is that, applied to the heart.
Its five functions
Here is what I think it would actually do.
First, it would declare. The nation would state, in plain words, the moral law it holds in common: the commandments on which all Christians agree, and the two great commandments on which they hang. Not doctrine, not the teaching of any church about baptism or the end times, but the moral floor. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Keep your vows. Love your neighbor as yourself. The Department would be the nation’s conscience speaking in public, the way the Surgeon General is the nation’s physician speaking in public.
That voice would speak to the government as well as the people. The Bible’s prophets were not chaplains to the king; they were the ones who told the king what God thought of his laws. So the Department would publish, for any major bill, a plain moral assessment: whom does this help, whom does it harm, and would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize it as love? It would have no veto. Its only power would be the power Nathan had with David, the power to say “Thou art the man” and let the conscience do the rest.
Second, it would teach. It would produce materials for families, for schools that choose to use them, for churches, and for anyone else: on marriage, on raising children, on handling money, on controlling appetite, on forgiveness. “Just say no” was ridiculed, but it put a simple truth in front of a generation of children. The Department would do that across the whole of life, in the way we’ve been talking: not “because we said so,” but “here is why, and here is what happens when you don’t.”
Third, it would train counselors, and this is the heart of it. Most people who are going wrong don’t need a lecture. They need somebody who can see what is actually happening in their soul, and tell them the truth in a way they can hear. I’ve practiced that for years, and I believe it can be taught. The method is rapport, confrontation, and change. Rapport first: a man has to trust you before he’ll hear you. Then confrontation, but the precise kind, a rifle shot rather than a shotgun: “When you do this, here is what it does to you and to the people you love.” And then an invitation to change. The diagnosis opens the door; he has to walk through it. The Department would train ordinary people in that skill: pastors, teachers, coaches, older men and women in every community. It would certify them, and then get out of their way.
Fourth, it would offer help to anyone who asks. A couple on the edge of divorce. A young man who can’t stop drinking. A father who wants to be a better father and doesn’t know how, because his own father left. A woman who was used and discarded and has hardened her heart so it can’t happen again. The help would be free and available close to home, provided mostly through churches and community counselors in the small groups where people actually know each other, the hundred-and-fifty-person cells I’ve talked about. And it would be voluntary. You could walk in, and you could walk out.
Fifth, it would help rehabilitate the convicted. For a man who has actually committed a crime, stolen or assaulted or defrauded, the court could offer or require counsel as part of his sentence, alongside restitution to his victim. That is the rehabilitation I talked about in Chapter 11: sitting in the corner, but for the purpose of coming back softened, not for the purpose of being put away. A prison that releases a man harder than it received him has failed at the one thing that would actually protect the next victim.
What it must never do
Now the other side, and this matters more than everything I just said, because the history of this idea is written in blood.
It must never watch. No surveillance, no files on anyone’s private life, no informants, no reports from neighbors about what goes on in a man’s bedroom or his home. The flashlight shining in on the backseat of the car is exactly what it is not. The moment it keeps a list, it has become the Stasi.
It must never compel. No one can be required to receive its counsel unless a court has convicted him of a real crime against a real victim. No one can be penalized for refusing its help, disagreeing with its teaching, or telling it to go away. A forced conversion is no conversion, and forced counseling of a free man is just a softer prison.
It must never enforce. It has no police, no power to arrest, no power to fine, and no power to deny anyone a job, a license, or a benefit. The sword belongs to the courts and is limited to the crimes that make victims. The Department holds a voice and an open door, and nothing else.
It must never inform. What a man tells a counselor stays with the counselor, protected the way what a man tells his priest or his lawyer is protected. If a person seeking help fears his confession will reach a prosecutor, he will never come, and the whole purpose fails. The only exceptions would be the ones the law already recognizes: a child in danger, or a clear threat to someone’s life.
It must never impose doctrine. It speaks the moral law on which Christians agree and leaves everything else to the churches. When a man is ready to go further, it sends him to his own church, or to one of his choosing. It never tells a Baptist what to believe about baptism or a Catholic what to believe about the Mass.
And it must never grow beyond its purpose. Remember the G-men. We created them to stop the robbers, and once the robbers were caught, they needed something to do, so they started watching everybody. Every agency wants to grow. This one would have to be built small and kept small. A small federal office to state the standard and certify training; delivery by states and counties, mostly through volunteers, churches, and community organizations; and a requirement to show its fruit. Are fewer marriages breaking up? Are fewer children growing up without fathers? Are fewer men returning to prison? If after a fixed number of years it can’t show that fruit, it expires. A Department of Morality that couldn’t prove it was making people better would be the most hypocritical agency ever created, and it should not be allowed to outlive its failure.
Why a department, and not just the church?
You might ask: if what I’m describing is what the church is supposed to do, why not just let the church do it? Why involve the government at all?
The honest answer is that the church should do it, and mostly isn’t. I said that plainly. And the state isn’t neutral now. It has allied itself with “do what you like.” Through its schools, it teaches our children that there is no moral center. It pays for the consequences of the collapse and says nothing about the causes. So the choice is not between the state teaching morality and the state being neutral. The state is already teaching. The only question is what it teaches.
But the order of responsibility matters. The family is first. The church is second. The community is third. The state is last, and its job is to strengthen the first three, not to replace them. The best measure of the Department of Morality would be how much of its work it could hand off: to fathers who have learned to be fathers, to churches that have learned to counsel, to communities that have learned to say “enough” to their own members early and in love. If it succeeded completely, it would work itself nearly out of a job. That is the opposite of the G-men, and the opposite of every Ministry of Love that ever existed. They needed more wrongdoers to justify themselves. This would need fewer.
What it looks like when it works
Let me make it concrete. A young husband goes to a counselor in his own town, somebody trained through the Department, maybe a deacon in his church, maybe a retired teacher. He says his marriage is falling apart and he’s thinking of leaving. The counselor builds rapport and listens. Then he tells him the truth: “You’re not getting your needs met, and neither is she, and neither of you has ever asked the other for what you need in a way the other could hear.” They work on it, as I describe in the next chapter: asking for what you need without demanding, serving by requiring service. Maybe the marriage survives. Maybe it doesn’t. But no one watched him, no one reported him, no one forced him to come, and no one punished him for leaving. The nation simply made it easy for him to find help, and made it plain what it hoped he’d choose.
Multiply that by a million homes, and you have a different country.
That is what I mean. The state pulling for you. The nation telling the truth with one voice, and then holding the door open. It’s what Hosea did for Gomer, and what God has done for every one of us: not throwing us away, but coming after us, over and over, seventy times seven, without ever forcing us to come home.
References for the rewrite: 2 Samuel 12:1–7 (Nathan); Hosea 3; Matthew 18:22. U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee report “Smoking and Health” (1964); adult smoking prevalence fell from about 42 percent in 1965 to under 12 percent by the early 2020s according to CDC data (verify current figure before publication). The rapport–confrontation–change method and the “rifle shot” delivery are from “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (RM, CDI, 2026-02-26). Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); Soviet punitive psychiatry is documented in Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (1977).
[Drafter’s note: The moral-assessment function for legislation (the “Nathan” function under “Declare”), the fruit-based sunset, and the confidentiality rule are proposals added in drafting. They follow from Thomas’s stated principles (prophets not chaplains; the G-men problem; rapport before confrontation) but were not stated by him, so he should confirm or strike them.]
Chapter 10 — Everything Is God: The Ministry’s Purpose, Marriage, and the Two-Way Street of Service
THOMAS: These things are the end goal of what we are trying to do. This is a ministry about creating that for the nation.
Why do you believe in God? Because look at the physics of it. At the bottom of it, you can see that everything is God. Now that you’ve got that, how does it fit your life? If everything is God, then I am a part of God. Certainly not the whole thing; I can see I’m just a tiny speck of it. But I have a viewpoint, and my point of view is a point of view God has, because I have it and God is everything. If I have a God point of view, you have a God point of view too. You have your particular desires, what makes you feel good, and I have mine. If you like good things, and I can give them to you without destroying my own life—if it’s in the domain of what is actually possible to do for another person, something that doesn’t destroy me but does help him—then I should take those options.
A marriage has difficulties within it.1 Corinthians 7:28, 7:33, but we must not be discouraged by the duties or hardships of married life. We need to realize, going into it, that there is great reward, but marriage also has things that are not pleasant. A level of maturity is required. It requires the same character that must be developed to successfully cope with life stresses. Marriage will be another one of the challenges that must be overcome; develop that maturity before marriage. Having reached that milestone, the difficulty of marriage can be more realistically assesed and the choice made with full understanding that there will be difficulties, and decide consciously to choose marry. But having chosen marriage, don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. Don’t be resentful. Do what marriage requires, and do it with a good spirit. The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Do it as unto the Lord, with a giving heart.
[Editor’s note: The marriage passage Thomas paraphrased has not been identified. “God loves a cheerful giver” is 2 Corinthians 9:7; “as unto the Lord” is Colossians 3:23. Note: I recently read this verse in the Amplified version and have not yet been able to identify it. I’ll put it in later.
If everybody did that all the time in their marriages, people wouldn’t get divorced. People get divorced because their needs aren’t being met. If you give to meet her needs and she gives to meet yours, even if they are very different needs, both people feel that this is all right. If that doesn’t satisfy you, and you want something else because it’s more exciting, faster, smoother, cooler, longer, quieter—the latest model—then you’re living on ice cream. You just want sugar. You want heroin, another dopamine hit. You have a maturity problem. So learn to be at peace. Learn to sit on the porch and be at rest. Learn to appreciate what is. It comes down to a regulated heart.
If everybody has that, everybody is being served by everybody else. “He who is greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all.” That’s because he made so many people happy. But you’re also supposed to love yourself, and loving yourself means that you need to be served as well. The person who only serves others is not obeying the Great Commandment. You love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t have a body and not have needs. It’s a given. So: What is it that you need? How can I help you? And what do I need in order to be served? Maybe all I need is a cup of water and a crust of bread. That’s very minimal, but I do need it.
[Editor’s note: Matthew 23:11; Mark 9:35.]
Most people need a great deal more than that. But if we all give and receive, and focus on the joy of giving to people who perhaps can’t give—all they can do right now is take, and they need that—then we give them that. When they’ve had enough, we say, “Now it’s time for you to learn to give. I’m going to serve you by letting you serve me, by asking you to serve.” That is serving him, because he is learning how to serve. So correction is a very important part of teaching. Training other people to give is an important part of giving. It’s another kind of service: we serve them by requiring them to serve.
So it isn’t self or other. It’s self and other, and it can’t be any other way. If it’s self or other, its imalanced. If you think, “I just serve.” you haven’t got like in a proper balance. You need some education. You need to let other people help you, and if they don’t then you have to teacch them how to serve. If you’re surrounded by takers, you need to train them to be givers, and that is giving to them and serving them.
ISAK: Yes. You can serve them and serve yourself at the same time, and ideally, in a harmonious society, that’s how it goes. But not everybody knows how to do each part.
THOMAS: That comes down to being able to ask for what you want. It’s rapport, confrontation, and change. “When you do this, it makes me feel bad. I’d like it if you did it this way. Wipe up the countertop, take out the trash, get up and take care of the kids.” Whatever it is. “Rather than my doing it all the time, I need to be served too. It makes me feel bad when I have to do it all the time. Would you do this for me?”
When you ask to be served, you are speaking the truth, and you speak the truth in love. It isn’t demanding its own way. It isn’t proud, arrogant, boastful, or angry. It’s patient. It asks for what it wants, but in a way that pleases. If that isn’t responded to, then you may need to be angry, but you don’t sin, and you don’t carry the anger with you. You keep faith and you forgive. You’re angry because you were sinned against. You were hurt. You were trespassed against. There was a debt, and you’re asking for it to be balanced. So it is necessary to use anger when sugar doesn’t work. You try the stick. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but occasionally you need a fly swatter.
ISAK: Good point. It doesn’t work for everything.
THOMAS: Sugar works really well most of the time, but you need the fly swatter too.
[Editor’s note: “Speaking the truth in love” is Ephesians 4:15; love “does not insist on its own way” is 1 Corinthians 13:5; “Be angry, and sin not” is Ephesians 4:26.]
Chapter 11 — A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State: Overcoming Evil with Good
THOMAS: So the Christian-nationalism question sounds as though it’s about a nanny state, but it isn’t. It’s about a church. It’s about a kingdom. It’s about creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. It isn’t about going out to raise hell, or going out tonight to get some sinners and string them up. It’s about actually loving other people. Be angry and sin not. You overcome evil with good. Lynching is not overcoming evil with good. It is participating in evil, being evil yourself. That isn’t how you overcome evil. All the things that have been done in the name of Christianity that aren’t Christian need to be called what they are. That isn’t it. You can call it Christian nationalism all you want, but it isn’t Christian. It might be national, but it isn’t the kind of nation I’d want to live in, so it isn’t even a good nation.
[Editor’s note: “Overcome evil with good” is Romans 12:21.]
ISAK: Ultimately, we’re trying to create a nice place for nice people.
THOMAS: And if you’re not a nice person, you need to rehabilitate yourself. That’s really important. We’re not into punishment alone; we’re into rehabilitation. If you need to sit in the corner, or be away from people for a while to soften your heart and get some perspective, we’ll do that. But this is about rehabilitating yourself, and that’s why we forgive people. We give another chance. How many times do you forgive? It’s turning the other cheek: “Let’s try again. The way you did that wasn’t good. Let’s try again.” It doesn’t mean, “You slapped me here; now slap the other side.” It means, “I’m not going to retaliate and repay evil for evil. I’m going to repay this with goodness.”
To me it all seems so simple. It isn’t some big, complicated routine. But if you try to explain how it applies to every part of life, it becomes quite a tome. If you try to address every inequity, it becomes very lengthy, because the number of ways you can put a watch together wrong is enormous. There is one way to put it together right. Any other way is just another wrong way, and there is no end to them.
ISAK: And we’re seeing it compound from one evil decision: the lynching, the eye-for-an-eye, and it continues and compounds. So it isn’t as if there’s one righteous side. When I see a war—this may be controversial—I don’t see a right side. I see that both sides have their issues, historically and now. It seems we’re so far gone that it isn’t about being right anymore. It’s about who can forgive. How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?
Addendum to Chapter 11 — Systemic Injustice: Inherited Wounds, Personal Guilt, and the Only Remedy That Breaks the Chain
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 11, “A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State,” after Isak’s question: “How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?” The frame follows Thomas’s February 2026 Fellowship response to Charles Eisenstein (“The Malware and the Patch”), which accepted that evil is both personal and systemic.]
THOMAS: You just said you see evil compounding from one decision: the lynching, then the eye-for-an-eye, then the next one. That is the last question on your list that I haven’t touched, and it’s the right place for it. Your draft asked, “What does CPP do with systemic injustice?” and then stopped. I want to give it a real answer, because it is a phrase that means two very different things, and one of them is true.
Two meanings of one phrase
The first meaning is simply this: sin doesn’t stay where it’s committed. It gets built into laws, customs, institutions, and families, and it goes on doing damage long after the people who committed it are dead. That is true. The Bible taught it long before any sociologist did.
The second meaning is the one you’ve been taught to hear in the phrase. It says that every difference in outcome between groups is proof of oppression, that people are guilty or innocent according to the group they were born into, and that the world divides into oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized. That meaning is not true. It is the worldview without a center I described to you, dressed up as justice.
I want to affirm the first as strongly as I reject the second. Christians who deny the first because they don’t like the second have made a serious mistake, and they have handed the whole subject to people who will use it badly.
What the Bible says about inherited sin
God said in the Ten Commandments that He visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I read that first as a description of how sin actually works, not as an arbitrary punishment. Abuse creates abusers. A father who abandons his children raises sons who don’t know how to stay. A community that was robbed stays poor, and poverty has its own consequences. The wound is passed on.
The Bible also recognizes sin written into law. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people.” That is systemic injustice in the most literal sense: injustice made into the system. The prophet Amos condemned Israel for selling the righteous for silver and turning aside the poor in the gate, where the courts sat. The Bible calls the whole of it “the world,” the system of human society organized apart from God, and says the whole world lies in wickedness.
But the same Bible draws a line that the modern ideology erases. Ezekiel says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Consequences are inherited. Guilt is not. The child of a thief may inherit poverty because his father’s stolen goods were confiscated, or wealth because they weren’t. But the child is not a thief. You cannot put a man in the dock for what his great-grandfather did, or for what people who looked like him did.
That one distinction settles most of the argument. The consequences of injustice are real and they travel down the generations. The guilt belongs to the man who committed it, and to no one else.
America’s own record
You told me you’re cynical about this country’s history, and I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty and not a flag-waving answer.
America has written injustice into its law. Slavery was protected by the Constitution itself, through the fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause. After slavery ended, the Southern states wrote Jim Crow into their statute books. As I’ve said, lynchers were acquitted by juries of professing Christians for the better part of a century. In the 1930s the federal government’s own mortgage programs marked black neighborhoods as bad risks and refused to insure loans there, so a generation of families couldn’t build wealth through their homes the way their white neighbors did. Treaty after treaty with the Indian nations was signed and broken. Those were not the private sins of bad individuals. They were the law. They were the system.
But here is the other half, which the ideology leaves out. The people who ended those systems were overwhelmingly Christians, acting on the Bible. The abolitionists were evangelicals quoting Scripture. The civil rights movement was led by preachers out of black churches. Martin Luther King Jr. did not quote Marx. He quoted Amos: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The remedy for America’s systemic sin came out of the same book that people now blame for it.
That is the pattern. When Christians do evil, they have to disobey their own book to do it, and the book is what convicts them. There is no other civilization that produced its own abolition movement out of its own scriptures in quite that way. So I don’t answer your cynicism by denying the sins. I answer it by pointing to where the repentance came from.
Why injustice outlives the unjust
Your draft asked what CPP has to say. Here is the one thing I think it adds.
The order of the universe is conservative. Disorder does not heal itself with time. It persists until a remedy is actually applied to it. This isn’t only physics. It’s the principle behind everything I’ve said about the cross: nothing is simply forgotten. A debt doesn’t disappear because the creditor died. A wound doesn’t close because the man who inflicted it is gone.
[Editor’s note: The “conservative order” is used here as it is in “The Architecture of Mercy,” as a principle of Thomas’s framework applied by analogy, not as a derived result about societies.]
That is why systemic injustice outlives the unjust. The slaveholders are dead, the Jim Crow legislators are dead, the lynch mobs are dead. But the disorder they introduced didn’t die with them. It is still moving through families, neighborhoods, and the ways people look at each other. Waiting won’t fix it. Something has to be done.
And it’s why, as Eisenstein saw, political fixes alone keep failing. When the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them. You can abolish one unjust arrangement, and if hearts are unchanged, another grows in its place, the way the tumor grows back when the cancer is still in the body.
The remedies that make it worse
There are two wrong remedies, and they are mirror images of each other.
The first is denial. “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with me.” It is true that it isn’t your guilt. But it isn’t true that it has nothing to do with you. You inherited a country, and a country is responsible for its own laws. Pretending the consequences aren’t there is not righteousness. It’s the priest and the Levite crossing to the other side of the road.
The second wrong remedy is the one you described: the eye-for-an-eye. It punishes the children for the sins of the fathers. It assigns guilt by race, which is exactly the thing it claims to oppose. It turns grievance into an identity, a permanent anger that no longer seeks to fix anything because the anger has become the self. It redistributes by group, which is the Pleasantville robbery in a new form. And it produces a new generation of wounded people who feel, correctly, that they were punished for something they didn’t do. So the chain continues. Every injustice done to remedy an old injustice is simply the next link.
This is what you meant when you said you don’t see a right side in so many conflicts. Once both sides have committed injustice in the name of redressing injustice, each side has a true grievance. Each can point to the other’s latest link. Arguing about who struck first stops being useful. The only question left is who will stop.
The remedies that work
So what does a Christian nation actually do about systemic injustice? I see six things.
First, it repeals unjust law and applies the law equally. This is the part that truly belongs to the state, because the state is responsible for its own laws. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.” One law for all, the same at the courthouse door for every man, whatever his color or his bank account. That is the systemic remedy for systemic injustice, and it is the government’s job.
Second, it makes restitution where the victim and the wrongdoer can actually be identified. When Zacchaeus met Christ, he didn’t say “I’ll be a better man going forward.” He said, “If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” Where a particular institution defrauded particular people, and the record shows it, justice requires repayment. What justice does not require is charging people who did nothing for debts owed by people they never knew.
Third, it confesses its national sins. Nehemiah and Daniel both prayed on behalf of the nation: “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity… we and our fathers.” They didn’t claim personal guilt for what their fathers did. They confessed that the nation had sinned, and asked God to restore it. I’ve said America must repent for its national sins, and this is part of what I mean. A nation that confesses the sin of slavery, of broken treaties, and of the lynching tree is not humiliating itself. It is doing what Nehemiah did.
Fourth, it rejects every form of racial nationalism, which answers the worry you raised about the people who want the black and brown people out. God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free.” He “hath broken down the middle wall of partition.” A nationalism built on race is not Christian nationalism. It is the same idolatry of the tribe that the gospel came to destroy. The Christian nation is defined by allegiance to Christ and to His law, not by blood.
Fifth, it transforms the relationships inside the system from within. Paul didn’t lead a slave revolt. He sent Onesimus, a runaway slave, back to his master Philemon with a letter saying to receive him “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” Within a few generations, a church that treated slaves as brothers had undermined the whole idea of one man owning another. When master and slave kneel at the same table, the institution cannot survive the meal.
Sixth, and underneath all the others, it forgives. And forgiveness is not the same as forgetting or excusing. It is the decision to absorb the blow instead of passing it on.
Who will stop
That brings us back to your question: how do we stop, forgive, and move forward?
Somebody has to take the blow and not return it. That is the only thing that ends a chain of retaliation. It is what Joseph did when his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, came to him in Egypt, and he had all the power in the world to repay them. He said, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” The chain stopped with him.
And that is what Christ did on a scale no one else could. He took the whole weight of human injustice, the systemic and the personal, the fathers’ and the sons’, into Himself on the cross, and He did not pass it on. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” That is the remedy from outside the system. It is the patch the system cannot write for itself, because the system only knows how to pass things along.
So the Christian answer to systemic injustice is not to deny it and not to repay it. It is to repeal the unjust law, restore what can be restored, confess what the nation did, refuse every idol of blood, change the relationships from within, and then let the chain end with us, because it ended with Him first.
References for the rewrite: Exodus 20:5; Ezekiel 18:20; Isaiah 10:1–2; Amos 2:6–7, 5:12, 5:24; 1 John 5:19; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17; Luke 19:8 (Zacchaeus); Exodus 22:1; Nehemiah 9:2, 33–34; Daniel 9:5–8; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Philemon 16; Genesis 50:20; Luke 23:34; Luke 10:31–32. U.S. Constitution, Art. I §2 cl. 3 and Art. IV §2 cl. 3 (pre-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments). Federal mortgage redlining: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps (1935–1940) and Federal Housing Administration underwriting manuals of the 1930s. Charles Eisenstein, “From Depravity to Redemption,” as engaged in the RM Fellowship transcript of February 24, 2026. “Grievance as identity” follows Thomas’s “Eight Strongholds” essay (April 30, 2026).
Chapter 12 — War and the Moral Side: Ukraine, Iran, and the Price of Victory
THOMAS: Usually one side doesn’t want to stop and forgive. It wants to dominate, and to dominate for evil. So you really do have to look at the moral sides. Who is the moral one here?
Look at Russia and Ukraine. On the surface, somebody was just sitting there being himself, and somebody came along and tried to take him over because he had always wanted it. That isn’t the right way to do things. But the way it actually happened was that we installed a government in Ukraine, and the people in the Donbas, or perhaps Crimea, voted to have their own government aligned with Russia. And the Ukrainians shelled them. The people weren’t doing anything; they had said they wanted to belong to Russia, and they got an artillery barrage. Thousands of people were killed.
Then Russia comes along and says, “Now we want to take the rest of it.” And you say, “No, you don’t have the right to come in and take us over just because you decide you want to.” So one group harasses the people who chose to leave, and the other group says, “We’ve had enough. We’re coming over to stop you from harassing the people who wanted to be with us.” But they didn’t stop there and say, “We’ve got our part; now we’re going home.” They said, “Since we’re here, we’ll take the rest of it.” So both sides escalated, and both lost the moral high ground.
[Editor’s note: In 2014 Crimea held a referendum on joining Russia that most of the world did not recognize, and Russia annexed it; separatist forces in the Donbas region declared independence, and the war there from 2014 to 2022 killed about 14,000 people on all sides, including over 3,000 civilians, according to UN estimates. The role of the United States in Ukraine’s 2014 change of government is disputed.]
This is the kind of situation in which people ultimately have to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” If nobody is willing to say that, then the only thing possible is to say, “If you won’t stop, I’ll have to defeat you.” When a group is doing wrong and won’t surrender, unconditional surrender—complete defeat—is the only thing possible.
That’s basically what Trump did last night, and it’s why the market went down today. He basically said, “If you don’t completely stop and disarm, and get rid of your nukes, we are going to annihilate you.” That was a correct statement. The problem is that the cost of annihilating Iran without annihilating the world is a price too great for America to pay. America doesn’t have the will to go in with, I would guess, five or ten million men to destroy the regime over a population of some ninety million people. Iran is huge, and it’s mountainous terrain. And the use of atomic weapons would wipe out so many innocent people that it is completely unacceptable. There are people there who are friendly to us, and we would be wiping them out to get rid of the cancer in their midst. Can we use nuclear weapons against a society like that? No, you can’t. Even to consider it is completely immoral.
So if you rattle your saber and say you’re going to annihilate them, that means either nukes or ten million men. They know you won’t send ten million men, and they know you won’t use nukes. So they’ll sit there and thumb their noses at you, because you won’t do it. “You’re just bluster. You’re just jawboning. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing. We’ll keep blocking the Strait and annoying you, because you don’t have the will to come in and defeat us.”
[Editor’s note: “Last night” refers to the evening before this conversation (September 22, 2026); the statement is summarized as Thomas described it. Iran’s population is roughly 90 million.]
ISAK: They’re calling the bluff.
THOMAS: They’re going to call our bluff, and it is a bluff. That’s all it is. And if it isn’t a bluff, that’s even worse.
ISAK: God forbid.
THOMAS: God forbid. The ten-million-men option isn’t workable, and the nukes aren’t workable.
ISAK: And dropping ten million people into a country isn’t good for your own economy, unless you’re ripping the other country to shreds and taking all its resources. Even then we’re still in that moral fight: even if we kill all the right people—
THOMAS: No, that part is moral. You have stood up and said, “By your character, you desire the reign of the Mahdi. You don’t mind bringing destruction on the world. The way you treat your people is completely unacceptable. And you have nuclear weapons, either in development or in a stockpile.” They probably have a stockpile. Imagine that they couldn’t develop nuclear weapons in the thirty years since we first went after them. Either they are the most incompetent nuclear scientists in the world, or they have nukes. It would be naive to think otherwise.
ISAK: And we haven’t been able to take them over or stop them in all that time, so clearly they aren’t completely incompetent. They’re not a nothing adversary.
THOMAS: It is moral for us to take them over. But if we’re going to make a claim like that, we have to be prepared to send troops. That’s all you can do. You won’t win by blowing up this and that. You go in and do complete regime change, and that is nation-building. And there’s no point in doing it unless you’re going to make it a Christian nation. If you are going to make it a Christian nation and eliminate the cancer of Islam in that country, it’s worth doing. If not, you just go in and say, “We took Bagram. Great, we have a big air base. We overthrew the Taliban once. Now we’re tired of this. This is the longest war we’ve ever had, and we’ve had enough. We’re out of here.”
ISAK: Yes. Then you get out, like you were saying about Vietnam, and the people you sided with, half the country, the allies you fought alongside, are left defenseless and get demolished, because there are no more American lives to spend. They were all destroyed, and the other side cleaned up shop.
THOMAS: Absolutely. Those are the most immoral things. There are probably others we’ve done too, but those are the top-of-the-shelf immoral things we’ve done as a country. It’s unbelievable not to go in, take out the leadership completely, and do missionary work afterward. Instead it was, “We’re culturally diverse. We’re honoring diversity.” What was the problem? Why were they acting that way? It was because of Islam. It wasn’t because they were Buddhists or Baha’is. It was because they were Islamists, and there is an element of Islam that is toxic. Islam carries within its ideology the seeds that allow that toxic strain to grow, and it grew in that place. Now we have the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Sharia, the Twelvers. It is a toxic religion, and to pretend we need to be diverse and honor that culture is nonsense. Would you put a black widow spider in your bed? That’s a stupid thing to do. You’ll get hurt.
ISAK: It’s like the scene in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. A meteor is heading toward Earth, and everybody is going to die in a few days. Steve Carell is brushing his teeth, and he looks down and is about to kill a spider in the sink. He thinks, “The world’s going to end. I’ll spare it.” The next scene, he’s driving to work with a big spider bite on his face.
Addendum to Chapter 12 — The Biggest Kid on the Playground: Empire, Resources, and Naboth’s Vineyard
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 12, “War and the Moral Side,” after the spider scene. The positions follow Thomas’s “The Ambassage of Peace” (drthomasforpresident.com, August 29, 2026) and his September 2026 energy-policy paper. See the editor’s note at the end on one tension with the Iran passage earlier in this chapter.]
THOMAS: I’ve told you how I look for the moral side in a war. Now I want to turn that same test around and point it at us, because that was the real question you asked me at the start, and I haven’t answered it yet.
You said capitalism seems to need to keep growing, a growing economy needs oil, and so America goes out and gets resources. You said we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out political cultures we didn’t like, funding regimes that crushed their own people’s movements, and letting civilians pay the price for a few bad men at the top. And you asked: at what cost that I’m ignorant of? Are the good guys really the good guys?
If I’m going to say “look for the moral side” about Russia and Ukraine, I have to be willing to say it about America. So here it is.
What the record actually shows
Some of what you suspect is true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
In 1953, after Iran’s elected prime minister nationalized the country’s oil industry, the CIA and British intelligence helped organize the coup that removed him and strengthened the Shah. The CIA has since acknowledged its role. The following year, the United States backed the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president after his land reform threatened the holdings of an American fruit company. In Chile in the early 1970s, the United States worked to destabilize an elected Marxist government. During the Cold War we supported more than one regime that tortured its own citizens, because those regimes were against communism. And in 2003 we invaded Iraq on the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction, and the weapons were not there.
That is the playground bully part of the record, and a Christian cannot look away from it.
But it isn’t the whole record, and if you only see that part, you’ll see something false. After the Second World War, the United States held more power than any nation in history. It did not annex Germany or Japan. It rebuilt them, and within a generation they were free, prosperous, and our friends. The Marshall Plan fed and rebuilt Western Europe, including our former enemies. The Berlin airlift flew food and coal into a blockaded city for more than a year rather than fight for it. And for most of the last eighty years, the American navy has kept the world’s sea lanes open to everyone’s ships, not only our own. Empires in history have not usually behaved like that. The Romans didn’t rebuild Carthage. They salted it.
So the honest answer to “Are the good guys really the good guys?” is this: America has done both. It has done great good, and it has done real wrong. The wrongs follow a pattern, and the pattern is worth seeing clearly.
The sin has a name: covetousness
Every one of those wrongs has the same root. It’s the tenth commandment: thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, nor his field, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s. James tells us where wars come from: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain.”
Remember what I said about property. King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard. Naboth wouldn’t sell, so the king’s wife arranged Naboth’s death, and the king took the vineyard. God sent Elijah to him: “Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?” The most powerful man in the nation had no right to a small farmer’s field.
Nations are held to the same law. When a powerful nation overthrows a smaller nation’s government because that government decided its own oil or its own land belonged to its own people, that is Naboth’s vineyard. It doesn’t matter that the smaller nation’s decision was foolish, or that the owners had a contract, or that the new government might be friendlier. A nation that takes by force, or by a coup it arranged, or by a puppet it installed, what it could not obtain by fair trade, has done what Ahab did. Paul says God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The borders of nations are not ours to rearrange for our convenience.
That is also the cancer picture. A tumor sends out signals that make the body build blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply for itself. An empire of plunder does the same thing beyond its own borders: it arranges for other nations’ resources to flow to it on its terms, not theirs. And like a tumor, it doesn’t stay put. It spreads.
Trade is not tribute
Here is the distinction I want you to hold onto, because it answers your worry about capitalism.
Capitalism doesn’t need conquest. It needs trade. Trade is two owners each saying yes. You have oil and want tractors; I have tractors and want oil; we agree on a price, and both of us are better off. That is the free market working exactly as it should, across a border just as across a street. It’s the good roads principle applied to the whole world. Everybody wants the sea lanes open, and a nation that keeps them open for everyone is doing something like building good roads.
Tribute is different. Tribute is when the stronger party sets the terms by force, or arranges for the other side’s yes to be spoken by someone it installed. That isn’t capitalism. It’s the captain of industry’s method, buying up the mousetrap company, done with gunboats instead of contracts. It’s the same centralizing perversion we talked about, at the scale of nations.
So your worry is aimed at the right thing but assigns it to the wrong cause. The problem isn’t that a growing economy needs resources. The problem is a nation that stops trading for what it needs and starts taking it.
And it’s worth noticing that the premise has changed. For a generation, the argument was that America had to secure foreign oil because it didn’t have enough of its own. That is no longer true. The United States is now the largest oil producer in the world and has become a net exporter of petroleum. And we have domestic energy we’ve barely begun to use: nuclear power, whose so-called waste is mostly unused fuel that could be recycled. A nation that produces its own energy has no excuse for resource wars. If we ever go to war again, we can’t pretend it’s for survival. We’ll have to state the real reason, and that’s exactly what should happen.
When fighting communism, the ends did not justify the means
You also raised the Cold War: funding regimes that squashed socialism or communism in their own countries. That one is harder, and I want to be fair to both sides of it.
Communism was not a harmless difference of opinion. It killed tens of millions of people in the twentieth century, through famine, purges, and camps. Resisting it was right. Keeping it from spreading was right. The people of Eastern Europe, when they were finally free to speak, said so.
But Paul warns against saying “Let us do evil, that good may come.” He says the condemnation of people who reason that way is just. A good end does not sanctify an evil means. When America armed men who tortured prisoners, disappeared dissidents, and massacred villages because those men were anti-communist, it was doing evil so that good might come. And it planted exactly the resentment that anti-American movements have fed on ever since. The shah we restored in 1953 fell in 1979 to the Islamic revolution, and we have been dealing with that regime for nearly half a century. Evil means don’t just stain the good end; they tend to destroy it.
The purchase of policy
Why does a nation that has done so much good keep doing these things? I think the deepest reason is the one I gave in the Pleasantville story: we pay the government to rob for us, and then the robbers get paid by others too.
Weapons makers profit when there’s war. Intelligence agencies grow when there’s an enemy. Politicians need campaign money, and some of that money comes from people whose business depends on conflict, and some of it comes from foreign governments’ friends and lobbies. When a legislator trades his vote on war for campaign money, that is prostitution, the sale of what must never be sold. America’s foreign policy may be advised by friends, but it must be purchased by no one. An alliance is a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney.
So the reforms I’ve proposed are concrete. No sustained military campaign without a congressional declaration or authorization that states its objective in one sentence, its conditions for ending, and a date on which it expires. If the objective can’t be written in a sentence, nobody knows what winning is. War-industry profits audited and capped while hostilities last, so that no company’s quarterly earnings ever again depend on a war continuing. The revolving door between the Pentagon, the agencies, and the contractors closed. And foreign-influence laws enforced equally against every nation’s lobby, friend and adversary alike.
But I have to tell you what I believe most deeply about it. A bought government is the symptom. A buyable people is the disease. The lobbyist’s check only has power over a man who has a price.
The test for American power
So what should America do with its power? The same thing I’d tell any strong man to do with his strength.
Use it to protect, not to take. Keep the sea lanes open for everyone. Defend the weak when they’re attacked. Keep your word to your allies and to your enemies, because a nation’s word is a moral act: the righteous man “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” Count the cost of every war before you start it, as Christ said a king must, and if you can’t win it, send an embassy and ask for terms of peace. Trade, don’t take. And when you’ve done wrong, say so.
And apply the same test to every act abroad that I apply at home: would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize this as love? Not flattery, and not always pleasant. Correction isn’t always pleasant, and neither is defending a nation against an aggressor. But love: the Iranian student, the Guatemalan farmer, the Russian conscript, and the Ukrainian mother, treated as children of God whose good is being sought. The coup in 1953 fails that test. The Marshall Plan passes it.
Tocqueville is supposed to have said that America is great because America is good, and that if America ever ceases to be good, it will cease to be great. Whoever said it first, it’s true. America doesn’t need to take other nations’ lunch money to be great. It needs to be good. A good nation does not covet its neighbor’s vineyard, and it does not feed meat grinders.
So, are the good guys the good guys? Sometimes. Our job is to make it true more often, starting by telling the truth about the times it wasn’t. That’s what repentance is for a nation. It’s the same thing it is for a man.
[Editor’s note for the chapter rewrite — decision needed]
Earlier in this chapter Thomas says it is moral for the United States to take over Iran, with full regime change and nation-building, provided it is prepared to send troops and to “make it a Christian nation.” In “The Ambassage of Peace” (August 29, 2026), the solutions essay on drthomasforpresident.com states the opposite: regime change “is not an American objective — because it is not an American right,” and the policy is “transformation over containment,” reaching the Iranian people with truth, commerce, and the gospel rather than invasion.
This addendum follows the “Ambassage” position (no conquest for another nation’s resources or government; Acts 17:26), which is the more convenient reading because it is already published. It avoids restating either position on Iran specifically. The rewrite of Chapter 12 should reconcile the two, either by revising the conversation passage or by explaining under what conditions (for example, an imminent nuclear threat that cannot be deterred) conquest and nation-building would become right despite the general rule.
References for the rewrite: Exodus 20:17; James 4:1–2; 1 Kings 21:19 (Naboth); Acts 17:26; Romans 3:8; Psalm 15:4; Luke 14:31–32; Proverbs 14:34. Iran 1953: the CIA publicly acknowledged its role in 2013 in released internal history documents. Guatemala 1954 (Árbenz, United Fruit Company); Chile 1970–1973 (documented in the 1975 Church Committee reports). U.S. petroleum: the Energy Information Administration reports the United States as the world’s largest crude oil producer and a net total petroleum exporter since 2020; verify current figures before publication. The Tocqueville line is widely attributed but not found in his writings, which is why the text says “is supposed to have said.”
Chapter 13 — Believing We Are Right: The Gentle Imposition of a Good Yoke
THOMAS: The point of all this is that we have a lot of work to do, and we have to actually believe in what we’re doing. We have to believe that we are on the side of right. Otherwise we’ll be double-minded, and a double-minded man receives nothing. We have to be willing to impose this on the world, and it is imposed by saying, “This is a really good thing. Won’t you do this?” It’s a very gentle form of imposition. “Good is good. Listen to this argument. Put this yoke on yourself. It’s easy. Its burden is light. You’re going to have to serve somebody. Put this one on. It’s a good one to serve.”
[Editor’s note: James 1:6–8; Matthew 11:30. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody” echoes Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.”]
ISAK: Those are very reasonable, strong standards. Not strong as in a heavy yoke, but strong as in something with strength, something that could make individuals, families, and countries stronger.
There is so much growing for individuals to do, and for me to do. But I feel that I’m growing, learning, and developing my worldview and the lines I draw. I don’t know about “boundaries.” I’m paying more attention to what I think God wants to feel and experience, and being sensitive to that. Hopefully that spreads to other people, the way you’re doing it with your group: spreading these ideas and trying to live them out, and we’ll see where they go. I think we could change the world.
THOMAS: It’s the only hope I see. I don’t see anybody else doing it, so I figure I’d better do it myself. And I can’t do it alone, so I have to bring other people along. Bringing other people along is changing the world, because that’s what changing the world involves. Everybody has to bring everybody along. You bring people along, and then you teach them to bring people along, and teach them to bring people along. It only takes a spark to get a fire going.
[Thomas recites the words of Kurt Kaiser’s 1969 song “Pass It On”: a single spark starts a fire that warms everyone around it; God’s love, once experienced, is as fresh as spring and must be shared; the singer wishes his friend the same happiness and wants to proclaim from the mountaintop that the Lord of love has come to him.]
ISAK: It’s a really good song. Well, let’s go pass it on.
Addendum to Chapter 13 — The Unreached: Those Who Never Heard, and Those Who Heard Only the Noise
[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 13, “Believing We Are Right,” after “Well, let’s go pass it on.” The theology below follows Thomas’s positions in “The Architecture of Mercy” (Christos Fellowship essay, July 10, 2026), including the corrections he made there to the July 8 exploration.]
THOMAS: Since we’re talking about passing it on, I want to answer one more question from your list, because it is the question behind every mission. Your draft put it this way: CPP says the moral law is real and discoverable, and I say Jesus in your heart is the alignment mechanism. But most humans who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman I told you about, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to encounter Christianity to come into alignment. What about the billions who never did?
That question isn’t new to me. It is the question that first sent me searching through the religions of the world. I’ll tell you where I have come to rest, and where I have deliberately stopped.
Two truths the careless collapse into one
The first truth is that there is only one way. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I hear that verse first as a statement about architecture, before it is a statement about religion. It says there is one and only one way the thing can work: one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. There is no second door, no Buddhist door and Muslim door and Christian door leading to the same room. The Son is the interface.
The second truth is that the signal of the Son has been going out since the beginning. John calls Him “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, not every man who has heard a sermon. Paul says the Gentiles who never had the law of Moses still “do by nature the things contained in the law,” because the work of the law is “written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” The early church father Justin Martyr spoke of the seeds of the Word scattered in every people, and said that Socrates, when he reasoned his way toward the good, was responding to the Logos without knowing its name. And when Paul stood in Athens before an altar inscribed “To the Unknown God,” he did not tell the Athenians their worship was nothing. He said, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”
So when a sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. His moral knowledge is real. His conscience is real. That is why your framework was right that the moral law is discoverable. It is discoverable because the One who wrote it has been speaking into every heart all along.
Look at Cornelius in the book of Acts. He was a Roman centurion, not a Jew, who had never heard the gospel. But he feared God, he gave generously, and he prayed. And God did not tell him, “You’re fine as you are.” God sent an angel to tell him to send for Peter, and at the same time gave Peter a vision to prepare him to go. That is the pattern. The seeker who responds to the light he has is not left where he is. God arranges for him to hear the name. The woman I told you about is the same. The fervor was always in her. She gave it to communism because communism was what she had been shown. When she met Christ, the same hunger found its true object.
Why the name still matters
Here is where I have to correct something, including something our own earlier exploration concluded. It would be easy to say: if the seeker can pass through the Son without knowing His name, then the name doesn’t really matter, the missionaries can stay home, and it will all work out. That doesn’t follow, and two hard facts forbid it.
The first is that entrance is a relationship. The sharpest word Jesus ever spoke was not aimed at pagans. It was aimed at people whose works were impeccable, who prophesied in His name, cast out devils, and did many wonderful works. To them He said, “I never knew you.” Whatever good works diagnose, they do not by themselves constitute the one thing He is seeking, which is a soul He knows. And a relationship is entered with open eyes.
The second is that the signal can be misread. The seeker who perceives the good without knowing its source can bend it, add to it, and build a religion around the bent version. The seeds of the Word are real, but seeds grow into whatever the soil allows. That is why Paul did not leave the Athenians at the altar. He preached the resurrection to them.
So the honest position is narrower than the comfortable one, and truer. The signal is universal. It is genuine wherever it is received. The interface is the Son, named or not. And none of that is a warrant to stop preaching the Name. The Great Commission is two things at once. It is cartography: we carry the fullest map of a terrain that many people are already stumbling across. And it is rescue: some of them are walking toward the edge of a cliff, and we are sent to pull them back.
What we are not appointed to do
What about the ones who never heard in time? Here I stop, and I stop on purpose.
I am certain of one thing: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” God will not condemn a man for failing a test he was never given. The Judge is exactly fair. But what He does with each soul is His to decide and not mine to publish. There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually allows, that God desires all men to be saved, that in Christ He is reconciling all things to Himself. I hold those threads, and I hold them as hope. I will not preach them as a promise. A man who is told he will certainly arrive has been given a reason never to set out. I think God left those passages as hints rather than headlines for that very reason.
And I have to be honest that the physics does not settle this either. Your framework asked the question in CPP terms, and I want to be clear about what CPP can and cannot say. In our first exploration of these questions we reasoned from the physics to a confident universalism, as though the good would spread through the whole lattice automatically, the way a crystal grows through a supercooled liquid until none of the old phase is left. That was an error. The order of the universe is conservative: disorder does not heal itself. It persists until a remedy is applied to it, and the remedy is applied only where it is willingly received. So the physics tells us something about how the remedy works. It tells us nothing about how many will receive it. That silence is honest, and I intend to leave it there.
We are not appointed to adjudicate the edge cases. We are appointed to go.
The unreached in our own country
Now let me bring this home, because it matters for the book, and not only for missions overseas.
It matters first for how a Christian nation treats those among its citizens who are not Christians. Remember what I said about good roads, and about the atheist and the priest agreeing that you shouldn’t take my stuff or hurt my person. Why do they agree? Because the law is written on every heart. The atheist knows theft is wrong, not because he has read Exodus, but because the Light that lights every man has lit him too. That is why a nation can hold the moral law in common without requiring every citizen to be a believer, and why the civil law of a Christian nation can be just to the Muslim, the Hindu, and the unbeliever. It asks of them only what their own conscience already knows. They are our neighbors and our fellow citizens, and they are owed love, not coercion. They are not enemies of the Christian nation. They are its mission field.
And second, America has its own unreached, and they are not in the jungle. They are the millions who have heard the name of Jesus all their lives, as a curse word, as a cliché, as the brand of a political party, or as the religion of their grandmother’s church, and have never once heard the gospel. They are in some ways harder to reach than the man who never heard the name at all, because they think they already know what it means. They have been inoculated with a weak dose of the thing, and the weak dose protects them from the real one.
That is the field for Transforming America. We are not trying to reach America by taking over its government. We are trying to reach the unreached who live on our own streets, with the real thing instead of the caricature.
Why it can’t wait
You gave the Fellowship something important when we discussed this in the summer, and I want to put it here where it belongs. You pointed out that the urgency of the Commission isn’t only about the life to come. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” is present tense. A soul that is out of alignment is suffering now, in this life, in the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces. You know that from your own experience, the fish chasing the hook, and so do I. And the way back to harmony is open now.
So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat. It is a physician’s urgency joined to a shepherd’s. “You are suffering, and you need not be.” And also: “You are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall.” Both are true. They are the same love looking at the same person over two horizons.
That is why it only takes a spark. The seeker is already there, with the light he has, looking for its source. Our part is to be the Peter who goes when the Cornelius sends for him, and to go even before we’re sent for. We bring people along, and we teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. And that is the only answer I can give you about the billions: God is fair to every one of them, and He has told us to go.
References for the rewrite: John 14:6; John 1:9; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:22–31; Acts 10 (Cornelius); Matthew 7:21–23; Genesis 18:25; 1 Timothy 2:4; Colossians 1:20; Matthew 4:17; Matthew 28:19–20. Justin Martyr, Second Apology 8, 10, and First Apology 46 (the “seeds of the Word”; Socrates). The universalism correction and the “cartography and rescue” framing follow “The Architecture of Mercy” (RM, CFE, 2026-07-10), Part IV. Isak’s present-life-urgency contribution is credited there as well.
Chapter 14 — The Worldview Without a Center
ISAK: Thanks for going down that road with me. In the political climate we’re in—I feel like I keep saying “climate”—there is a lot of confusion and chaos, and centuries and decades to learn from about where we are and why we’re here. As a young person, I feel like I’m getting my bearings, getting my sea legs: what’s happening, what came before, what we anticipate will come after. Unfortunately, I’m very ignorant of past generations. I’ve read history and studied enough to have an overall view, but the details get filled in as you get older. That’s how it happens, I guess.
THOMAS: I’ve always thought what was missing for you was a correct framing. I think you’ve been indoctrinated by the woke worldview: diversity, oppressor, colonizer, imperialist. “What about the pygmies? What about other people’s consensual viewpoints? Who’s to say what’s right?”
That worldview is not new. It is eternal. It is the satanic worldview, the rebel against God. It dresses itself in the clothing of caring about other people, about fairness, about doing right and letting people be. “Who’s to say what’s right?” It is a worldview without a center. Everybody has his own world, and who’s to say whose world is right? If everybody has his own world and everybody feels he is doing the right thing, who are we to tell him what the right thing is?
It’s a libertarian kind of perspective, and it’s really common. I think the libertarian philosophy is actually the most dangerous ideology, because it seems so right. “I’m not hurting anybody.” Non-aggression, contract, willing consent. Add in a market economy where everybody produces what he wants, and you’re not imposing anything on anybody. That openness to anything is very attractive. It’s intuitively obvious: “I’m not hurting anybody, and if I think this is right, who are you to stop me? Who are you to tell me what’s right or wrong?” It’s a very difficult worldview to combat because it’s so close to being right.
About the only thing that needs to be added is this: “By the way, there is a God, and there are things that actually are right. Most of what you want to do actually is right. Most of what you’re feeling is good. But there are a few things that aren’t, though you probably enjoy them.” You want to smoke a joint; you’re not really hurting anybody. Shooting up is a little harder, and you’ll probably die, but who am I to tell you not to enjoy yourself on the way out? Who you want to sleep with, which gender, for how long—if people agree, who am I to tell them what to do? At some point we have to ask: If there is a God, does God care about these things?
Your dad’s story about the eternal happy family—has he told you that story?
ISAK: Remind me. I’m not sure I’m familiar with it.
THOMAS: I wish I could tell it as well as he does. It’s one of the most profound stories I’ve ever heard. He was at BYU, and he had been studying child development. He had been immersed in that study, for a day or for days. He came out and sat down on a bench, and something came over him. I think he heard a voice. It was as though all the wisdom of the universe opened up to him. He went into one room, and either it was spoken to him or he realized it: family. Behind it was this unfathomable wisdom, beauty, and eternity. Then he went into another room, and it was the room of eternal family. Then he went into another room, even grander, and the depth and magnitude of it was eternal happy family.
ISAK: That’s the goal.
THOMAS: That’s the goal.
ISAK: It’s a good goal. It isn’t a power-craving goal. It isn’t exclusively self-serving. It’s literally loving others, as God loves us. It’s a beautiful story.
THOMAS: That vision really is the top. It’s the kingdom of heaven on earth. Have him tell you the story again. I didn’t tell it nearly as well as he does. It’s an amazing story.
ISAK: Firsthand beats secondhand.
Chapter 15 — The Sacrifice a Nation Must Make
THOMAS: That is what we’re moving toward. This is not about a Christian-Nazi, Handmaid’s Tale, Scarlet Letter world. It isn’t an Inquisition. It isn’t a revival meeting. It is living life, living holy, enjoying life, and having a life that is really good.
But we do have to sacrifice something. We have to sacrifice sexual diversity. It won’t happen without that. We are going to have to be pleasing to God in our sexuality. We are going to have to take a stand as a nation. We are going to have to take a stand for Christ. We are going to have to say, “No, we are not multi-ethnic, multi-everything, multi-religion.” We are not establishing a national religion. But we pray at everything. We use the Bible and quote it at everything.
George Washington said this nation was founded on the general principles of Christianity, and that is what we teach. The general principles of Christianity are the Bible. We talk it, and we use its metaphors. When we talk about Romans 1, we talk about the fact that there are sexual acts God does not allow, that God actually hates.
The other thing we will have to do is make an absolute, complete recognition that God exists, and that God rewards and punishes nations. We have to apologize for our national wrong, for our worship of the Pride movement. It was actually a shame movement. It should be called the Shame movement.
[Editor’s note: The phrase “the general Principles of Christianity” is from John Adams’s letter to Thomas Jefferson of June 28, 1813, not from Washington.]
ISAK: I’m evaluating my own inclusivity: “all are welcome,” toward people and toward ideas. I’m evaluating that kind of thought. I’m having to do a lot of inner work, stopping at any reluctance or pushback I feel against an idea and inspecting it. “Why is that? Where did I learn this?” There’s a lot of work to do, and that’s why I’m quiet. I’m thinking. It’s very interesting to break things down and see where they came from. And if you can’t tell where they came from, you ask what fruit they bear.
THOMAS: The theory is all wonderful, blue skies and roses, until you say, “And by the way, you actually have to discriminate against certain sexual behaviors.” Then it’s no longer fun and games. Now it’s personal. “Sorry, you’re not welcome there. I believed in all that other stuff; it was great. But you want me to behave sexually in one particular way, the way the Bible says is the authorized way?” Essentially the missionary position. “No, I’m sorry. We’d rather live in hell. We want our sexuality the way we want it, and we’ll sacrifice everything for it.”
That is essentially the bargain we have made in America. We held the line against it pretty well, at least on the surface. People never actually behaved well, but on the surface we had government that had blue laws. Adultery was a punishable offense. And in the church, divorce was the only unforgivable sin. You probably weren’t old enough to know that, but it’s a phrase people actually used.
ISAK: Divorce being the unforgivable sin. I’ve heard that sentiment. I’m not the wisest person in the world, but it never quite made sense to me, because of the circumstances of divorce, the reasons for it. I think people should be allowed out of an agreement in some cases. But culturally, divorce was the “D word.” You didn’t say it. You didn’t hear about it. “Where are his parents?” “We don’t talk about that.” It was very taboo, very scary, and reasonably so. If you’re going through it, somebody did something wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean the person leaving did wrong, or the person staying. But it was, “That family fell apart. We don’t know what will happen to them. It’s just the baby and the mama now,” or the dad and the baby.
THOMAS: The context for “the only unforgivable sin is divorce” was the church. It was a Christian concept. “You were a homosexual? A drug addict? A murderer, a robber, a liar, a thief? We can forgive you. Welcome in, dear brother. You’re divorced? No, we don’t accept people like that.” That’s the taboo I was referring to. These were people who could forgive sin, who thought sin was sin, and they couldn’t forgive divorce. That was the era I grew up in. It was a very real Christian cultural concept.
But the point I was making concerns sexuality at the national level, after having fallen. We could have done this forty years ago. We could have said we’re turning it around and making homosexuality illegal, and it was illegal in many states. Maybe it still is on the books. Adultery was illegal. Pedophilia is illegal. We’re still willing to do that much. Now we would be saying that fornication, adultery, homosexuality, the whole list, are recognized by us as a nation as sins against God and a threat to the state.
And it may be that this Department of Morality counsels people and helps them: helps them overcome gender dysphoria, orientation problems, fidelity problems, the problem of using sexuality too early. It helps people overcome the thing that is at the center of life, because sexuality was made for a purpose. Now you get to use it as God intends, because God is our center. He is our source. More than our source, He is our being. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that. You can’t separate God from who you are, or from who somebody else is. You can’t do it.
[Editor’s note: Acts 17:28.]
ISAK: You can’t hide.
THOMAS: You can’t hide. “God doesn’t like this.” “How do you know?” “It says so in the Bible.” “You’re mixing church and state.” “No, I’m not saying you have to have a religion. I’m saying what’s true.”
ISAK: If you separate the state from truth, what do you have?
THOMAS: Separation of state and truth. Yes.
ISAK: Separation of state and truth. That’s what we’ve been heading toward. It seems so simple when it’s laid out that way. There is a way of life, and there is something that protects it, so that citizens can go on living that way of life. Then it gets twisted, so that way of life can no longer be carried out in government. It’s no longer “In God we trust.” It’s “God, we’ll put You over there,” and in Hoover we trust over here. In God we piggy-bank.
THOMAS: Oh my.
Chapter 16 — Why I Run: The Righteous Society
ISAK: This has been really intriguing. I’m going to learn more about political science and the nature of the universe and how they overlap—not which ideology is right, but where the truth is and what we do with it now. What is good, and what do we do with it? I don’t think picking through all the world’s ideologies and asking which brand of capitalism or socialism is most like Jesus is the way. That will come as a byproduct of people and their hearts. It won’t come from “I have this whole plan, and I’m going to change everything right now.” The Bible says a man makes his plans, but the Lord directs his steps. We can have all the plans we want, but really we’ll watch it happen by participating, by being part of the play, so that we can hear applause at the end.
[Editor’s note: Proverbs 16:9.]
THOMAS: As you can see, this is the vision I’ve carried for forty years. It’s why I’m running for president. It isn’t that I want to be president. I want the world to be better, and I don’t hear anybody else carrying the message I have.
ISAK: If somebody else were saying it, you’d say, “Great, let’s do that.”
THOMAS: You do that.
ISAK: But nobody’s doing it. There isn’t a vote I can cast and say, “This is a vote for this way of life.” It’s a vote for the same thing we’ve always had.
THOMAS: It’s a vote for the righteous. I called it the Righteous Society. That was one of my first names for it. It was the Christian nation. I’m just trying to get people to get with the program. It’s an important thing to do.
ISAK: Thanks for answering my questions and going on that journey. These are goals with merit. It isn’t a self-serving goal. You see a need in the country and what could fix it, and it’s something God saw a long time ago. What can we do to inspire people and direct them to change their lives?
THOMAS: That’s what we’re doing: showing people how to change their lives, how to live in a godly way. It’s simple, really.
ISAK: I don’t know what all the chaos is about. I don’t know what the problem is.
THOMAS: As far as I can tell, the whole deal is about being able to do what you want sexually without anybody interfering with you. In America we opened the floodgates and said everybody can do whatever he wants. Now we’re saying, “That thing where everybody does what he wants? We’re taking it back.” And people say, “No. We’ve seen what it’s like, and we don’t want to leave it. It was too great. Our bodies, ourselves. Women unite. We’re not going back.” At this point we’re dealing with rebels, hardened rebels, people willing to kill those who stand against their sexual freedom.
The Charlie Kirk assassination was exactly that. There’s a big conspiracy theory about Israel and all that, but that isn’t it. We had a man who didn’t like being told what he couldn’t do. In his eyes Kirk wasn’t honoring his tribe; Kirk was dissing it. So he went and killed him. And we’re not saying that loudly enough. This is a time for a national cry: this is what is going on. We have people who, because their sexuality is threatened, go out and kill people. The fruit of this sexual anarchy is death.
[Editor’s note: Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. The account of the shooter’s motive given here is Thomas’s reading of the case.]
ISAK: Anarchy.
THOMAS: I think what makes this palatable is that you love the sinner and hate the sin. If you can just get it across: “No, we don’t hate you. You’re a child of God just as much as I am. You just haven’t learned how to control one of your appetites. Maybe I don’t control my appetite for ice cream as well as you do, and you don’t control your sexual expression as well as I do. We both have our problems. We’re both imperfect. We both need to master our appetites.” That’s really what this is: appetite control.
It is very sad for people who have been afflicted with same-sex attraction disorder. It’s a terrible burden. Or for people who have given license to their appetites long enough that they became addictions. Addiction doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s nurtured, by people who didn’t control themselves well enough, until the appetite was out of control. I’m sorry, but abstinence is the start. You start with nothing. You just stop. You say no. You don’t do it a little; you just say no. If you fall, you say, “I’m sorry. That was wrong. I shouldn’t do it anymore. I’ll try again another day.” Today you do it one minute at a time.
ISAK: Self-control.
THOMAS: Self-control over desire. Desire is the issue, and control of desire is the largest part of maturity. Get your desires under control, and you won’t sin. You know what sin is. You know your desire to sin. You simply say no. Then we don’t have to worry about sin diversity. We don’t take pride in our sin. We don’t have diverse sins. We don’t honor diverse sins. We just don’t sin. We say no, and that’s the important thing. You have these desires? Learn to control them. You’ve got them, I’ve got them, everybody’s got them. Mine are different from yours, but we all have them, we all have to work on them, and we all have to control them. That’s your job.
And there’s a reward for it. There is a payoff. We won’t live in this body forever, and by living for Christ there is gain. “Are you doing it for the reward?” As a matter of fact, I am. No need to apologize for that. If there were no reward, why would I be doing it?
ISAK: You only work that job because you’re getting paid.
THOMAS: Right.
ISAK: How embarrassing, to have to have a job. “What do you mean, you need money?”
THOMAS: “What do you mean, selling your time for money?”
ISAK: “Your valuable life, for money.”
End of the conversation’s book material. Thomas’s closing words: “I think what we actually have here is a book… This is the backbone of the book. Transforming America.”