Stewards, Markets, and a Common Standard

PART ONE — The Conversation, Point by Point

1. Turning to the Book

Thomas asked whether anyone had read the essay — his attempt at starting a book. Leonard remarked on its length (about 50,000 words in the full draft). Susan said she had read the first two chapters, which Thomas said were the only ones he had edited so far. Susan said she needed a few minutes to gather her thoughts, but that she had been fascinated by Isak’s questions and enjoyed seeing them.

She added one correction about Isak. The draft implies he had a typical school experience; he did not. He did not attend a traditional school. Charlie said Isak went to no school at all — not even homeschool. Susan said the family practiced what is called unschooling. Charlie and Leonard joked about it (“a nice term for ‘parents are overwhelmed — figure it out yourself’”; Leonard added that his father taught him to swim the same way, and he ended up at the bottom of the pool). Susan said the parents did help and guide the children, and all of them learned to read. She said this was a side issue and asked for a moment to collect her thoughts, inviting others to speak.

Note (correction to the manuscript). The chapter text should be revised to reflect that Isak was unschooled rather than conventionally schooled, if the draft states or implies otherwise.

2. Thomas: How the Book Began, and the Insight from Conscious Point Physics

Leonard asked Thomas to give the group the crux of the book.

Thomas explained its origin. Isak had asked Claude how Conscious Point Physics relates to politics — whether it answers the questions of politics. Claude produced a range of considerations, and Thomas and Isak went through them one by one, with Isak commenting on each. Thomas’s reading of Isak was that he did not trust any system. (Leonard remarked that he was a chip off the old block.) Isak had said at one point that he did not want to come across as “some sort of woke idiot.” He was critical of everything: he regarded capitalists as somewhat exploitative, had nothing good to say about communism, considered the capitalist system a mess, and thought the parties stood for nothing but themselves. Thomas said there was, as far as he could tell, no real defense of America in Isak’s view; the picture was of a deeply flawed system. Thomas’s response was to ask what capitalism should be and what communism actually is. Isak did not defend communism at all; he regarded it as a disaster.

What Thomas found most interesting was the way Claude drew a polarity out of the physics — less capitalism versus communism than communalism versus individualism. In Conscious Point Physics, all of creation is God, so in one sense nothing is individual. Yet every conscious point is a complete individual. What makes the whole work is that every point obeys a law: God gave the law, and all of them obey it. Thomas said this was probably the most interesting insight in the whole discussion — reality is communal, and it is individual.

He described the next step. A conscious point receives messages from the entire universe, but it looks at, and acts upon, only its own small locality. It takes in everything, computes, and acts locally; that locality then communicates to the next, and the next. Everyone has his little influence, which affects the whole; the individual listens to the whole and acts locally, which in turn affects the whole. So there is individuality and there is groupness, and the two are joined by a lawful interaction of listening, computing all that comes from every other individual, and acting in a local area. The individual affects the whole and the whole affects the individual; both the group and the individual matter. That, Thomas said, was the big picture he took from it.

3. Susan: Communism, Capitalism, and the Heart of the Buyer

Susan said she saw that too, and that Chapter 2 is the chapter to focus on. She understood Thomas’s point about individualism, but in comparing communism and capitalism, she said communism makes the state a god. It is entirely force, and it has no compatibility with Christ at all. Capitalism, by contrast, can be compatible, because it has freedom. Whether it operates well depends on the hearts of the people in the system. People can run businesses peaceably, trying to serve others, and customers can choose to support businesses that act in the people’s best interest. They can also choose to support businesses that overtake small businesses — and, she said, we see that a great deal. She and Charlie do it themselves, and she hates that they do. Amazon is so convenient. But she thinks it works against our interests and against what is right, because it puts small businesses out of business and weakens local economies, since money flows out to one person. When someone becomes astronomically rich compared with everyone else, he often uses that wealth in ways that are counterproductive for the common man — making him poorer or more dependent. She acknowledged this was her opinion and possibly a bias.

So capitalism, compared with communism, at least has the potential for Christ to be served, because there is liberty. But, she said, we are living in a society where people are largely not awake to those principles — even devout Christians feel separated between their belief and how they spend their money and whom they support. They may avoid businesses that support abortion, but there is not, generally, a consciousness of how spending connects to following Christ. In her opinion, there should be.

4. Thomas: The Parallel with the First Hour

Thomas said Susan’s description returned to the first hour’s discussion. Islam, once it reaches a certain population and power, takes over; Susan was describing the same pattern in Amazon and other large concentrations of convenience, which grow so large that they dictate the culture: “We just want to get along until we own it — and then we have an agenda, and this is how you’ll act.”

Susan said the difference is that businesses do it, usually, without killing — abortion aside. Home Depot is not trying to kill anyone, but the small hardware stores are nearly gone. The little stores run by knowledgeable people are gone; large franchises have taken over. Money spent there leaves the community, and so spending it there does not build a strong local economy.

5. Leonard: Competition, Innovation, and The Fountainhead

Leonard said our tendency is to look at things myopically. A Home Depot is built and has everything; then a Lowe’s is built down the street with different things, perhaps lower prices, and both survive and thrive. Home Depot and Lowe’s, he said, were once small; they saw an opportunity. That is the beauty of capitalism: someone can take a small hamburger stand in Southern California and say, “We could build these in every town and become among the largest real-estate holders in the country by selling hamburgers.” That was McDonald’s. Nothing like it exists in any communist country or totalitarian regime, except what those regimes themselves support. The Marxist idea of owning the means of production is flawed and destroys countries and people; it means everything is controlled by an overarching committee, usually of incompetents.

He recommended Ayn Rand. He read The Fountainhead at fourteen and it changed his whole perspective; his handle on X is “Howard Freaking Roark.” Thomas asked what that meant. Leonard explained that Howard Roark is the architect in The Fountainhead who did his own work and would not bow to convention; he designed magnificent buildings, and people came to understand and seek him out. Leonard loved the idea that if you build, design, or create something excellent, people will be drawn to it — and that this can happen only in a free environment that allows free thinking and paradigm change. He mentioned the film version starring Gary Cooper, with the screenplay by Rand herself, so it is faithful to the book; he recommended it, said he had shown it to his class at BYU, and said it shaped what he wanted to become — first an architect, until he learned about industrial design.

Note (Home Depot, Lowe’s, McDonald’s). Lowe’s began as a single hardware store in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina (1921). Home Depot, however, was founded in 1978 by Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, who had been fired from a hardware chain, specifically as a large-format warehouse store; it was never a mom-and-pop store. McDonald’s began as the McDonald brothers’ restaurant in San Bernardino (1940); Ray Kroc franchised it from 1955, and the real-estate model (owning the land under franchises), devised largely by Harry Sonneborn, became central to its profitability, as Leonard said.

Note (The Fountainhead). The novel was published in 1943; the film, starring Gary Cooper with Rand’s screenplay, was released in 1949 (not 1946).

6. Charlie and Leonard: Music, Platforms, and Makers

Charlie recalled a conversation around 1985 in which he lamented how big record companies — Capitol, RCA — controlled music, choosing and promoting a few artists while many talented people were ignored. That has changed with the internet: an artist can gather a thousand or two thousand patrons and make a living, and one can find anyone doing anything musical. It is beautifully diversified, he said. Leonard mentioned a young South African artist (the transcript renders the name “Kifnus”) who composes songs from animal sounds, such as cats meowing, and has a large, monetized following. Leonard said he loved that kind of creativity and innovation.

Charlie said many beautiful things are happening. Amazon may or may not be a problem; he loves buying his plywood on Amazon. Leonard asked why Home Depot, with stores everywhere, has not turned them into automated warehouses on Amazon’s model — no one has copied the model, he said; Amazon has been forward-thinking. He reminded the group that Amazon started with books.

Charlie added that Amazon has opened avenues for many small producers of specialized items. He knows a machinist who was frustrated that clamp collars were unavailable, so he started making them and now sells many on Amazon. That may hurt the local hardware store, Charlie said, but it gives small producers a worldwide audience. They pay Amazon its share, but Amazon provides the entire front end and back end; they are simply the producer.

Leonard said nothing stops the local merchant from getting creative, and described his brother, who changed commercial music. After an eight-year engagement with the Osmonds ended, his brother and a fellow trombonist (who had played in a band with Leonard before his mission) started Nonstop Productions, which produced identity music packages for radio and television and earned royalties through ASCAP each time a client aired the music. He bought an old church already outfitted as a studio. This was in the 1980s, about the time of Charlie’s conversation. He also started a record label, Eris Records, whose first artists — Sam Carden, Kurt Bester, and Michael Dowdle, all local musicians Leonard had played with — recorded smooth jazz; when smooth jazz faded, the label faded, though its records can still be found. Leonard said his father was similarly innovative in medicine: he pioneered the nurse-practitioner concept and started one of the first nurse-practitioner programs, at BYU.

The problem, Leonard said, is that small operators get locked in. A convenience store owner sees a huge Maverick station with five grades of gas open nearby; nothing stops him except his own lack of creativity. If he stepped back and said, “This is coming; I can’t stop it; what can I do with what I have?”, there are services and products that could compete. Competition, he said, is fuel for innovation. Susan agreed.

Note (nurse practitioners). The first nurse-practitioner program is generally credited to Loretta Ford and Henry Silver at the University of Colorado (1965). Early programs followed at other universities in the late 1960s and 1970s; Leonard’s account of his father’s program at BYU is recorded as he gave it.

7. Charlie: Christ as Creative Artist

Charlie said he looks to the life of Christ, whom he called his artistic guru. Christ was profoundly creative at storytelling, which was the filmmaking of his age: standing and telling a story. He taught twelve men to be innovative and go out, and the gospel was a kind of live, active performance art. Within their sphere they did what we are all meant to do wherever we are placed in creation: make something beautiful.

8. Thomas: Monopoly, Cartel, and Monoculture

Thomas said the central tension in his discussion with Isak, which they had not explored deeply, was monopoly and cartel — which the group was now touching: Amazon as a kind of monopoly under which the small operator dissipates. In Portland there were many small lumber and hardware dealers; after Home Depot, they went out of business. The result is a monoculture, nearly everywhere. Susan’s point, Thomas said, was exactly right: we say, “I really don’t want to, but I’ll do it because it’s convenient,” and the next time we want real expertise, it is not available, because the small operator could not support himself and has retired or gone into telemarketing to survive.

Charlie said he had needed small ring connectors to crimp onto wire ends the previous night. He was having trouble, so he asked AI — “my expert” — and received a full explanation of ring connectors and what each size and number means. The local hardware expert may be gone, he said, but at midnight he can get the most minute technical advice. Is it all evil?

Thomas said it is not that it is evil but that it is a monoculture, a single species, and therefore limited. The variety is lost — the unusual tool that a particular store stocked. Amazon has every tool, but you cannot touch it, feel it, or talk with someone about it. There are reviews, and there have been attempts to build a digital version of the local hardware store, but it is not the same; we do not get the same wisdom.

9. Susan: The Health Food Store and the Hidden Cost of Convenience

Susan agreed and described a health food store in their town, and a similar one in Concord. The people who ran them were extremely knowledgeable; they had carved out a niche: come in with a problem and they would suggest this and that. They had studied a great deal, and visiting them was almost like seeing a doctor, except that they used natural substances, were not doctors, and charged only for their products, not their expertise. They sold fresh herbs and would order in bulk at bulk prices. They were creative. But they could not survive against large chains, and when one asks questions in the chain stores, the staff know nothing. We traded an immense resource, she said, for supporting a large company. The chain has more products, which is an advantage, but there are disadvantages.

She said we may be supporting greed for the sake of convenience — acknowledging that this might be a bias and not always true — and it does not work out for the small operator. When all the small operators are gone, the large company can raise prices; she thought that was almost certain to happen more as competition disappears. The result is lower quality, less knowledge, perhaps more choice in one store, money sent out of the local area, and wealth concentrated in someone whose uses of it are unknown. She acknowledged that Home Depot does good things too, such as helping employees pay for college. It is not all bad. But, she said, we could be much more mindful of what our purchasing choices produce in the long run, and if we were, we would make many different choices.

10. Charlie: Lonely Are the Brave

Charlie recalled the 1962 film Lonely Are the Brave, which he saw at a drive-in with his family. Kirk Douglas plays a cowboy who opens the film cutting a barbed-wire fence so he and his horse can pass. The whole film is about him as practically the last cowboy, struggling against modernization because he wants to remain a cowboy on a horse. At the end, he and his horse are hit by a truck; he lies on the ground and in the background one hears the police shooting the horse, which is in terrible pain. He did his best and was heroic, but he lost.

Charlie said that is an example of what the group was discussing. There are always troubles in transition. The streets around his home were once cow and horse trails; would anyone want that back? Progress and change seem unavoidable, and all an individual can do is his own part. If you want a good local supplier, Charlie told Susan, go find one — an herbalist and so forth. It is not easy, but we have no choice but to deal with it, because this is how God made the world: people do what God does. We create, and creation goes on — not always beautiful creation — and we have to deal with it.

Susan said part of what we can do is be proactive about what we choose to support. Charlie summarized: “You’re in favor of mindful change and choice.” Susan agreed: we need not simply go with the flow; with mindfulness, and by communicating that mindfulness to others, there can be a higher level of understanding of what we are doing with our money.

Note (the film). Lonely Are the Brave (1962), directed by David Miller with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, is adapted from Edward Abbey’s novel The Brave Cowboy (1956). In the final scene the cowboy, Jack Burns, and his horse are struck by a truck on a rain-slick highway; the horse is shot off-screen, and Burns’s own fate is left ambiguous as he is taken away by ambulance.

11. Thomas: Von Mises and the Herculean Task of Entry

Thomas said it is a challenging problem in a changing world. The ideas Leonard, Charlie, and Susan were expressing reminded him of Ludwig von Mises, who held that the market corrects itself without intervention: if there is a need and people want something, they will support it, and someone will come along and do it differently. If you do not like Amazon, do something different; if enough people share your view, the world will beat a path to your door. Mises opposed nearly any regulation: let the market do what it does, and if you want change, be the entrepreneur.

But Thomas said he sees, in the effort to market the walker, how difficult it is to fit anything into the market — Herculean. There are regulations, the product’s actual performance, insurance, advertising and sales, and limitations in every one of them; it is like threading a needle. He referred to the book Charlie had shared — an entrepreneur’s handbook by Blank — which he said felt like a fifteen-hour audiobook of “and there’s this, and there’s this, and there’s this.” So when someone says, “If you really want this, go do it yourself,” the answer is: here is a fifteen-hour book; figure out how to thread that needle, enter a moving freight train, and either change its direction or get people to get off it and onto yours. Capitalism, he said, is a very large thing to try to intervene in. Charlie said, “It’s not for sissies.”

Note (Mises). Ludwig von Mises (Human Action, 1949; Interventionism, 1940) argued that piecemeal government intervention in markets produces consequences that invite further intervention, and that durable monopoly arises chiefly from government privilege rather than from free competition. He was not an anarchist: he held that the state must protect property, enforce contracts, and suppress violence. Friedrich Hayek, his student, allowed a larger role for general rules and some public provision.

Note (the book). The reference is almost certainly Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, The Startup Owner’s Manual (2012), a long, checklist-driven guide to “customer development.” Steve Blank is not related to Arthur Blank of Home Depot.

12. Leonard and Charlie: An Art-Market Model for the Walker

Leonard said he likes the model Charlie has used for the last thirty years: building sculpture that functions. Art has a different character from a mere product. He has friends in Spring City, near Manti and Mount Pleasant, Utah, who are artists and sell through galleries, which sell to the public. Charlie has been successful in that way and has supported his family. Leonard suggested considering whether the walker could be expanded on that model — “order your piece of art that helps you walk” — so that it might be categorized as something other than a medical device.

Charlie said Leonard was onto something. He told of a high-school friend, Nancy Sessions of Arcata, California, who wanted to see his work; he sent a picture of the lift walker, and when she showed it to her son, he said, “Whoever made that is an artist.” Leonard said that is Charlie’s background and who he is to the core.

Charlie said this was off the gospel topic, but Leonard said it was not: the Lord provides for us at our own level and according to our hearts; He knows us and gives us what helps us, by precept or by hard experience, and we learn and grow. Charlie had applied his art to help people escape the dungeon of a wheelchair.

Charlie restated the idea as incorporating elements of the art market into the medical-device market; Leonard agreed. Leonard described a device he sees advertised: a walker with a small saddle, into which the user straps; if he loses balance, the device holds his weight. He estimated its price at about $8,000. Charlie identified it as a walker he had seen (rendered in the transcript as the “Zine Walker”). Leonard said the Ideomotion device is in that price range and could be made unique — a piece of art people order, choosing colors and forms, even making their own art for the walker — as a way to get these machines to people without all the difficulties. That, he said, is what Charlie has been doing: he does not carry insurance.

Charlie said, “Insurance is the cost of disclosure.” Leonard said disclosure is paramount: buyers must understand they buy at their own risk, and that the device supports the body, lifts them from the chair, and lets them move their legs. Charlie said that from the beginning, one of the two professionals who first described their needs had told him: there is a risk in getting people up and walking, but it is not as great as the risk of sitting and doing nothing. Leonard agreed that this is the foundation of the work — getting people vertical as they were designed, moving their legs as they were created to — and that it changes not only their physical state but their mental and emotional state; and the device is art that they love to look at and use.

Charlie recalled that when the Mini Cooper was introduced, its selling point was that there were countless ways to configure one — color, trim, many choices — so that it became one’s own piece of art. Ideomotion has been moving toward standardization, Charlie said, which is a different direction; perhaps it is worth reconsidering.

(Later, as he was leaving, Leonard recommended the website of a company in Spanish Fork, Utah — rendered in the transcript as “Not a wheelchair.com” — which lets buyers customize their wheelchairs, as an example of the idea.)

Note (regulatory status). Under U.S. law a product’s status as a medical device depends on its intended use as shown by the maker’s claims, labeling, and promotion (21 U.S.C. §321(h); 21 C.F.R. §801.4), not on whether it is also beautiful or sold through galleries. A product promoted to help people with impaired mobility stand or walk is a medical device, whatever channel sells it. Many simple devices are low-burden: mechanical walkers are Class I and exempt from premarket notification (21 C.F.R. §890.3825). Powered or more complex mobility devices may fall in higher classes. Customization and artistic design are fully compatible with device status, and may be a marketing advantage; they do not remove it.

Note (disclosure and liability). Disclosure and assumption-of-risk agreements help, but in most U.S. jurisdictions they do not bar claims for injury from a manufacturing or design defect under strict product liability, and consumer-product waivers of negligence are often unenforceable. Disclosure is necessary but not a substitute for liability insurance and sound design documentation. Charlie’s clinician’s point about the risks of immobility is well supported: prolonged sitting and bed rest are associated with muscle loss, bone loss, pressure injuries, circulatory and respiratory complications, and depression.

Note (the advertised device). The device Leonard described matches the general type of seated, harness-supported “wearable” walkers now marketed direct to consumers; the transcript’s “Zine” may refer to the product sold as the Zeen. Its price is recorded as Leonard estimated it.

13. Susan Steers to Chapter 2: Ownership and Stewardship

Susan asked to steer the conversation, and all agreed; Leonard said the business discussion was itself interesting, and that if we keep Christ in mind, He will lead us.

Susan read a line she had written down from Chapter 2, which she believed was nearly word for word: everything is made of God’s own substance, so perhaps ownership is an illusion because it all belongs to the Creator. It came, she said, from the part of the conversation where Isak asked what Thomas’s physics says about ownership. Thomas answered that the physics does not really say anything about ownership, but that he holds the opinion that God does own everything.

Susan said that as individuals come to belief in Christ and take on God’s heart by reading His Word and trying to obey, they come to see themselves more as stewards than owners of what God has given them — because Scripture is clear that God has given it, even if we worked for it. (Leonard said, “The right attitude.”) When we think of ourselves as stewards whose aim is to make our behavior, thought, and speech conform to Christ’s will, it changes how we use our property, our finances, and our businesses. The question becomes less “How can I make money and get rich?” and more “What contribution does God have for me to make, and how can I make it with what He has entrusted to me?” It is an entirely different mindset.

She said she believes this involves surrender — saying to God, “Your will, not mine,” as Christ did — and acknowledged not everyone agrees on that. Surrender, she said, puts a new flavor on every part of life, including business and spending, which we typically do not think of as religious or spiritual; we think of them as just what we do to survive. If we take off that mindset and put on one in which everything we do is an effort to do God’s will and support His purposes, it changes how we view everything, including property.

But, she said, God also wants us to have free will — the freedom to choose. So it would not be right to say, “You cannot own property here; God owns it.” One could say that gently, perhaps, but God wants each person to come with a full heart to a realization of His purposes, including how to think about his property. As we gently put out the truth, in word and action, more people will respond, because it is loving rather than harsh and judgmental. Some will respond, and then more.

14. Thomas: Holiness in the Economy — Finance as Gateway

Thomas said what Susan described suggested incorporating holiness into the economy. The general gatekeeper of enterprise is money: people lack capital, so they go to a bank, which asks questions that are mostly economic. Susan’s idea opened a possibility: that in the interview in which capital-holders — the gatekeepers of society’s exchange of value — decide whether to fund an enterprise, they would ask whether it will support the kingdom of God. That would be a radical proposition: a moral gateway, requiring a declaration of allegiance to a particular God. At present, he said, the only god one must acknowledge to obtain money is the god of money: we promise to pay our tithe to it, in the form of interest, the price of using its money — roughly our ten percent a year. If Susan’s proposal were implemented, Thomas said, that would be the hinge point, the entry point.

15. Susan: Change from the Bottom — The Plumber

Susan said she understood, but thought those with money and financial decision-making would be the last to adopt this. There are many stories of ordinary people who wanted to do something, lacked the money, went to God and said, “I feel You want me to do this; I have no way; help me find one,” and God made a way — sometimes through a bank loan, sometimes not.

She retold the story of a plumber. He felt he could not ethically keep working for a crooked employer, so he quit without knowing what he would do. A friend suggested he start his own business and offered to handle the paperwork. He was an excellent plumber. Without advertising, people told their friends that he did great work at a fair price, and his business grew. He often lacked money to stock parts; for a couple of years it was very hard, and he depended on the Lord, saying, “God, these people want this work, and I don’t have the money for the parts — now what?” God helped him through. He told his children there would be no money for Christmas or birthday presents or restaurants; they cut back seriously. He is still in business. He is not rich, but he can take his wife to a nice restaurant and has what he needs. He still does not advertise — no name on his van, no listing in the Yellow Pages; it is all word of mouth.

Someone remarked, “That is advertising,” and Susan agreed; Charlie said it is the best kind, and Susan and Leonard said that is how their own businesses started. God can help, Susan said: lean on Him first and foremost — not that one never uses traditional channels — and ask how to conduct one’s life and business according to His will.

16. Thomas: Miracles, and Whether God Wills a Sanctified Nation

Thomas said Susan’s story was a story of miracles — God does miracles, without doubt. His own approach, though, has been to ask how to change the system so that the entire system calls on God. Perhaps, he said, that is an unreasonable ask. Perhaps it is not God’s intention — perhaps the point is always to be fighting the empire, as rebels, a rare few, and a program to sanctify the nation is not God’s way at all. He said that is not what he believes, but he put it forward because Susan’s idea runs very much against the program he is pursuing. What he is doing, he said, would require a miracle. He is saying, “God, You wanted a righteous church to return to; I am willing to try; we need a miracle, because this will not happen without You.” So he is doing the same thing she described. He has no certain idea how to do it; he has generated many ideas, and one never knows what will work — one throws much against the wall and sees what sticks.

17. Susan and Thomas: Trickle-Up and Top-Down

Susan said that, realistically, she sees change happening among the ordinary people who turn to God and do as the plumber did, with God making a way. As more and more people do that, eventually the banker says, “We have no more business; we have to change how we do this.” She thinks change is most likely to come from the bottom up — from the humblest, least greedy people — and then trickle up: “trickle-up religion.”

Thomas said that if her theory is correct, it would require the people on a wide scale to be sanctified, so that they act in this bottom-up way; what would drive it is a sanctified citizenry. Susan asked how one would get that.

Thomas said his experience of systems is that one works from the bottom up and the top down simultaneously. You work at the top, saying “here is an idea,” and they say “no, you’re crazy; nobody wants that.” You work at the bottom, and they say “no, you’re crazy; the people at the top won’t let us.” You keep working at both ends and do not say, “This is the one way it will work,” because there are too many variables. Probably what actually works was not even on your list — but if you had not tried what you tried, the thing that worked would never have come up as an idea. So you put it out, try as hard as you can, and hope that some seed is planted and grows in a garden you did not know was there, and eventually populates everything.

Susan said she agrees with working from the top as well, to some extent, though she would probably go about it very differently. That does not make her right and Thomas wrong, she said; God works in each heart to do what that person can do. Her vision is what God has put in her heart for her to do, and Thomas’s is what God has put in his. As they talk and influence each other, they help each other see how to conduct their own efforts to obey God.

Thomas said this resembles how conscious points work: they take in data from everywhere and exert influence in their own small group. We take in data from the world and go out and try to do something; if it is a good seed and we plant enough of them in enough places, we may find it grows and say, “That’s my idea coming back to me — it took root.”

Susan said one advantage is that the Bible, the fundamental record of truth, has been planted throughout the world. Even people who read only its stories, without grasping their deeper meaning, may someday see or hear something that puts it into perspective. Christ said His sheep know His voice. Having read the Bible makes people able to change — perhaps a whole community, even the whole world, could change overnight when their eyes open to what they have already read, and they say, “This is Christ.” We should not assume our influence can only be small; sometimes one person influences a whole society for good. It could be large.

Note (Scripture). “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (John 10:27; cf. 10:4).

18. Leonard Reads Alma 32; Susan and Charlie on Discernment

Leonard asked to read a passage from The Covenant of Christ, a modern-English edition of the Book of Mormon — Alma 32 in the standard edition. In it Alma compares the word to a seed: if you let it be planted in your heart and do not cast it out by unbelief or resist the Spirit, a good seed will begin to grow within you; when you feel it growing, you will say it must be a good seed, because it enlarges your soul, enlightens your understanding, and becomes delightful to you. This increases faith, though it is not yet perfect knowledge. Every seed that grows is living, and a seed that does not grow is dead and should be thrown out. Leonard said this is how Alma taught his hearers to discern — and it is the group’s mission too: to plant good seeds in hearts willing not to cast them out through unbelief, and to let them grow. We know the gospel is true and the Bible is a great way to help people; so let us plant seeds.

Susan thanked him and said there was much beautiful in the passage, with a strong likeness to the parable of the sower. But she disagreed with one part: that one can tell a seed is good because it grows. Many things grow and flourish that are not of God — that are evil — so growth by itself cannot be the test.

Charlie said there were other qualifiers in the passage besides growth — whether it produces good fruit — which is critical and resembles the Quaker process of discerning a leading, where good fruit is one of several tests. Susan said she had heard the passage as saying that growth itself is how one knows the fruit is good, and asked whether she was mistaken. Leonard said the passage contains several tests — whether it strengthens faith, among others. Charlie asked for the reference; Leonard gave it as Covenant of Christ, Alma 16:28, corresponding to Alma 32 in the standard Book of Mormon. Susan asked whether the wording is the same; Leonard said the meaning is the same, rendered in modern English, like a modern Bible translation.

Leonard then left, thanking everyone. Susan closed the fellowship meeting in prayer, thanking God for His blessings and His Spirit and for the fellowship’s opportunity to share ideas and edify one another, and asking Him to help them receive more understanding and truth, grow in love for Him and others, let their efforts be fueled by real love, and bring them together again the next week.

Note (Alma 32). The passage (Alma 32:27–43 in the 1830 and standard editions) states the tests explicitly in verse 28: that the seed “beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.” Verse 32 adds the negative test: if it does not grow, it is not good. Charlie and Leonard are therefore correct that growth is accompanied by other criteria (enlargement of soul, enlightenment of understanding, goodness of taste); Susan is correct that the passage’s conclusion in verses 33–35 does rest heavily on growth. The biblical parallels are discussed in the meta-essay.

19. Thomas and Armond: Chasing Rabbits

After the others left, Thomas said Armond’s comment about chasing rabbits had been the high point, and asked what he thought.

Armond said that a question like the one discussed can be approached historically, through policy, and in many other ways, and from all of them the group can never reach a point of consensus, because each side can draw on thousands of years of ideology, warfare, and events. He said the best question he could ask is how to avoid that kind of conversation.

Thomas said it is the conversation that has to be resolved, because until it is, everyone is marshaling a thousand years of different policies, events, and wars — and that is why people cannot get along.

20. Armond: Where Is the Black and White?

Armond said one thing he thought of during the discussion was the section of the essay on the gray — that gray is a combination of a finite black and a finite white. So the real question is: where is the black and white? That is what can be debated and brought to an agreed conclusion. The black and the white are the principles. How far back is the principle? Thomas asked, “How deep is it buried?” Armond agreed, and asked how we can identify a principle outside of religion; if that is possible, we can all figure it out.

Thomas asked whether Armond meant that it could not be found outside religion. Armond said the opposite: he did not think it would be found within religion, but only outside it. Thomas asked whether by religion he meant the practice and formalization — crystallized patterns of worship, belief, or practice. Armond said yes: those are the behavioral practices we adopt to outline or represent the principles. Can we go straight to the principles before defining them with our version of behavior?

Thomas said that sounded right. The principles have to come from somewhere; he chooses the Bible. But we also have an internal sense of right that validates it. For example, “do not get drunk”: you wake up and everything is a disaster. There is a principle of sobriety; the Bible says it, and we experience it, and the two reinforce each other. In that sense, Thomas said, we have precept and experiment.

Armond agreed, and raised the challenge: what about the person who cannot read or never hears the word — as Isak had asked? How is he able to live within this? Armond thought that is where the Spirit of God within comes in. But then one runs the risk of the New Age approach — “I am God, and whatever makes me feel good must be right.” So is the standard that it must bear fruit for all, that it must not violate other parameters?

Thomas said this is really the question of what truth is and how to determine it. He said he had short-circuited the whole question because he cannot resolve it philosophically: we have a Bible that claims to be from God; let us check it out, use it, and see whether it works, and let it be our standard. Armond said, “Let this be our diver’s weights” — meaning our standard of weights and measures. Thomas said: our standard, rather than divers weights, which are exactly what we are not using.

Armond said the question then is how to get everyone to share it, because the only way to reach a solution is to share a standard. Thomas said that was evident with Michael, who, in Thomas’s view, has no standard at all: everything is good except Christians, who are bad because of the Inquisition and so on. Thomas said the real question is how to form people with a common standard: unless we share one, we cannot trade. “Here’s a pound.” “My pound is this big; how big is yours?” If the measures differ, there is no fair exchange. He called the “diverse weights” illustration very important. Armond said that is what it comes down to: without a common standard we will never share a solution. Thomas said the group had illustrated that in spades — even between the Book of Mormon and the Bible, the standard is not the same.

Armond said Susan had pointed that out immediately. Charlie and Leonard contested it, but she was right: the verse Leonard read said, plainly, that one knows it is a good seed because it grows. Anyone listening would have heard it; if one did not want to hear it, one would not admit it — again, not the same standard, even of interpretation.

Thomas said the problem of “why can’t we all get along” is clear: we are marching to different drummers with different sizes of weights in our bags, so we cannot trade — there is no commerce. That seems to be the state of human beings. His one hope, he said, is that people come to understand that God is at the center of all of it. With his physics: if the high priests of society, the scientists, continue to say there is no God and everyone believes it, people will continue to act as if there is no God — and that is a very different weight in the bag. The standard his theory supplies is very broad, he said: it does not say who God is; it says there is one. Armond said: call Him what you want, but there is a God who controls all and has His hand in everything. Thomas said: there is no place He is not. Armond: and He has already established His rules; whether you acknowledge or abide by them, you live within that structure.

Note (“divers weights”). “Thou shalt not have in thy bag divers weights, a great and a small… But thou shalt have a perfect and just weight” (Deuteronomy 25:13, 15); “Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 20:10; cf. 20:23; Leviticus 19:35–36). “Divers” means various or differing. Armond’s “diver’s weights” and Thomas’s correction both point to this text.

21. Armond: The Bible Is Not Christianity

Armond said God gave us the Bible, but he does not think the Bible is Christianity; it is biblical law. Thomas asked what Christianity is, then — the religion they had been setting aside? Armond said yes, he thought Christianity is the religion. Thomas asked whether religion meant rituals, verbiage, doctrines, and distillations from the Bible rather than the Bible itself — “these are our principles; this is our code.” Armond said that Christianity, derived from the Bible, often takes on a life of its own and becomes a sect — the Pentecostal church, the Baptist churches — and that is the religion part.

Thomas asked whether that is a problem. Armond said it is fine if one still abides by biblical law and principle; it simply represents one’s personal and cultural perspective. It becomes wrong when it is personalized to the point that ego has shaped it enough that it is no longer biblical. It becomes, for example, Mormonism, because it was so influenced by personal ego that it ceased to be biblical. If the standard is only the Bible, it does not matter what a church calls itself; all share one source. If the Mormon church said, “We follow biblical doctrine, and all our other texts are subordinate to the Bible,” it would have something to answer to beyond a man — Joseph Smith, Brigham Young — and that would change everything.

22. Thomas: False Christs, and the Question of Renunciation

Thomas said it does change everything. He said he thinks that when Jesus and the apostles warned that false christs would come and even the elect would be deceived, they had in view Islam and Mormonism specifically. They are masterful imitations. He believes their founders had a real encounter with a spirit — angelic, in the sense of a demonic channeling — but not God’s Spirit; an imitator. Both, he said, contain parts that are genuinely good, so that people say, “You shouldn’t dismiss them; look at all the good they stand for,” and he agrees those parts are excellent. The question is whether there is any part of either that one would not want duplicated massively and implemented everywhere.

With Islam, he said, one cites Quran 9:5 — kill the unbelievers — and is told that was merely historical and not part of Islam. Then renounce it, Thomas said: make it clear; cleanse it completely. In Christianity, he said, we do not go out and commit genocide against, say, the Ethiopians on the principle that Israel wiped out the Jebusites, Hivites, Amorites, and Perizzites — as if that Old Testament pattern were our criterion for any people we dislike. (Armond joked: what if we brought back the Passover?)

In Christendom, Thomas said, we have renounced what was done in the Inquisition, renounced the Klan, and renounced whatever was done in the 1880s. Islam has not. One does not hear a united renunciation — especially among the Shiites — of the goal of bringing the world under Islam. They expect the Twelfth Imam to come and rule the entire world, and Iran is run by Shiites who are completely convinced of that and whose doctrine is to take over the world. The Sufis, he said, are no concern: they want to whirl, sing, and dance and enjoy the ecstasy of God; they can come in. Others cannot.

Thomas said Michael seems dedicated to the view that Christianity has these bad episodes in its history and therefore can never be allowed a place of universal adoption, because it contains seeds that might overtake it and produce an oppressive umbrella — racism, as with the Klan, or one denomination killing another. Michael fears it is not a good religion to put in charge of everything because of its past.

Note (Scripture). “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matthew 24:24; cf. Mark 13:22). The list of nations is in Deuteronomy 7:1 (Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites); the transcript’s “Hevites” is the Hivites.

23. Armond: Offer the Standard, Not the Religion’s Record

Armond said he would suggest not presenting Christianity as the religion responsible for all those things, but presenting biblical principles as the standard. Thomas agreed and gave the example of slavery: the South said it was doing God’s work, but it misinterpreted the Bible. Armond said exactly — it was a misinterpretation; they did not uphold the standard. If they had, it would have looked different. That is how biblical standards survive and thrive in the face of all the transgressions brought up. It is like a man: one can list what he did wrong, whether intentionally or not; the question is what the standard was, and what it would have looked like if he had upheld it. We are talking about human beings portraying the standard, not the standard perfectly portrayed; humans have free will and make mistakes. We cannot deny the oppression of slavery, Jim Crow, the Spanish Inquisition, or the colonization of America. But we can talk about the biblical principles that were not followed, and how we prevent those things from happening again.

Thomas said that is the key: “We did that; we don’t do that anymore.”

Armond added that one could even debate how followers of Christ upholding biblical standards should have acted in those situations. If we can identify that, we can begin to figure out how radical it will be when we have to defend these principles again, and what it will look like — will it look like a Spanish Inquisition?

24. Thomas: Islam, Introspection, and a Renunciation Requirement

Thomas said that Islam does not do that kind of introspection or broadly denounce what was done in its name. Reformers are afraid even to speak, because they know what will happen to them for opposing the traditions of Islam. That makes it a religion that uses the satanic parts of itself and prevents them from being excised.

He referred to his long essay of the previous week, in which he proposed that anyone entering the country be required to renounce the practices of Islam that are anti-Christian and anti-constitutional, and to demonstrate that the renunciation is sincere — not merely say “I renounce it” and then practice it. The difficulty, he said, is taqiyya, which he described as the doctrine of lying to deceive the enemy in order to enter and take over his land. If one asks a Muslim whether he has renounced the anti-constitutional parts of Islam and he swears on the Quran that he has, how can one trust him if his doctrine permits lying for advantage in order to subvert the host nation?

Even so, Thomas said, the principle he offered — the best he could devise — has value because it is overt. It would declare, as a nation, that Islam contains patterns that are anti-constitutional, revolutionary, supplanting, and disloyal to the Constitution. We already require an oath to support and defend the Constitution for federal employment and for naturalization; let us enforce it and make clear we mean it. The nation would thereby declare that it stands for the Constitution and recognizes that Islam, in these respects, is an invader that deceives and seeks to form colonies large enough to supplant the Constitution.

By contrast, he said, after 9/11 President Bush said Islam was a religion of peace, which Thomas called a complete lie, and that only a few extremists were responsible, which he also called a lie: there are hundreds of millions of Shiite Twelvers who, by their religion and by verse, are fundamentally opposed to the constitutional order and hold a revolutionary philosophy. The nation should recognize that there are people within Islam who oppose the constitutional order and are not welcome, and should defend itself. It is a poor gate, a poor fence, a poor barrier, Thomas said — but at least it is an acknowledgment. To say “Islam is a religion of peace” implies the whole religion is peaceful. A truthful statement might have been: it is a religion of peace, except for the group that opposes the constitutional order. This is not a minor problem, he said; because of the Obama and Biden administrations, the country now has populations that have isolated themselves in colonies resistant to assimilation.

Armond said opening the borders has created the same dynamic on many fronts — Latin American, Middle Eastern, East Asian — and asked where it ends.

25. Thomas: Jesus All the Way Down

Thomas said that is why his proposition is completely uncompromising: it is Jesus all the way down. “We are not trying to accommodate you; we are trying to make you a Christian. It is a Christian nation; we acknowledge it; we embrace Jesus and the way of Jesus; we embody the person of Jesus. That is our religion: we do Jesus. That is what we do here.”

By declaring that this is who America is at its core, he said, the nation pushes outward into isolated enclaves rather than having them push inward. This is not a matter of “why can’t we get along,” he said; it is war — a population within the borders that wants to kill you.

Armond said Susan was right that it happens from the bottom up — in every family and household — but there must also be leadership that does not condemn it but promotes and encourages it; that is the top-down part.

Thomas said it is all jawboning — declaring what we stand for. Right now leadership is emasculated: it cannot say anything Christian or it will lose votes by alienating one bloc or another. So leaders speak multiculturalism, and that, he said, is what we worship now instead of a Christian nation.

26. Media and Omission

Armond said that is only because we have allowed a regime opposed to Christian values to control the mass media, and have allowed the media to become the arbiter of what is right — through censorship and through the messages it chooses to broadcast. Thomas called it censorship by omission — lying by omission: telling people only the news the media want them to believe. It is indoctrination and propaganda, he said, invoking Alex Jones’s term “info wars.” Armond agreed: if you knew differently, you would do differently.

27. The Individual as the Point of Attack

Thomas said it is not an easy fight. He has written millions of words, and no one will read them. Even if people agreed and felt fired up to change things, what would they do — punch the mailman? There is no place to attack it; it is a phantom.

Armond said there is a place, but not many people are willing to look in the mirror and attack it there — right where it counts.

Thomas said Armond had hit the nail on the head: the problem is the individual. What does the individual do to change himself into an effective cultural warrior — to change all the conscious points in his own Planck sphere and transmit the message? His thesis, he said, is: if you believe this, start speaking it and start getting canceled. Martyr yourself by saying what is true. At every opportunity, do not simply get along; be the pariah; say the truth, even when no one likes it. If you do not, you are part of the problem, giving comfort and aid to the propaganda already out there, and approving it by silence.

28. Armond: A Conversation with His Family

Armond said that was exactly the conversation he had had with his sister the week before.

His mother had recently had a procedure to remove a breast. Doctors had found a lump; they had not proven it was cancerous, but because she had had breast cancer before — treated with radiation and chemotherapy, followed by remission — they recommended removing the breast preventively. Armond said he was against it. Sitting in the living room with his mother and father, he asked her: if you went to the doctor with a twisted ankle and he said, “We don’t know how badly you sprained it, so let’s cut off your leg so we won’t have to worry about the ankle,” would you do it? She laughed and said that sounded crazy. He said it sounds crazy because it is — and doctors are paid a great deal to take these chances with your body. He told her she was more willing to trust a doctor telling her to remove part of her body just in case than to take responsibility for herself and stop smoking. She was not willing to play any role in her own recovery, he said, yet wanted everyone else to be responsible for it, which is even crazier. He asked whether she wanted to be healthy and to live: it is her life and her decision, but she was giving the doctor the authority to make this decision while not even being willing to quit smoking — “a band-aid for a bullet wound.”

When he says such things, Armond said, everyone is upset with him: “You can’t judge Mom and Dad; they raised you.” He said he is not judging them; he loves them. But why can’t we be honest with each other? No one else will be. Thomas said no one else really cares. Armond said no one cares more about his mother than he does.

His conversation with his sister, he said, turned on this: if we are willing to normalize this insanity and say nothing and do nothing, what then? And if we are going to do something, what does it look like? What does it look like for someone to speak against these choices? Let us discuss that; once we have a baseline of what it will look like, does it take precedence over what we are comfortable with?

Note (medical context). Risk-reducing (prophylactic) mastectomy is an established option for women with a prior breast cancer, a new suspicious lesion, or elevated genetic risk. Whether it is advisable depends on factors such as the prior cancer’s type and treatment, imaging and biopsy findings, genetic testing, and the patient’s own weighing of recurrence risk against surgery; when biopsy cannot rule out cancer in a previously treated breast, surgery is sometimes the only definitive way to establish and address it. The ankle analogy, while vivid, does not fit well: a recurrence of breast cancer can be life-threatening, whereas a sprain is not, and removal of breast tissue does not carry the functional loss of an amputated leg. Armond’s point about smoking is well supported: smoking impairs surgical wound healing, increases complications, and worsens outcomes in cancer survivors, and quitting at any age improves them. Both concerns — seeking a second opinion on whether surgery is necessary, and stopping smoking — can be raised together, and the decision properly remains the patient’s, made with full information.

29. Thomas: Triangulation and the Voice in the Wilderness

Thomas said it is very hard to change how someone else acts, thinks, and decides. One seldom hears, “That conversation completely changed my life; now I believe what you believe.” It happens, but one cannot expect it from a single heartfelt conversation. One reason, he said, is that people are colony members: I need to hear it not only from you but from someone else, because you live in your world and I in mine, and I do not know whether your world is really like mine. If we put out the truth of the Bible in everything we say — and are pariahs everywhere because we speak straight Bible — no one believes us at first. Then someone does, and begins speaking it; someone else believes because of him and passes it on. Eventually the person you spoke with hears the same thing from someone else.

Armond said: they triangulated the truth. Thomas agreed: “I have two people saying the same thing; maybe it’s true; I think I’ve changed my mind.” Did you change because of me? “No, I’ve been thinking about it and saw different points of view” — but it was actually because of you, around the corner. Armond said: the backside of the coin.

Thomas said: who was John the Baptist? A voice crying in the wilderness. He made little difference by himself, but because his voice was followed by another saying the same thing, people began to listen. Had there not been that lone voice, people would not have believed the true voice when it came. Both said the same thing — “make straight the way of the Lord” — and people believed because a second voice confirmed the first.

Note (Scripture). “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3), applied to John in Matthew 3:3. Thomas’s point that the two voices said the same thing is exact in the Gospel text: John’s message was “Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2), and Jesus began to preach, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17).

(The conversation then turned to property business and family matters, which are omitted.)

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PART TWO — Meta-Essay: Individual and Whole, Steward and Market, Standard and Witness

This session moved through three large subjects that are, on inspection, one subject viewed at three scales. At the scale of physics and metaphysics: how an individual relates to the whole under a common law. At the scale of economics: how a buyer, seller, and lender relate to a market, and whether the market can carry moral purpose. At the scale of culture and religion: how people with different standards can reach any shared conclusion, and what a Christian’s witness should look like in a pluralist and, in Thomas’s view, hostile order. The Conscious Point picture Thomas described at the outset turns out to be the organizing image for all three, and this essay follows it.

1. The Conscious Point Picture as a Social Model

Thomas’s summary of the insight in Chapter 2 is this: every conscious point is fully individual; all of them are made of God’s substance, so none is independent; each receives signals from the whole, computes, and acts only locally; its local act propagates to its neighbors and thus to the whole; and the whole works because every point obeys one law given by God.

Why the picture is apt. It maps with striking precision onto three established ideas in political and social thought:

• Hayek’s knowledge problem. In “The Use of Knowledge in Society” (1945), Friedrich Hayek argued that the knowledge needed to run an economy is dispersed among millions of individuals, each knowing his own local circumstances, and that prices function as a signal system that transmits information from the whole to each individual, who then acts locally. No central planner can gather the knowledge; the system coordinates because each acts locally on global signals under general rules (property, contract). This is exactly Thomas’s picture — “receive from the whole, compute, act locally, affect the whole” — and it is the strongest known argument against the central planning Susan and Leonard rejected.
• Subsidiarity. Catholic social teaching (Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, 1931) holds that decisions should be made at the lowest competent level — the person, the family, the local community — and that higher bodies should help rather than replace lower ones. American federalism embodies a political version of the same idea.
• The body of Christ. Paul’s image in 1 Corinthians 12 — many members, one body, each with its own function, none able to say to another “I have no need of thee,” all governed by one Head — is the scriptural form of the same structure: full individuality, full membership, one governing law and will.

Where the picture needs care. Thomas himself drew the essential distinction when Susan quoted the line on ownership: the physics does not say anything about ownership; his view on ownership is his opinion, not a derivation. This is important for the book’s credibility. A physical model can illustrate a social principle, and the illustration can be illuminating, but it cannot by itself establish a moral or political conclusion, because the same physical facts are compatible with different social arrangements. (Communist theorists also appealed to the unity of all things; Social Darwinists appealed to physical law to justify the opposite.) What makes the conscious-point picture morally informative is the element Thomas placed at its center: every point obeys a law given by God. That element comes from theology, not from the physics’ equations; the physics supplies the image of local action under universal law, and Scripture supplies the content of the law. The book will be strongest if it says so explicitly: the physics shows what kind of order is possible — individuals fully free and fully lawful at once — and the moral law says which order is right.

One more point in the picture deserves development. Conscious points do not choose whether to obey the law; persons do. The analogy therefore breaks exactly where the moral life begins: at free will. Susan identified this when she insisted that God wants each person to come to stewardship freely rather than by compulsion. The social version of the model must include what the physical version lacks — the possibility of disobedience, and therefore the need for persuasion, repentance, and (where others’ rights are violated) law.

2. Communism, Capitalism, and the Moral Content of Markets

Susan’s formulation — communism makes the state a god; capitalism is compatible with Christ because it has freedom, but whether it serves Christ depends on the hearts of the people in it — is both a good summary of a long Christian tradition and an accurate reading of the evidence.

On communism, the historical record is not seriously in dispute: every regime that abolished private ownership of the means of production concentrated power in a party-state, suppressed religion and dissent, and produced economic failure, and several produced mass famine and mass killing (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, North Korea). Christian critics from Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum, 1891) onward identified the root: communism denies both the dignity of the individual person and the existence of a moral law above the state. Leonard’s “committee of incompetents” is a colloquial version of Hayek’s point that no committee can know enough, however competent.

On capitalism, Susan’s qualification — “it depends on the hearts” — is the classic position of the thinkers who defended markets most thoughtfully. Adam Smith wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) before The Wealth of Nations (1776) and assumed that commerce operates within a society formed by sympathy, conscience, and justice. Wilhelm Röpke described the market as needing a moral and social framework “beyond supply and demand” that it cannot itself produce. Michael Novak (The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 1982) argued that the political, economic, and moral-cultural systems are three legs of one stool. The common thread: markets coordinate efficiently whatever people value; they do not make people value the right things. That is precisely the gap Susan’s call to consumer stewardship and Thomas’s call for holiness in the economy are trying to fill.

Isak’s skepticism deserves a fair hearing, since the book begins from it. His view — capitalists are somewhat exploitative, parties serve themselves, the system is a mess — is common among his generation and is not simply mistaken. Crony capitalism, regulatory capture, and concentrated market power are real. The best response, which the group moved toward without stating it, is to distinguish free-market capitalism (competition under neutral law) from crony capitalism (incumbents using the state to shield themselves from competition). Much of what Isak distrusts, and what Susan objects to in large corporations, belongs to the second. That distinction lets the book defend markets without defending every outcome in the current economy.

3. Concentration: Amazon, Home Depot, and the Monoculture

The richest economic exchange of the session was among Susan (concentration harms local economies, destroys expertise, and will eventually raise prices), Leonard and Charlie (concentration also creates opportunity, and competition drives innovation), and Thomas (the result is a monoculture, and entry is Herculean).

Susan’s case, with evidence. The loss of local expertise is real and hard to measure: the knowledgeable hardware clerk and health-food proprietor were an unpriced public good, offering advice for free and recovering its cost in product margins; when price competition removed the margin, it removed the advice. Studies by the consulting firm Civic Economics reported that locally owned independent businesses recirculate a substantially larger share of revenue in the local economy than chains do — often two to three times as much per dollar — though economists have questioned their methods and generalizability. On wealth concentration, the tendency of very large fortunes to translate into political influence is a documented concern across the political spectrum.

Susan’s prediction of rising prices is the contested point. The theory is predatory pricing: cut prices to drive out competitors, then raise them. The Chicago school of antitrust (Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox, 1978) argued that predatory pricing rarely succeeds, because once prices rise new competitors enter. The “neo-Brandeisian” school (Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” 2017) argued that platform markets differ: network effects, data advantages, and control of the marketplace on which competitors themselves must sell make recoupment possible in other ways — through fees on sellers, self-preferencing, and control of search rankings rather than visible price hikes. The Federal Trade Commission’s suit against Amazon (filed 2023) rests largely on this theory; as of this writing the case has not been finally resolved. So Susan’s intuition has serious support in current antitrust scholarship, but the mechanism is more likely to be higher seller fees passed on indirectly than a simple rise in sticker prices.

Charlie’s and Leonard’s case, with evidence. Charlie’s machinist is not an isolated example: third-party sellers, most of them small and medium businesses, account for roughly 60% of units sold on Amazon. The platform lowered the cost of reaching a national market almost to zero for specialized producers — the clamp-collar maker, the independent musician with a thousand patrons. Charlie’s record-industry story is the same phenomenon in music: concentration in distribution (record labels) gave way to a platform that enabled a vast diversity of production. Leonard’s point that Home Depot and Lowe’s coexist and compete is correct, and his broader point — that a small operator who adapts can survive — has many real examples (independent bookstores’ partial revival after 2010, specialty and service-heavy retailers).

The synthesis the conversation reached for. Thomas’s word “monoculture” captures what both sides were describing. Platforms can simultaneously diversify production (more small makers than ever) and concentrate distribution and expertise (one store, one search box, one review system). The loss is not variety of goods but variety of judgment — the loss of many independent human filters, advisers, and local institutions that knew particular customers. Charlie’s midnight AI consultation about ring connectors is a partial, genuinely valuable replacement for one of those filters, and it is also another step in the same direction: expertise centralized in a few systems. Whether that is good depends, again, on whether those systems serve the people who use them.

Thomas’s point about entry, and the irony it reveals. Thomas’s lament — regulation, insurance, compliance, and the fifteen-hour manual make entry Herculean — is, when examined, one of the strongest arguments for Mises’s position rather than against it. Mises and later economists argued that regulatory burdens fall hardest on small entrants and newcomers, while large incumbents absorb compliance costs across huge volumes and often help write the rules (regulatory capture; George Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” 1971). Part of the reason Home Depot defeated the Portland lumber dealers is scale economies; part is that the fixed costs of regulation, liability, and compliance favor scale. So the two complaints in the conversation — “the small operator can’t survive” and “entry is Herculean” — may have a common cause, and it is not only market concentration but the regulatory environment that concentration thrives in. That does not settle the question for or against regulation in any given field (some regulation protects the public, including the users of mobility devices), but it shows that “let the market work” and “protect the small operator” are not always opposites.

4. The Buyer as Moral Agent

Susan’s call — that Christians should connect how they spend to whom they follow — has a long pedigree. G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc (The Servile State, 1912; The Outline of Sanity, 1926) developed distributism: a Christian economic vision favoring the widest possible distribution of property, family businesses, guilds, and local economies over both state socialism and concentrated capitalism. The fair-trade movement, “buy local” campaigns, and faith-based investing are modern expressions.

The case for it is that purchasing is one of the few daily acts by which ordinary people exercise economic power, and that a steward, as Susan argued, is accountable for the effects of his spending as well as his earning. Charlie’s reframing — “mindful change and choice” — captures the realistic version: not refusing all concentrated suppliers, but choosing deliberately.

The case against, or the limits, are information and coordination. The buyer usually cannot know how a firm uses its profits, how it treats its workers, or which alternative is actually better for the community; and one buyer’s choice has almost no effect unless many coordinate. The most successful consumer-conscience movements have solved these problems by providing trustworthy information and shared standards (certification labels, lists, cooperative purchasing). If the book develops Susan’s idea, the practical question is how a community of Christians could produce such information — for example, directories of businesses committed to explicit standards of honest dealing, local ownership, and fair treatment — so that conscience can act on knowledge rather than guesswork.

Charlie’s Lonely Are the Brave is the necessary counterweight. Joseph Schumpeter called it “creative destruction” (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 1942): the same process that destroys the cowboy’s world and the corner hardware store creates the platforms that let Charlie’s machinist and a South African sound-artist earn a living. Charlie’s theological framing — people create because God creates, and not all creation is beautiful — places the question correctly. The task is not to stop change but to steer what one can, as Susan said, and to accept with grace what one cannot.

5. The Art-Market Idea for the Walker

Leonard’s proposal that Ideomotion market its walker partly on an art-gallery model, with customization as its signature, was the most concrete business idea of the session and deserves a separate assessment.

Strengths. (1) It fits the maker: Charlie’s thirty-year practice is functional sculpture, and a stranger’s spontaneous reaction (“whoever made that is an artist”) is the kind of evidence marketers pay to obtain. (2) Customization is proven in adjacent markets — the Mini Cooper’s configurability, the customizable wheelchair company Leonard mentioned, and the broader shift in assistive technology toward devices users are proud to be seen with. Research on assistive-device abandonment consistently finds that stigma and appearance are major reasons users stop using devices that would help them; a device the user regards as beautiful and his own addresses a real clinical problem, not only a marketing one. (3) It differentiates the product from both mass-produced walkers and the comparable direct-to-consumer device Leonard described.

Limits. As the Part One notes explain, calling the device art does not change its regulatory status if it is promoted for mobility; and disclosure does not replace liability protection. The art model can therefore be a brand and design strategy layered on proper device compliance, not a way around compliance. It also has a cost: customization works against the standardization Ideomotion has been pursuing to reduce unit cost and simplify manufacturing. A common resolution in other industries is “mass customization” — a standardized core mechanism with a bounded set of customer-selectable finishes, colors, and decorative elements, plus a premium tier of one-of-a-kind commissioned pieces. That would preserve the engineering standardization while delivering Leonard’s and Charlie’s vision.

Charlie’s clinician’s principle — the risk of getting people up is less than the risk of leaving them sitting — is sound and well supported by the literature on immobility, and it is the right ethical foundation for the product. It is also the right foundation for disclosure: the honest message is not “use at your own risk” alone, but “every choice carries risk, and sitting still is also a risk; here is what this device does and does not do.”

6. Stewardship and Ownership

Susan’s reading of the Chapter 2 line — “perhaps ownership is an illusion, because it all belongs to the Creator” — and her development of it into a theology of stewardship was the theological center of the group discussion.

The scriptural basis is broad: “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof” (Psalm 24:1); “the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Leviticus 25:23); the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30), where servants are entrusted with a master’s goods and judged by what they did with them; “What hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

The necessary balance is that Scripture equally protects human property against other humans: “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15) presupposes legitimate ownership; the jubilee laws restored land to families, not to the state; Naboth’s refusal to sell his vineyard to King Ahab (1 Kings 21) is presented as righteous and the king’s seizure as a crime. The coherent position — which Susan articulated precisely when she said it would not be right to tell someone, “You can’t own property here; God owns it” — is that property is owned in relation to other people and held in trust in relation to God. Stewardship is a vertical relation that does not dissolve horizontal rights. This matters enormously for the book, because the line “ownership is an illusion,” read without that balance, could be taken as support for collectivism — the very system both Thomas and Isak rejected. The chapter would be strengthened by stating the two-level view explicitly. (John Locke, whose labor theory of property shaped the American founding, grounded property rights in God’s gift of the earth to mankind and the individual’s labor mixed with it — a stewardship theory in origin.)

Susan’s emphasis on free will and gentle persuasion is the natural consequence: if stewardship is a relation to God, it can be taught and modeled but not compelled, because a compelled steward is not a steward but a servant of the state. That is the same principle, applied to economics, that the Western church eventually applied to belief (see the paired file, Section 9): faith coerced is not faith.

7. Finance as the Moral Gateway

Thomas’s image — interest as the tithe paid to the god of money, and the bank interview as the gateway through which every enterprise must pass — is vivid and has substantial history behind it.

History. The Old Testament forbade lending at interest to fellow Israelites (Exodus 22:25; Leviticus 25:35–37; Deuteronomy 23:19–20). The medieval church forbade usury broadly; the prohibition was gradually relaxed from the 16th century as lending came to be understood as financing productive enterprise rather than exploiting the needy. Islamic law still prohibits riba (interest), and a large Islamic finance industry structures loans as partnerships, leases, and cost-plus sales. There is a notable irony here in relation to the first half of the meeting: Islam is currently the major religious tradition that most visibly subjects finance to religious law — which shows both that Thomas’s idea is practicable and that the question of whose religious law governs finance is exactly the question of the first hour.

Christian practice today includes church-based credit unions, Christian community development lending, faith-based impact investing, and “kingdom business” venture funds that finance enterprises by explicit moral criteria. These are the working forms of Thomas’s proposal and could be surveyed in the book.

A legal constraint must be noted. The federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act (15 U.S.C. §1691) prohibits creditors from discriminating against applicants on the basis of religion (as well as race, sex, and other categories). A commercial bank therefore could not lawfully require a declaration of Christian allegiance as a condition of credit. What is lawful is (a) private investors and funds choosing what to invest in by their own values, (b) lenders evaluating the conduct and purpose of an enterprise by stated ethical criteria applied to everyone (as “ESG” lenders do from other value systems), and (c) communities building their own cooperative finance. The moral gateway Thomas envisions would therefore be built by persuading the holders of capital, and by building alternative capital institutions — which is the combination of top-down and bottom-up that the conversation converged on.

8. Bottom-Up, Top-Down, and the Question of Miracles

Susan and Thomas framed their difference as bottom-up (“trickle-up religion,” the plumber) versus top-down (changing the system, the gatekeepers), and then largely resolved it: both work, God assigns different people different parts, and the outcome is unpredictable. History supports that resolution.

• Bottom-up: the Great Awakenings in America (1730s–40s, 1790s–1840s) were popular revivals that changed millions of individual lives before they changed institutions; they produced the moral energy behind abolition, temperance, prison reform, and the founding of colleges and charities.
• Top-down: William Wilberforce spent twenty years in Parliament to abolish the British slave trade (1807) and saw slavery abolished in the Empire just before his death (1833). He could not have succeeded without the evangelical revival that had changed public sentiment — and the revival could not have abolished the trade without Wilberforce’s legislative work. His circle, the Clapham Sect, worked both ends deliberately: legislation, public campaigns, consumer boycotts of slave-grown sugar (a direct precedent for Susan’s mindful purchasing), schools, and missions.
• Unpredictability: Thomas’s observation that the thing that works is often not on anyone’s list — but would never have appeared if people had not tried the things on the list — describes how most successful reforms looked from inside.

Thomas’s self-questioning — perhaps God does not intend a sanctified nation, and the faithful are always meant to be a remnant resisting an empire — is a real theological position, with serious scriptural support (the narrow way of Matthew 7:14; the church as “strangers and pilgrims,” 1 Peter 2:11; Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the earthly city). The opposite position, which Thomas holds, also has support (the Great Commission to disciple nations, Matthew 28:19; the prophets’ calls to national repentance; the historical fact that Christian ideas did reshape whole civilizations). A reconciliation many theologians have offered: the church does not rule the nation, but it may leaven it (Matthew 13:33), and the degree of leavening varies across history. On that view, Thomas’s program and Susan’s are both leaven — hers working through individual lives, his through ideas and institutions — and neither is a failure if the nation as a whole never becomes fully sanctified.

9. Discernment: Does Growth Prove a Seed Is Good?

Susan’s objection to the Alma 32 passage — that many evil things grow and flourish — was the sharpest exegetical exchange of the session, and Armond later treated it as the clearest example of the “different standards” problem.

The text. Alma 32 does give additional criteria besides growth: the seed enlarges the soul, enlightens the understanding, and is “delicious.” Charlie and Leonard were right that growth is not the only test. But Susan was right that the passage’s culminating logic (vv. 32–35) is that the seed’s growth proves it good. So both readings have textual footing.

The biblical counterpart. The New Testament offers both a growth test and a warning against it:

• For: Gamaliel’s counsel (Acts 5:38–39) — if this work is of men it will come to nothing, but if of God it cannot be overthrown; and “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16–20).
• Against, or qualifying: the parable of the wheat and tares (Matthew 13:24–30) — the enemy’s seed grows alongside the good one, to harvest; the mustard seed (Matthew 13:31–32) grows so large that birds lodge in its branches, which some interpreters read as a warning about growth that shelters what it should not; and Jesus’s warning that false prophets will perform great signs (Matthew 24:24), which Thomas cited later.
• The decisive refinement is that Jesus’s test is fruit, not size: “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit” (Matthew 7:17), and Paul defines the fruit of the Spirit by its character — love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (Galatians 5:22–23).

Resolution. Growth is a necessary sign of life but not a sufficient sign of goodness; the character of the fruit is the test. That formulation honors Susan’s objection, Charlie’s point about the Quaker practice (where a leading is tested by its fruits, its consistency with Scripture, and the discernment of the community), and what is best in the Alma passage (enlightenment of understanding and enlargement of soul are qualitative tests, not merely quantitative ones). It also applies directly to the first hour’s debate: the growth of a religion, a movement, or a corporation proves only that it is alive; its fruit — what it does to the people under it and around it — is what shows whether it is good.

10. Armond’s Problem: Where Is the Black and White?

Armond’s contribution — that the group could never reach consensus because each side draws on thousands of years of events, and that the only way forward is to locate the principles (“the black and white”) beneath the gray — is the methodological key to both sessions.

He is right that events cannot settle the debate. Each side can cite atrocities by the other indefinitely; history supplies evidence for every thesis about human wickedness. Only principles can adjudicate between events, because only principles tell us which events count as violations.

His question — can principles be found outside religion? — has a classical Christian answer, and it partly supports him. Paul writes that Gentiles who do not have the law “do by nature the things contained in the law,” showing “the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Romans 2:14–15). This is the basis of the natural-law tradition (Aquinas; the American founders’ “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”). C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man (1943), assembled parallel moral maxims from Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Norse, Hindu, Greek, Roman, and Hebrew sources — the prohibition of murder and theft, duties to parents and children, justice, good faith, mercy — to show that a common moral law is recognized across civilizations. That answers Armond’s question about the person who never hears the Bible: he is not without a standard; he has the law written on the heart, which is dimmer than revelation but real.

Thomas’s “precept and experiment” completes the answer: Scripture states the principle (precept), and experience confirms it (the drunkard’s morning). This is a sound epistemology, and it is also how natural law and revelation relate in classical theology: revelation clarifies and completes what conscience and experience already partly know.

Armond’s New Age concern — that appeal to the Spirit within can become “I am God, and whatever feels good is right” — is answered by the same structure: the inner witness is tested against the outer standard (Scripture) and against its fruit (Section 9). “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 John 4:1).

Thomas’s remark that Michael “has no standard” needs correction in fairness. Michael does have a standard, stated plainly: coexistence, empathy, starting from points of agreement, rejecting killing for belief. It is a procedural standard — how people should treat each other when they disagree — rather than a substantive one about which beliefs are true. Its weakness is that it cannot, by itself, decide between a tradition that accepts coexistence and one that does not; but it is not nothing, and it overlaps substantially with the Christian standard (the prohibition of coercion in matters of faith, love of neighbor). Recognizing that overlap is the natural starting point for the next conversation with Michael, and it is precisely what Michael asked for: begin with what we agree on.

The “divers weights” image is the best single illustration in the session of why a common standard matters. Commerce requires common measures; so does moral argument. The text (Deuteronomy 25:13–16) also carries a moral warning: using a different measure for oneself than for others is itself an abomination. That cuts in every direction — it forbids judging Islam by its worst practitioners while judging Christianity by its best, and equally forbids the reverse. Thomas’s mainstream-practice test (paired file, Sections 2 and 9) is an attempt at a single weight applied to both; its fairness depends on applying it to both with the same care.

11. The Bible and “Christianity”; Mormonism and Islam

Armond’s distinction — the Bible is the standard; “Christianity,” as a set of denominational practices, is the religion — is close to the Protestant principle of sola scriptura (Scripture as the norm that norms all other norms) and to the ancient distinction between the rule of faith and the customs of particular churches. His criterion — denominational variety is acceptable so long as the Bible remains the governing standard; it becomes unacceptable when personal ego displaces the standard — is a workable test.

Thomas then advanced a stronger claim: that Islam and Mormonism are the “false Christs” of Matthew 24:24, founded through genuine encounters with a spirit that was not God’s. This is Thomas’s theological position, and it has a recognizable history — historic Christian critics of both religions have made versions of it, pointing in both cases to a founder receiving new revelation through an angel, a new scripture that revises the biblical account of Jesus, and (in Islam’s case) the denial of Christ’s divinity and crucifixion, or (in Mormonism’s case) a doctrine of God that departs from the historic creeds. Several considerations bear on it:

• Textual. Matthew 24:24 speaks of false christs and prophets arising in connection with the end of the age; whether it refers specifically to these movements, to others, or to a recurring pattern is an interpretive judgment. Paul’s warning against “another gospel,” even if delivered by “an angel from heaven” (Galatians 1:8), is the verse historically cited most often in this connection, and it fits Thomas’s argument more directly.
• Self-understanding. Latter-day Saints regard themselves as Christians restoring the original church, and they accept the Bible as scripture “as far as it is translated correctly” (Articles of Faith 8). Armond’s proposed test — would the church subordinate its other texts to the Bible? — is exactly the point of contention: the LDS answer is that later revelation clarifies earlier, which historic Christianity rejects.
• Relational. Leonard, a member of the fellowship, reads the Book of Mormon (in a modern-English edition associated with a restorationist movement outside the main LDS church) as scripture, and Charlie is a former Latter-day Saint missionary. The fellowship’s practice of candid disagreement among friends is a strength, and it is served best when this kind of judgment is stated directly to those it concerns, as a reasoned position held open to reply.
• Policy. As a matter of law, the distinction Thomas draws must remain theological rather than civil. The United States cannot classify citizens by whether their religion is true; it can only act on conduct and on advocacy of lawbreaking. That is the point on which the next section turns.

12. Renunciation, Taqiyya, and the Limits of an Oath

Thomas’s policy proposal — that immigrants renounce the anti-constitutional elements of Islam and demonstrate sincerity — is the most concrete political claim of both sessions. It deserves the most careful examination.

The premise: Christianity has renounced its past; Islam has not. The Christian half is accurate (see paired file, Section 9). The Islamic half is partly accurate and partly not.

• Evidence supporting Thomas: there is no single Islamic authority that can issue a binding renunciation for all Muslims; classical positions on apostasy and non-Muslims remain in force in the law of many states; reformers have faced death threats, prosecution, and murder (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, 1989, and the 2022 attack on him; the killing of Pakistani governor Salman Taseer in 2011 for opposing blasphemy laws; prosecutions of reformist scholars in several countries). Thomas’s claim that reformers fear speaking out is well documented.
• Evidence qualifying Thomas: there are significant Muslim repudiations. The Amman Message (2004–2005), endorsed by hundreds of scholars from 50 countries, restricted the declaring of other Muslims apostate and the issuing of fatwas by the unqualified. The Open Letter to al-Baghdadi (2014), signed by more than 120 scholars, rejected ISIS’s killing of non-combatants, enslavement, and forced conversion point by point. The Marrakesh Declaration (2016), from hundreds of scholars, affirmed the rights of religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries on the model of the Charter of Medina. Nahdlatul Ulama of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim organization (tens of millions of members), declared in 2019 that non-Muslim fellow citizens should not be called kafir in the civic sphere, and its “Humanitarian Islam” movement explicitly calls for reforming obsolete elements of classical law. These do not amount to the united renunciation Thomas asks for, and critics question their reach; but they show that renunciation is not absent, and they identify the Muslim allies a policy should strengthen rather than alienate.

The taqiyya problem. Taqiyya in its technical sense is primarily a Shia doctrine permitting a believer to conceal his faith under threat of persecution or death, developed during centuries in which Shia were a persecuted minority; Sunni jurists recognize a narrower permission to deny faith under compulsion, based on Quran 16:106 and 3:28. Critics (e.g., Raymond Ibrahim) argue that these permissions, together with hadith permitting deception in war (“war is deception”), amount to a broader license to deceive non-Muslims for strategic advantage; most Muslim scholars and many Western scholars of Islam reject that reading as a distortion of a doctrine of self-protection. The honest assessment: the doctrine exists; its application to peacetime dealings with non-Muslims is contested; and — as the paired file argues (Section 8) — if every assurance is presumed deceptive, no evidence can ever count, which makes the claim unfalsifiable. The practical implication Thomas drew is correct: an oath alone cannot verify sincerity. But that is true of all oaths, for all people; it is why law judges conduct.

What existing law already does. The naturalization oath already requires the applicant to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty” and to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Federal law bars naturalization of anyone who within ten years has advocated the violent overthrow of the government or been a member of a party advocating totalitarian dictatorship (8 U.S.C. §1424), and immigration law bars admission of members of designated terrorist organizations and those who endorse terrorism. The courts give the political branches broad latitude in admission decisions (Kleindienst v. Mandel, 1972; Trump v. Hawaii, 2018, which upheld an entry restriction on several predominantly Muslim countries on national-security grounds while noting it did not on its face target a religion).

Where the proposal meets constitutional limits. A requirement that names Islam and demands renunciation of its doctrines would raise serious questions under the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, and the Religious Test Clause (Art. VI) forbids religious tests for federal office. The constitutionally durable version of Thomas’s proposal is doctrine-neutral and conduct-focused: require every applicant, of every religion, to affirm specific constitutional commitments — equal legal rights for women and religious minorities, the supremacy of civil law over any religious law, the freedom to leave or change religion, the rejection of violence for religious ends — and treat demonstrated advocacy to the contrary as disqualifying. This would capture exactly the elements Thomas identifies as anti-constitutional without classifying people by faith; it would bind Christian nationalists, Islamists, and any other movement equally; and it would publicly declare, as Thomas wants, what the nation stands for. It would also place the burden where Susan’s and Charlie’s concern locates it — on the political program of Islamism — rather than on the faith of Muslims such as those Michael has met.

On the Twelvers. Thomas’s claim requires distinction. Twelver Shia number roughly 150–200 million worldwide. They await the return of the Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi), who they believe went into occultation in the 9th century and will return to establish justice. But the Iranian doctrine of velayat-e faqih (rule of the jurist), which gives a cleric political authority on the Imam’s behalf and underlies the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary foreign policy (its constitution’s preamble and Article 154 speak of supporting the struggles of the oppressed worldwide), is not accepted by all Twelvers. The most senior Twelver authority outside Iran, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Najaf, has long held a quietist position limiting clerical political rule. So the Iranian state’s revolutionary program is a real threat to the constitutional order where it operates, but it is not the doctrine of every Twelver. Here again the durable policy target is the program, not the population.

On “religion of peace” and “colonies.” Bush’s statement was a political and strategic judgment, as the paired file notes; whether it was true depends on which of the questions in paired file Section 1 one asks. On immigration and enclaves: residential concentration is real in several places (Dearborn, Hamtramck, parts of Minneapolis), and immigration from Muslim-majority countries did increase in recent decades. Survey data (Pew 2017) also show that U.S. Muslims, as a population, report high identification with America and substantial integration. Whether particular communities are resisting assimilation is an empirical question best answered community by community.

13. “Jesus All the Way Down” and the Christian Nation

Thomas’s closing position — “we are not trying to accommodate you; we are trying to make you a Christian; it is a Christian nation; we do Jesus here” — and his description of the present situation as war, is the point where the two halves of the meeting meet, and where Michael’s objection returns with the most force.

What the position gets right. A nation cannot be culturally neutral in the sense of having no view of the good; every nation’s laws enact some moral vision, and a nation that is embarrassed to name its own foundations tends to lose them. The American founding was overwhelmingly Christian in the sense that its population, moral assumptions, and vocabulary were Christian, even where its founders’ personal theology varied. The principles that the paired session identified as the West’s self-correcting ones — equal dignity, conscience, consent, the rule of law over rulers — were articulated and defended largely in Christian terms. Thomas’s claim that leaders are afraid to speak in those terms, and that “multiculturalism” is functioning as a substitute civil religion, is a common and serious criticism.

What the position must account for. The distinctively American contribution to Christian political thought was religious liberty, argued from Christian premises by Christians — Roger Williams, the Baptists of Virginia (John Leland), and Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance (1785), which argued that establishing Christianity by law contradicts Christianity itself, since the religion “disavows a dependence on the powers of this world.” Thomas’s own stated method elsewhere — advocacy with reasons, a position taken and held open to a better argument, never imposed — is consistent with that tradition, and “we are trying to make you a Christian” fits it well if it means persuade: that is the Great Commission. It fits poorly if it means require, and that is exactly how Michael heard “Christian nation.” The paired meta-essay’s open question 4 applies directly here: the book will serve its purpose best by defining “Christian nation” in terms that make clear it is sought by conversion and consent, with equal civil protection for those who decline — which is also the only form in which it can serve as the alternative to Islamism rather than its mirror.

On “war.” The language of war is scriptural (Ephesians 6:12, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers”), and Paul immediately specifies the weapons: truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the word of God, prayer. Armond’s instinct — begin in the household, and have leaders who encourage rather than condemn — and Thomas’s own conclusion — speak the truth and accept the cost — both describe that kind of war. A fair statement of Thomas’s position, consistent with all he said, is: the conflict is real and the stakes are civilizational, and it is to be fought by open witness, by law applied equally to conduct, and by the formation of a sanctified people — not by coercion of conscience, which the gospel itself forbids.

14. Media, Omission, and the Individual

Armond and Thomas described the media environment as propaganda by omission. The phenomenon they named is studied under the terms agenda-setting (Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, 1972) and framing: media shape what people think about, and how, by what they cover and omit. Surveys of American trust in mass media (e.g., Gallup) have shown sharp declines over several decades, now to historic lows. The decline of trust has, however, been followed less by a return to a common standard than by fragmentation into partisan media on every side, each practicing its own omissions. That observation supports Armond’s larger point: the problem is not only who controls the channels but the absence of a common standard of truth by which any channel could be judged.

Armond’s decisive move — “not many are willing to look in the mirror and attack it there” — relocated the problem from institutions to persons, and Thomas accepted it: the problem is the individual, and the first territory each person can change is himself and his own local sphere. This is the conscious-point model returning at the end: act locally, faithfully, and the effect propagates.

15. Speaking the Truth: Cost, Love, and Accuracy

Thomas’s charge — speak the truth at every opportunity, accept being canceled, because silence gives consent — has strong support: “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11); Ezekiel’s watchman (Ezekiel 33:6); and the tradition, from the prophets to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (“Live Not by Lies,” 1974), of refusing to participate in falsehood.

Armond’s family story tests the principle at the closest range, and it shows three conditions any such truth-telling must meet:

1. Love. “Speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). Armond insisted he was not judging but loving — “who cares more about my mother than me?” — and that is the right motive. The family’s objection (“you can’t judge Mom and Dad”) shows how often honest concern is heard as judgment; the manner of speaking affects whether truth can be received.
2. Accuracy. Truth-telling is only as good as the truth told. In this case, Armond’s point about smoking is well founded; his point about surgery is more debatable, as the Part One note explains. A truth-teller who is sometimes wrong on facts loses credibility for the times he is right, which is why the book’s standard — precept checked against experiment, claims checked against evidence — must apply to the witness himself.
3. Respect for the other’s agency. Armond said himself, “it’s your life and your decision.” That is Susan’s principle of free will from earlier in the session, applied within a family. The witness speaks; the hearer decides.

Thomas’s triangulation principle is the realistic complement to the call for courage. Most people change their minds not from a single conversation but when they hear the same truth from more than one independent source, often without recognizing who first planted it. Research on persuasion and social influence supports this: repeated exposure from multiple credible sources, especially trusted people in one’s own network, is far more effective than a single argument. The Gospel pattern Thomas cited — John’s message repeated verbatim by Jesus — is the same principle in its original form. It also answers Thomas’s discouragement (“I’ve written millions of words and no one will read them”): the voice in the wilderness does not need to be the voice that persuades; it needs only to be the voice that prepares, so that when the second voice speaks, it is recognized.

16. Resolutions and Open Questions

Resolutions reached, or nearly reached, in the session:

• Communism is incompatible with Christ; capitalism is compatible to the extent that the people in it are formed by Christ (Susan, Leonard, Thomas, Charlie).
• Concentration of commerce has real costs — lost expertise, weakened local economies — and real benefits — opportunity for small producers and diversity of production; mindful choice by buyers is part of the Christian response (Susan, Charlie, Leonard, Thomas).
• The Christian holds property as a steward before God, while owning it rightly before other people; stewardship is taught and modeled, not compelled (Susan, with Thomas).
• Change must be pursued bottom-up and top-down together, and its path cannot be predicted; each person does the part God has given him (Susan and Thomas).
• Growth alone does not prove goodness; fruit is the test (Susan, with Charlie’s qualification).
• Consensus requires a shared standard; events cannot settle what principles must decide (Armond and Thomas).
• Christianity’s past wrongs are best addressed by distinguishing the standard from its failed practitioners and by committing not to repeat them (Armond and Thomas).
• Cultural change begins in the individual and his local sphere, through truth spoken with courage and love (Armond and Thomas).

Open questions for the book and for future sessions:

1. The physics–ethics boundary. How will Transforming America mark clearly which conclusions come from Conscious Point Physics as illustration, and which come from Scripture and moral reasoning as justification? Thomas’s own answer to Isak on ownership is the model.
2. Ownership. Should the Chapter 2 line on ownership be revised to state the two-level view (owned before men, held in trust before God), so that it cannot be read as collectivist?
3. Monopoly. The book names monopoly and cartel as the unexplored tension with Isak. What is the Christian principle for concentrated economic power — is it wrong in itself, wrong only when obtained or maintained by fraud and state privilege, or wrong when it harms the neighbor? Each answer implies a different policy.
4. Finance. What would a lawful “moral gateway” for capital look like — Christian investment funds, cooperative lending, published ethical criteria applied to all — given that religion-based credit discrimination is prohibited?
5. Ideomotion. Can the art-and-customization model be combined with standardized engineering through a fixed core and selectable finishes, within proper device compliance?
6. The common standard. Can the fellowship articulate, as Armond proposed, a short list of principles — drawn from Scripture and recognizable by conscience across traditions — against which the Islam question, the capitalism question, and Christianity’s own history can all be measured with the same weights?
7. Renunciation. Would Thomas accept a doctrine-neutral, conduct-based version of his naturalization proposal, applied equally to every applicant, as a fulfillment of its purpose? What evidence of sincerity beyond an oath could be required of anyone?
8. “Christian nation.” How will the book define it so that it is unmistakably pursued by persuasion and consent, with equal civil protection for dissenters — and thus clearly distinguished from the imposition of religious law it opposes?
9. Witness. How does a person speak the truth at every opportunity while remaining accurate, loving, and respectful of others’ decisions — and what should the fellowship practice with one another, and with Michael, to model it?