Eight Strongholds: A Christos Civitas Reading of the “Ingredients” Joan Swirsky Inventoried
Fellowship Discussion Essay | April 30, 2026 | Revised May 1, 2026
Ingredients That Make Up Our Body Politic – News With Views
Occasion: A column by Joan Swirsky published at NewsWithViews uses a Food Network metaphor as scaffolding for an inventory of eight characteristics she attributes to Democrats as a class — consistent negativity, dependence on big government, behaving like infants/children, anger on parade, jealousy, victims R us, conceit, intolerance. The column is sharp, polemical, and aimed at producing the reader’s confidence that the November 2026 midterms will properly dispose of all the Democrat bums. I want to engage the column not because Joan and I disagree about most of the substantive concerns she names — we do not — because the eight items Joan inventoried turn out, on closer inspection, to be a remarkably accurate catalog of demonic strongholds once they are understood for what they are. This essay re-purposes Joan’s inventory toward what it actually catalogs and develops the asymmetry between the strongholds that capture progressives and the failures of execution that afflict conservatives.
The philosophical position governing this essay: Both the progressive and the conservative are subject to unholy spirits, but the spirits are not the same and the spiritual conditions they produce are not symmetric. The Democratic Party, as an institutionalized movement, has across multiple decades and through deliberate policy and rhetorical strategy cultivated spirits that operate in active rebellion against God’s order — the strongholds Joan named. The orientation of that movement is toward false gods. The conservative movement, by contrast, is in its mainstream form oriented correctly toward the right God; its failures, when they appear, are failures of execution within a fundamentally correct orientation rather than failures of orientation itself. The conservative does not need to repent of his confession that the unborn child is a person, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that Christ is Lord, that the constitutional ordering protects what Scripture commands the state to protect. He needs, in many cases, to repent of his lukewarmness in defending what he confesses, of his niceness-as-cowardice in the face of cultural attack, of his expectation that elected leaders will deliver the cultural restoration that only personal-family-community spiritual transformation can deliver, of his hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage that consume his energy without channeling it into righteous action. The vehicle is different, but both spirits are unholy. The corrective is not the same in both cases, and the framework that pretends otherwise has flattened a real distinction. This essay names the asymmetry honestly. The framework operates at three levels — spiritual (the principalities and powers themselves), individual (the human persons captured), and institutional (the organizations that function as vehicles) — and at each level, the asymmetry is preserved.
Context: This is the second essay to work from the four-component Christos Civitas Code framework rather than developing it, following the Leaman political-violence engagement. The asymmetric-orientation principle developed here is itself a substantive framework correction that will need to be integrated into the Christos Civitas Code book in a future revision. The framework correction is documented in the paired meta-document and in templates/RM_organizational_open_questions.md as theological clarification T3.
To the Fellowship —
Joan Swirsky has done us a small favor. I do not think she meant to, but the substantive accuracy of what she observed is greater than the rhetorical use she put it to, and the inventory she catalogued — once relocated to its proper level — turns out to be a useful theological resource. Joan named eight characteristic traits she sees in the contemporary political moment. She labeled them Democrat ingredients. They are something more specific than that. They are demonic strongholds, eight of them, each with its own operating signature, each with a distinct relationship to the parties of the contemporary political moment. Some of them have been deliberately cultivated by the Democratic Party as electoral strategy and now function as core organizing principles of progressive political life. Others have come, in milder or different form, to afflict conservatives also — but the conservative affliction is not, in most cases, the same captivity. It is a failure of execution against the right adversary, often arising from lukewarmness, fear, or the substitution of niceness for the boldness the moment requires. The framework names both honestly. It does not pretend they are the same.
Paul named the situation precisely. We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12). The wrestling is not with our progressive neighbors. The wrestling is not with our family members who voted differently. The wrestling is with what has captured them. The captured are not the enemy. The spirits that captured them are. And this we must say plainly: the contemporary church in the West has, in large measure, forgotten that we are at war. We have laid down our weapons. We have made truce with the enemy. We have substituted devotion-with-attendance for devotion-with-fire. We have called our cowardice “love” and our silence “tolerance.” We are, as the Fire at the Center essay named it, a Laodicean church — neither cold nor hot — and the fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, far exceeds the fire we have for the One we say we worship. This is the cardinal sin of the Western church, and it shapes how the eight strongholds operate through us.
So let us walk through Joan’s inventory. Each stronghold named, with its biblical resonance, its operating signature, the captivity it produces in its primary form, the conservative failure of execution that allows it to advance, the institutional vehicles, and the discipline of resistance. The framework is not partisan. It is principled. But principled does not mean symmetric, and the same eyes that see the captivity in our progressive neighbors must see the different failure in ourselves with equal honesty.
A pastoral note before we begin. The eight strongholds are not just abstract spiritual categories. They are the actual operating modes by which actual human beings — our daughter, our brother-in-law, our college roommate, our former pastor — are being held. When I name a stronghold and describe its operating signature, I am describing what is currently happening inside someone we love. The naming is not contempt. It is diagnosis, in the medical sense, in service of rescue. Speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ (Ephesians 4:15). The truth-telling is the love. The pastoral target of this essay is therefore not Joan’s audience of fellow conservatives but God-in-the-captured-neighbors who are reading this and need correction delivered as God would want it delivered. Humor is allowed where humor is appropriate; the humor is directed at the spirits, not at the captured.
Stronghold I — Negativity
Joan’s first item is consistent negativity: she describes a settled posture in which the sky is always falling, the glass is always half empty, and the worst is always right around the corner.
This is the spirit of perpetual lament, and it has biblical names. Murmuring and complaining are how the apostles named it in their Greek (gongusmos, the murmuring of the children of Israel in the wilderness; me gogguzete, do not murmur, in 1 Corinthians 10:10). It is the captivity that produces in human beings an inability to see the good in what God has given. Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things (Philippians 4:8). The spirit of negativity is the spirit that systematically refuses Philippians 4:8 — that finds, in every situation, the angle from which the situation looks dark, and absorbs the human being into a permanent posture of grievance.
The captivity captures human beings on every side. The progressive captive of negativity sees the United States as fundamentally a story of injustice and oppression, with whatever progress has been made overwhelmed by the structures that remain. The conservative captive of negativity sees America as already lost, the culture beyond saving, every passing day producing more evidence that the country is past the point of recovery. Both are captured by the same spirit. The signature is the same: an organizing posture of the worst is right around the corner, an inability to receive any good news without immediate qualification, a settled assumption that the universe is bent against what we love.
The institutional vehicles for this stronghold are real. Cable news on every side has built a business model on activating it. The progressive captives are reliably nourished by one set of channels; the conservative captives by another. The Democratic Party has, in its rhetorical strategy, made systematic appeals to the negativity-captured progressive — the country is in a state of crisis, fascism is at the door, the planet is dying, all is lost without our urgent action. The Republican Party has, in its rhetorical strategy, made systematic appeals to the negativity-captured conservative — the culture is collapsing, the institutions are gone, all is lost without our urgent action. Both parties are mobilizing the stronghold’s captives. Both parties are reliable vehicles for this spirit. The believer who recognizes the stronghold sees the operation on both sides simultaneously, refuses to be activated by either, and grieves over the captured on both sides.
The discipline of resistance: Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice (Philippians 4:4). Not the cheap optimism that pretends nothing is wrong, but the rooted joy that knows what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do — and refuses to be displaced from that knowledge by the political climate of any given week.
Stronghold II — Dependence as captivity to a parental state
Joan’s second item is dependence on big government: she frames the captives as needy and scared children, at a loss to function adequately in the adult world.
This is the spirit of infantile passivity dressed up as compassion, and it captures human beings by offering them a substitute for the actual work of forming their souls into mature image-bearers of God. The biblical resonance is the murmuring of Israel in the wilderness, wishing for the fleshpots of Egypt (Exodus 16:3) — preferring the security of slavery to the responsibility of freedom. Egypt provided. The wilderness required. The captives chose the providing.
The stronghold operates by persuading the human being that someone else is responsible for what the human being is responsible for. Someone else can be the state, an ideology, a charismatic leader, a tribal affiliation, or a parental figure who refuses to let the adult emerge. The mechanism is the same. The captive surrenders the burden of his own moral, economic, intellectual, and spiritual formation to an external agent who agrees to carry it on his behalf, and in exchange surrenders the freedom and dignity that come with bearing the burden himself.
The progressive form of captivity is most visible in Joan’s framing — the citizen who looks to the state for cradle-to-grave provision, who experiences the suggestion that he might be responsible for himself as a form of cruelty. The conservative form is real but less acknowledged. The conservative captive of this stronghold looks to a principled political leader and a party majority in the legislature to fix the big problems of the state, the economy, the environment, education, foreign relations, etc. Desiring and working to elect moral leadership to set the moral/legal framework at the macro level of the state, nation, and nations is a correct impulse. But without a moral/spiritual transformation of the populace at the personal and interpersonal levels, the legislative work of a moral majority of legislators will be inadequate to take and hold Godly societal programming. The conservative must be the agent of moral witness by example and leadership/enrollment of his own family and community in righteousness and the defense of the Faith. The work of government in setting the tone of the culture is important, but we cannot wait for elected leadership or our political tribe to do the full job of delivering cultural restoration. We must be the salt and light in our world, which gives a witness to the transforming power of the Gospel by our words, actions, and the way we love God, self, and neighbors. Podcasts and talk shows can be educational, offering perspectives outside our insular and mundane world, but we must resist the hopelessness, anger, and fear that should mobilize us to action rather than paralyze us. The conspiracies, cancellations, and improper influence (money, sex, and power) may be real, fabricated, or distorted, but independent validation of their truth is usually not possible. Retaining hope and doing the work of personal witness is where we all must live and can make a difference. We can rightfully criticize Democrats who are captive to the listed principalities and powers, but if we allow ourselves to be dragged into hopelessness, chronic anger, or fear, then we have become captives of another spirit. We are both subject to the temptation and being captured by unholy spirits. The vehicle is different, but both spirits are unholy.
The Democratic Party has, in its policy and rhetorical posture across multiple decades, systematically activated this stronghold among its electoral base. This is empirically observable in the platform documents and the rhetorical strategies; it is not a partisan caricature. We will take care of you is a recurring frame in Democratic mobilization, directed precisely at the demographic the stronghold has captured. To the extent this is the party’s de facto strategy — and, across multiple cycles, it has been — the party is functioning as a vehicle for this spirit, organizing the captives, mobilizing them, and rewarding their captivity with policy outcomes that deepen it. This is the institutional accountability the framework requires us to name. The Republican Party has its own institutional patterns that reward the conservative form of the same stronghold — the expectation that moral leaders will save us, that top-down government will legislate, execute, and judge our way back to moral uprightness as a nation. To expect righteous leaders to arise from a morally corrupt nation, with the media-education indoctrination in worldly/Godless values, becomes ever more unlikely as the culture manifests the values being trained into our youths, and modeled by their elders. The question is what is the appropriate response to the latest perversion of science, legislation of immorality, the silencing of critics by deplatforming, or worse, the control of industry by lobbyists, or the judicial overreach that prevents justice, etc.? Hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage is its own principality and power to resist.
The discipline of resistance: the recovery of mature personhood under God. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God (Galatians 2:20). The believer is not infantilized; he has been made son, capable of bearing the responsibilities sonship requires. The political agent is not the believer’s father. The party is not the believer’s family. The state is not the believer’s provider. The believer is to grow up into Christ.
Stronghold III — Infantilization
Joan’s third item is behaving like infants and children: she points to frequent temper tantrums, public obscenities, and the substitution of theatrical emotion for adult discourse.
This is the same spirit as Stronghold II viewed from a different angle. Where Stronghold II is the structural surrender of adult responsibility, Stronghold III is the behavioral expression of the surrender — the public performance of immaturity as a permanent personality state. The two are interlocking; Stronghold II produces Stronghold III, and Stronghold III ratifies Stronghold II.
The biblical witness on what mature adulthood looks like is consistent. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things (1 Corinthians 13:11). That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine (Ephesians 4:14). The believer is to grow up. The captivity to perpetual childishness — the inability to disagree without screaming, the inability to lose without melting down, the substitution of emotional intensity for argument, the public performance of feeling as a substitute for the work of thinking — is a stronghold. It is my opinion that the Democratic Party has planted the seeds, nurtured the growth, and facilitated the expression of this stronghold.
The conservative form deserves direct naming, because Joan’s column treats this as something only the political opposition does. The conservative-captive form of Stronghold III holds that good government policy will solve the underlying social problems. Yes, it will help, and is necessary, but the body politic has turned the task of teaching values over to secular public schools and attended churches which do not strongly organize its congregants toward manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.
The church should teach the Biblical patterns of character, application of Biblical metaphor to contemporary issues, and the connection between theological principle (salvation, repentance, holiness…) and daily personal expression. I contend that the lessons of the modern church are typically sufficiently far separated from the topics of life interactions during the week, that there is little actual training in wisdom that makes a difference in the culture.
As adults, many of us never fully mature into adults, elders, leaders in our families, businesses, and community. Many do not take daily stands that risk security and community approval in their microcosm of influence that are necessary to spread to the society writ large, to make the fundamental changes in the common knowledge/law/ethics of that guides the self-discipline and interpersonal relationship guided by the standards of Godliness within individuals, between individuals, the dynamics of small groups, and the meta standard the becomes the spirit of Godliness that shapes population/societies/nations and the governmental organizations that codify, judge, and enforce that code.
As natural law conservatives and believers, we are polite in our discourse; we don’t teach our children to boldly speak the truth with love about issues of sexuality, government dependency, and the threat of implementing socialism. We fear the retaliation of the jihadist and speak in the coded language of tolerance of diversity and embracing equality to the point of allowing hostile ideologies to establish enclaves of Sharia and other forms of hostile philosophy and government to exist as parallel governmental structures and societies. We are setting ourselves up for eventual hot conflict or being subsumed by another governmental form that will not honor tolerance that has been used as a weapon against our Judeo-Christian moral foundation. In other words, we have been infantilized, taught to be silent and nice children in the face of our politically correct/woke cultural masters. These are conservative failings; they are not the exact mirror image of the progressive failings Joan inventoried, but they are the stronghold’s operations through a different cultural channel.
Institutional vehicles operate on both sides, but their motives, means, and ends are different. Progressive activist groups have made tantrum-as-political-tactic a core organizing strategy across multiple decades. There is a strain of Conservative entertainment media that has made outrage a hook for engagement, but this is not the primary expression of conservative failing; it is passivity, hopelessness, disorganization, internecine squabbles/doctrinal purity fights in the presence of massive Right-Left distinctions, and submission to the creeping Leftward incrementalism of legislative advance.
To an extent, both parties reinforce this stronghold among their captives because it works. But outrage at evil is appropriate. The challenge is to keep it under control. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath (Ephesians 4:26). The challenge of maturity is to express the appropriate emotion and then return to equanimity and faith to be able to perform well in life. By contrast, the Democratic Party has purposefully endorsed emotional intensity, performed grievance, and theatrical childishness to generate engagement, donations, and electoral mobilization. The institutions reward what the stronghold produces, and so the stronghold deepens its grip.
To the extent that talk show hosts use this as a tactic, it is inappropriate; to the extent that it is righteous anger against evil, it is justified, and the challenge is then how to frame righteous anger. This is what institutional accountability looks like in practice. Those who activate and enroll righteous anger must direct their audience toward an effective outlet, a constructive direction to discharge those emotions in action. The institutions did not invent the stronghold, but to the extent they are building financial and organizational structures that reliably activate it, without directing righteous action, and use its activation across cycles, they are functional vehicles for it.
The discipline of resistance: Be not children in understanding: howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men (1 Corinthians 14:20). Childlike in trust toward God, in absence of malice toward neighbor, in receptivity to the truth. Adults in capacity to disagree without melting down, to lose without a tantrum, to engage difficult questions with sustained patience rather than emotional theater.
Stronghold IV — Anger as identity, and the failure to channel righteous anger
Joan’s fourth item is anger on parade: she observes that the captives in question seem perpetually angry or aggrieved about something, with the anger never resolving but instead reconstituting itself around new objects as old ones are addressed.
The progressive form of this stronghold is the spirit of perpetual grievance as identity. The captive does not have anger; the anger has the captive. The anger is no longer a response to a specific injustice that, once addressed, would dissolve; it is the captive’s defining characteristic, the lens through which every situation is processed, the channel through which every emotion is filtered. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath (Ephesians 4:26). Paul allows anger; he limits its duration. The captive of progressive grievance-identity has violated the duration limit by orders of magnitude — the sun has gone down on the same wrath for a decade, and the wrath is no longer wrath about something but the captive’s permanent resting state. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath: fret not thyself in any wise to do evil (Psalm 37:8). Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice (Ephesians 4:31). The progressive captive is in active disobedience to these commands. The captivity is real, and Joan is right to name it.
But here the asymmetry must be insisted upon, because the conservative posture toward the cultural moment is not, in its mainstream form, the mirror image of progressive grievance-identity. It is something different.
The conservative who looks at the cultural revolution of the last two decades — at the redefinition of fundamental categories of human existence, at the legalized killing of unborn children at scale, at the ideological capture of educational and corporate and governmental institutions, at the open hostility to orthodox Christianity that has emerged in domains where Christianity was once the assumed framework, at the genocidal-violence question regarding Hamas and Hezbollah and the global resurgence of political Islam — and feels anger in response is not, in feeling that anger, captured by the spirit of perpetual grievance. He is feeling righteous anger at real evil. The anger is appropriate to the object. The biblical witness commands it. Ye that love the Lord, hate evil (Psalm 97:10). Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good (Romans 12:9). Through thy precepts I get understanding: therefore I hate every false way (Psalm 119:104). The believer who feels nothing about what is being done in the cultural moment has not understood the cultural moment. The anger is required.
The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold lies elsewhere — at the level of what is done with the anger. Three failure modes are common, and each is its own captivity that conservatives must repent of even as they hold the underlying anger in its proper place.
The first failure mode is anger that becomes identity rather than response. A conservative who has so fully identified himself with grievance against the cultural revolution that he can no longer rest in the peace of God — who cannot watch the news without spiking blood pressure, who carries the day’s outrage into the night, who lets the sun go down on his wrath day after day until the wrath has become his permanent resting state — has fallen into the same captivity Paul forbade in Ephesians 4:26. The anger is not wrong in its origin; the failure is in its duration and its replacement of the believer’s God-given peace as resting state. The discipline is to express the appropriate emotion at the time appropriate, and then to return to equanimity, faith, and the rooted peace that allows the believer to perform well in the work to which he has been called. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:7).
The second failure mode is anger without action. The conservative who consumes outrage media for hours every day, who knows the latest atrocity before breakfast and the latest cultural-revolution overreach before dinner, but who does not act on the anger — does not vote, does not engage neighbors, does not raise children to speak boldly, does not build alternative institutions, does not pursue holiness in his own life, does not pray fervently, does not give sacrificially to the work of the kingdom — has converted righteous anger into spiritual entertainment. The anger has become a substitute for the action the anger was meant to mobilize. This is the wood-cricket condition the Suicidal Sympathy essay named: parasitized to the point of ineffectiveness, watching the cliff approach while consuming commentary about the cliff.
The third failure mode is anger that hardens into hopelessness. The conservative who has watched the institutions captured one by one, who has seen the cultural ground he stood on dissolve under his feet, who has reached the conclusion that the country is lost, the church is lost, the West is lost, and there is nothing to be done has fallen into a captivity that wears the costume of clear-eyed realism but is in fact despair. Hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage is its own principality and power to resist. The biblical witness on this is consistent. Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world (John 16:33). We are more than conquerors through him that loved us (Romans 8:37). If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31). The believer who has surrendered to despair has, in effect, denied that the God he confesses is God. The captivity is in the surrender, not in the sober assessment of the cultural situation.
The institutional vehicles for these three failure modes are familiar. Algorithmic social media has been engineered to maximize engagement, and engagement is maximized by activating outrage in users on every side. Conservative talk radio and online commentary have, in many quarters, built business models on sustaining viewers in the first failure mode (anger as identity) and the second (anger without action) — keeping the audience in a perpetual state of grievance-consumption that monetizes the captive’s permanent rage without ever directing it toward action, righteous formation, or the bold witness the moment requires. To the extent that conservative institutions activate righteous anger without channeling it into righteous action, they are functioning as vehicles for the failure modes even when their substantive analysis of the cultural moment is largely correct. Those who activate and enroll righteous anger must give their audience a proper outlet, a constructive direction to discharge those emotions in action. The institutional accountability is real.
But the asymmetry stands. The progressive captive of perpetual grievance-as-identity is angry about things that are largely not what he says they are — his anger is sustained by ideological frames that name oppressors who are not oppressors and victims who are not victims, by a victim-oppressor mythology that does not track real moral structure. The conservative captive of any of the three failure modes is angry about things that are largely what they are — the cultural revolution is real, the moral collapse is real, the threats to Christian witness are real. The conditions are not equivalent. The progressive captive needs reorientation: the world is not actually structured the way your anger assumes it is; the gospel offers a different and truer account of what is wrong with the world and what is being done about it. The conservative captive needs corrective action: the world is in fact structured the way your anger assumes; what you have not been doing is acting on what you see, channeling the anger into righteous engagement, holding peace as your resting state alongside the focused outrage at evil, and refusing to surrender to despair. Different correctives. Different conditions. Both need correction. Neither is simply a mirror of the other.
The discipline of resistance, for the believer in either condition: rage is allowed at the moment, in response to the specific injustice, oriented toward addressing the specific injustice through righteous action. Permanent grievance-as-identity is to be put down. The believer’s resting state is the rooted peace of Philippians 4:7 — the peace of God, which passeth all understanding — alongside the focused, time-limited, action-channeled righteous anger that the moment requires. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Both halves of the verse must be operative.
Stronghold V — Jealousy, envy, and the conservative grief over real cultural loss
Joan’s fifth item names jealousy as one of humanity’s strongest emotions — second only to fear in her ranking — and locates its operation behind cancel-culture mechanisms and behind the disproportionate hostility toward Israel that some quarters of progressive politics display. The cancel-culture mechanism is, on her reading, envy operationalized at scale.
This is the spirit of envy, and the apostolic deposit treats it with unusual seriousness. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work (James 3:16). The works of the flesh are manifest, which are these … hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders (Galatians 5:19–21). Envy is named in the same list as murder. The proximity is not rhetorical excess; envy is the operating spirit behind much of what the apostles called the works of the flesh.
Joan has located envy’s operation correctly in its primary contemporary form. The progressive cancel-culture mechanism is, on inspection, an envy-driven operation — the captive cannot tolerate the cultural recognition or institutional standing of those whose views he opposes, and constructs social mechanisms to destroy what he cannot have or be. The disproportionate progressive hostility toward Israel includes envy as a real component, alongside other ingredients (absorbed antisemitism, ideological captivity to anti-colonial frames misapplied to the Jewish state, and a network of disinformation operations that have shaped progressive academic and activist discourse for decades). The progressive captive of envy has built his political identity around the destruction of those he envies, and the apostolic deposit’s verdict on this captivity is severe.
But the asymmetry must be insisted upon here also. What conservatives experience when they observe the cultural-elite consensus, the dominance of progressive frameworks in educational institutions, the corporate enforcement of progressive cultural orthodoxy, the legal and journalistic protection of the progressive consensus against orthodox dissent — what conservatives experience is not, in its primary form, envy. It is grief over real cultural loss. The cultural goods that conservatives once shared in have been, in many domains, deliberately taken from them by hostile cultural action, and the conservative’s response to that taking is grief, lament, and the proper desire to recover what has been lost. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion (Psalm 137:1). The Israelites in exile were not envious of Babylon; they were grieving over Zion. This is the conservative posture toward the cultural moment in its proper form.
Grief over real loss can curdle into envy if it is mishandled. The conservative who has been carrying his grief over the cultural moment for so long that he has become bitter, who has come to resent the cultural elite as a class rather than to grieve over what has been done, who has begun to relish their hypothetical fall rather than to pray for their genuine repentance, has allowed his grief to be turned into envy by the spirit that is always working to do exactly that turning. The discipline is to keep the grief properly directed — toward the cultural goods that have been lost, toward the captured neighbors who have lost them along with us, toward God who alone can restore — rather than allowing it to curdle into resentment of the persons who currently occupy positions of cultural influence.
The biblical antidote is charity envieth not (1 Corinthians 13:4) — and rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep (Romans 12:15). Both halves are required. The believer who can rejoice in genuine goods even when those goods are currently being received by people whose cultural project he opposes — who can recognize a beautiful piece of progressive art as beautiful, a true progressive observation as true, a humane progressive instinct as humane — is the believer who has begun to be free of envy. The believer who cannot grant any progressive achievement any value because the progressive has achieved it has fallen into envy. The diagnostic is whether goods can be received as goods regardless of who is currently holding them.
The discipline of resistance is therefore double. For the progressive captive of envy: turn from the destruction of those you envy, repent, and learn to receive God’s gifts to others as gifts rather than as wounds. For the conservative whose grief has begun to curdle: keep the grief properly directed at what has been lost rather than at those who currently hold cultural ground, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you (Matthew 5:44).
Stronghold VI — Victim-identification, and the conservative experience of real grievance
Joan’s sixth item is victims R us: she frames the progressive worldview as one in which the world is divided into helpless victims and cruel victimizers, with conservatives cast in the victimizer role and Democrats positioned as the compassionate saviors who alone can address the injustice.
The progressive form of this stronghold is the spirit of self-identification with victimhood as primary identity, organized around victim-categories that the captive’s culture has named as the basis for political organization. The stronghold captures by offering the captive a narrative role — the wronged-one, the marginalized-one, the oppressed-one — that becomes the organizing frame of his life. The frame is not negotiable; the captive cannot consider whether he is in fact a victim of what he claims to be a victim of, because the question itself is experienced as further victimization.
The biblical witness on the believer’s identity is the opposite. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1). Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ (Galatians 4:7). The believer’s primary identity is sonship. Whatever he has suffered — and the believer has suffered — the suffering is not his identity. The suffering is something he has gone through. Sonship is who he is.
Joan’s locating of victim-identification on the progressive side is empirically defensible — and the asymmetry here matters. The Democratic Party’s electoral coalition has, across multiple decades, been organized substantially around victim-category identification, and the rhetorical mobilization of those categories is a core feature of Democratic political strategy. Crucially, the progressive victim-narratives are largely false in their underlying premises. The categories of victim/oppressor that contemporary progressivism deploys often do not track real moral structure. Real injustices are recognized in the same breath as fictional ones; the framework’s claim to be addressing oppression is undermined by its inability to distinguish actual oppression from imagined grievance, actual victims from manufactured ones. The captivity here is not just a posture toward real wrongs; it is a posture toward a world that does not exist as the framework describes it, and the captive lives inside the description rather than inside the world.
The conservative experience of grievance is structurally different. The conservative who feels that cultural elites are arrayed against him, that mainstream media misrepresents him, that the academy excludes him, that woke corporate America discriminates against him, that the deep state has been weaponized against him — is responding to grievances that have substantial truth-content. The cultural elites are arrayed against orthodox Christian conviction in ways that were not true thirty years ago. The mainstream media does systematically misrepresent conservative positions. The academy has been ideologically captured to the point that orthodox views cannot be safely held in many disciplines. Woke corporate America does discriminate against employees who dissent from progressive cultural orthodoxy. The deep state has been weaponized against political opponents in documented ways. The grievances are real, and the conservative who refuses to acknowledge that they are real is not faithful — he is captured by the wood-cricket Christianity that cannot see what is plainly before its eyes.
The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is therefore not the recognition of the grievances. The grievances are recognized rightly. The failure is in what is done with the recognition. Three failure modes are common.
The first failure is the captive’s organization of his identity around being-the-wronged-one. When the believer’s settled posture is they are doing things to me, when his primary self-knowledge is I am the one being acted upon, the captivity is real even though the underlying grievances may also be real. The recovery of sonship as primary identity is the corrective. The son is not a victim. The son is loved, equipped, and sent. Wrongs done to the son are addressed, not absorbed into the soul as identity.
The second failure is the substitution of grievance-recitation for action. The conservative who can articulate every cultural wrong with great precision but who has not built a single institution, has not raised a single child to speak boldly, has not organized a single neighbor for civic action, has not given sacrificially to a single restoration project, has converted the recognition of real wrongs into a permanent posture of complaint. The grievances are real. The complaint about them is not the response the moment requires.
The third failure is the misdirection of resentment from the spirits to the captured persons. The conservative who has come to resent his progressive neighbors as a class because the cultural revolution has captured them, who has begun to relate to them as enemies rather than as captives, has fallen into the same captivity Component Two of the Christos Civitas Code forbids: collapsing the distinction between the spirits that capture and the human beings captured. The grievances are real, and they are real against the spirits. The captured progressive neighbor is not the enemy. He is the field on which the enemy operates. The conservative who has lost this distinction has, in effect, mirrored the progressive victim-narrative in the direction the progressive narrative has been pointing him: they are doing things to me, therefore they are the enemy. This is a real captivity that conservatives must repent of, even while continuing to recognize the real grievances that the framework names rightly.
The discipline of resistance, for the believer in any of these conditions: the recovery of sonship as primary identity. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son. The son addresses the wrongs done to him through the means available to a son in his Father’s house — prayer, righteous action, building, witnessing, raising children, organizing community, voting, advocacy. He does not absorb the wrongs into his soul as identity. He does not substitute complaint for action. He does not extend his proper resistance to the spirits onto the human beings the spirits have captured. The grievances are real; the response is sonship.
Stronghold VII — Conceit, and the conservative failure of love alongside truth
Joan’s seventh item is conceit: she names the settled assumption among progressives that they are morally and intellectually superior to those they regard as cruel or unenlightened.
The progressive form of this stronghold is real, and Joan has named it accurately. It is the credentialed sneer that has become a recognizable feature of progressive cultural production: the assumption that the right to lecture the surrounding country about its moral failings comes by virtue of education, social positioning, and cultural placement, regardless of whether the lecture is grounded in actual wisdom or actual care for the country being lectured. The progressive captive of conceit positions himself as morally and intellectually superior on the basis of his cultural-tribe identification — I hold the views of the credentialed elite, therefore I am right, therefore those who disagree are stupid or evil — and the operative claim is grounded not in actual moral truth but in social positioning.
The biblical witness on conceit is consistent and severe. Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18). Be of the same mind one toward another. Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits (Romans 12:16). God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble (James 4:6). The progressive captive of conceit is, by scriptural testimony, in active resistance from God. The position the captive occupies — above his neighbors by virtue of his cultural-tribe identification — is precisely the position God has reserved as His judicial response to the proud.
But here the asymmetry is at its sharpest, and the framework as I previously articulated it has done damage that requires correction. The conservative confidence in being right about the personhood of the unborn, the created order of marriage, the lordship of Christ, the apostolic deposit’s authority, the moral seriousness of work and family and constitutional ordering — is not the conservative form of progressive conceit. It is not the same kind of move. The progressive conceit Joan named is a false claim of superiority grounded in cultural-tribe identification, in which the captive claims to be right because he holds the views of the credentialed elite. Conservative confidence in the apostolic deposit’s teachings is grounded in actual revealed truth and in natural-law reasoning that has been tested across millennia — not in cultural-tribe identification, not in social positioning, not in elite credentialing. The conservative is not claiming to be morally and intellectually superior because he is conservative; he is claiming that what is true is true, and that he confesses what is true.
The two postures have entirely different underlying structures. The progressive conceit collapses if its cultural-tribe positioning is removed; without the credentialing, the claim has no warrant. The conservative confession does not depend on cultural-tribe positioning at all; it depends on the apostolic deposit, on the historic creedal tradition, on natural-law reasoning, on the witness of scripture and the witness of conscience. The conservative who confidently confesses what scripture teaches is not in the same spiritual position as the progressive who claims superiority based on which views are currently held by the credentialed elite. To call the two postures mirror images, as my original draft did, was to flatten a real distinction that the framework cannot afford to flatten.
The conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is at a different level entirely. It is not that conservatives wrongly think they are right when in fact the question is open. It is that conservatives sometimes hold the rightness without the love that should accompany it. They speak the truth without speaking it in love. They confess the apostolic deposit accurately and engage the captured progressive contemptuously. They have the right confession and the wrong tone. Speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ (Ephesians 4:15). Both halves are required. The conservative who confesses the truth without the love has done half the work, and the half he has done is corrupted by the half he has not done. This is a real failure mode and conservatives must repent of it.
But this is also the place where the contemporary church must repent of the opposite failure — and this is where the asymmetry of the two failures must be honestly named. For every conservative who has spoken the truth without love, there are ten conservatives who have spoken neither — who have, out of fear of being called proud or contemptuous, declined to speak the truth at all. Who have privatized their convictions. Who have decided that the cost of confessing what the apostolic deposit teaches is too high in mixed company. Who have substituted niceness for boldness and called the substitution love. Our supreme virtue has become not offending anyone. We call this ‘love,’ but it is cowardice dressed in religious language. This is the wood-cricket church the Suicidal Sympathy essay named, and it is the cardinal failure of contemporary Western Christianity. The conservative does not, in mainstream form, fail by being too confident he is right. He fails by being too cowardly to say what he believes is right. The proper corrective is not less confidence. It is the confidence held in love and spoken aloud — boldly, kindly, persistently, without shame, in the same breath as the love that animates it.
The discipline of resistance is therefore double. For the progressive captive of conceit: humility, the recognition that the cultural-tribe positioning that grounds the conceit is not actual moral warrant, repentance of the contempt for fellow image-bearers that the conceit has produced. For the conservative whose confidence has slid into contempt: repentance of the contempt while preserving the confidence in revealed truth. For the much larger group of conservatives whose confidence has slid into silence and niceness: recovery of the boldness the apostolic posture requires, speaking the truth in love with both halves operative — truth boldly confessed, love fiercely active — and never losing either to keep the other.
Stronghold VIII — Intolerance, and the conservative failure of overtolerance
Joan’s eighth item is intolerance: she identifies the cancel-culture phenomenon as the operating expression of a settled refusal to host disfavored views in the public square, with the concomitant working to remove their carriers from positions of cultural influence.
The progressive form of this stronghold is real, and Joan is right to name it. The cancel-culture phenomenon, the deplatforming campaigns, the corporate diversity-and-inclusion regimes that punish dissent from progressive cultural orthodoxy, the academic disciplines that have made the holding of orthodox Christian views professionally suicidal in many fields, the journalistic conventions that have made caricature of conservative positions standard practice — these are all real institutional expressions of the spirit of intolerance that has captured substantial portions of contemporary progressive cultural production. The captive of progressive intolerance has decided that disfavored views are themselves a kind of social violence requiring suppression, and that the proper response to disagreement is not engagement but elimination.
The biblical witness against this captivity is plain. Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not (Romans 12:14). Recompense to no man evil for evil (Romans 12:17). Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). The Christian response to being canceled is not to cancel back; the Christian response to being maligned is to bless. This is not pacifism in the political sense — the believer can resist unjust legal or institutional regimes through every legitimate means, can defend himself in court, can build alternative institutions where the existing institutions have been captured. What he cannot do is return cancel for cancel, because that is to be conformed to the very stronghold that has captured his opponent.
But again the asymmetry must be insisted upon, and here it is at its most consequential.
Progressive cancel culture and conservative resistance to ideological capture are not mirror operations. They have entirely different structural logics, and treating them as equivalent is a category error that the framework cannot afford to make. Progressive cancel culture seeks to silence orthodox views — to remove them from public discourse, to make them professionally costly to hold, to treat their expression as itself a form of harm. Conservative resistance to ideological capture seeks the opposite: to restore the conditions under which orthodox views can be heard, to defend the public square as a space where disfavored views can be expressed without professional or social annihilation, to push back against the silencing operations that have captured institutions one by one over decades. One operation silences truth; the other restores public space for truth. They are not mirror images. They are inverse operations.
There are, to be sure, real failure modes in conservative discourse. Some conservative activists have, in some cases, built mirror cancel-operations targeting progressive cultural figures — the public-shaming campaigns, the boycotts, the celebration of professional destruction visited on a progressive opponent. These failures are real and they should be named. The believer recognizes them for what they are and refuses to participate in them, even when the targeting is being directed at someone he would otherwise have reasons to oppose. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good. But this is a smaller failure mode than the broader conservative resistance, and treating the broader resistance as if it were itself an instance of cancel culture in mirror form is to misclassify the resistance and to disarm the church at the moment when the church most needs to be armed.
The much larger conservative failure with respect to this stronghold is the opposite of intolerance. It is overtolerance — the wood-cricket failure to recognize what is happening, the parasitized-mind failure to say plainly what is true, the Christian who cannot say Islam is false even when Islam is actually false, the believer who flag-flies progressive cultural orthodoxy in his own home because he is afraid of being thought intolerant, the church that has substituted niceness for holiness and tolerance for truth. This is the captivity of the contemporary church, and it is the captivity that has positioned us where we now stand: passive in the face of an aggressive ideology that worships a false god and is actively working to impose its worship upon us, lukewarm in the defense of the apostolic deposit, neither cold nor hot, fit only to be spit out (Revelation 3:15-16).
This is the cardinal sin of the Western church in our generation, and the framework cannot pretend otherwise.
The fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, must be matched and exceeded by the fire of those who know the living God. I came to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? (Luke 12:49). The believer who has been told that orthodox confession is itself a form of intolerance has been told a lie, and the lie has captured significant portions of the contemporary Western church. The corrective is not to mirror the silencing operations of the cultural revolution. It is to recover the boldness that the apostolic posture requires: to say what is true, plainly, without apology, in love, with the willingness to bear whatever costs the saying produces. Be ye angry, and sin not. Speaking the truth in love. Bless them which persecute you — but say it. Recompense to no man evil for evil — but do not let the refusal of evil-for-evil become the cowardice of saying nothing at all. Overcome evil with good — but the good must be overcoming, not merely passive.
The conservative who has built a mirror cancel-operation must repent of it. This is real and the discipline is appropriate. But the much larger conservative — the wood-cricket Christian who has gone silent in the face of the cultural revolution, who has suicide-empathied himself into ineffectiveness, who has taught his children to be polite and nice in the face of an enemy that is actively working to capture them, who has made truce with the culture and forgotten that we are at war — must repent of the opposite failure. He must recover the fire. He must learn, again, what the early martyrs knew, what the Otranto martyrs knew when they refused to convert at the cost of their lives, what the Confessing Church knew under National Socialism, what the believers under communist persecution knew in the gulags: that some things are worth saying out loud regardless of cost, that the truth is worth the boldness it requires, that the love that loves God and loves neighbor is fierce, willing to suffer, unashamed, active, and will not let the captives go without having said clearly that the Christ they need is the Christ we confess.
The discipline of resistance is double here as well. For the progressive captive of intolerance: turn from the silencing of those you disagree with, repent of treating disfavored views as social violence, and learn to host disagreement as the public square requires. For the conservative who has built mirror cancel-operations: turn from them, recompense no man evil for evil, overcome evil with good. For the much larger group of conservatives whose failure is overtolerance and silence: recover the fire. Speak boldly. Be not ashamed of the testimony of our Lord (2 Timothy 1:8). The hour is late. The captives need to hear it.
What Joan was reaching for, and what the framework offers her
I have engaged Joan’s inventory with the eight strongholds because the inventory she produced, once relocated to its proper level, is genuinely useful. She catalogued eight characteristic operating modes of demonic captivity in the contemporary moment. Her error was not in the cataloguing; the cataloguing is on its surface accurate. Her error was in the level at which the captivities were located — at the level of Democrats as a tribal class rather than at the level of spirits that capture human beings. The patterns Joan saw are real. The Democratic Party as an institutionalized movement has, by deliberate strategy across multiple decades, made itself a vehicle for several of these spirits. This is empirically observable; it is not a partisan caricature. The institutional accountability the framework requires us to name is real, and on the question of which strongholds the Democratic Party has cultivated, Joan’s analysis is largely correct.
What the framework adds is the asymmetric-orientation principle that the original draft of this essay missed. Both progressives and conservatives are subject to unholy spirits, but the spirits are not the same and the spiritual conditions they produce are not symmetric. The Democratic Party has cultivated spirits that operate in active rebellion against God’s order — the strongholds Joan named. The orientation of that movement is toward false gods. The conservative movement, by contrast, is in its mainstream form oriented correctly toward the right God; its failures, when they appear, are failures of execution within a fundamentally correct orientation rather than failures of orientation itself.
The conservative does not need to repent of his confession that the unborn child is a person, that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, that Christ is Lord, that the constitutional ordering protects what Scripture commands the state to protect. He needs, in many cases, to repent of his lukewarmness in defending what he confesses, of his niceness-as-cowardice in the face of cultural attack, of his expectation that elected leaders will deliver the cultural restoration that only personal-family-community spiritual transformation can deliver, of his hopelessness, fear, and chronic outrage that consume his energy without channeling it into righteous action. These are real failures. They are not the same failures as the progressive captive’s. Different correctives. Different conditions. Both unholy. Not the same.
The cardinal failure of the Western church in our generation is overtolerance and lukewarmness in the face of an aggressive ideology — the ideology of the cultural revolution at home, and the ideology of resurgent political Islam abroad — that is actively working to dispossess us of our God, our heritage, our institutions, and our children. We have substituted niceness for holiness, tolerance for truth, attendance for devotion, doctrine for fire. We have laid down our weapons. We have made truce with the enemy. We have forgotten that we are at war. I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth (Revelation 3:15–16). The framework can name this with the same honesty it names progressive captivity, and it must, because without naming it the framework will not produce the correctives the contemporary church most needs.
The fire that the adversary has, misdirected as it is, must be matched and exceeded by the fire of those who know the living God. Passionate as the Muslims are passionate — but for the true God. Devoted as the Muslims are devoted — but to Christ. Uncompromising as the Muslims are uncompromising — but on the truth. Willing to die as the Muslims are willing to die — but for the Gospel. This is not a call to hatred. It is a call to love so fierce it cannot tolerate the destruction of those we love, love so strong it will speak truth regardless of cost, love so deep it would rather die than see souls go to hell unreached. We must speak the truth in love. We must not let the sun go down on our wrath. We must live in His peace as resting state alongside the focused, time-limited, action-channeled outrage at evil that the moment requires. We must love the captives. The captured are not the enemy. The captured are the field on which the enemy operates, and our task is to rescue them, not to destroy them.
To Joan, if she ever sees this: I am with you on most of what your column was reaching for. The patterns you observed in contemporary Democratic Party rhetoric and policy are real. The substantive concerns about the genocidal-violence question regarding Hamas, about the historical record of the Democratic Party on civil rights, about the dependency structures created by progressive policy designs, about the cultural revolution operating through institutional channels — these are concerns I share, and the column’s substantive analysis on most of these points is accurate. What the framework asks, with your inventory, is to relocate the diagnosis from the level of Democrats to the level of spirits that capture human beings and institutions that function as vehicles for those spirits. The patterns you saw are real; some of them have made the Democratic Party a deliberate institutional vehicle for them; conservatives also have failures with respect to the same stronghold areas, but the failures are different in kind and different in their corrective. The framework keeps the asymmetry honest. The conservative does not need to repent of being a conservative; he needs, in many cases, to recover the fire that orthodox conservatism requires.
To the fellowship: this is what the framework looks like applied to a piece of polemical conservative cultural commentary, with the asymmetric-orientation principle preserved. The substantive concerns that animated the column are not abandoned. They are relocated, named more precisely, and addressed in a way that honors what is true while naming what is incomplete in how the truth has been held. We hate the spirits. We love the captured on every side. We listen carefully. We speak boldly. We refuse to be assimilated into either the captivity of false-god worship that has captured the progressive movement or the captivity of lukewarmness and niceness-as-cowardice that has captured significant portions of the contemporary church. We hold our convictions firmly and our relationships open. We recover the fire. One heart to make Christ King.
Thomas
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” — Ephesians 6:12
“I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” — Revelation 3:15–16
“I came to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled?” — Luke 12:49
“Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12:21
Renaissance Ministries | Fellowship Discussion Essay One heart to make Christ King.