The Sharper Stick and the Liberty in Christ
A conversation between Thomas and Isak on Islam, Christian nationalism, and why the changed heart is the only answer that holds
A wide-ranging discussion | 21 September 2026
The question that opened the discussion
The conversation began with Isak’s response to Thomas’s essay on Islam, which distinguished its political take from its religious take and examined what happens when a political group applies a religion’s rules to a population that does not share it. Isak found the essay illuminating in its examination of the parallels between Christian nationalism and Islamic Shari’a. He wanted to know if there was a contradiction in supporting one but not the other. If Sharia is a case of religion becoming the law of the land, is there a corresponding risk on the Christian side? Could Christian nationalism drift into extremism, or into a religious rule that displaces the rule of law? And, more pointedly: if Christians got everything they wanted, if every Christian rule were followed, would there be any downside at all, or would it be all upside?
He was also honest about the cultural inconsistency he observed. Americans fight bitterly over gay and trans rights at home, and treat conservatives who resist as the villains; yet the same Americans extend a tolerant, almost admiring curiosity to cultures that punish those same things with the full weight of the state. He suspected the tolerance was less about principle than about opposition: whatever stands against the older, conservative, Christian viewpoint gets a pass. He admitted he wished he had more contact with people of other faiths, so his picture came from acquaintance rather than from the news.
Those questions set the course for two and a half hours of discussion between them, ranging from theology to geopolitics to the origin of existence and back to the practical problem of how one person changes another’s heart. The essay that follows tries to cover the ground.
Can Christianity become the thing it opposes?
Thomas’s answer to the Christian-nationalism question turned on a definition. Everything depends on what it means to be a Christian. If a movement says “these are my rules, there is no tolerance for anyone doing otherwise, we will force you to be our way, and if you won’t, we want you gone from society,” then whatever that is, it is not Christian. The trouble arises when something that is not Christian goes under the name. The perversions available are numerous. People proof-text from a single verse and build a program on it, and the results have been bad for a long time; the witch trials and the Inquisition are the familiar examples, and the familiar objection.
So the risk is real, but it is not a risk of Christianity. It is the risk of a counterfeit. His image for it was a cross painted over a pentagram, or a pentagram hidden while the cross is waved. Christianity done wrong will not have the power to take anything over; it will simply be another satanic religion in Christian dress. Christianity done right is the only version with the power to transform a society, and it transforms by changing hearts, not by coercion.
He extended the point to the whole family of counterfeits. Mormonism, on his reading, is Christianity-lite with a small twist: it keeps most of the furniture and offers a more appealing heaven than harps on clouds, which is exactly why it is dangerous. Islam is the same screw turned all the way. Both are versions of the same ploy: a deceiver asking, “What about this? What about that?” until a person settles on anything but true Christianity. The size of the twist does not matter to the principle; the question is only how much of hell one is willing to accept.
Islam, in this account, is a religion for people who admire the Christian virtues but cannot govern themselves. It supplies an enforcement team. His summary formula, repeated later in the conversation, was that Islam is Old Testament Christianity with a sharper stick and more supervision. What it lacks is the liberty in Christ. That liberty is not available at the Islamic kiosk; it is sold next door.
Religion and the rule of law
Isak pressed the comparison from the legal side. In the Islamic case, the religion replaces the law of the land, or becomes it, and noncompliance is met with harm or death by group agreement. In the American case, everyone is encouraged to live as a Christian, but the Constitution does not yield to religious law. And yet the Constitution seems to rest on the same moral principles, so the two are not at odds. What, then, is the actual difference in how people are kept in line? America also has prisons, fines, and a death penalty. The list of moral sins does not look very different between Christianity and Islam; both seem to be running the same program.
Thomas agreed that it is largely the same program. The difference is in the mechanism and the spirit. One system supervises with a whip; the other offers a changed heart and a free choice, with the civil law as a backstop for those who refuse the choice. Isak later added a complementary observation: a nation does not grow stronger by mimicking the enforcement model, and a Constitution grounded in the person of Christ (as revealed in the Bible) leaves fewer gray areas between the civil order and the moral order.
The Islamic Jesus
At Isak’s request, the two reviewed the Islamic account of Jesus, and the summary is worth recording because it makes clear where the divergence lies.
In Islam, Jesus is a prophet, born of a virgin, who performed miracles by God’s permission and received a revelation, the Injil or gospel. Muslims generally hold that the four Gospels are later human accounts that have been altered. He is called the Word of God and a Spirit from Him, but these titles are understood to mean that he was created by God’s command, not that he is the eternal Word. Mainstream Islam holds that he will return near the end of time, defeat the false Messiah, live out his life and die; some traditions add that he will break the cross and kill the swine, that is, reject what Christians made of him.
The crucifixion is denied. The Quranic verse says it was made to appear so, and the classical commentaries read this as substitution: someone else was made to look like Jesus and was crucified in his place. Accounts differ on who. One version, the one behind the charge that the Islamic Jesus is a coward who fled the garden, has him asking for a volunteer; another makes the substitute Judas, as punishment. A minority of scholars read the verse as allowing that Jesus died but was not truly defeated. More fundamentally, Islam does not need the cross theologically: each person bears his own sins, and God forgives directly on repentance, so no sacrifice is required.
Jesus is placed in a single line of prophets from Adam through Abraham, Moses, and David, all preaching submission to one God; he is the last great prophet before Muhammad, and a Quranic verse has him foretelling a messenger named Ahmad, which Muslims take to be Muhammad. Some also identify the Paraclete of John 14 with Muhammad. Muslims often present all this as honoring Jesus more than the Jews do.
The Christian reply is that the Islamic Jesus differs from the Jesus of the Gospels in exactly the points Christianity considers essential: who he is, God incarnate; and what he did, died and rose to atone for sin. Isak reflected on the strangeness of it: three faiths drawing from a similar well of inspiration and scripture, then diverging so sharply on the identity of one man that the historical shifts can be traced on a map.
Europe, terror, and the chill on speech
Isak then asked the geopolitical question directly. What is the actual risk of Islam? Europeans say their continent is being overtaken; the same is said of New York after its recent mayoral election. Is the fear a fear of a coordinated regime slowly changing America’s principles? His own diagnosis was that Americans are so ungrounded in any moral code that any code offered to them gains power, so long as it is not Christianity, which is treated as the one code that is not acceptable.
Thomas accepted that diagnosis and filled in the European picture. A friend who had just returned from a tour of Europe reported that it was no longer the Europe he came from. The leadership there welcomed Islamic immigration and provided for it, which Thomas likened to inviting a Trojan horse through the gate, or a fifth column into the city. The people have not been able to reverse it. The politically correct portion of the public congratulates itself on its virtue, repeats that diversity is strength, and thereby gives cover to the leaders. As for the leaders’ motives, he offered several possibilities without choosing among them: they may believe the slogans; they may be paid with oil money; they may owe their positions to electoral manipulation; or they may simply be afraid.
The fear is the important part. Everyone in a position of influence knows that a subset of Muslims is willing to sacrifice themselves entirely to neutralize opposition to Islam. That is the strategic benefit of terrorism: it does not need to reach everyone, because it chills speech. A person who might write, or run for office, on an overtly anti-Islamic platform looks at what has happened to others, considers that he loves his wife and children and his life, notices that no one else is standing up, and goes along. Good people say nothing; those on board take the graft and accelerate the process. The end state, if the accommodation continues, is a demographic majority that abolishes democracy by democratic means, which would be the ideal victory.
He described the motivational engine as a cult, in the specific sense that its adherents are willing to die for it because they believe it is true. Burmawi, in his recent interview, said that martyrdom is the only certain route to paradise in Islam; good works and repentance might get one there, but martyrdom is guaranteed. Every society contains a fringe of people who will do anything for a cause; in America, they become special forces. In Islam, given organizers who supply a story, that fringe packs a vest with ball bearings and detonates it in a crowd, and justifies the act from the scriptures and maintains his courage, focus, and momentum at the direction of the leadership.
He concluded that the only counter is a willingness to be a martyr on the other side: at some level, a people must decide that life is not as dear as standing for truth. Until that decision is made, the accommodation will continue. He did not think America was near it. The nation, he said, is not the home of the brave; it has become the home of the cowardly and politically correct.
What America forgot
Isak offered his own account of how the country got there. He has watched the culture move away from Christianity toward “spirituality.” One can no longer say “I am a Christian,” but one can say “I am spiritual,” usually because one was hurt by a church, and what follows is a personal relationship with the universe. The trouble is that this spirituality stops connecting to other people. The actual Christian content, loving God and loving one’s neighbor, drops out, and what remains is love of self and of one’s place in the cosmos. Meanwhile, other countries, by force or by will, are strong in their beliefs and practices.
He also saw a national shame at work. People do not like being the big bad empire. They take the sins of the past- Vietnam, the Middle East, all the wars- and conclude that this is the worst country, and they are sorry to live in it. Rather than fixing what is wrong and building a culture of love, respect, compassion, and the defense of those who cannot defend themselves, they let go of patriotism altogether. His image was the man in James who looks at his face in a mirror, walks away, and forgets what he looks like. A country so full of consumerism and effort has forgotten the picture of the country it meant to be, and every citizen now carries a different picture, which is its own problem.
The one-trick pony: the changed heart
Thomas’s answer to all of it was, by his own description, a one-trick pony. You create the changed heart, and the changed heart is oriented to the highest morality. What is the highest morality? Christ. Who Christ is is the highest moral. The changed heart is that heart placed inside a person, and once it is there, the governing rule is to love others as we were loved. From that vantage, the social errors become easy to identify. It really is “what would Jesus do?” The Jesus movement slogan of the 70’s is about all one needs. The problem is not finding the answer but getting the message to everyone that this really is a good thing.
He then took up the narrative of national evil and argued that it had been oversold. Vietnam, he maintained, was not an unrighteous war. When North Vietnam came south, it killed a million Vietnamese for not being communists; preventing that was the reason for being there. What was dishonorable was the way the country left: the promise to arm the South so it could defend itself was withdrawn by a Congress that did not want to keep it. The same dishonor was repeated in Afghanistan. Fifty thousand men died trying to protect people who were about to be overrun by a dictatorship that would rule with an iron hand and kill dissidents; the effort was right, and the nation lacked the endurance to see it through. Iraq illustrated a different failure: they removed the dictator and put nothing in his place. The population was told, in effect, “behave as you would behave unregulated,” and when it behaved badly, the response was to call it culture and honor it.
This is where he located the idolatry. The posture that says “we must not impose anything, because imposing would be ideologically genocidal” is presented as tolerance and felt as virtue, but it is a morality with no content other than abstract, earth-worship principles. There is a proper place for letting a people have their own culture. There is even a place for evolution, for things working themselves out. But when a culture’s project is to take over your culture, “leave us alone while we do it” is not a neutral request, and granting it is allowing evil to triumph because good men did nothing. He named the god being served: diversity, equity, and inclusion. That, he said, is another god before Me, and it is destroying society like a virus.
Why there is evil at all
The discussion then went underneath the politics to the question of why the world is arranged so that these choices exist. Thomas’s answer was that God created the whole thing with a good guy and a bad guy, so that a person could show his love for God by choosing the good over the bad. To do that, one must know the standards of good and the standards of badness, which is the opposite of the good, and stand against the bad. The arrangement only makes sense, he said, on the assumption that God actually experiences all of it and really does want to be loved. God wants to feel that people chose Him from a place of experiencing Him as other than themselves.
He pressed the literal reading of Matthew 25. When Jesus says that a cup of water given in His name was given to Him, people take it as a nice phrase: God appreciates the gesture, the way one appreciates a kindness done in one’s honor. That is not what it says. The cup was given to Him. Isak took the point and extended it: the thirst quenched in that moment was not the thirst of some metaphorical person; it was real thirst in the life of God, in the life of all that is. And it cannot be sorted by category: one cannot imagine God choosing whom to be and rejecting a person as too dark or too light to be Him. The question underneath is what the actual intent of life and of doing good is.
Thomas’s answer: to love God. The play we are living is God trying to satisfy His own hunger and His own loneliness, the unspeakable loneliness of being the only consciousness in existence, with nothing other than self. “Be fruitful and multiply” was a cry for something to fill it. All morality comes from this. It is not about black or brown or white people, or respecting another religion, or inclusion; the race question is shallow by comparison, one of the points of contention God engineered so there would be something to choose against. He cited Isaiah’s line that God creates good, and He creates evil, whether directly or through an agent given the job and doing it superbly; on every scorecard, the enemy looks like he is winning. But God can only be satisfied if there is a way of not being satisfied, and His way is chosen over it. One cannot kiss God or bring Him flowers; the symbols exist, but God is truly loved when a person rejects the animal desires the man loves, but God hates, and does it God’s way instead.
Isak put it as following God’s will and being in tune with His desires, which also means being in tune with what is repulsive to His character. Thomas added the serpent-and-dove formula: know evil front to back, recognize it anywhere, and remain gentle, acting from choice, desiring to please Him, knowing the other thing would be enjoyable and choosing His way anyway. That is the sacrifice God feels, and at different intensities, because we feel at different intensities and He must feel what we feel.
Islam as deception, and the sameness of sins
Returning to Islam with this framework in hand, Thomas said plainly that he takes the revelation to Muhammad to have been an angel of light that was a demon: a very good story, with hooks and twists, that seemed right and was not, and that has deceived the second largest religion in the world. He sees Islam and Christianity as the two poles in the contest between God and Satan, and the people under Islam as in bondage, which he called tragic. The deception is strong enough to deceive the elect, and a great many intelligent people accept it.
But he was insistent that the hunger behind it is the same hunger. Muslims know they need discipline; they know they must control themselves. The error is in where the discipline is applied. Covering women so that men are not tempted misses the point completely. The Christian discipline is to look away and be charitable. And here he made an equivalence he considered important: racism and lust are the same category of sin. One can fail to love God by being racist; one can fail to love God by committing adultery. Both feel good at the time; both bear bad fruit; both are apples at the center of the garden, and the answer to both is the same: we were told not to eat it, so we do not. The reason may not be given. The instruction is enough.
He read the garden itself this way. The command was not to eat from the tree, and the life was in the rejection. Adam and Eve already had life; it was going well; they wanted more. Eternal life was fine, but it lacked zing, so they tried some evil to see how it worked out. Every temptation- racism, adultery, murder, lies, idols- carries a blessing in its rejection. Life is in the no.
A taste of the kingdom
At this point, Isak told a story. The previous evening he had sat in his backyard with nothing stimulating him, in a kind of peace, and by eight o’clock he could have gone to bed. He had nothing in the world he wanted to do. He was simply experiencing. It came to him that on the same Saturday or Sunday evening, all the bars and outings and conversations that end in foolishness, chaos, confusion, and memory loss were happening elsewhere, and none of it was here, and he did not feel that he was missing anything. The desire to go out was gone. He had forgotten that this kind of sitting was possible. He thought it was communion with God, or with the whole of the natural universe from the point where he connects to it, and he does not get it when he is looking for the next feeling, the next high, the next tie. It felt like being in the garden. He noted that we don’t see this every day; we see the search, and what we want becomes our north star instead.
Thomas’s response was the verse: “My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you,” (John 14:27) the peace that passes understanding. The sixties had “peace, love, dope,” and “peace, pot, microdot,” which he called the caricature of the peace that passes understanding; the real thing is walking with Him in the cool of the garden. What Isak tasted was the kingdom: a beautiful place in which one does what one does, watching colors or flowers or sky or building something, and it is enough. It is just okay, and okay is enough.
He drew the lesson about why life exists. This world challenges us to develop a soul with God’s characteristics while living as an animal, which always wants it now and wants more. Life is for learning, and each lesson is a way of God that we strive to incorporate; we do not get it unless we ask for it. That is why life is so dear, and why a life given for one’s country is such a large sacrifice: it is cut short before the full palette of experience could be lived and its lessons of maturity and character deposited inside. Maybe those lessons cannot be learned in heaven, because everything is good and nothing is challenging. As Isak put it, you cannot learn that fire burns if there is no fire around. You cannot say no where there is nothing to say no to. We say “it’s all good” a great deal in this life, and it is not; we have to discriminate. There will be a time when it is all good, and then the phrase will be true.
Isak added the note of responsibility: so much good can be done, so many things to pursue and things to refrain from. This is the everlasting war of good and evil, and this is our moment in it, our turn on the battlefield alongside eight billion others. What matters is how well we do with it in the time we have, rather than letting it dissolve into empty grand gestures of morality. What is real inclusion? What is God’s way of bringing people into His family?
Inclusion, equity, and diversity, redefined
Thomas took the three words and gave each its Christian content. Inclusion is bringing people into God’s family. Equity is the deposit one has made: we all have God’s love, but to receive it we must choose God’s way, and every cup of water given in His name, every evil repaid with good, is treasure put in the storehouse; there is no equity without a deposit. Diversity is giving the same love, God’s love, in all things to all people, in every place we go, walking softly on the earth because it is sacred ground.
Part of that is honoring honorable traditions and finding what is honorable within the dishonorable, which requires a great deal of discrimination. Sometimes the only good in an evil is that it provided the example of what good is, and that was necessary. He extended a kind of sympathy toward those who play the villain’s part; it is a hard role, and one wonders whether they knew what they were taking on. He floated, with explicit uncertainty, the idea that souls choose their lives before birth; there is enough scripture (Jeremiah 1:5): “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” to suggest a consciousness prior to this life, though it might equally be luck of the draw. On the choosing hypothesis, no one chose to be a gangster; each chose to go down into a hard life believing he could turn it around. Some do. Most forget, and are swept away. Those who choose it and turn it are betting on the reversal, the trade that buys at the bottom and holds to the top, with a large payoff. Most do not win, and he doubted that people understand the cost of losing. The cost is separation: being cold, out of His presence. That would be a shadow of the loneliness God Himself bears.
The loneliness of God and the origin of existence
Isak observed that no conscious person has ever been in God’s position. Castaways, prisoners, people buried under something, someone alone on a space station: these are levels of loneliness that can be likened to it but not compared. Thomas went one step further down. Even the loneliest human is observing existence, so there is always an other. God’s loneliness is one level lower: it is existence compared to nonexistence. And how existence ever arose, he could not imagine, could not even frame a hypothesis. There was nothing, and then an awareness of nothing arose. Where did the nothing come from?
The two agreed that there is no answer to that question except that it did happen; there is something. Genesis truncates the creation story at a comparatively developed stage: in the beginning God moved over the waters. From a conscious awareness, everything that followed is comprehensible; it is mechanism, a building up. But where the God who moved over the waters came from is too hard. Thomas doubted we will comprehend it even in glory. The only thing he could see is that when He comes we shall be like Him, and that realization may be the only one that actually changes us.
Does anyone get it?
Thomas described his project as trying to save the world by having people realize what it is all about and where it came from, and confessed that it is a tough climb; people do not seem to get it very well. He asked Isak directly whether he was projecting or being hopeful, or whether it made any sense.
Isak’s answer was careful. It made sense. He didn’t get all the levels; he was immature in his study and, like everyone, limited in perspective, and he couldn’t verify the physics underneath. But the process was intriguing because he could take things in, let his own consciousness work on them, and test them against the world through a different-colored lens. This lens was close in color to the one he had been cleaning his whole life: clearly the universe exists; clearly he is not the most important thing in it; clearly some engine drives the train of life, and humanity did not invent it. What Thomas had done was reconcile the two things that, between them, encompass everything: the laws of nature and the moral laws that exist because of the same Creator. Being subject to gravity together does not mean both of us may do whatever we like; we are operating within someone else’s rule set. He had come a long way, he said, without wanting to be prideful about it; his brain had changed; he did not think he had been brainwashed; the things being said clicked with how the universe would have to be made if God exists. He no longer felt he was worshipping the earth or the sky, because they are not separate but interconnected, and he felt he had reconciled spirituality, psychology, and physics. He was also honest about his guards: he is wary of propaganda, of cults, of misuse of leadership in churches, and he noted that the conversation would be very different if it came from someone whose intentions he could not trust.
Isak then described a conversation with a close friend of ten years, a skeptic who regards Christianity as a hoax to control people, a view Isak has himself held and expects to hold again in weaker moments. Without planning it, he found himself saying what he thought, in a rational back-and-forth that felt like sitting in the fellowship’s discussions. The friend’s objection came down to not wanting to be controlled by rules. The reply was that he already lives under rules: the Constitution, the laws of wherever he is, the social rules of whatever group he is with, which shift depending on whether a policeman is present. As a well-known songwriter put it, everyone serves somebody; the only choice is whom. Isak’s choice puts him in harmony with the Creator, so what he wants to do and what God wants become the same thing, rather than a life spent trying to get away with everything.
He did not think he had converted his friend, whose worldview was shaped by a family tragedy that left him with no one to hold accountable and no answer, and who has concluded that since anything can happen, one should live for now and feel good. But Isak noticed that these conversations are coming easier. He can put his foot down and say, “This is what I believe, at least right now,” and remain open. All his interactions are different. He finds himself seeking the right thing in every moment, and feeling it more when he does the wrong thing, whereas the old pattern was to know better and do it anyway, desensitizing himself, covering the antenna, hiding the light on the hill, until he was in touch only with what he wanted to feel. Now, the excitement comes from noticing why he is no longer inclined toward what used to attract him.
The spark that fans out
Thomas’s assessment of transmission was sober. Looking at people in general, he observed that they came into a conversation believing something and usually left still believing it. When a person already has a theology that explains everything for him, he keeps searching but fits everything he hears into what he already has, and no real transformation happens. The one-on-one encounter, which should be the most powerful method, has not proven reliably effective.
Isak seemed to be an exception, and the exception gave him hope. If the message changes one heart, there is a class of people susceptible to it, and if their two stories are as similar as they seem, that class could carry the message on. He compared the experience he was after to what a seminar movement of the 1970s tried and failed to produce: everyone said “I got it,” but doubted it because the method was a secular-humanist, knowledge-based debate that could not reach the level of transformation it promised. The real thing can be found anywhere, as a song said, even in a guitar. If he has a method that crosses a gap of a certain width to one person, that person, a little different from the source, crosses the next gap to someone a little different again, and the understanding fans out. All it takes is a spark.
Isak said that was exactly what he felt with his friend: he just needs a spark, not conversion, just the recognition that there is something deeper, and then let it do what it does. He described the discipline of not preaching, of resisting the urge to tell everyone to stop drinking because he remembers how that sounded to him, and of instead helping with the problems the person is drinking about. He wondered aloud who the actual audience is. He and Thomas are both curious people for whom the standard answers were not enough; he traced his own habit of looking at every side to having felt unheard, and to a resulting concern that others feel heard. That openness has also made him receptive to the idea that all religions are looking for the same thing, and to the occasional sensation of an evil presence in a passerby. Is this system for the curious, or for everyone?
Marketing the message, and the only argument that holds
Thomas accepted that this was a marketing question and did not pretend to have the answer. How many people will be changed, whether the world will be changed, whether anyone will want him in office because of it, are all low-probability outcomes; it does not hurt to try, and he feels the passion for trying. Borrowing a colleague’s phrase, this is a startup: no one knows what will work, so you try many presentation methods until you find one that works.
He reflected on the essay that had started the conversation, which had taken a week and somewhere between twenty and fifty hours. Rereading it, he thought it held together, but he was under no illusion that any argument is ever closed. Every sentence has a phrase with implications that lead somewhere the writer did not intend, and the only way to button up every loose end would be to speak all of life, past, present, and future, in every permutation. Isak framed it as a joke: the final argument would have to be a nuclear bomb. He believed every argument begins with a premise: that no one can address everything except God, and that every law and argument has a downside for someone, so the real work is seeing what each one fundamentally does and whom it helps.
Thomas offered the abbreviation that covers all the possibilities: what you need is Jesus in your heart, guiding you, and the words will come when you need them. That single postulate requires all the words in the world to justify it, so the best one can do is move people toward it, and sometimes all one can do is give a cup of water, which may be the turning point. Whatever the surface topic, the real subject is being guided by the Spirit of Christ, and a long chain connects one to the other. His proposal for a campaign was therefore to put the message out in many ways, choosing any starting point and any trajectory, and always ending in the same place. He revised the familiar saying to make it stronger: not “preach the gospel, and use words if you have to,” but live it and use words, and tell people where the endpoint is at the start, on the Toastmasters principle of telling them what you are going to tell them, telling them, and telling them what you told them. The aim is not to lead people to a conclusion by allegory but to give them the answer at the back of the book: Jesus is Lord, put Him in your heart, and then tell the stories that show what it means.
Isak agreed, with a refinement. Jesus taught in metaphors drawn from what people knew, and that remains valuable, but he was still saying the thing. The clearer the truth, the less room for misinterpretation. Clever framings that lower people’s defenses have their place, but the best approach does not trick anyone: this is the way things seem to be; here is the option to have it in your heart; now what do you do with it?
Thomas acknowledged that his own method is not the only one, and perhaps not the most effective. A family member in the fellowship simply advocates putting Jesus in your heart. A reader on his mailing list, a woman who was once a Muslim and a communist, present at the Iranian revolution, and who is now as fervent a Christian as she was a revolutionary, told him over dinner that his method is very intellectual and that the place it touches her is the simpler one. He admitted that “put Jesus in your heart” remains more abstract to him than the path he actually walked: recognizing that it all is God, taking that as a central hypothesis into which everything had to fit, and discovering that Jesus being Lord fit.
Conscious points and rebellious bits
The conversation closed by connecting the theology to Thomas’s physics. His program, Conscious Point Physics, proposes that the universe is built from elementary points that are themselves conscious, each knowing the rules and acting within them. Isak saw the moral picture reflected there: every conscious point operates within the rules; whether it has a choice or not, whatever it does is still within them. Thomas replied that the points are God’s point of view and God’s way of manifesting the world. It makes sense that they are committed to following the rules. Whether there are rebellious bits is unknown.
His closing reflection was on scale. At the level of a human, or a group of humans, a direction can be chosen, and the same categories recur as the scale grows: unity and chaos, what breaks things apart and what heals. He joked that he found a little germ and brought her home to feed, and that we are all lost little germs interacting inside the body of the universe, keeping it healthy or fighting its health, and that the task is to recognize what kind of germ each one is and how to treat it. If a wolf led its pack the way some politicians lead theirs, it would be eaten alive. The perspective gives one something to compare against: one can read the Torah or the Quran against what one has come to believe is right and wrong. We are designed to process these things, and the closer we get to God, the cleaner we process them.
Thomas’s last word was that when the time comes, they will be able to put on a good show.
Conclusion
The discussion began by asking whether Christianity could become the mirror image of the thing it warns about, and ended by locating the only safeguard in a place no political program can reach. A counterfeit Christianity that coerces is not Christianity, and will not have the power that the real thing has. Islam, on the view presented here, is the same moral program administered by supervision rather than liberty, and its strength in the West comes from the West’s own loss of nerve and memory. The remedy proposed is not a stronger stick but a changed heart, chosen freely by a person who knows evil and refuses it, because that refusal is the only gift God cannot give Himself. Everything else in the conversation- the redefinition of inclusion and equity, the taste of the kingdom in a quiet backyard, the origin of existence, the problem of how one heart reaches another- follows from that single point, and every argument, however it begins, is meant to end with living the person of Jesus Christ.