Transforming America
by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 24 September 2026
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 — A Young Man’s Questions
On a Wednesday morning in September 2026, Isak and I had our usual early morning business meeting. Isak is the son of my friend and business partner, Charlie. Isak is my right-hand man and working collaborator. He builds and maintains my websites, manages the technical side of my research, and helps with the mobility devices our company is developing. We had a list of company matters to get through: bank accounts, insurance, suppliers, invoices. We got through them. Then Isak said he wanted to ask me about something that had been bothering him, and we talked for two more hours. By the end of that conversation, I knew the material was so important and complete that I had to share it with the world.
This is that book. It is built on Isak’s questions. Isak is a young man who grew up in the same culture every young American has grown up in for the last generation. He learned what the schools, the entertainment industry, and the internet taught him about capitalism, about America’s history, about Christianity and its place in public life. He realizes that some of it was true, and some of it was not, and he has spent the last few years sorting out which was which. He is not a partisan. He distrusts both political parties. He is honest about what he doesn’t know. And when something doesn’t make sense to him, he won’t let it go until it does. He asks the questions a thoughtful young person actually asks. He is not a debater trying to win an argument or persuade me that he is right; he is a truth seeker who sincerely wants to understand how the universe was made, the right way to live, and what is fair.
This book attempts to answer those questions across a broad swath of social, personal, and existential issues. What I believe about God, this nation, and how a people ought to live is put to the test of an honest young man’s honest doubts. I hope in the fire of close examinations, we will forge a program for transforming America that will be worth asking a nation to adopt.
One more word before Isak speaks. Some of his questions came out of an exercise he had been doing with Claude (the artificial intelligence system by Anthropic that we use to organize our business). He has been helping me organize my theory of everything that I have been developing for about forty years, which I call Conscious Point Physics. I have been explaining the principles of CPP as I have discovered them. Isak has access to the entire database of the theory and its development on its website at www.hyperphysics.com. The theory describes the foundation of the physical universe as built from elemental points of view, each a unit of God’s consciousness.
I call each unit a Conscious Point. Each one perceives other Conscious Points, and they move depending on how close they are to other CPs. The CPs move on a grid made of points that I call Grid Points. The GPs are also conscious points, but their function is to give the CPs a background that they can move upon. The CPs communicate with each other using messenger bits that I call DI-bits, which are also conscious points. So there are three types of conscious points: 1) the Conscious Points that move, 2) the Grid Points, which are fixed in space and give the markers of distance, and 3) the Displacement Increment bits, which communicate between Grid Points.
[Additional detail: (not necessary to understand the analogies used in the book). Each CP lands on a GP at the end of each Moment. The GPs communicate their local state to other GPs in a small sphere, to the other GPs in that sphere, via DI-bits). Each GP integrates the messages it gets, and it communicates that state to the CPs around it through the messenger bits. Each CP moves according to how it should move. Thus the CPs move because of the small set of rules God gave them.]
Everything in the universe is composed of Conscious Points; electrons, stars, living bodies are all built from CPs, and they move and interact because of the rules that govern their interaction. You don’t need to know anything more about the physics than that to read this book. If you need to know a physics concept to understand a concept while reading this book, I will explain what I mean so you can understand how things work at this deep level.
Some of the lessons are analogies (life reflects the patterns present at this fundamental level), and some are simply fundamental patterns of how the universe works. Life at the human level is complex. There are no simple solutions. I will let you know which is which when we discuss the various principles. Analogies are powerful teaching tools because they compare known phenomena with unknowns, and fundamental principles with complex combinations. I will use both methods in my explanations. Fundamentals describe reality and analogies make connections.
Isak was skeptical that physics could settle political questions because, on the surface, they have very little causative relevance to ordinary political concepts. But on closer examination, we see strong analogical resonance. The fundamental fact about life is that everything is composed of Conscious Points, and the CPs fundamentally depend on God’s consciousness for their existence. That is the foundational perspective of the book and life. Getting it that God is omnipresent in a way even more fundamental than the normal “God is watching everything you do.”
The fact that God is present in the substance of our being should guide every political, psychological, religious/spiritual, and physical question; every moral consideration; and every question of meaning and purpose. So, while the detailed study of particles, fields, relativity, and quantum mechanics is not particularly relevant to solving political problems, understanding the basic premise that the physical-spiritual universe is composed of God’s mind-spirit-perspective is necessary.
Without understanding the foundational nature of reality, we will be distracted by appearances (God out there watching and judging us vs. God inside feeling us as we live life). God is other in every practical sense, in that we have a relationship with Him, but the fundamental reality is that He has loaned us His consciousness, and we are living for Him. Many incorrect conceptions of reality contain an element of truth, but when used as a foundation, they produce bad results.
Examples of partially true conceptions include: living as though we are under scrutiny and our lives are separate from Him; living as though no transcendent companion lives with/within us; God will forgive me, so I’ll do what I want, and ask forgiveness later. When we try to solve life’s problems using these models, we solve problems that differ from reality; such solutions will not produce lasting relief from the pain of misalignment between God’s goals and our own.
All this matters because we must understand/hold/apply the proper model of what life is to address the reality-based problem and to solve the various political dilemmas. The proper perspective is that we walk on holy ground. In Him we live and move, and have our being. He witnesses and experiences everything we think, see, feel, and do. This perspective is reality, and it should frame all political solutions. Without this perspective, some of what I advocate in my Presidential run, as a program for transforming America/ordering society/behaving as individuals and citizens and family members, seems radically politically incorrect and socially impossible. But from this perspective, we can solve political conundrums that are otherwise insoluble. By living within Jesus’ new commandment to love as I have loved you, we could create on Earth what it is like in Heaven.
Here is what Isak said:
ISAK: I’ve been working on something on my own, for my own understanding. I’ve been trying to understand the forces at work in this country’s politics: socialism and capitalism, empires and rebellions. It’s like trying to see how the world actually functions.
To understand these issues, I ran my questions through Claude and asked him to frame political ideologies using physical processes in the Conscious Point Physics paradigm as an analogy for how human systems should work. I wanted to see how it would evaluate a list of ideals and ideologies. I wanted to know how the processes underlying the universe correspond to cultural movements. How does group consciousness respond to different ideologies? I’ve been developing it with Claude as a thought experiment.
I’m trying to analyze the political spectrum of social problems without bias. I’m reevaluating everything I’ve learned over the years about capitalism and socialism. I think the right and the left are both missing the mark, and neither one is carrying out its agenda of service. They’re both part of the system. I think both parties need reform. There isn’t an obvious party where you can say, “This is going to be right for the country.”
So I’ve been asking: What would God do with a group of people? What does God do with groups of people?
Here are some questions the conversation raised.
Question: The first one is about the Constitution. If the universe organizes itself, why does a society need a constitution? Conscious Points don’t have a written constitution; they just have their built-in rules. If we’re made of the same stuff, why can’t human society organize itself the same way? Maybe the answer is that humans can do something Conscious Points can’t: we can override our built-in rules. A particle can’t choose to ignore electromagnetism, but a man can choose to ignore his conscience. So maybe the Constitution is how a society preserves the good arrangements it has found, like freezing meat and vegetables to keep them from breaking down and decaying. But then who decides what gets preserved? God decides what’s preserved in nature, and that’s safe because God is good. When men and the state decide what to keep and what to destroy, that’s pretty much the whole history of political abuse. Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good.
Which leads to the question I asked you before: What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding God’s law with man’s erroneous interpretation of law? And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?
I think that question comes from my hesitation about Christian nationalism. I see your point and what your intention is, but I’m so used to hearing “Christian nationalist” as an insult that I have to reprogram my reflexive concern about Christian nationalism. I’m trying to develop an understanding rather than just have an opinion. I would rather have a considered and informed opinion than just believe something I read or was told. Regardless, I trust that if something is true, it will come up.
Question: The next question was about property. Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. Does the physics say anything about property ownership? Every conscious point has its own position, its own place in the structure. Does that mean having a place of your own is built into existence? Or does “it’s all God’s substance” mean ownership is an illusion, because everything belongs to the Creator? I don’t know that the physics argument has to be made there. I may be trying to apply physics where only a metaphor is appropriate.
Question: Then there’s the failure of self-organization. Order can emerge without anyone in command, but self-organizing systems also produce cancer: cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the body. Monopolies and cartels are the social version of cancer. That’s basically the critique of capitalism: left to itself, it produces tumors. So is cancer a violation of the rules, or is it the rules working without any moral alignment? If it’s the second, then that’s capitalism without a conscience.
Question: Then there are the people who never hear. You say the moral law is real and can be discovered, and that letting Jesus into your heart is what brings a person into alignment with it. But most people who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman you told me about, who was once a communist but is now as fervent a Christian as she was once a revolutionary, had to meet Christ to change. What about the billions who didn’t?
Question: Then there are questions about democracy. If a constitutional republic is supposed to be the political form closest to how reality works, is that something you derive, or just something you prefer? A monarchy with a good king might fit just as well: one wise ruler preserving the good. And in your own framework, God is a king, not an elected president. So why should human government be democratic? The only answer I could find is that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions around works better than putting them all in one man’s hands. That makes sense. But it’s an argument from human weakness, not from the physics.
Question: And the last question: How does this relate to systemic injustice?
I think a lot of these are answered by having “Jesus in your heart and studying the Bible.” If we’re all hearing from the same God, the same high command, we can move together in harmony. But I wanted to see whether the physics framework could answer these questions, or whether they are still open.
And it won’t leave me alone. What’s right and what’s wrong? Every point you’ve made about God and the nature of the universe is well taken. I just find this troubling. I’m not sure about capitalism, and I feel like I sound like one of those woke idiots. But capitalism seems to need to keep growing. A growing economy needs oil. We need to go out and get resources. So it seems like we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out political cultures we didn’t like, funding regimes that crushed their own people’s socialist or communist movements.
Maybe that was a good thing. I know there’s a lot of nuance: how many people died under communist governments, and how “eat the rich” takes over when the tide turns toward communism. I’m seeing all these sides and trying to understand them. If I were with somebody on the other side, I’d probably argue more. But here I’m trying to understand, and I feel like you understand these things.
There’s so much nuance. How can anything be black and white? Maybe I feel responsible for seeing the black and white in everything, but I only see gray. Lighter and darker shades of it. I don’t see God as gray. But I see the world and humanity as an extension of God, and in that case, gray.
I don’t believe we have the right to do anything we want in another country. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing. I’m just more cynical about our history and our motives. Yes, we have gasoline and no wars at home, and that’s a beautiful thing. But at what cost? Are the good guys really the good guys? Are the bad guys really the bad guys? Or is it civilians paying the price for a few bad men at the top?
That’s where my fevered brain has been, trying to figure out socialism, capitalism, and empires.
Thomas: I want to answer Isak’s comment about everything being grey because that is a central concept in this book.
When Isak says he sees only gray. I understand why. The world, as it actually is, looks gray because it is a mixture. Every nation has done good and evil. Every economic system contains something true and something false. Every political party is right about some things and wrong about others. If you look at the mixture, you will see gray, and you will be tempted to conclude that there is no black and white, only shades.
But gray is what you get when you mix black and white. It doesn’t prove that black and white don’t exist. It proves that they are mixed. The work is to separate them: to find the principle that is true, and then to look honestly at where it has been followed and where it has been betrayed. Isak said he doesn’t see God as gray. Neither do I. The principles are clear. What is complicated is the history, and our own hearts.
So this book will do two things with every question Isak asked. It will try to state the principle plainly. And it will try to look honestly at the record. Christians have done evil in Christ’s name: the inquisition, the witch trials, and our judgmental vs. compassionate attitude toward the souls in the clutches of sin. America has done evil in its pursuit of oil and friendly governments. All the evil America has done is not inevitable. We were founded on Christian principles, but we did not apply them in these situations. We have walked away from them, or never fully understood and incorporated them into our group psyche – the divine Law under the laws and acts of man. We can change, and it will turn out much better for America if we actually apply those principles. But we will have to pay for those benefits to get the wonderful world we want. The cost will be that we must stop yielding to our desire for the pleasures and short-term payoffs of sin. We must acknowledge God’s existence, the sacrifice of His Son to reconcile us with Him, and incorporate His way into our individual and group lives.
We will consider these questions in the chapters that follow. The next four chapters take up the economic and political systems: why capitalism and communism each fail when taken to their pure form, why property is real but held in trust, why monopolies grow like tumors, whether self-government is derived from the order of creation or merely chosen, and how every remedy for human corruption gets corrupted in its turn. Chapter 6 states the rule of life I believe a nation should live by, and answers his question about safeguards: who decides what “Christianity done right” is, and what keeps a Christian majority from becoming a theocracy of clerics. Chapter 7 addresses the first objection most people will raise: the separation of church and state. The chapters after that go to where agreement ends: sexuality and the family, and what a nation might do about moral collapse without becoming the thing it fears. Chapter 12 answers Isak’s question about systemic injustice. Chapter 13 turns the moral test on America’s own conduct in the world, including the oil and the playground. Chapter 15 answers the question about those who never heard of Jesus, where it belongs: in a chapter about passing the fire on.
I don’t expect every reader to agree with every answer. I hold each position the way I hold any claim I make: as the best argument I have found, and I am open to a better one. But I think the questions deserve answers. Establishing a Christ-centered, righteous, and Holy nation is not the answer either party usually gives.
Isak asked what God does with groups of people, and we will keep returning to that question throughout this book.
Chapter 2 — Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism, Communism, and the Steward
Isak had put a great many questions on the table at once. I started with the one underneath most of them: capitalism and communism, and why neither works in its pure form.
THOMAS: The flaws and strengths of communism and capitalism are really good topics. You raised a broad spectrum of issues, and we need to address them together.
Start with capitalism. All of these systems (capitalism, communism, monarchy) are like a single rule in Conscious Point Physics. They have no nuance. Capitalism in its pure form is this: whatever makes the most money, you invest in, and when it stops making money, you move your resources into something else that does. It is driven by a goal. It has no particular concern for the environment, the poor, or minorities. The environment has no economic value unless you put a price on restoring it after resource extraction or waste disposal, or living among it rather than creating a steel, glass, and asphalt monoculture. When you do the repair, it actually becomes a moral system, and a measurable one. How much does it cost to care for the land by doing cleanup and replanting? Can we live among green zones? Who will pay for the farmer’s land so that it isn’t converted into strip malls and industrial zones when he retires or needs cash? How can forests and mountains remain remote?
Communism has a different goal. In its pure form, everybody produces as much as he can so there is a world of plenty, but there’s no comparative system available to price products or judge need so that each person gets what he needs. So everybody has to decide for himself what’s needed and what it’s worth, without any real idea what the price should be. There’s no incentive to take risks, or to do the hard work of getting the most production from the least labor and cost. People are supposed to be altruistic saints who work their hardest for others, with no more reward than the man who stays home and plays video games.
So communism suffers from a pricing problem, a lack of a way to determine need, and a motivation problem. “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work,” was a well-known phrase from the Soviet era. People don’t work hard, are not innovative, and don’t strive for efficiency because there’s no payoff for working, excelling, or economizing. It all pays the same. Everybody becomes, in essence, a government worker, punching a clock and doing as little as he can to fit in and get by. This breeds corruption because people want more, and the top-down/central control makes access a commodity that can be turned into personal profit. Every thought and effort is supposed to be for “the people,” but the rewards of group benefit are too abstract to satisfy the hunger for nicer, more functional, and more quantity. Communism doesn’t allow for individual differences in temperament, industry, and taste.
And the moment you say, “Somebody will start poking you if you’re not working hard enough,” you’ve brought in elements of capitalism and fair play, and those are Christian values. You’ve had to bring in Christianity and capitalism to overcome communism’s deficits.
Socialism is a step toward the communist pole. It still has a remnant of pricing, efficiency, coordination, innovation management, and accountability.
Capitalism is at the other end of the polarity from communism because every individual decides what he wants, how hard he wants to work to get it, and gets the rewards of his labor. In capitalism, division of labor and specialization naturally arise because specialization creates jobs for those who want to provide a needed service. Specialization refines every aspect of production, distribution, and consumption. Innovation to meet new needs provides rewards to the innovator/entrepreneur. Individual tastes and motivation shape what we want, how hard we want to work for it, how much risk we want to take, and what reward we are willing to work for. Management, privately administered (not by government), is motivated by reward because both managers and workers are rewarded for the team’s achievement. Businesses are group, cooperative experiences, but the whole team experiences the reward of the team accomplishment, and everybody specializes for efficiency. The market sets the price, how much gets made, what people will pay, and whether a business survives at all. There’s an automatic adjustment. Capitalism has a self-regulating governor built in for motivation, pricing, production, and phasing out with new products and technologies.
That was the core of my answer in response to Isak’s question about pricing and motivation. Communism discards private property; capitalism is built on it. Does the order of creation say anything about which is right? Does Conscious Point Physics offer a metaphor we can apply to understand how life should be properly understood?
As we would expect, we can see elements of the universe’s fundamental nature peeking through.
The first physics metaphor:
The question, as Isak posed it, offered two pictures. In the first, every Conscious Point has its own definite place in the structure of the universe, so perhaps the concept/principle/precedent/pattern of having a place of one’s own is built into existence itself. In the second, everything is made of God’s own substance, so perhaps ownership is an illusion, because it all belongs to the Creator.
This means that we see patterns of individuality and communal oneness at the fundamental level of existence.
Each Conscious Point perceives itself in relationship to its own small sphere of other Conscious Points. From the perspective of an individual Conscious Point, in its own location, with its own identity, following a single, uniform rule set, each CP computes its next location for the beginning of the next Moment, then moves to that new location. Each CP proceeds through a sequence of Perceive, Compute, and Displace (move) each Moment (each unit of processing). It acts on the spot it occupies and on nothing else directly. It doesn’t perceive the whole universe, and it doesn’t move anything but itself. So each point is a real, bounded center of perception and action. It has its own viewpoint and its own move to make, and nobody makes that move for it. Individuality is built into the lowest level of what exists.
But the Conscious Point does not own the place it sits on. The structure of space is common to all of them. Points pass through the same locations; two can even land in the same place for a moment before they both move on. Neither the Conscious Point nor Grid Point is self-made. Both the Individual and the property are parts of God’s own consciousness. The individual and the property both exist because He exists and created both for His pleasure. He has rules by which the individual and the property interact – rules which He developed. Thus, in the ultimate sense, everything belongs to, and is of, the Creator, both the individual (the Conscious Points) and the Property (the Grid Points).
Put those together, and you get neither absolute private ownership nor the abolition of the individual. You get stewardship: a real, bounded domain of action, with real responsibility for one’s own moves, inside a whole that belongs to Someone else.
The physics has no concept of “property,” and I am not deriving a law of ownership from the motion of particles. What the physics does is dissolve a false choice between Capitalism (choice based solely on economic factors) and Communism (choice directed by the State based on the judgment of a single external director).
- The communist promotes his program as superior because everything is owned in common and everyone has an identical experience of satisfaction, and that is good because it is fair.
- The capitalist chooses what is most profitable to sell and least expensive to buy. This is relatively benign if isolated from the ability to appeal to others’ greed for more money, more power, and more pleasure, and from people’s willingness and ability to segment the market to capture supplies, influence legislation and officials, and propagandize. Thus, the rich get richer because they can create an environment for self-growth. Extreme wealth can come from providing better service, or it can be accumulated by manipulating the market in ways that do not provide value but allow market domination; this can show up as cartels and monopolies, which enrich more than would otherwise be possible.
- The third choice is Libertarian: The Libertarian perspective allows any interaction between contracting adults (competent parties) and actions that do not initiate aggression.
- The anarcho-capitalist abolishes government because the market provides the governmental services that people are forced to accept through voting, and all products and services are produced and consumed based only on price considerations.
- The polarities are: 1) self alone as an island and getting what you get because of your effort, ambition, and luck; 2) the group as the important survival entity and fairness for every person as the only expectation.
The picture at the bottom of reality says that life cannot be strictly segmented into these two polarities. Every person has a place and an environment, and a group of others who are self-interested and also dependent upon the group for survival and prosperity. Thus there is no possibility of isolating the self from the group, or the group disregarding the welfare of the individual. The two are interconnected on a level that is logically impossible to separate.
This reflects the ultimate reality that the One who created all individuals and the group of individuals is the Source of both. Scripture merely restates the proposition that both are true: all property is His, because “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and we are separate from Him because He calls us to invite Him in, and He will dine with us. The physics says why both are true; the mind of God created all the Conscious Points (the CPs, GPs, and DI-bits), and they were gathered together as the dust of the earth and fashioned into man and woman and made in His image, and He desires to commune with us when we are pure (Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God; blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God). God does truly want us all to get along.
What Scripture says
On one side, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” God says of the land He gave Israel, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” The silver is His, and the gold is His. Nothing we hold is ours in the final sense.
On the other side, the same Bible guards private property fiercely. “Thou shalt not steal” makes no sense unless some things are rightly yours and not your neighbor’s. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark,” the boundary stone of his field. The prophets’ picture of peace is “every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” not every man under the collective’s vine. And when King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, and Naboth would not sell his father’s inheritance, the king’s wife arranged Naboth’s death, and the king took the land. God sent Elijah to pronounce judgment on him. The most powerful man in the nation had no right to a small farmer’s field.
People like to cite the early church as Christian communism. In Jerusalem the believers sold their possessions and held everything in common. But when Ananias sold his land and lied about the price, Peter said to him, “While it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” The sharing was voluntary. Ananias’s sin was not keeping part of the money. He lied to God about it. The church held all things in common because hearts were given, not because property was abolished. That is the difference between the Kingdom and communism. The Kingdom produces generosity by changing hearts. Communism tries to produce it by taking property, and it cannot, because no one can confiscate a heart.
Christ’s parable of the talents completes the picture. The master gives his servants real money and real authority over it, and then he leaves. They are free to trade, to invest, or to bury it in the ground. When he returns, he holds each of them accountable for what they did with what he entrusted to them. That is stewardship: real property, real freedom, and real accountability to the true Owner.
Why a steward needs property
This isn’t only theology. It is how things actually work, and it connects directly to communism’s pricing and motivation problems.
A steward needs a domain he answers for. If everything belongs to everyone, then nothing is anyone’s responsibility. The common pasture is overgrazed, because every herdsman gains by adding one more cow and no herdsman bears the cost alone. The public restroom is dirtier than the one in your house. Nobody washes a rented car.
We have run this experiment many times, and it always comes out the same way. The Plymouth colonists began with a common store: everyone worked the common land and drew from the common supply. By Governor William Bradford’s own account, it bred confusion and discontent, and the young men resented working for other men’s wives and children without pay. In 1623 the colony gave each family its own parcel of land, and the harvest improved so dramatically that women who had pleaded weakness now went willingly into the fields, taking their children with them.
The Soviet Union ran the same experiment on a continental scale and got the same result. Collective farmers were allowed to keep small private plots, usually less than an acre. In 1966 those plots made up only slightly more than three percent of the country’s sown land. Yet they produced about two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s potatoes and eggs, more than forty percent of its vegetables, and about forty percent of its meat and milk. Defenders of the Soviet system point out that the plots relied on feed and equipment from the collectives, and that’s partly true. But no accounting trick closes a gap that wide. Men worked their own ground differently from the way they worked the state’s.
This is also why property can’t be separated from pricing. A price is what happens when owners say yes or no. When I own something, I decide what I’ll accept for it, and you decide what you’ll pay, and that exchange tells everyone what things are worth. Abolish the owners, and you abolish the yes and the no. Then the planner has to guess. That is why the Soviet planner never knew how many shoelaces to make.
The limits of property
But property is not absolute. God’s law laid duties on the owner.
The farmer in Israel was not to reap the corners of his field, or go back for the gleanings, or strip his vineyard bare. The poor and the stranger were to gather those with their own hands. Notice the design. The owner was not taxed, and an official handed out the proceeds. He was required to leave room for the poor to work for their own bread on his land. The land rested every seventh year. In the year of Jubilee, land returned to the families it had originally been given to, so no family could be permanently dispossessed, and no man could accumulate field after field forever. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”
So a steward’s property is bounded by two duties. The first is to the home: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,” and what we do for the least of these, we do for Christ. The second is the duty not to use one’s property to destroy other men’s stewardship. The man who buys up every mousetrap company so that no one else can build a better mousetrap is not exercising his property right. He is using it to abolish everyone else’s. That is where the next chapter begins.
So the question to ask of any arrangement of property is this: Does it enable faithful stewardship, or does it concentrate control in ways that prevent stewardship by others? Communism fails that test by concentrating everything in the state. The monopoly fails it by concentrating all productive capacity in a single company. The Jubilee passes it. So do the small farm, the family business, and the home a man owns outright.
Taxation, and the quieter kinds of theft
Where does taxation fit? Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The government has a legitimate claim to what it needs to do what it is actually for: the common defense, the courts, and the good roads everybody wants. A just tax for the common good is not theft.
But when the government takes from one man to give to another, not because the second man is helpless but because he votes, that is robbery done by proxy. The citizen hires the government to do the robbing he would be ashamed to do himself. I will say more about that in Chapter 5. The Bible’s corrective for greed is not confiscation. It is voluntary generosity, the obligation of family to family, and the gleaning principle.
There is also a quieter theft. The Bible condemns “divers weights and divers measures,” the merchant who keeps one weight for buying and another for selling. When a government expands the money supply faster than the goods it measures, every dollar a man has saved buys less. His property has been taken without a law being passed or a tax being levied. It is the ancient practice of clipping coins, done with a printing press. A steward cannot plan to be faithful if the measure itself is dishonest.
The answer
So is ownership an illusion because everything belongs to God? No. It is real, but it is delegated. The illusion is not that the field is yours. The illusion is that it is only yours: that you answer to no one for it, and that no poor man has a right to glean its corners.
And is property built into the structure of existence? In the sense that matters, yes. Each of us has a place and a move that are truly his, and no one can perceive, choose, and act for him. That is why the collective cannot replace the individual, and why every system that tries to abolish the individual’s domain ends in the planner’s guess, the empty shelf, and the gun. From an absolute perspective, the place one lives and works is on loan, and so is the identity/beingness of the one who holds that property.
Stewardship holds both halves together: the dignity of ownership and the humility of accountability. It is a pattern we will keep finding. Every system without nuance takes one true thing and makes it the only thing. The communist takes “it all belongs to God” and hands it to the state. The libertarian takes “this is mine” and forgets Whose it is. Christ’s way keeps both.
Notes
Psalm 24:1; Leviticus 25:23; Haggai 2:8; Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 19:14; Micah 4:4; 1 Kings 21 (Naboth’s vineyard); Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–5:4 (Ananias); Matthew 25:14–30 (the talents) and 25:31–46; Leviticus 19:9–10 and 25 (gleaning, the sabbath year, and the Jubilee); Isaiah 5:8; 1 Timothy 5:8; Matthew 22:21; Deuteronomy 25:13–15 and Proverbs 20:10 (divers weights).
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, entry for 1623.
Soviet private plots: “The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture,” Slavic Review (1969), reporting 1966 output from Soviet sources: 64 percent of potatoes, 43 percent of vegetables, 40 percent of meat, 39 percent of milk, and 66 percent of eggs, on slightly more than 3 percent of the sown land. The Soviets stopped publishing many private-plot statistics in 1980.
End of Edit for 9/27/2026 Fellowship essay
Chapter 3 — The Perversion of Centralization: Cartels, Monopolies, Captains of Industry, and Cults
I just described the governor built into capitalism, the way price and demand keep a free market in balance. Isak brought up the obvious objection.
ISAK: But the exercise raised the problem with that. It was talking about cancer. Self-organizing systems also produce cancer cells, cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the body. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent.
THOMAS: You brought up cults in that list. I have a particular definition of a cult, and I don’t know whether it’s correct, because it’s the definition we used when I was in one. We said we weren’t a cult, because we didn’t have a guru over us; we were a religion. But we did have a guru, and he interpreted the religion for us, bringing his particular version of Sikhism from India, and we practiced it the way he instructed us. I don’t think the Indian Sikhs accepted this American version of Sikhism or us completely. I think they were puzzled by our group, and I heard there were factions who did not accept our leader. It was probably different than the religion as it was practiced in India. I know we tried to do it as perfectly as the 10 Sikh Gurus practiced it. I think we fit into the category of unreformed purists. We had a battle cry: someone would call out, “Bole So Nihal,” and everyone would answer, “Sat Sri Akal.” We adopted the dress, turban, hair, comb, bracelet, the food, free Sunday meals, and reading the holy book (Sri Guru Granth Sahib). But we added things the Indians did not: yoga, probably an addition from Hinduism. We tried to do everything perfectly. The Indians had been practicing Sikhism for centuries, and their attitude seemed more relaxed and practical.
To me, the essence of a cult is a single-minded idea of how things should be following the revelation of a man. In a true and mature religion, the revelation comes from God, and men’s interpretations get averaged out. In Christianity, many people received different aspects of God’s revelation over several millennia. In a cult, a single person gets the revelation, and then everyone follows it, and the guru sets a single direction. In Sikhism, 10 gurus led over several centuries, and the scriptures are collections of writings by several authors considered holy men. Because this pattern follows that of Christianity so closely, we must closely examine the veracity of Sikh history and the holy book. We shall do that in another essay.
But I’d put your list differently. A cartel is a group of companies allied together to create a unified price structure that prevents competition. A monopoly is one company that has dominated the market. I would replace the category of “cult” with the term “captain of industry. Examples of such people are the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Morgans, the Rockefellers; we have modern equivalents to an extent: Gates, Jobs, Diamond, Welch, Zuckerberg, etc. The equivalent of the cult they share is a single will pushing everyone in one direction.
And we should add one more to the list: government. So we have government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry. Those are the four poles people can be pulled toward. Communism is the pole where government takes over. The government decides how many shoelaces, ballpoint pens, or computers, etc., because it’s in control.
The perversion in every one of them is centralization. All four are the opposite of free-market capitalism. In each case, competition has been suppressed. The captain of industry undercuts his competitors to put them out of business, uses force of personality to intimidate, or buys out the competition so that he can control it. In some way, he overtakes the market that would have let somebody else build a better mousetrap and take market share. He says, “I’ll buy your mousetrap company. Then I’ll raise the price of my mousetrap because there are no competitors you can purchase from.” It’s nearly always some perversion of the free market, carried out by a group or a man.
There’s another place for the cults: the ecological cult. In California, water that could have irrigated the San Joaquin Valley is sent out to sea to protect the habitat of a small fish, the delta smelt, and in dry years farmland goes fallow. In the Northwest, it was the spotted owl. Logging on federal land was cut back drastically, and forest management cutbacks followed. Undergrowth was allowed to grow without being cleared, and forests were not harvested. The result is so much fuel on the forest floor that when fire comes, it burns hundreds of thousands to millions of acres at a time, without cleared firebreaks to stop it.
A cult is a group or way of thinking that hasn’t reckoned with the rest of reality. There is a time for growing and a time for harvesting, a time for clearing the undergrowth, and a time to leave places wild. There should be islands of wilderness, not a whole world of it.
All of these (the captain of industry, the monopoly, the cartel, the government, and the special-interest cult) corrupt the market by artificially modifying the market. All of them say, “My way is the right way,” which points to a religious cult, where one particular way of acting is the only right way. Cults can form around Ideologies.
That answered part of Isak’s question. It named the players in the spectrum of market forces. But it didn’t answer the question underneath.
The question was this: self-organizing systems produce order without anyone in command, but they also produce cancer. Is cancer a violation of the rules, or the rules operating without alignment with the body’s overall purpose and function? And if it’s the second, perhaps this is the objection/criticism of capitalism: a system operating without integration with the larger purpose of life?
Capitalism is a set of rules that has arisen that reflects human nature. Referees have been designated (government, associations, guilds, and authors/writers/speakers), and they have codified the rulebook (the body of Federal, state, county, and local laws) that people follow. The question of whether the capitalism-government alliance is an inherently inhumane driver of men and an exploiter of resources and nations is important because nations have been overthrown and cultures put into extreme oppression and poverty because of the rebellion against the golem (the mindless spirit) of capitalism. So, yes, Capitalism has become an inextricable melding of needs, producers, rules, and government enforcement. Some claim the problem is government, and some claim that government is the solution. The second consideration concerns capitalism’s integration with the larger system. Has capitalism become its own entity that grows without connection and regulation with the larger purpose of the system? If so, how can this system be integrated with the purpose of life and meaning?
Two levels of law
To illustrate the principle of lawful, rule-based operation, let us begin with the most fundamental level of reality as the prototypical example of lawful operation: the Conscious Points. A conscious point cannot break its rules. It perceives, computes, and moves every instant, exactly as it was made to. A particle cannot decide to ignore electromagnetism. At that level, no action/behavior/function of the Conscious Point violates the rules of physics/reality. On this level, everything that happens happens lawfully. We could call this the law of function.
Now go up to the cell. A cancer cell doesn’t break chemistry either. Every reaction inside it obeys the same laws as the reactions in a healthy cell. Nothing in a tumor violates physics. So at the lowest level, the answer is the second one: cancer is the rules operating without alignment with the goals of the larger purpose.
The body is a system operating in a larger reality. Likewise, each cell is operating in a larger system. We could call this the law of the whole. A healthy cell lives inside a web of signals from its neighbors and from the body. Those signals tell it when to divide and when to stop, when to specialize, and when it is damaged beyond repair and should die for the body’s sake. A healthy cell constantly listens to its environment, and that environment listens to its environment, all the way up to the point where this chain of cause and effect integrates the whole. Each cell has regulators that adjust its function to respond to its environment and maintain functional homeostasis. No obvious coordinator of health sets the body’s function, but the most likely candidate is DNA: the stored pattern of structures, production methods, and rate adjustment that coordinates internal cellular processes with the cell’s external environment. The perfectly programmed cell maintains its function and production relationship to meet the requirements of its environment, repairs or replaces itself if damaged. When repair is needed, it does so by specializing general function cells into the type of cell needed for that function in that part of the body. If that coordination with the local environment is lost, the cell can begin to multiply without regard to the needs of the local tissue. So at the level of the body, the answer is that cancer is a violation of the law of the whole, a violation of the law of coordinated relationship that results in diminished function of the whole because of uncoordinated action with the parts.
That is exactly the situation of a man in a society. The man is the cell, and the rules of society and market demand that he adapt to maintain his survival and prosperity, and the survival and flourishing of the larger economic-social organism. The laws of economics work in him the way chemistry works in a cell. Supply and demand, incentive, scarcity: the monopolist obeys them perfectly. The captain of industry who buys up his competitors breaks no law of economics. But a second law stands above him: the moral law, the law of the whole: love your neighbor as yourself. The question is whether putting other companies out of business by lowering prices falls in that category. Does the monopoly/cartel/COI provide better service to customers by lowering prices and reducing supplier diversity? Is serving more people, at the cost of product diversity, a necessary tradeoff for low prices? Is it possible to have both?
The question comes down to what ethical capitalism is. Capitalism has no conscience; it is a system of relationships that produces goods and services for consumers in exchange for payment (a fungible scrip in a market economy). Capitalism is a set of rules, like chemistry. It is lawful and powerful, and by itself it has no idea about the larger function of the participants, either the consumer or producer. It doesn’t produce tumors because its rules are broken. It produces them when the men operating it stop listening to the law of the whole.
What a cancer cell does
Look at how cancer actually works. Cancer researchers describe a set of capabilities a cell must acquire to become a tumor. Here are the ones that matter for us, with their social equivalents.
A healthy cell should stop dividing when it touches its neighbors and the structural gap is filled. This is called contact inhibition. The neighbor’s presence says “enough,” and the cell listens. A cancer cell ignores its neighbors and keeps multiplying. That is the man who hears his brother say, “You’re getting out of line,” and keeps going to satisfy his desire for “just a little more.”
A badly damaged healthy cell destroys itself for the body’s sake. A cancer cell refuses to stop multiplying even though it is damaged. In an economy, a failing business is supposed to fail, so its people and capital can go somewhere more useful. When a failing giant must be kept alive at taxpayer expense because it is “too big to fail,” it signals that the system and its components have not been properly regulated to meet the contingencies of changing market conditions. The problem is that regulation can look like market interference; better preparedness calls for government regulation, voluntary corporate diversification, or consumer discretion. All these solutions likely have failure modes. This is why free markets have historically gone through periodic booms and busts. The free market does work to correct itself, but the cycle of irrational exuberance and hopeless despair reflects the psyche of men operating with low awareness of the whole, the trends, and regulating appetites. Government intervention can regulate the economy, but it is typically myopic, or agenda-driven, rule-bound, or subject to industry capture by the industries it regulates. What I am looking for is a solution to smooth the booms and busts while retaining the incentive for production by the captains of industry and their desire for monopoly and huge profits. In some way the animal spirit of the market must be allowed to run free to produce the abundance that the desire for profit brings.
A tumor can’t grow beyond a small size on its own. To grow, it sends out signals that make the body build new blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply and redirects it to itself. That is the cartel or monopoly that lobbies for subsidies and favorable regulation, and the special interest that gets resources, taxes, or funding to promote its cause.
The body has an immune system that patrols constantly and destroys abnormal cells, most of them long before anyone would ever know they existed. A successful tumor learns to hide from it. It displays signals that say, “I am part of you; leave me alone.” That is the cartel dressed up as free enterprise, and the megachurch with a message that appeals to the senses without the gospel and the discipline of holiness. The disguise is always the same: the perversion wears the clothes of the healthy thing it is destroying.
The most dangerous tumor is the one that spreads. It leaves its place and sets up colonies in other organs. The economic equivalent is a company that grows large enough to influence regulators through campaign contributions or other favors that bend government will to favor its interests. This influence may come from being a first mover, being the inventor who dominated a market sector, mergers and acquisitions that enable market domination, or cartels (alliances to fix prices). So the pattern is market domination through various means, followed by influence on government regulation and public opinion through the press.
The end goal of cults, monopolies, and cartels can be social, political, or economic, but the bottom line is that these players can have significant, non-integrated influence on the public in some domain. The question is how to regulate these players, internally and externally, so the public is well served in its needs and desires for functionality, diversity, and low prices, while the entrepreneur’s initiative is maintained.
Government solutions and monopolistic market control are examples of centralization. The healthy body is made of trillions of cells, each in its place, each limited by its neighbors, and none of them in charge. A tumor is a line of cells that has become self-focused and lost its connection to, and mutual regulation with, the whole. That is what I meant when I said the perversion in every case (government, cartel, monopoly, captain of industry) is centralization. A monopoly suppresses competition by pricing low to clear the market, then charges market-maximizing prices for essential (high-desire) items. Governments restore competition by breaking up large companies. It seems there should be some business ethics applied internally to ensure that market-domination methods are ethical, that is, that they care about customers. Lowering prices to eliminate competition, then raising them, is simply unethical. Government-industry collusion that influences law through campaign contributions to produce regulation that favors one market competitor is a moral failure. Other competitive practices are arguably just good business to gain market share.
A failure of perception
Here we shall examine the pattern of Conscious Point Physics, the cell, and the market to establish a metaphorical parallel.
A Conscious Point computes its move from what it perceives. What it can perceive determines what it can consider. Now consider what the cancer cell has lost. It hasn’t lost its ability to act; it acts with enormous energy. It has lost its ability to perceive the whole. Signals from its neighbors still arrive, but it no longer responds. It computes its move as if it were alone.
Greed is the same failure in a man. It is not mainly a failure of will. It is a narrowing of perception. The greedy man computes his next move from a sphere that has shrunk to himself. His neighbor is still there, still sending signals: “I need to eat.” “You’re hurting me.” “That was mine.” When greed has overtaken a man, he no longer takes them into account.
This is an analogy, not a result the physics proves. It explains why the remedy can’t consist only of outside constraints. You can cut out or poison a cancer cell, but health is a body whose cells can recognize aberrant cells and contain, eliminate, or restore them to the healthy function of listening to the whole. That is what “love your neighbor as yourself” is: a command to widen your sphere of perception until your neighbor’s good is as much a part of what you weigh when you decide your move. The corporate/community conscience depends on the conscience of the individuals who compose larger institutions/groups.
Challenging the analogy
The analogy between cancer and monopoly is that both are unregulated aggregations of functional cells within a larger body or economy. The cancer cell does not choose to become cancerous; it results from gene damage, accidents, toxin exposure, infection, etc. A person with cancer may or may not have done something consciously or unconsciously to develop it. Often, the cause can be connected to choosing to smoke, live an unhealthy lifestyle (out of ignorance or anesthetizing the pain of life with food), or work in a toxic environment. Once we know the risk, it becomes a choice, but it still damages us if we choose badly – choice does not sanctify or immunize. Unhealthy food and behavior choices reflect poor internal governance.
A man chooses the actions that put himself and others at risk, sometimes by accident, and other times when fully informed. That is the one thing humans have that conscious points and cells do not: the ability to override the law of the whole. A man may suppress his conscience because of ignorance/naivete, or he may choose to silence it to achieve a specific goal (more money, power, fame, sensual experience). The social pathology underneath the tumor of unethical business growth may stem from childhood pathology. The monopolist may have seared his conscience because of trauma, the pain of difficult circumstances, or by feeding his addictions. He knows his neighbor is there, but has considered his own needs more. That is why we call greed a sin rather than a disease. The remedy includes choosing new behaviors and attitudes toward our fellow man. The behaviors may include intoxication, illicit sexuality, conspicuous consumption, desire for fame or power to fill a hunger inside, and other signs of excess or deficiency and dysregulation. Repenting of old behaviors and attitudes and adopting new behaviors will be the larger arc, but the inner work required to make such changes will need more granularity.
This perspective also answers the first question Isak asked: why a society needs a written constitution when conscious points don’t. Conscious Points cannot defect, and cells defect only through damage. Men can defect on purpose. A person can choose to stop listening to the whole and suffers from an excessive love of self and a deficient love of others. If he is fortunate, such a man will hear the voice of conscience/the still small voice of the Holy Spirit, and heed the counsel of neighbors, clergy, and mental/spiritual health professionals. When internal warning and intervention fail, he may someday face the State’s harsher counsel. Juries and courts administer their machinery of transformation through the cycle of rapport, confrontation, and change, and will say “enough” when conscience and personal initiative are insufficient regulators.
How a body stays healthy
How does a body keep cancer from taking over? Not mainly by chemotherapy or surgery. Chemotherapy may be a lifesaving tool for some, for a while, but it is a blunt one; the collateral damage can be significant, the treatment may cease to be effective, and the invasion returns if even a small seed remains. Chemo attacks every rapidly dividing cell, healthy and sick alike, and the patient suffers. The main defense is ultimately the one God gave us: the immune system, distributed everywhere, recognizes abnormal cells early, while they are small, and removes them long before they become life- and function-threatening tumors. Many newer cancer treatments work by stripping away the tumor’s disguise so the body’s own immune system can see it and do its job.
A society works the same way. When the tumors are already large, the big central remedies have their place: antitrust law, breaking up a monopoly, and prosecuting fraud. But those remedies can be like chemotherapy. They are blunt; they harm the healthy along with the sick, and a government big enough to wield them is itself at risk of becoming the largest tumor of all. We will see that happen in Chapter 5.
A society’s real health is distributed. It is a market with many competitors, where no one grows large enough to capture the entire market, and the economy’s survival does not depend on a single supplier. Defenses include neighbors who say “enough” early, while the problem is small; juries who see through a disguise; and churches and families in communion with their neighbors; everyone needs accountability for doing the right thing. The public likely will not recognize the pathology of the individual who walks through the public spaces wearing the demeanor of the sharp-dressed man. Intimate knowledge, accountability, and relationships with a group of men committed to ethical business keep the lone businessman from sinking into self-obsessed pathology. As with the body, the tumor wears the clothes of healthy tissue, so can the man who hides his inner life from examination by anyone except himself.
Growth for its own sake
Last, Isak’s worry that capitalism has to keep growing, has to keep going out to get more. The writer Edward Abbey said that growth for its own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell. This is correct, but growth itself isn’t cancerous; it’s focusing on growth alone at the expense of the larger whole. A child grows. A healthy body grows to its proper size, then keeps renewing itself: cells die and are replaced every day, and the body stays alive through steady, orderly production.
An economy should work like that: growth is good when it serves the needs of a growing population and a more affluent, prosperous, luxuriant one. Growth is good when it expands to serve those who previously lacked access to goods and services. Growth becomes cancerous when it no longer serves the whole, only itself. When “How much is enough?” gets the answer “Just a little more,” the question is whether that desire for more is blind to its environment. Is this the desire to serve more people with goods and services, or the desire to own everything to satisfy a desire to control, be powerful, be famous, or other drives that center on self more than others?
So self-organization does not fail because its rules are bad. It fails when the beings operating within it stop perceiving the whole. For Conscious Points, that can never happen; God is in control, and He is always Lawful. For cells, it happens by accident or the failure to properly care for the body. For men, it happens by a complex mixture of nature, nurture, and choice. The group must recognize and accurately diagnose the pathology to nourish, teach, discipline, or confine the aberrant actor. As a society, we cannot pretend that all behaviors are justified. There is a remedy that cells don’t have: men can learn the ways of health, repent/renouce the old ways, develop a new heart, adopt the ways of Christ, and be born again. Being born again is sometimes through long, hard labor that almost kills us; sometimes it is quick and relatively easy; it is usually hard work, and eventually everything works out fine. Regardless, a new heart is always available.
Notes
The California water dispute concerns pumping limits imposed to protect the delta smelt, listed as a threatened species in 1993. Federal timber harvest in the Pacific Northwest fell sharply after the northern spotted owl was listed in 1990 and the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted in 1994.
Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg, “The Hallmarks of Cancer,” Cell 100 (2000), and “Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation,” Cell 144 (2011), describe the capabilities cited here: evasion of growth suppressors (including contact inhibition), resistance to cell death, induction of new blood vessels, evasion of the immune system, and invasion and metastasis. The comparison of antitrust enforcement to chemotherapy and of distributed competition to immune surveillance is an analogy, not a medical claim.
Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please (1988).
Chapter 4 — Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and the King
I described the cults of our time as groups that say, “My way is the only right way.” But that is exactly what Christianity does. To resolve this paradox, we must closely examine the facts and our standard of truth, since the cult’s truth may be false, and the true truth is true regardless of who says it.
THOMAS: The interesting thing is that there is a particular way to think that’s right. An old folk saying goes: “Everybody wants good roads.” That’s just a fact. Nobody wants a road with chasms in it, or boulders that fell from the cliff across it.
ISAK: Or a tree across it.
THOMAS: Everybody wants good roads, and that phrase is the equivalent of absolute morality. Nobody wants bad roads. The only people who want bad roads are highway robbers. They take advantage of a break in the system to victimize people who are vulnerable; the stagecoach comes up to the washed-out road, the robbers jump out and say, “All right, everybody, hands up. Where’s the strongbox?”
ISAK: So your point is that it’s a moral good, a moral truth, that the government should pay for roads. But isn’t that a socialist idea, taxing everybody for a common good?
THOMAS: I didn’t address that, and it’s a really good point. When we talk about government taking one person’s money and giving it to someone else to meet their needs, that is the central planning, authoritarian, communist element. In the case of good roads, we’re saying that in this particular area there’s a common good, and that’s why we have government: to take care of the common good. Libertarians and a group called anarcho-capitalists say that if you put a price on everything, somebody will take care of it if they want it badly enough to pay the cost. In this system, everyone pays their share, and only the things that people want done are done. In this system, there is no government; people advocate for themselves. As a result, each person negotiates their own prices. People vote by purchasing what they want. Cooperation is required for large purchases. The market handles everything from fire and police to roads, and no one complains about waste, cost, or service because people pay for what they want and use.
Each of these systems has a good argument. Anarchy even has a place. It lies in letting people experience their own lives and everything that goes on in them. Even anarchy has its place; some level of anarchy is absolutely irreducible. In physics, that’s thermal noise. At its smallest level, nature is anarchic. But its environment tempers that anarchy. It only goes so far, and then it passes into a realm where it’s ordered. Things get hotter and hotter, and you get a sun. The sun is extremely chaotic, and yet it’s a very ordered object. It holds itself together at a particular size. So the question is: What size boundary marks where anarchy passes into order?
ISAK: Interesting. Keep going.
THOMAS: Take the anarchy of an individual life. “I want to be free.” What do you want to be free to do? “I want to be free to work, have a family, do recreation, travel on good roads, and go to nice places on them.” That dream sounds like you want a very ordered life.
ISAK: Yeah.
THOMAS: It seems contradictory, but it illustrates the principle of living a compartmentalized life where mutually contradictory things can both exist. For example, I want the anarchy of unrestricted access to all these things, but I want them in an orderly way. An ordered life has many parts, and each part has freedom within it, the unpredictability of anarchy. When I have gotten all the experience I want from one, I move to another. We do not want the disorder of a tornado. That’s too much randomness and disorder. You have a lot of freedom there, as you can walk through spaces that were once houses and trees, but it’s too disordered to experience anything but the disorder. Usually, I don’t want the disorder of unlimited boundaries within an ordered path. I prefer good roads, recreation, and family.
ISAK: Anarchy gets old.
THOMAS: Anarchy gets old if you get too much of it in areas of life where order is desired. Order gets old if there is too much of it – a prison cell in solitary is very ordered, but it’s too ordered.
Isak’s question prompted a question for me: where is the size boundary at which anarchy becomes order? The answer turns out to be the answer to one of Isak’s questions.
Isak’s question was about democracy. If I argue that a constitutional republic is the form of government closest to the structure of reality, I have to say whether that’s a derivation (a conclusion that follows from the fundamental nature of the universe) or just a preference. A monarchy with a good king might fit the pattern just as well: one wise ruler preserving the good.
In my own framework, God is a king, not an elected president. So why should human government be democratic? Isak concluded that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions out works better than central command. Then he noticed that this is an argument from human weakness, not from physics.
I think the argument from human limitation and the argument from the physics turn out to be the same argument.
God is King, and the throne is taken
Start with Isak’s evaluation that God is a monarch. The universe is clearly not a democracy. The rules the Conscious Points follow were not put to a vote. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom, and its King is not up for re-election.
I do not support democracy in the sense that I believe the majority is the source of what is right. The majority chose Barabbas. A crowd that shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Crucify him” on Friday. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, and a system that treats it as final authority follows and caters to the mob’s will. Pure democracy is mob rule with a vote count. Fifty-one percent can rob forty-nine, and whether your money or agency is taken with a ballot instead of a six-gun, it is still robbery.
But notice what follows from God being King. If the throne belongs to Him, then no man can rightly sit on it. That is what I mean by the Revolutionary War slogan: “No King but King Jesus.” It is not a slogan against monarchy as a form. It says the office of absolute sovereign is already filled. Every man who claims absolute power over other men is claiming a seat that is not vacant.
That is the Bible’s own verdict. When Israel asked Samuel for a king “like all the nations,” God told Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Then He had Samuel warn them what a king would do. He would take their sons for his chariots and their daughters for his kitchens, their best fields for his servants, and a tenth of everything, until they cried out because of the king they had chosen. It accurately describes centralized government, and it was written three thousand years ago. Little has changed in men’s hearts.
Why not a monarchy with a good king? The question isn’t whether a good king would govern well. Some did. David was a man after God’s own heart. Hezekiah and Josiah led the nation back to God. The problem is what came after them. Hezekiah’s son, Manasseh, was one of Judah’s most wicked kings. Rehoboam succeeded Solomon and split the kingdom in two by promising to be harsher than his father. A monarchy rises and falls with the heir’s character. Even a good king has no one to correct him when he goes wrong, except a prophet like Nathan, willing to risk his life to say, “Thou art the man.” Monarchy puts a nation’s character on one man, and men’s character is inconsistent.
How God governs what He made
Now the physics: Conscious Point Physics does not derive a constitutional republic from first principles, but its principles are consistent with it. No ballot box exists in the structure of space; each Conscious Point follows His rules perfectly. This is how God actually governs the universe He made. This tells us how He intends men to be governed.
God does not move each Conscious Point by direct command. He gave the points their rules, and each point perceives what is within its own small sphere, computes its move from what it perceives, and moves itself. No point commands another. No point perceives the whole universe. Each one sees only its own neighborhood. And from countless local perceptions and local moves, all obeying the same law, everything comes: atoms, stars, living bodies. No central office issues the order. It emerges from local agents faithfully following a law that stands above them all.
So creation’s structure is neither a monarchy of creatures nor a democracy of creatures. It is a Kingdom whose King wrote the law, and whose subjects govern their own moves, locally, under that law. God alone holds absolute sovereignty at the top. Below it, agency is distributed and local, and no creature rules another by decree.
This is an argument from pattern, not a proof. The physics describes how Conscious Points behave; it contains no theory of government. My claim is that a constitutional republic aligns with how God governs creation. The physics doesn’t derive a republic, but it does reflect the pattern of a people governed by the rule of law.
The question is then: why is spreading decisions out better than central command? The answer is, because no human has God’s knowledge. But why doesn’t any human have God’s knowledge? Because every created thing perceives only within its own sphere. That limitation is present in human nature, and it is built into every created point. Only God perceives the whole. So the argument for a Constitutional Republic rests on human limitation, and it reflects creation’s structure. Every creature is finite in what it can perceive, which is why no creature may be trusted with the whole.
James Madison put the practical conclusion plainly. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels governed men, no controls on government would be necessary. We are not angels, and angels do not govern us. So government must be able to control the governed, and the people must control the government; only people faithful to God’s character are worthy and trustworthy to control government. To do this, we must acknowledge that God exists, be willing to name our God, study and know His ways, expect that behavior, and hold each other and government to account for acting according to His ways.
Where anarchy passes into order
That brings me back to the size boundary.
At the smallest scale of human life is the individual and the family. There, government is mostly self-government: a man ruling his own appetites; a father and mother ordering their home, their economics, their recreation, and raising their children in the ways of the Lord.
The next boundary is about 150 people. That is roughly the number of people a man can actually know: their names, their faces, their families, and how they live. Researchers studying human groups have found that number again and again, in villages, military companies, and congregations. Below that size, a community can largely govern itself through relationships. Everyone knows who can be trusted. Accountability is personal. When a brother says, “You’re getting out of line,” it means something, because he knows you, and it means more if he knows the Laws of God. That is why I have proposed a group of about 150 as the basic building block of the civic network I have been developing. At that size, a community can still feel like a family.
Above that size, you can no longer know everyone, and you need something else: representation. You choose someone you do know, whose character you have seen, to stand for you among people you don’t know. And that is exactly the structure Moses was given. When judging the whole nation was crushing him, his father-in-law Jethro told him to choose able men who feared God, men of truth who hated covetousness, and make them rulers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They judged the small matters at the lowest level. Only the great matters came up to Moses. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, “Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.” The people chose men known among them, and God set them over them under His law.
That is a republic, [Res: (the thing), Publica: (the public)], a government of the people. It was in the Bible three thousand years before Philadelphia: a people choosing leaders they know, organized in nested levels from smallest to largest, each level bound by a law written by God, who is the King above them all. It has the same shape as the physics: local knowledge, local decisions, one law above everyone, and no creature on the throne.
No state should reach beyond prosecuting crime.
The republic depends on the King
One more thing: the republic works only if the law above it is real and the people submit to it.
John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and that it is wholly inadequate to govern any other. He was right, and the physics shows why. Distributed agency produces order only when every agent follows the same law. Conscious points can’t help following theirs. Men can refuse. A republic of men who have rejected the law above them is not really a republic. It is a crowd with a constitution, and a crowd will eventually vote itself whatever it wants, including a king. That is how republics have always died. Rome was not first conquered by a foreign enemy. It handed itself to Caesar.
So when someone asks whether I believe in democracy, this is my answer. I believe in the Kingdom of God. And I believe the best form of human government under that Kingdom is a constitutional republic: nested levels of self-government, beginning with the man who governs himself and the family that governs its home, rising through communities small enough for their members to know each other, bound at every level by a moral law no majority can repeal, with every office held as a stewardship under God. That form is not derived directly from the physics, but it is consistent with it. It is the form most in harmony with the way God actually governs what He has made. And it keeps the throne vacant for the only One who can fill it.
It works only as long as the people keep Jesus as King, use Him as the standard of the law, and hold each other accountable for abiding by it. When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, a woman is said to have asked him what kind of government the delegates had made. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” We keep it the same way a Conscious Point keeps its place in the order of things: by following the law that we were given from God, in the place we were given, one move at a time.
Notes
“Everybody wants good roads” echoes the Good Roads Movement of the 1880s through the 1910s, which campaigned for paved rural roads across the United States.
1 Samuel 8:5–18; Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (the limits placed on Israel’s king); Exodus 18:13–26 (Jethro’s counsel); Deuteronomy 1:13–15; Matthew 20:25–28; 2 Samuel 12:7 (Nathan); 2 Kings 21 (Manasseh); 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam); Matthew 27:15–23 (Barabbas).
James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788). John Adams, letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798. Franklin’s reply is recorded in the notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Convention.
The figure of roughly 150 is anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s estimate of how many stable personal relationships a person can maintain. The 150-member cell is the building block of the Christos Voting Network.
Edit of Edit for Fellowship Essay for 10/4/2026
Chapter 5 — From Pleasantville to the G-Men: How Every Remedy Is Corrupted
Isak and I agreed that too much anarchy is disturbing, and too much order is boring.
THOMAS: Maximum chaos and maximum stability are both intolerable. In social and individual situations, the government’s job (as per Romans 13) is to establish laws that reflect God’s laws so people can act, even encouraged, to move toward Godliness. The State should be limited to enforcement (fines and restraint) of criminal behavior (crimes against person and property). This is a constitutional republic (res: the thing; publica: the people), meaning it is government of the people, and the people ask for restraint.
Without state law and enforcement, no uniform consequences are administered for violating moral or civil law. Those who have been violated, or their clan, will likely seek revenge or retaliation after a guilty verdict. The problem with such vigilante and revenge justice is that guilt can be misjudged, and excessively harsh punishment can be meted out.
People are driven by the animal passions of sloth (avoiding work), survival (doing what it takes to stay fed, sheltered, clothed… avoidance of pain, cold, poverty, and death), pleasure (satisfaction of the senses), and avoidance (pain, cold, poverty, death). People will choose the easiest path to satisfaction of their desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain. When pleasures are removed (or unavailable) and deprivation sets in, people are motivated to commit criminal violations of person and property to satisfy desire. It is the state’s place, as God’s representative, to provide the disincentive to criminal violation, which is a de facto steering people away from unGodliness. This is the Righteousness and Accountability of my 2028 New ERA Presidential campaign.
Enforcement will happen, even in the most lawless society. In response to violation, animal instincts of self-preservation ensure that those who are violated will oppose those who violate the boundaries of person and property. The only difference between vigilante/private justice and a society without centralized government is that the violator of law and standards of law will be a patchwork of judicial standards, tolerance thresholds, and retaliatory punishment.
If the State’s standards of law are not God’s standards, and society’s laws are not God’s law, the people will oppose the injustice of the State and culture. In a secular and free society, there will be a spectrum of people who respect and disrespect God’s law. The animal within us desires to satisfy our survival needs and wants for comfort with as little work as possible. Energy is a limited resource, and we are innately driven to obtain the most gain with the least work. We are driven by sloth, because it is easier/less painful than working.
Everyone wants to experience less pain. Some people lack the moral restraint to consume only what they have produced, and they take the next step toward theft because “It’s a lot easier to take other people’s stuff.” The criminal, the person who doesn’t want to live by God’s law, will take a six-gun to Pleasantville, line up the shopkeepers and bankers, load their sacks, ride out of town, and enjoy the goods until he needs a refill. Then he goes back to Pleasantville to pull another heist.
Government’s job is to supply disincentive to criminal violation, so they say, “Mr. Capone, we don’t like the way you ride into town and take other people’s stuff, so we’re going to send the G-men after you. We will catch you and isolate you from society so you can’t do that do it anymore.” Everybody says, “This is great. The disorder is under control.” Now there are G-men everywhere. But when the law arrives and works, the G-men have nothing to do. They need to justify their jobs, so they find other ways to be useful. They may say, “We’ll go into surveillance and watch everybody.” Maybe they run sting operations, try to prevent crime by infiltrating, or find another enemy. So mission creep can happen. They decide to monitor everyone and find that all have violated some law in the maze of legislation and regulation. With ammunition against everyone, the G-men can be persuaded to look the other way for a little side money. The people can keep doing business, but now there’s both crime and corruption.
So we set up a court to judge the G-men. Courts are good because they administer justice uniformly, but they get corrupted too, through payoffs for judgments. So the government passes laws and establishes special investigators to watch the courts, and agencies to watch the investigators, etc. But that doesn’t solve the problem because crime and corruption never end until our hearts are transformed.
Humans naturally tend toward sloth and greed (exerting energy is painful, and excess energy is desirable). This internal drive leads people to do as little work as possible and be paid as much as possible. We step into criminality when we stop working and start taking other people’s stuff, and we stop controlling our appetites and take control of other people’s bodies and stuff to satisfy our hungers. Most of us don’t cross the line into theft, murder, lies, and adultery, but the temptation is there, and most feel the pull, even if most don’t act on it.
And while most of us wouldn’t take other people’s stuff, most of us will vote for the project that benefits me and costs others. We have little compunction about using the strong arm of government as our agent of theft, taking other people’s money to pay for our survival and comfort. We want the government to provide Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and pave good roads. But the government has no money other than what it takes from people. It supposedly invests your money so you will have money to retire on, but that pretense does not reflect reality.
I have met people who actually believe there is money being held in a Social Security Trust Fund. The government perpetuates the deception by saying the Trust Fund will run out of money in X years, when the SSTF has no funds to run out of. The SSTF only holds government bonds it owes to itself. The government doesn’t invest money to get a return. The money is not held in an account for your entire life and then returned to you with interest. The money we pay into Social Security is used to pay other people’s Social Security. If we take out more than we put in, we take other people’s money; if we don’t take out all we put in, we cannot pass that wealth on to our children and their children. At the beginning of Social Security, everyone paid in, and only a few people received. At some point, what people paid in, on average, equaled what they drew out. Regardless, no account stores the money we paid in for later withdrawal. Social Security is a transfer payment: one person is working to pay for another person’s expenditures. In effect, we are participating in the government’s theft from other people to pay for our retirement. Those who want to keep Social Security want to keep the cycle of theft going. It’s dishonest. (ref: SSTF Essay)
If we framed Social Security as charity and made contributions voluntary, that would be honest. Voluntary giving to support the poor retired lets us feel virtuous. Giving to widows and orphans is a Biblical mandate. Likewise, we could feel the weight of spending our free money on pleasure and survival throughout our lives.
As a halfway measure that would solve the philosophical-economic conundrum of government investing in the private sector economy and choosing winners and losers, we could do something else. We currently let the government deposit our Social Security dollars into the general fund, pay Social Security recipients from it, and spend the rest on various government programs. If we want to keep the Social Security system in place, then we could continue depositing the same amount as we currently pay, but instead of going to the general fund, we put that money into a pension fund that each taxpayer/Social Security participant and the Social Security Administration pension fund managers choose to invest in. Of course, this can distort the free market by directing money to government-favored investments, but it also gives people a chance to get educated, support new industries and technologies, invest in their retirement, and support the causes they believe in. This proposal has potential for abuse, misdirection of the economy, and choosing winners in the industrial world, but we have to grow up to do that. The alternative is being children who have taken no responsibility for our survival and support, and leaving an inheritance to our children’s children.
Medicare is not quite as big a fraud as Social Security, because, to an extent, it is like insurance; we pay a certain amount per year for medical coverage. The problem is that a government-supported insurance company distorts the insurance industry, and eventually only the government/one-payer insurance company survives. As a result, if we get sick, the government/Medicare/nationwide government-sponsored insurance company pays for our medical care. This is more in the realm of a government takeover of medicine, so it’s more properly called socialized medicine. It is not fully single-payer yet, but the difference between our system and single-payer/government-run medicine is almost indistinguishable.
On the other hand, Medicare/Medicaid is the same kind of investment in the private sector that chooses winners and losers, that we were worried about in the Social Security scenario. In Medicare, the healthcare dollars we spend have only allopathic options. Advocacy/direction toward real healthcare that supports healthy living, lifestyle, and exercise is almost non-existent in the Medicare/Medicaid system. The money we put into these systems should go into a Medical Savings Account (MSA) instead of the general Medicare fund. The same principles of self-directed investment should apply as for Social Security. If a person does not work and deposits nothing into their MSA, and they need medical care, then the private sector should handle it, and charity should support it. People who care about others should give to support them.
My point is that we vote for people who promise to direct government money to their district for public works, regulations, and business contracts. We vote for the robbers we like, so we don’t have to do the dirty work of riding into Pleasantville and holding up the stagecoach.
ISAK: So we don’t have to rob anyone ourselves.
THOMAS: We say, “Government, rob them for us, so we can get what we want/need without working so hard.” Every arrangement ends in corruption. The trouble is, we don’t know where that point is. We say we want a government, but not too big. We want police, but we don’t want them to get corrupt and require us to pay for protection from their shakedowns or to provide services they should already be providing because of their salaries.
Then the politicians say, “If we’re going to regulate you the way you like, you’ll have to pay for our campaigns so people vote for us.” Essentially, they say, “Send us campaign contributions, and we won’t regulate your business.” So businesses get overlooked because they paid not to be regulated, and we call the payoff a campaign contribution. Democracy itself gets corrupted by campaigns. We try to pass laws, but we leave big loopholes: “Everybody has to report everything, except the people with lots of money. They can have SuperPACs and give huge amounts. Anybody small will be monitored and regulated.” In a corruptocracy, you have to buy access to a politician, and you have to buy the politician for favorable legislation.
Everybody needs to survive. To survive, people work, take charity, or steal. Everybody either works for what they have, steals what they need, has someone else take things for them, or lives on charity. In a socialist economy, people who work are universally subject to the government stealing their stuff (through taxes to pay for people who aren’t working). Charity should meet the needs of the poor, but instead it becomes theft: taking stuff from one person and giving it to others without consent, and without the character-building and inner reward of sacrificing to give to the poor, widow, and orphan.
Corruption is officials/representatives/executives/judges, etc., selectively enforcing the law for personal benefit. In America, we don’t openly allow corruption. (Note: payoffs for selective enforcement are a normal business expectation in other countries.) Honest men pass laws, judge against, and prosecute corruption, but the same government that commits it also regulates the government that bends the law. Such self-regulatory efforts are ineffective. Laws defining corruption and prescribing prosecution by special prosecutors are ineffective because the “independent” enforcer is subject to corruption. Laws are ineffective barriers to a heart committed to rebellion against God’s law.
The problem is that everyone wants free stuff because getting stuff requires effort, and the human frame is governed by animal instincts to conserve energy. Those undisciplined in righteous ownership may succumb to the temptation of theft. Everyone wants to get stuff with the least effort. Getting the other guy to pay for it, or taking his stuff after he makes, finds, or buys it, is the animal inside us all.
Another principle is that humans desire security. This means getting and keeping more females to breed and multiply, more territory to graze, and more herds to hunt. Survival is more secure with more resources. In the modern context, the human drive for security shows up as greed, wanting more women, cars, property, and money. The human drive for security, comfort, and luxury drives men to build bigger businesses to experience the pleasure of the power, fame, and sensory stimulation that come with them. Pursuing this passion can concentrate the production of goods and services. This concentration can dominate the market, allowing one producer or coordinated group to set market prices for products and labor.
A single dominant business is not inherently bad and should not be eliminated reflexively. But when one player becomes dominant in a business space, it can distort product and labor prices, which a single person (captain of industry), business (monopoly), or allied industry (cartel) can set. In a free market, competitors can enter and challenge the captain of industry/monopoly/cartel. But high entry costs and the monopoly’s ability to sustain losses to eliminate competition make overthrowing the monopoly impractical. This has led to the belief that the government needs to intervene to break up dominant businesses.
So the problem is sloth and greed. Instead of saying, “I’ll work hard for my money and get what I need to survive and satisfy my desire for pleasure,” people try to have everything and do whatever they can to get more. When Rockefeller was asked how much is enough, he said—
ISAK: Just a little more.
THOMAS: Just a little more. There’s no end. Proverbs talks about things that are never satisfied, like the fire that never says “enough.” Greed is one of them. There’s no top to it. You can’t have enough power. You can’t have enough money. If you’re into destruction, it never ends either. Jim Morrison captured the essence of the eternal hunt for sensory satisfaction when he sang about looking for the next whiskey bar, and the next girl, and if not, we will die. The hunt never ends, and there’s never enough.
ISAK: That’s how it feels sometimes. If I don’t find it, I might as well be roadkill.
Every remedy for human wrongdoing that depends only on threat or exercise of force is subject to corruption. The heart desires more, and the heart of one who regulates desires more; the people who hold the power have the same hearts as the people they are supposed to restrain. We hire the sheriff to stop the robber, and the sheriff learns to take a cut. We appoint a judge to watch the sheriff, and the judge can be bought. We elect a legislature to write laws for the judge, and the legislature sells its votes for campaign contributions. The ancient Roman poet Juvenal asked the question two thousand years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? Every new guard is a man, and every man desires more; without an internal governor, corruption has no end.
That is not an argument against government. Everybody still wants good roads, and we all want someone to stop the man with the six-gun that came to take your property or life, and we want the punishment to fit the crime. It is clear that government cannot cure the disease. At best it can contain the symptoms. That is the same point I made about chemotherapy in Chapter 3. A central remedy strong enough to stop every robber is strong enough to become the biggest robber of all.
Notice, too, where the corruption actually starts. It doesn’t start with the G-men who were bought. It starts with covetous human nature: we want to survive and be comfortable; we want to conserve energy; so we want other people’s stuff without paying for it. So, we vote for “the robbers we like.” We want the government to take money from our neighbors and then give it to us as welfare and good roads in our area. This is the same heart as the man who rides into Pleasantville with a pistol. The man who votes for his own benefit has only found a more respectable way to rob his neighbor. Rockefeller’s “just a little more” isn’t a passion that tempts only one rich man. It lives in every citizen who votes himself his neighbor’s property, in every contractor who pads a bill, and in every official who looks the other way for a price. We complain that Washington is corrupt, but Washington is made of people like us. A bought government is the symptom. The disease is people who can be bought.
The Bible names the root: covetousness, sloth, and greed; the unwillingness to work for what one needs, and the residual restlessness when one’s needs are met. They are the two appetites behind every drama in the Pleasantville story. And Proverbs names what makes them so dangerous: they are never satisfied. Fire never says, “It is enough.” “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough.” (Proverbs 30:15-16)
A hunger that has no natural end can only be stopped by a decision. Somebody has to say “enough.” Laws can provide a penalty, a consequence for taking other people’s stuff, but we can’t regulate the fire that never stops by saying no.
That leaves only two ways to govern a people. The first is from the outside: more guards, more laws, more agencies, more agencies watching the agencies, in an endless string of watchers. That is where we have been heading for a century, and it ends where Samuel warned Israel it would end: with a government that takes a tenth of everything, then more. The second is from the inside: a people who restrain themselves, who can hear a neighbor say, “You’re getting out of line,” and answer, “You’re right,” and who need only a small government because citizens mostly govern themselves.
The second way is difficult, but it is the only long-term solution. That is why the American founders said our form of government was suitable only for a moral and religious people. The solution requires knowing the rules, knowing when to apply them, and keeping them. That is where Isak and I turned next.
Notes
The answer “Just a little more” is usually attributed to John D. Rockefeller.
Proverbs 30:15–16 lists the things that “are never satisfied,” including “the fire that saith not, It is enough.”
The whiskey-bar song is “Alabama Song,” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1927) and recorded by The Doors (1967).
Juvenal, Satires VI, 347–348.
1 Samuel 8:15–17 (the king will take “the tenth”).
Chapter 6 — The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You
Isak described the hunger that is never satisfied as: the next whiskey bar, the next thrill, and “just a little more.” This is where value discrimination comes in. What is good and valuable in the short and long term, and what are the consequences? This question intersects with meaning and purpose.
THOMAS: It isn’t what we want, or how much we want, that leaves us without peace and satisfaction; it’s that those hungers have no end. That’s what the question of ideology and values implies: that rules and standards exist for how to live right. If society has no rules for living right, and no one holds their brothers to them when no one is watching, people will see a chance to take a little more than they earned.
Everyone should watch out for everyone as though they were a brother. Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the answer is yes, you are. Watch out for yourself and your brother. If your brother says, “You’re getting out of line,” I should ask, “Really? Am I? I’ll have to look at that.” Then, after some introspection, respond truthfully: “Yes, you’re right,” and stop it. It’s reminiscent of Archie Bunker telling Edith, “Stifle yourself.” At some point you have to say no to bad behavior. That’s the Nancy Reagan campaign: “Just say no.” Say no to covetousness/greed. Say no to theft. And say yes to working with a servant’s heart. Regarding loving your country, love the Godliness that is manifest, and love the Godliness it could be. We are called to hate evil, and yes, hating evil is a family value; love the sinner, hate the sin and the spirit of evil. (Psalm 97:10): “Ye that love the LORD, hate evil: he preserveth the souls of his saints; he delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.” Proverbs 8:13: “The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.”
So the rule that is the moral equivalent of the physics is this. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. And “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (John 13:14). “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13:35).
We demonstrate that we love God by following His law. (John 14:15): “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” (1 John 5:3): “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.” (1 John 2:3-5): “And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.”
We love our neighbor by doing whatever promotes his welfare. Loving yourself is the most concrete. How do you love as He loved you? That calibrates our love. We know what love looks like, because “love as I have loved you” is another way of saying “What would Jesus do?”‘
People thought that slogan was trite, but it was the truth. It’s really the only thing we needed to know. We take “What would Jesus do?” into every part of life, and we live it. That’s how it should be done in government. It should be done that way in business, religion, relationships, work, raising children, and in honoring our parents.
You asked me the other day, “Can you have too much Christian nationalism?” The answer is no. The reason is how I define Christian nationalism. I define it as the government of the Kingdom of Heaven (KOH). Implementing the full KOH government is impossible without Jesus returning with power and authority. So the challenge is implementing Christian nationalism with humans administering a Christ-centered government.
People fear that government will impose doctrinal enforcement, but such behavior is explicitly not what a Christian nation is and does. The Witch Trials way, Protestant vs. Catholic war way, the Inquisition way, the Dillinger–Capone way, the Carnegie–Rockefeller–Mellon-Morgan way, the KKK/Jim Crow/Dred Scott way are not Christian nationalism.
The concern is that overtly acknowledging that we are a Christian nation, and have adopted Christian nationalism as the standard of legislated morality, will bridge a gap that will encourage people to go farther than just legislating crimes against persons and property. In particular, people will be emboldened to legislate against sexual acts that are defined as sin by the Bible. I address this more directly in later chapters, but in brief, my stand is that heterosexual sexual fidelity is significant because the heterosexual family unit is the elemental unit of society. I believe heterosexual fidelity must be embraced by the heart, will, and commitment, and that such imprinting is best done in the home, and supported through the culture, media, clerical and psychological counseling, healthy family relationships taught and modeled in the home, and government moral support in tone, words, and policy.
Examples of behavior that is not Christian nation behavior include captain-of-industry monopolism, cartelism, communism, and authoritarianism. The shaming and religious zealotry of The Handmaid’s Tale, Jonestown, and The Scarlet Letter are not examples of Christian nation-type policies. There are many perversions of Christianity justified by proof-texted verses. But the whole of the Bible must be distilled to the general principles of Christianity: the Sermon on the Mount, the life of Christ, the person and heart of Christ, and the way Christ lived as an ordinary citizen, businessman, priest, warrior, king, and judge. This high standard is Christian nationalism in a nation that actually follows the way of Christ, loving as He loved us. If it’s anything else, then it may be nationalism, but it’s not Christian. It may be Christian in name, and people may be using the Bible as their justification, but saying it’s Christian doesn’t make it so. God judges the heart.
ISAK: I think that’s the worry behind the whole Christian-nationalist debate: the Handmaid’s Tale scenario. I know people who are really concerned about “Christian nationalism”. What if women’s rights are taken away? Any number of horrible things could come from a group gaining power and deciding, “This is the way things are.”
Ideally, a Christian nation is one committed to acting as Christ wants us to. “What would Jesus do?” is the best way to frame all actions, laws, and speech. When we share a common Christ-like way of being, we know who people are when we meet them because we share a standard of goodness and trust as followers of Christ. When the national standard is Christ’s way, we know our role in our community. The cartels and the captains of industry don’t create a real service connection between people. Some people, maybe many, believe the Handmaid’s Tale image of religion as authoritarian and suppressive. I know the story is a caricature. But how would it play out? What does it look like when it’s done out of love, not out of control?
THOMAS: As Christians, we honor the principle of non-coercion and free will in matters of belief, thoughts, and inner life. This principle should apply universally and dictate that people change voluntarily because their minds and hearts have changed. This principle allows legal and physical restraint for criminal violations of person and property. All other behaviors should be left to the culture.
It is improper, and impossible, to force others to manifest the fruit of the Spirit in their inner lives. This is the realm of encouragement, teaching, modeling, and convincing people, through logic and evidence, to adopt a behavior. The deeper work uses the same tools to persuade people to consciously, positively, and willfully adopt a new inner life. The government, church, and teacher can’t force it. Threats of force and punishment can force outward behavior. The outward expression of the fruits of the Spirit can be faked, but the inner life cannot be. To some extent, human intention, desire, will, and action can accomplish that transformation and make changes in that direction. Making an intentional commitment to move toward that new inner state is helpful. Reinforcing self-talk and applauding the new inner reactive habit move in the right direction. In addition, a change of the inner man by grace, by a literal miracle, is worthy of prayer, hope, faith, and pursuit. Ultimately, grace is unmerited and cannot be forced, but we can exert personal effort to move toward the new man (expressing the fruits of the spirit).
Thus, there are two domains: the outer behavior and the inner thought life. Outer behavior can be coerced, but the inner cannot. Mind control/brainwashing/dis-information are efforts to control this inner life externally, but such efforts are fundamentally violative, as they contradict the intent and purpose of God’s creation, which is the expression of love for God (by obedience to/choice of His Law/Way) from free will.
Choosing to change one’s inner life (reactions, thought patterns, emotional responses) is a crucial step in the right direction, and it will succeed to varying degrees. Essentially all such efforts are a form of mind control, and if chosen freely, they are laudable and good if they move toward God’s perfect pattern of loving as Christ loved. Some may receive the transformation of the inner man as a miracle. But others suffer as Paul did, with a thorn in the flesh, and continue to struggle against the temptation of the flesh. Such patient endurance produces character, which brings a reward, which is ultimately treasure in heaven. A commitment to Christ as Lord cannot be expected to transform the heart without temptation to return, but He has promised His companionship in the trial.
The final step is establishing a relationship with Christ, following the pattern prescribed in the Gospels. Christ invited us to follow Him and His way and be reborn. The specifics of what happens when we are “reborn” are the fruits of the Spirit. The fruits mature internally and are exhibited externally. As many have testified, some are no longer tempted, but others now have a conscience and are tempted but must exercise the character to resist. Either way, the goal is transformation through the will and decision to follow in Christ’s steps. The one thing it is not is the forced route, the Inquisition, and all the other perversions of imposing Christian belief or profession on others. These are all the opposite of the opportunity God gave us and his intention for creating us. He gave us the opportunity to choose His way or follow our own path, and to choose to love Him from our hearts and free will. He gave us free choice and asked us to choose to “Love as I have loved you.”
The Inquisition and Cults use the language of God, holiness, the Bible, and Christ’s name, but hidden inside it is control. It can look like this: “We as a group are all going to love and serve God according to our own revelation of what is true.” Such groups use various enforcement methods: separation through distinctive dress and vocabulary; rituals and practices to please God; separation from close association with anyone outside the group; and enforcement of orthodoxy by expelling people for various infractions or beliefs; punishment for sexual, dietary, speech, or behavioral violations of the code. That’s the authoritarian side of religion that people are worried about. It’s also the version we’re told about in other countries that live under Sharia law, which prescribes practices for many of life’s daily activities. When many prescriptions tell you what you must do to please God, life doesn’t feel free.
The same evil drives each one. The man who claims to be serving the God of the Bible and tortures people who believe differently has committed the same evil as the man who says, “Give your life for this cause, and you’ll have seventy-two virgins.”
The question is how to influence the people, society, the world so Christ, through us, can bring about a holy society, a church, and a world fit to be the bride of Christ. I think the most effective witness is every individual affecting his circle of influence with his life and his words. Each of us witnesses to God’s standard through how we live. We all desire the Kingdom of Heaven to come on earth—for life to just be good. But much of that depends on how I treat you, and you treat me. So the real challenge is knowing how to act, acting it out, and encouraging, modeling, and teaching others to do the same. As we move closer to that ideal, the Kingdom of Heaven comes closer to manifestation on Earth.
Eschatological/end-times prophecies foretell a dramatic return of Christ with angels and power; all things will be set right, and the New Jerusalem will descend. That will eventually come, but that’s a distant, abstract hope we cannot depend on to rescue us from our daily struggles with character and relationships. We cannot wait to be happy until the end times are fulfilled. The real question is: what can we do today?
Serving our fellow man by teaching and demonstrating the goodness of life in Christ’s freedom is how witnessing and governance should be. Christ’s way is not to control anyone into holiness or force anyone to submit. Every person is a one-man evangelical witness for the goodness of Christ’s way. Witnessing should show that we live in His way. We should bear good fruit daily. It should be pleasant, and people should want it because it looks good and tastes sweet.
I don’t think we should apologize for promoting Christian nationalism in the way we are defining it. People can use a good, true, and right way, cause, and principle in the wrong way. There have been and are groups who call themselves Christian nationalists who are racists. I reject that version of Christian nationalism completely.
ISAK: The country needs a unity of mind. Under the Constitution, we’re all supposed to share an agreement, a common belief. “Borders, language, and culture” is the slogan Michael Savage popularized. Those are the elements that make a country a country: a people with faith in something and a shared mission. We probably don’t have much national pride right now because we lack a shared mission. Everybody has their own, and too many perspectives are tearing us apart.
Isak asked two important questions at the start of our conversation: 1) What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law? 2) And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?
Let me begin by describing the fear that people feel.
The fear is justified by history
Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good. In nature, God decides which arrangements of life and substance endure, and that is safe because He is good. In politics, men decide what to preserve and destroy, and it reveals a history of various kinds of abuse.
Examples include juries in the American South that acquitted lynchers for the better part of a century. These juries were not made up of atheists. Nearly every man on those juries was a professing, churchgoing Christian. Many of them believed they were defending a Christian social order. If I had stood at the courthouse door with a test that asked, “Do you hold the Bible as your moral standard?” every one of them would have said yes, and every one of them would have been seated.
So the problem in those courtrooms was not the Bible’s absence. It was a people who held the Bible and read it in a way that permitted contempt for their neighbor. Profession is not discernment. Christ said so Himself: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven,” (Matthew 7:21) and “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20) A test can examine what a man professes. It cannot examine his fruit; only God can examine his heart.
That means no safeguard works by checking labels. Any answer that amounts to “Put Christians in charge and trust them” is not an answer. It is exactly what the Inquisition’s defenders said.
So here is what I actually propose. Safeguards exist at four levels: in the definition of the faith itself, in the limits on how the state may use its sword, in the structure of government, and in the character of the people who lead it. None of them is sufficient alone. And all of them together can still fail. I will get to that at the end.
The first safeguard: the faith defines itself by its fruit, and its fruit cannot be coerced
Who decides what Christianity done right is? The first answer is that Christ already decided it, and He did not leave it vague. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” John 13:34. That is the calibration. We know what the love looks like because we have seen how He loved. He did not conscript anyone. He healed, taught, rebuked, and invited, and when the rich young ruler walked away, He let him go. He told Peter to put away his sword.
So the test of whether something done in Christ’s name is Christian is not whether the people doing it say so. The test is whether it looks like what He did. And the simplest form of that test, for anything done in public life, is this: Would the neighbor on the receiving end of this act feel loved by it? Not flattered, not indulged, not necessarily pleased, because correction is not always pleasant. But loved: treated as a child of God whose good is being sought.
A lynching fails that test instantly. So does the Inquisition. So do forced conversion, forced baptism, and the burning of heretics. None of these was Christian nationalism done badly. They were not Christian at all. They were the captain-of-industry spirit, the cartel spirit, the will to dominate, wearing the church’s clothes.
Coercion is ruled out for a deeper reason: God gave man free choice. He didn’t have to. He could have made beings that obeyed Him automatically, like a Conscious Point obeying its rules. He made us able to refuse Him, because love that cannot refuse is not a choice. A forced conversion is no conversion. A man who repents because there is a gun at his back has not repented; he has only been frightened. So a government that tries to compel faith works against the purpose for which God created man. The brake on government coercion is written into the center of the revelation of God’s intent for man’s existence.
Not every creed has that brake. A creed whose founding texts command conquest has no such brake. The moderates who ignore or contextualize these commands are not a threat. Zealots faithful to the literal texts can move the culture of the entire religion if the moderates are not vocally/actively opposing their message.
A creed whose founding text tells its followers to overcome evil with good, love their enemies, pray for those who persecute them, and forgive seventy times seven has a brake built into its first principles. When its followers become persecutors, they must disobey their own scripture. That is why the right response to factions/sects/movements that violate Christian principles in the name of Christ is not less Christianity, but a fuller, whole-Bible understanding of Christianity’s general principles. And the first people who should stand up and say, “That is not Christ,” are Christians.
The same text answers Isak’s worry about the people who want “all the black and brown people out.” God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” Acts 17:26. In Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Greek.” Galatians 3:28. Blood nationalism is not Christian nationalism. It is the idolatry of the tribe, the very thing the gospel came to break down. I return to it in Chapter 12.
The second safeguard: the sword has a limited job
The second answer is about what the State may do. The fear is that the state may do whatever its majority believes.
I have never argued that the government should prosecute every sin. Thomas Aquinas argued centuries ago that human law should not try to forbid every vice, because the attempt produces worse evils than it prevents. I agree. The sinner, his family, church, and friends should resolve most sin through confession, repentance, and accepting the forgiveness offered. Professional help with letting go of old habits, ways of thinking, and feelings may help. Ultimately, we should “…Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”
John 8:11, as Jesus commanded the woman caught at in the act of adultery. Enforcing Godly character is not the business of the State.
But that does not mean the nation must be silent about sin, or the fruits of the Spirit. Naming a thing is different from punishing it. A nation, like a family, has standards of moral excellence it aspires to, and it should teach and speak about them. It can name the opposite of those standards for what it is. It can say, in its laws, in its schools, and in the public speech of its leaders, that adultery, fornication, and every sexual practice outside the covenant of heterosexual marriage fall short of what this nation holds as good and pleases God. The God of the Bible also condemns a long list of unregulated behavior, including drunkenness, greed, and breaking a child’s spirit. Officially naming sin is not persecution, a phobia, nor is it establishing religion. It is telling the truth about missing the mark of Godly character. Practices are either good, morally neutral, or neither. When public and private leadership, business, media, art, and sports take a stand against personal and public sin, the nation aligns its morality, character, and heart with God; His blessing requires this. Naming sin is essential; identifying the enemy is necessary to defeat him.
The nation does not humiliate the sinner by public shaming. “For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.”
Ephesians 5:12. Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery; He said, “Go and sin no more.” A nation that loves as Christ loves does not put the adulterer in the stocks or sew a scarlet letter on her coat. The purpose is not punishment but rehabilitation. That work begins at home, and society reinforces it. The partners in personal and national holiness are the family, the community, the counselor, and the church. In Chapter 10, I describe how a nation can support a turn toward God and holiness without becoming what Isak fears.
The question is: when does the State draw the sword?
First, the state punishes the sins that make victims: murder, rape, the abuse of children, theft, fraud, violence. Crimes should be defined; laws should codify them, as those acts that take my property or hurt my person. On these, the atheist and the priest agree. And I count among the victims the one whose voice is least heard: the child in the womb. Abortion falls on the side of violence. It is not a private sin between consenting adults, or exercising autonomy over one’s body. The sexual acts between consenting adults are the point. That is the moment a woman has the right to do with her body as she wants. At the moment of conception, another soul enters the relationship equation. All souls are under God’s ownership, as is all of nature and life. Regardless of his independence from the body of the mother, it is murder when his life is taken. Viability and independence cannot be used as the criterion by which to judge the border between lawful and criminal abortion, as the child has no independence from parents until self-sufficient adulthood; infancy and childhood are the obvious examples of dependency; the lack of a binary divide in the timeline from conception to adulthood makes the argument for viability and dependency one of convenience rather than qualitative perfection. The argument for rape, incest, and malformation falls under the category of God’s providence to end a life rather than man’s sense of indignity or inconvenience. Be fruitful and multiply was God’s first command, because He desires to live through every part of His creation. It is His judgment, not ours. I continue this argument for a total ban on abortion except for saving the life of the mother, such as in ectopic pregnancy, in Chapter 18. Adoption is the appropriate option. The inconvenience, shame, and emotional reminders of incest, rape, and uncommitted relationships can and should be borne. He is faithful to be with us as we endure. Consider the burden a short trial, a time of service to God.
Second, the state should never compel a man to take part in what he believes is sin, or the support of sin. A baker should not be forced to bake and decorate the homosexual couple’s wedding cake; a photographer should not be forced to photograph the wedding. When the state punishes a man for declining, the State is a de facto enforcer of a secular religious creed. When a man does not honor another man’s religious creed, he does not violate the other man’s person or property. The homosexual might believe that everyone should honor his ritual of “marriage.” But God allows freedom of thought and belief (inner qualities not subject to observation or enforcement by man) as primary personal abilities and attributes. The State should not enforce observance, honoring, or participation in the beliefs, rituals, speech, or sacraments of a man of another faith. Disruptive behavior that interferes with a man’s lawful practice of his rituals, beliefs, sacraments, or speech should be treated as a crime against person or property if the interference is judged unlawful conduct, without regard to the sacramental nature of the behavior.
Third, the state judges men by their actions, never by their doctrine. A man’s view of baptism, the end times, or which day is the Sabbath, whether he is Catholic, Baptist, or of no denomination, religious affiliation, or belief, should never carry the force of law. Christians imposing doctrine on one another is as much a sign of immaturity as anything the secularists do. It is also what the Founders feared, and it was the subject of Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. The Association feared the government would intervene in their religious practices. In response, Jefferson replied that a wall of separation existed between church and State; thus, the Association need not worry about state interference.
- “Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should’make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Thomas Jefferson’s January 1, 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association:
The modern invocation of Separation of Church and State is not what Jefferson meant. The American founding’s caution about religion was not mainly unbelievers against believers. It was Christians afraid of one another. Baptists and Quakers had been jailed by Christian magistrates, and they were among those who fought hardest for the separation of church and state.
Fourth, speech is free, and the state may restrict it only where it becomes an act in embryo: a threat, an incitement, a fraud. A man advocating a way of life I think is wrong is not threatening me. He is left alone.
So the answer to “Who decides what Christianity done right is?” has a second part. Where Christians disagree on doctrine, the state is silent. Where they agree on the moral law, on the commandments, and on the two great commandments on which they hang, the nation has a conscience. That is what John Adams meant when he wrote to Jefferson that independence had been won on “the general principles of Christianity.”
“The general Principles, on which the Fathers Achieved Independence, were the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite…”
“And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity, in which all those Sects were united: And the general Principles of English and American Liberty, in which all those young Men United, and which had United all Parties in America, in Majorities sufficient to assert and maintain her Independence.”
“Now I will avow, that I then believed, and now believe, that those general Principles of Christianity, are as eternal and immutable, as the Existence and Attributes of God…” John Adams to Thomas Jefferson on June 28, 1813
A Baptist and a Catholic can both stand under that. They cannot both stand under each other’s catechism, and the state should never ask them to. The next chapter explains how this squares with the First Amendment.
The third safeguard: power is broken into pieces and handed to neighbors
The third answer is structural, and here the American founding did something remarkable. It did not trust anyone with all of the power: not the executive, not the legislature, not the courts, not the majority.
In nature, one Being decides which arrangements endure, and that works because He knows everything and is wholly good. No man is either. So in politics, many hands must decide, and none can do it alone. The Constitution divides power among three branches that check each other. It divides it again between the nation and the states. It reserves a list of rights that no majority can vote away without enormous effort. And it makes the Constitution itself very hard to change: two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. That high barrier is itself a safeguard. You do not write something into a nation’s foundation unless nearly everyone agrees. It means that the amendment I have argued for, declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible, will almost certainly not pass in my lifetime, barring a sovereign act of God. The same barrier that keeps my amendment honoring the God of the Bible out keeps out the amendments of people who would establish Political Correctness as the foundation of the nation.
Federalism is the second structural safeguard. When power sits mostly with the states and counties, a failure in one place does not become a failure everywhere. A man who opposes one state’s moral code can move to another. And when a community proves unfit to govern itself in some matter, it can refer the discipline to a superior authority for adjudication. The county’s authority can pass up to the state, or the state’s to the nation, for as long as the failure persists.
When Southern juries would not convict lynchers, the nation was right to bring those cases into federal court. That was a wider community’s conscience overruling a narrower one. My objection is only that this judicial/cultural violation made jury nullification its casualty. The remedy for the injustice was permanent and universal. A father who takes the car keys from the son who drove recklessly is right. A father who never gives the keys back to any of his children is no longer disciplining; he is withholding from them the privileges and responsibilities of mature, trustworthy adulthood after they have learned their lesson.
The jury is the third structural safeguard. Every other check on the government runs through the government. Courts review legislatures, legislatures fund courts, the executive appoints judges. The jury is the one place where ordinary neighbors sit in judgment of their neighbor according to the principles of the law, and where their acquittal cannot be appealed. But the jury has a more fundamental duty than judging the facts; it must be able to judge the law.
If a legislature passed an unjust law, twelve citizens could still look at the man in the dock and say, “This law, applied to this man, is wrong, and we will not be the instrument of judging his guilt nor imposing its penalties.” John Adams wrote that it was not only the juror’s right but his duty to reach a verdict based on his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, even when it directly opposed the court’s direction.
That power still exists. No juror can be punished for an acquittal. What has been taken away is the jury’s knowledge of it. Since Sparf v. United States in 1895, judges have not been required to tell juries they hold it, and a prospective juror who says honestly that he would use it is struck from the panel. I have friends who told the truth in jury selection and were sent home for it. So we are teaching our citizens that they may judge the law only if they hide that they would. I would restore the instruction and stop punishing candor. Jury nullification can be, and has been, abused, as it was in the South. The alternative is a people with no direct influence on the law they must judge by and enforce.
The last structural safeguard is the vote. I propose that people should exercise their vote not only on election day, but every day. I am building a tool to make participatory democracy a reality. The concept rests on a simple idea: every citizen informed, every citizen voting on every issue, and every citizen adding their argument to the public conversation with their name attached. Such votes cast on developing policy are not binding; rather, they give every interested American the opportunity to shape policy at every stage, from infancy to maturity. Openly argued opinion produces consensus because, at some level, every man knows the truth. The truth is stubborn; it never changes, and it resonates with the heart. A government that knows what its people think, and why, may be influenced by reason, the spectrum of thought, and the outliers of opinion. A State under constant surveillance by an active army of citizens scrutinizing bills, judicial acts, and administrative action will not fall into corruption, incompetence, and tyranny as easily.
The fourth safeguard: leaders who can be corrected
The fourth answer concerns the men who lead. A leader who will not admit error cannot be corrected. So the way a Christian holds public power is itself a safeguard, or its absence a danger.
I have tried to practice what I am describing. I take positions, give my reasons, and hold each position open to a better argument. I cannot claim to speak for the Lord in every position; but I openly admit that I am trying to. That admission is not modesty for its own sake. It is structural. The man who claims to be God’s mouthpiece has put himself beyond correction, and the history of religious tyranny is largely the history of such men.
That is also why I describe my candidacy for president as a witness candidacy. I am not seeking power. I accept no donations. I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win; otherwise, to vote for the best man on the ballot. That is not false humility. It is the only honest position for a man whose platform is attempting to convert a nation’s heart to the way of the Lord. My campaign platform and strategy are to persuade men that the yoke of Christ on the hearts of every soul in the nation is the most effective intervention to solve our social, moral, and economic problems. The yoke I am offering is offered the way Christ offered His: “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28–30
It is an argument and an invitation.
When all the safeguards fail
Being real, all safeguards can fail. They failed in the lynching South. The courts were there, the Constitution was there, the jury was there, the churches were there, and still innocent men died, and their killers walked free. Structure did not save them, because structure is only as good as the people who operate it.
So the final safeguard is not laws, courts, or a government department. It is the people’s hearts. The jury box, the courthouse, the legislature, and the amendment all flow from what a nation actually loves. A people whose hearts are right will operate even a poor structure justly, and a people whose hearts are wrong will corrupt the best structure. That is why the work I am calling for is not mainly political. It is the formation of men, by fathers, churches, teachers, and neighbors, one heart at a time. The government cannot do that work alone. Government can support people raising their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, and men willing to teach, preach, counsel, and coach the way of Christ in their work, home, and communities. The bottom line is that every man must lead in the salvation and sanctification of the people. Government can support that army of men by coaching, encouraging, and leading men toward holiness in the fullness of their lives.
When a nation will not listen to its prophets, God corrects it through its history. Every nation that walked the road of cruelty in His name eventually learned, at great cost, what persuasion could not teach. Spain learned it. The American South learned it. That is not a comfort, but it is a last-resort safeguard.
So who decides what Christianity done right is? Christ decided it, and showed us. The Bible states it, and every citizen must read it and judge for himself, with the humility to be corrected by his neighbors and by the facts. The nation names what falls short and helps those who fall short rise. The state punishes only the sins that make victims of property and person violation. Persuasion and example carry the rest. And the people who most need to say “That is not Christ” when Christians do evil are Christians.
That is the only Christian nationalism I have ever meant. If it becomes anything else, it’s no longer what I am describing.
Notes
Genesis 4:9; John 13:34; Matthew 7:16, 21; Matthew 19:16–22 (the rich young ruler); John 18:11; Romans 12:21; Matthew 5:44; Matthew 18:22; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Matthew 11:29–30.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 96, a. 2.
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813 (“the general Principles of Christianity”). Adams’s statement on the juror’s duty comes from his February 12, 1771, diary.
Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51 (1895).
The amendment process: U.S. Constitution, Article V.
End of Chapters 5-6 edited for Fellowship meeting on 10/11/2026
Chapter 7 — Separation of State and Truth: The Establishment Clause
Near the end of our conversation, Isak and I came back to the objection that hangs over everything in this book. It is the first question most people ask when they hear that my platform rests on creating policies that are those of a Christian Nation, as this brings up concerns about Christian nationalism and separation of church and state.
THOMAS: “There are behaviors that God will not bless as they oppose His character.” You may ask, “How do we know?” To which I reply, “I believe the Bible is a revelation from God.” The immediate response is, “You’re mixing church and state.” To which I reply, “No, if the State and its officials judge the Bible’s standards of morality to be true, good, and worthy of basing its social standards upon, the State is not saying you must practice a religion. It is saying that the Bible contains truths that we, as a nation, hold as the moral standard on which our laws should be based. We must choose a moral standard upon which to base law. We have chosen the Bible as that moral standard. This is no more establishing a state religion than choosing a historical custom, tradition, or philosophy as the basis for legislation. Law should be based on what is true and produces desirable results, and that should be the standard on which the representatives of the people base legislation.”
ISAK: It sounds like we are separating the state from truth. What do you have when that happens? It seems that’s where we’ve been heading. It seems so simple when it’s laid out that way. There’s a way of life, and something protects it so citizens can keep living it. Then it gets twisted, so that way of life can’t be carried out in government anymore. It’s no longer “In God we trust.” Instead it’s “We’ll put God over there.”
Every proposal in this book will meet the same reflexive answer: separation of church and state, because I use the same moral framework to judge how life should be lived and which laws should be chosen in every proposal. I look at the fundamental principles of life and see no separation or distinction between the eternal/spiritual world and the temporal, material world. Separation of Church and State seems to be used less as an argument than as a way to trump every argument with a seemingly unassailable objection. If the nation named adultery as falling short of its moral standard, then someone will object by saying, “Separation of church and state.” Say that abortion takes a human life, and the answer is the same. Say that a president, teacher, or coach may pray in public, or that a law should rest on the moral law of the Bible, and the phrase comes back like a reflex. Those five words are meant to dismiss this book’s (and my presidential platforms’) whole program. The phrase “Separation of Church and State” is quoted so often that many/most people who say it may believe they are quoting the Constitution.
They aren’t. So before going further, I want to look at what the Constitution actually says, what the men who wrote it actually did, and what a right relationship between church and state actually requires. I believe that separating church and state, properly understood, is right. What I reject is the state prohibiting any institution that is associated with government from using the Bible as a source and reference of moral truth and as a legislative and judicial standard.
What the text says
The religion clauses of the First Amendment are sixteen words long: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
There are two clauses there. The first, the Establishment Clause, forbids Congress from establishing a religion: creating a national church, as England did with the Church of England, supported by taxes, with its clergy appointed by the government and its doctrine enforced by law. The second, the Free Exercise Clause, forbids Congress from prohibiting people from practicing their faith.
The phrase “separation of church and state” appears in neither clause nor anywhere else in the Constitution. It comes from an 1802 letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Danbury Baptists were a religious minority in a state that still had an established church, and they worried about their liberty. Jefferson assured them that the First Amendment had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” This wall protected the church from the government, not the government from God. The Baptists wanted to be left alone to worship. They were not asking the government to stop acknowledging God.
For nearly a century and a half, Jefferson’s phrase was a line in a letter. Then in 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court quoted it and declared that the wall “must be kept high and impregnable.” Oddly, the Court upheld the challenged state program, which reimbursed parents for busing their children to Catholic schools. But the phrase had now entered constitutional law via a Supreme Court ruling, and over the following decades it grew. In 1962 and 1963, the Court removed official prayer and devotional Bible reading from public schools. In 1971, in Lemon v. Kurtzman, it announced a test under which a law could be struck down if its purpose was religious or if it “entangled” government with religion. For fifty years, that test scrubbed religious expression from public life.
In 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court abandoned the Lemon test. It held that the Establishment Clause must be read by “reference to historical practices and understandings”, that is, what the men who wrote it actually meant and did. So the question of what they meant and did is not merely historical. It is now the law’s own test.
What the founders actually did
The Congress that wrote the First Amendment appointed paid chaplains to open its sessions with prayer, and it did so in the same months it was drafting the amendment. The House and Senate have had chaplains ever since.
That same Congress reenacted the Northwest Ordinance, which governed the western territories and declared, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
The day after the House approved the amendment’s final wording, it asked President Washington to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving and prayer. He did, calling on the nation to acknowledge “the providence of Almighty God,” to obey His will, and “humbly to implore His protection and favor.”
In his Farewell Address, Washington told the nation that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” and warned against supposing “that morality can be maintained without religion.”
John Adams wrote that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people,” and that “it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Several states kept established churches long after the First Amendment was ratified. Connecticut’s lasted until 1818 and Massachusetts’s until 1833. The First Amendment did not apply to them because it applied only to Congress. It forbade a national church, and it kept the federal government out of the states’ religious arrangements. Only in the twentieth century did the Court apply it to the states.
So the men who wrote the Establishment Clause did not think the Constitution required the government to be silent about God, or to legislate as though the moral law were unknown. They prayed in Congress. They proclaimed days of thanksgiving to God. They wrote that religion and morality were indispensable to the Republic. They forbade a national church: a single denomination given the government’s power and money, with its doctrine enforced by law. This was wise, and I fully support this.
Why the wall cannot be absolute
The modern idea of an absolute wall fails for a deeper reason, and it has nothing to do with history.
Every law is a moral statement. A law against theft says that taking your neighbor’s property is wrong. A law against fraud says that lying for gain is wrong. A law prohibiting abortion says something about who counts as a person. People say, “You can’t legislate morality,” but all law is legislated morality, and a legislature does nothing but legislate morality. The only question is whose morality is used as the standard.
And every morality rests on some account of what is ultimately true: of what man is, what he is for, and whether there is anyone above him to whom he answers. The secular state likes to present itself as neutral, standing above all such accounts. But a state that governs as though no God existed has not avoided answering the question. It has answered by declaring, de facto, its allegiance to a secular morality. But secularism is not the absence of a religion. Rather, it functions as one while alternately, passively and vehemently, denying its religious nature, commitments, and form. It has its own account of ultimate reality, its own moral code, its own orthodoxies that may not be questioned, and, as I argue in Chapter 18, even its own sacrament. In Chapter 16, I describe this worldview as the worldview without a center. When the government supports that religion with public money, teaches it to children as the only acceptable view, and requires its practice as a condition of public life, it has established a religion, exactly as the First Amendment forbids. The wall meant to keep a church out of government has become the means of establishing one. The Supreme Court itself once listed secular humanism among the religions that do not teach belief in God.
There is also a deeper reason that the State should acknowledge God. That reason is the picture of reality I hold: every thought, word, and deed is ultimately a relation between a soul and God, because He holds everything that exists in being. No secular corner of life is without God. So we cannot draw the line between church and state by sorting life into sacred and secular compartments. That line does not exist.
We must draw it on other grounds, and I think a clear, workable way exists. The state has jurisdiction over criminal conduct between man and man, whatever its religious motive. The state has no jurisdiction over the relationship between a man and God. The state may judge whether a man stole, lied, assaulted, or murdered, even if he did it for religious reasons. The state may not judge what a man believes about God, how he worships, what he confesses about baptism or communion, or which church he attends, if any. That is the real separation. It is a division of jurisdiction, not a quarantine of truth.
What this means in practice
Here is what this book’s program asks for.
It does not ask for a national church. The government would not give any denomination authority. The state would not support any church as its official church. No man would be required to attend worship, profess a creed, or be baptized. No doctrine on which Christians disagree would carry the force of law. The Catholic, the Baptist, the Orthodox believer, the Jew, the Muslim, and the unbeliever would all worship, or not worship, as their consciences direct.
It asks the nation to stop pretending that a nation’s legislation can be separated from its foundational moral standards, and to name those standards openly. It asks the nation to openly acknowledge God, as its founders did in Congress’s chaplains, Washington’s proclamations, and the words “In God We Trust.” It asks that the nation recognize the moral law on which Christians agree: the 10 Commandments; the Great Commandment to love God; the second to love neighbor as self; to love as Jesus loved us; and the Sermon on the Mount, as the standards the nation aspires to. It asks that the nation openly name its standard of truth as the God of the Bible, and the person of Christ. It asks that leaders be free to pray in public and quote the Bible when they reason about the common good, as leaders have done for most of American history. And it asks that the state protect the victims of wrongs the moral law forbids, including the child in the womb.
None of that establishes a church. All of it separates church and state exactly where the founders separated them: the state holds no power over the soul’s relation to God, and the church holds no government office. It simply refuses to separate the state from the truth the Bible declares, the law should encode, and a man may hold in his heart.
Where free exercise ends
The second clause needs a word too, because the same absolutism has attached itself to it. Some people read the Free Exercise Clause to mean that anything done in the name of religion is immune from the government’s notice. That reading is like taking one verse of Scripture and applying it to every situation in life. “Turn the other cheek,” taken literally and universally, would mean that a man who breaks into your house and harms your family should be shown where the other children sleep. No one reads the Bible that way, and no one should read the Constitution that way either.
The state’s authority comes from God. Paul wrote about “The powers that be are ordained of God” (Romans 13:1-7). A state that is responsible for protecting its people is responsible for its own survival, and it cannot ignore a movement that intends to overthrow it simply because that movement calls itself a religion. When a religious body teaches its members to replace the Constitution with its own law, that teaching concerns conduct between man and man, and between man and the state. The state rightfully has the jurisdiction to examine it, monitor it, and act against any crime committed against it. I take this up in Chapter 14, where this tension is playing out in the battle for our culture’s standard of true morality.
The honest road
One more thing. I have argued elsewhere for a constitutional amendment declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible and His moral law. I know that such an amendment would go further than anything the Founders wrote. That is why I propose to reach it only through persuasion: through Article V, by persuading two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. I do not favor changing the nation’s character by appointing judges who will read it into the First Amendment, nor by establishing it through any executive decree. If the American people will not choose it freely, we should not impose it on them. In the last chapter, I said that the high barrier to amending the Constitution is itself a safeguard. It protects the nation from my ideals of truth and plans of action as much as from anyone else.
So when someone says “separation of church and state” and expects the conversation to end, I want it to begin. I agree with separation of church and state to the extent that we should establish: no national church, no government over the soul, and no church wielding the government’s power. Such separation is right and proper. But separating the state from declaring and naming the Bible’s truth is wrong. The Constitution does not require that the government must legislate as though God did not exist. The Establishment Clause also does not require legislation that accommodates contradictory religious and cultural standards. We live in reality, and if we ignore the fundamental cause-and-effect relationships that exist, we will suffer the consequences of opposing/violating/ignoring the natural laws of cause and effect. Such flexible, non-offensive, centerless morality is not what its authors practiced. A nation without a true/accurate/God’s-design/reality-reflecting moral standard for prosecuting violations of that standard will not support men living in harmony. Men instinctively, reflexively, and irrepressibly rise up against injustice. A nation whose standards/laws reflect a false god will be inherently unjust; men will rise up against men, and the nation will be torn apart by internal disunity.
Notes
U.S. Constitution, Amendment I. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802.
Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), footnote 11, lists “Secular Humanism” among religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.”
Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971); Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. 507 (2022). On legislative chaplains, see Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983).
Northwest Ordinance (1787), Article 3, reenacted by the First Congress in 1789. George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1789; Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. John Adams, letter to the Massachusetts militia, October 11, 1798.
Connecticut disestablished its church in 1818 and Massachusetts in 1833. The Establishment Clause was first applied against the states in Everson (1947).
Romans 13:1; Matthew 5:39.
The functional division (“conduct between man and man falls under the State’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive; the relation between a man and God does not”) is from Thomas’s September 2026 essay on the Burmawi interview.
Chapter 8 — Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality, the State, and the Economics of Enough
Isak said a country needs a shared mission, and we no longer have one. I told him where I think the disagreement actually lies.
THOMAS: The place where Biblical morality becomes controversial is in one area: sexuality. There isn’t much disagreement about other moral laws. The concept of God’s existence is controversial because it implies we are responsible to someone. But God’s existence is debatable, and the Biblical definition of Godly morality restricts everyone’s options to monogamous heterosexuality. The problem is that people have strong and real animal instincts. They do not want to be restrained by society or the state in their sexual expression because of a standard which goes against that animal desire.
The state makes laws about things that harm other people. You took my stuff; you hurt me. Property and person. Enforcement is what the state is for. Then comes the question: Should the state care who I sleep with, and how? That’s where people say, “You’re pushing religion on us.” The answer is yes: religious concepts are at work here, but so are social ones. If sex is violent, we say clearly that it crosses into the lines of the State’s jurisdiction, and such violations should be adjudicated and punishment enforced for crimes against person and property. But then there’s consensual sex. Should the form of sexuality be the state’s business or not?
That’s exactly where you can tell whether a society is committed to living by the law of God. Up to that point, everybody agrees, from the atheist to the most devout priest. We don’t want people taking our things or hurting us. Until we get to sexuality, there’s no disagreement. When we get there, people say, “My rights,” and “Keep your laws off my body,” over mutually agreeable sexuality. And you could make a case for that: laissez-faire government relationship to the market is argued for that relationship between government and sexuality.
Alternatively, we could argue that the family is the foundation of the state. If families don’t hold together because of all the kinds of sexuality that aren’t procreative, or that break up stable family life, then we’re looking at disturbing the foundations of society, which is a threat to the stability and survival of the State. Therefore, the state has reason to be concerned as the common welfare falls apart without the family.
If babies come out of a long glass tube in the song In the Year 2525, it recalls Brave New World, where bonding is reduced to a competition of feral cats’ struggle for survival. In a world where we are cultured to be Alphas, Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, life becomes a caricature of what a meaningful bonded experience is. The world isn’t as warm or as meaningful. It’s just industrial, just functional, just convenient. Nothing means very much when uncommitted sexuality becomes common, and sexuality is separated from procreation and family. The bottom line is that sexuality is tied to the meaning of life. Without a standard, everybody does whatever he wants, and it’s really just “whatever.”
ISAK: Anything’s good.
THOMAS: It’s all good. Was it Cream or Blind Faith that did “Do What You Like”?
ISAK: Blind Faith. Ginger Baker.
THOMAS: That song is basically Aleister Crowley set to music: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” If sex had nothing to do with family, if it were just a matter of getting a thrill wherever you like and moving on, it would have no significance. It would be like an ice cream cone. You get a real thrill from an ice cream cone. And heroin is the ultimate ice cream cone with a bad hangover, and a strong desire for another one.
ISAK: And eventually you can only eat ice cream, or you get sick.
THOMAS: That’s why drugs are regulated. People don’t control themselves well, and when they don’t, they don’t eat, they don’t work, and they take your things because they don’t have any money, and eventually they need drugs to even feel normal. It all comes down to this: you have to act right. Otherwise somebody will come along and stop you because you aren’t controlling yourself. You’re just doing what you like. People don’t like government regulation because they like to act on their hungers and desires. Then there is the other side. Government can go too far and regulate by whim. Laws often go too far and interfere with people’s ability to do what they like, even when done in moderation and chosen properly.
People have to choose to regulate themselves. You can do what you like, but only up to a point. You can’t take it too far. You have to say, “This is enough.” Arnold Schwarzenegger made a movie called “Stay Hungry.” But the real issue is greed: doing more than you need. A Foreigner song, “Double Vision,” has a line, “I never do more than I really need.” That is an important principle, but I doubt that the song was really advocating temperance. I think the real message of the rock-and-roll life is, “Do more than you need, because that’s where the real mojo is.”
ISAK: Do more than you need: drink too much, eat too much, and take too many drugs. So in this case it’s about personal temperance: a man sustaining himself without ridiculous consumption. If we had a culture where people weren’t overconsuming, the economy would change. But it would also feel less cancerous than using things we don’t need, spending money we don’t need to spend, buying clothes we don’t need, and eating too much. What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich? Would we be spending money on things that actually matter? How much of the society we’re trying to protect is built on overindulgence, beyond sex and drugs?
And it’s interesting: “Don’t steal, don’t kill,” and then sexuality. I’ve heard people argue that everything people do is for sex. You get a job to make money, or a nice car to take girls out. We are driven. As you said, meaning and sexuality are intertwined, because we’re driven to keep the line going, to let whatever is in us continue past our death. Be fruitful and multiply. So it makes sense that we have the urges we have.
But is that the only meaning? I don’t think so. You can find so much gratitude, so much ability to appreciate life, that it doesn’t all come down to sex. But a lot of people do live that way. That’s what they live for, and they don’t know there’s anything beyond it. And the drugs just heighten the feeling. It’s a craving for the next dopamine hit. I think it’s our lazy side. You can’t commit to something, so you have the fling, never see the person again, and move on to the next one. You never learn the work of connection, family, or responsibility. You don’t grow, because you don’t have to. There’s a perfectly willing person over there, so you break a couple of hearts and keep going.
There can be selfishness in every good thing. You can pervert anything. So do the country’s problems come down to sexual immorality, aside from the stealing and the killing? Or is it greed?
THOMAS: No, that isn’t where it all breaks down, and not everything is about the rush of sex. But there’s nothing that isn’t related to sex, because without sex there would be nothing to relate to.
ISAK: True.
THOMAS: What comes out of sex is all the bondedness: overcoming hard times together, celebrating good times, raising children the right way, helping each other when one goes wrong and getting him back on track, and getting everybody else to do the same, so that it’s good for all of us because we’re all doing the right thing together. The problem with sexuality that I was bringing up is that people do not want to be restrained in their sexuality; it’s one of the deepest animal instincts, and we feel it strongly and want to act it out. People can find themselves attracted obsessively to all sorts of unusual sexual tastes, and it feels natural, like “this is who I really am,” and they don’t want to be restrained by anyone saying no to their particular tastes in sexual expression. Thus, when someone comes along and says, “sexuality outside of the heterosexual marriage is condemned by the Bible as unpleasing to God,” people don’t like that with great vehemence and objection, invoking liberty, autonomy, freedom of expression, keep your laws off my body, etc., and they will reject the Bible because it condemns their sexuality. That is why I said there is almost no objection to most of what the Bible says, except for sexuality, and that is where the problem lies. The people don’t want the yoke of sexual restraint placed on them, so they reject all of the Bible, its message of a transformed heart, salvation, and the fruits of the Spirit because they love their sexual expression, possibly more than anything else. They end up throwing away the peace and love that is the center of properly lived sexuality.
When I asked whether sexuality should be the state’s business, I meant it in the sense I laid out in Chapter 6. The nation should name what falls short of its standard and strengthen the family that sexuality exists to build. It should not send the police into anyone’s bedroom.
But Isak asked a second economics question mid-conversation that America and the world must soon confront. He asked what would happen to the economy if overindulgence went away. If Americans stopped overeating, overdrinking, buying clothes they don’t need, and spending money they don’t have, would we be rich? Or would the whole economy fall apart?
The objection: won’t the economy collapse?
Consumer spending is roughly two-thirds of the American economy. So the argument goes: if Americans stopped overconsuming, businesses would sell less and lay off workers; those workers would spend less, and the economy would spiral down. Economists even have a name for it: the paradox of thrift. What is prudent for one family, saving instead of spending, becomes harmful when everyone does it at once, because one man’s spending is another man’s income.
That point is real. If every American stopped buying anything but necessities tomorrow morning, there would be a shock. Stores would close, and people would lose their jobs.
The following are the conventional arguments used to justify the postulate that the economy will adjust to lower consumption. I think they are plausible, but the problem is bigger than self-imposed austerity. We will soon live in a world where AI agents, and then AI-driven robotics, will replace more jobs each year. At some point, no job will need a human. At the very least, the number of humans needed to create all the goods and services man needs will be small compared to the number of people working. The result will be an economy where goods are plentiful, but no one has money to buy them.
First, let us consider the conventional arguments for why the economy is self-adjusting and how market mechanisms will compensate for self-imposed austerity.
First, money you don’t spend doesn’t disappear if you save it in a bank. People invest that money through loans. The dollars you don’t spend on more shoes, a vacation, or a new car go into a bank, a business, a home, or a child’s education. They become a machine, a workshop, a house, or a skilled worker. Consumption uses things up; investment builds the capacity to make more. The nations that rebuilt fastest after the Second World War, such as Germany and Japan, and later South Korea, did so with very high saving rates. Their people put off consumption, and their savings built the factories.
Second, the change I am talking about is not sudden. It is a cultural change, one heart and one household at a time, over a generation. An economy adjusts to that the way it adjusts to every other change in what people want. When people stopped buying typewriters, the economy didn’t collapse. It moved.
Adam Smith put it best: prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom. If it is wise for your household to live within its means, avoid debt, save for the future, and not waste, it cannot be foolish for the nation your household belongs to. A nation is only its households added together.
Third: The tempered economy would look like this: people have as many children as they can support, and each child grows up to do the same. The economy grows to meet the demands of the growing population. Each person needs a home, car, food, power, amenities, and recreation. If everyone is satisfied with that modest level of consumption, then the prices of goods and services equal the cost of production. New jobs are created to meet the needs of the growing population. The problem is the mismatch between people’s demand for goods and services and the number of people it takes to produce them. When more people have needs than jobs to meet them, the advertising and sales industry makes up the difference by creating demand. The question is whether the invisible hand can direct exactly the right amount of employment to satisfy people’s basic needs without creating excessive needs that drive people to conspicuous consumption.
Temperance moves money; it doesn’t destroy it
Temperance doesn’t mean people stop spending. It means they spend differently. The ice cream becomes vegetables. The money stays in the economy; what it buys changes.
Consider what a temperate household spends its money on. It buys fewer things, but better ones: the tool that lasts thirty years instead of the one that breaks in three, which means more craftsmen and fewer landfills. It owns and maintains its home. It gives more, because people who aren’t drowning in their own appetites have something left over for others. It invests in education and skills. And above all, it has children and raises them. Family is the largest “consumer” in a temperate life: food, clothing, housing, schooling, and time. A nation of intact, fruitful families does not lack demand. It builds the next generation of workers, taxpayers, and parents, the one thing a nation cannot import or borrow.
And notice what happens to debt. American households owe more than a trillion dollars on credit cards alone. “The borrower is servant to the lender.” A nation of temperate households is a nation freed from servitude. Every dollar not spent on interest can be redirected toward real needs and wants.
The ledger of intemperance
Now look at the other side of the ledger, the one the objection never counts: what intemperance already costs us.
Excessive drinking has been estimated to cost the United States about 250 billion dollars a year in health care, lost productivity, crime, and car crashes. Smoking costs more than $ 600 billion a year when you include lost productivity. Medical care for obesity costs about 170 billion a year. Diabetes, mostly the kind that diet and activity can largely prevent, costs more than 400 billion a year in medical care and lost work. The opioid epidemic has been estimated at about one and a half trillion dollars in a single year, when the value of lives lost is included. New sexually transmitted infections run to billions in lifetime medical costs every year. Family breakdown, meaning divorce and childbearing outside marriage, has been estimated to cost taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars a year through welfare, courts, and the other programs that step in when fathers leave. And something like a third of all the food produced in this country is wasted.
These figures come from different years and overlap in places, so you can’t simply add them. But even with the overlap, we spend well over a trillion dollars a year cleaning up after uncontrolled appetites.
From my perspective as a naturopathic physician, it looks like most of the chronic disease comes from how people ate, drank, smoked, slept, and moved. Most diseases are preventable, and many are reversible when patients are willing. The American health care system largely manages the consequences of intemperance, and it is the largest sector of the economy.
That is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and we all pay for it, whether or not we ever ride in it: in insurance premiums, in taxes, and in the lost work of people who should have been healthy.
The broken window
The nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat told a story about a boy who breaks a shopkeeper’s window. The townspeople console the shopkeeper: at least the glazier will get work. The glazier spends his earnings, and so on, and the broken window seems to have stimulated the economy. But Bastiat pointed out what isn’t seen. The shopkeeper would have spent that money on a new pair of shoes. Now he has the same window, and no shoes. The town is poorer by one pair of shoes.
Intemperance is a nation breaking its own windows. The rehab clinic, the divorce lawyer, the prison, the dialysis unit, and the bariatric surgeon all show up in the national accounts as production. They count toward the size of the economy exactly the way the glazier’s work did. But they are not wealth. They are repairs. A nation that spent a trillion dollars less each year cleaning up after itself might even show a smaller economy on paper for a while, and be far richer in fact: more savings, more real goods, more children, more years of healthy working life, and more time on the porch.
It is the same distinction we drew in Chapter 3. A tumor grows fast, but growth is not necessarily health. A temperate economy grows like a healthy body: it meets real needs, then sustains itself through steady, faithful production. It doesn’t have to keep swelling to stay alive.
Who would lose
If temperance spread, some businesses would shrink: businesses that depend on people not controlling themselves. Gambling apps designed to be addictive, predatory lenders, the pornography industry, the makers of food engineered so you can’t stop eating it, and the marketers whose whole trade is making people feel they need what they don’t. A large share of their profit comes from a small number of people who have lost control.
When those businesses shrink, the tumor shrinks. People who work in them would need other work, and a healthy economy would provide it, because their former customers would spend and invest the money they no longer lose elsewhere. The transition would bring real hardship, and charity should help people through it. But no one should mourn an industry whose profits depended on other people’s ruin.
What rich means
So would we be rich? We could save, invest, and put the trillion dollars a year we spend cleaning up after ourselves (in energy, resources, and time) to a better use. Families would carry less debt and own more of what they use. Government would be smaller, because there would be fewer messes to clean up. That is the opposite of needing armies of G-men to combat crime: government would shrink because there would be less wrongdoing.
But we would also be rich in the way that matters more. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” (1 Timothy 6:6). Temperance is one of the fruits of the Spirit, listed with love, joy, and peace. The man who can say “This is enough” is the only man who can ever be satisfied. The man who always needs “just a little more” is poor no matter what he owns.
God taught Israel this in the wilderness with the manna. Every family gathered what it needed for the day. “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” Those who tried to hoard it found it spoiled in the morning. On the sixth day, He gave them twice as much so they could rest on the seventh. That was the first lesson in the economics of enough: gather what you need, trust God for tomorrow, and rest.
“There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.” (Proverbs 21:20). That answers Isak’s question. The temperate nation is not the one that has stopped enjoying life. It is the one that has something left over: money in the bank, oil in the lamp, time for its children, strength in its old age, and the peace to sit on the porch and say, “This is good. This is enough.”
A Bridge From Capitalism to the AI/Robot Age via the Living Wage, Retraining, and A Life of Play as Work
Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 15 October 2026
We are entering an age in which machines will do most of the work. AI-driven robots will farm, build, manufacture, haul, and increasingly do the clerical and professional work that once required trained men and women. The goods will exist. The question is how a man who no longer has a job can purchase a claim to his share. I propose an answer: pay a living wage to those the economy has released, train them for the work that still needs doing, finance the transition with production taxes and public debt used for productive purposes, and let the market keep deciding what gets made. I offer it as the best plan I have found, and I hold it open to a better one.
The problem
For two hundred years, every labor-saving machine has been followed by new work. In 1900, about forty percent of American workers were on farms. Today it is under two percent. The freed workers went to work making cars, radios, refrigerators, and computers, and providing the services of a modern economy. Much of that new work exists because sales and marketing persuaded people to want things they hadn’t wanted before. Our employment system is calibrated to appetite.
In our system, a man claims a share of the nation’s production in one of four ways: he sells his labor, he owns something productive, he receives charity, or the government transfers it to him. As robots replace labor, the first route narrows. If robot ownership stays concentrated, owners receive nearly all the income, and everyone else depends on them or the government, which depends on taxes and debt.
Why the other answers fall short
One answer is a modern Jubilee: give every family a share of the nation’s productive capital. The goal is right. Scripture’s picture of peace is “every man under his vine and under his fig tree.” But someone owns the existing vines and fig trees. To hand them to everyone else, the government would have to take them from their owners. That is coercion, and in principle it is no different from taxing the productive to support the unproductive. A just plan cannot begin by seizing what men have lawfully built.
Another answer is time: if machines do the work, everyone works less. But shorter hours distribute nothing on their own. A man who works fewer hours earns less, and the man who works none earns nothing. Unless something carries goods from the few who produce to the many who don’t, shorter hours simply describe unemployment politely. Producers will not give their goods away. If the government taxes producers so non-workers can buy those goods, then producers become the only people in the nation carrying a real burden of work and responsibility. That feels unfair and unmotivating.
So both answers point to the same conclusion. At some point, the nation will need its government to help its people move from a world where nearly every man works for his bread to one where machines produce most of it. The question is how to build that bridge without destroying the motivation, property, and freedom that made the abundance possible.
The proposal
The plan keeps the capitalist system running while it carries the nation across. Little would change in how goods are made, priced, and sold. Five things would be added.
- A living wage for those the economy releases. When a machine takes a man’s job, he receives a wage sufficient to live on. He is not cast out of the game because the game no longer needs his old skill. As machines make goods and services more plentiful and cheaper, the living wage adjusts with them, so it buys a decent life without being fixed to a dollar figure that grows obsolete.
- Retraining as the condition and the purpose of that wage. The man between jobs trains for work that still needs doing: building, installing, maintaining, and supervising the robotic systems themselves, or work the machines have not yet reached. He works that skill until it, too, becomes obsolete, then he trains again. The living wage is a bridge to the next work, not a couch.
- Financing comes from production taxes and public debt. Producers pay taxes, as they do now. As their workforces shrink, their labor costs fall, and they can carry a larger share of the cost of supporting those who no longer work. Where taxes fall short, the nation borrows. Public debt is rightly used to increase productive capacity, and training a man to be productive is an investment in capacity, as surely as building a factory.
- Markets and the financial industry continue to allocate capital. Producers still have to read what people want, adjust their output, borrow for new equipment, and bear the risk of being wrong. Banks and investors still judge which AI-robotics ventures deserve capital. The government does not decide how many shoelaces to make.
- Work is rewarded according to service and risk, within limits. The entrepreneur who builds and runs the productive machinery still earns more than the man on the living wage. He can still buy the house on the shore, in the mountains, or far out on the prairie. That reward incentivizes work and risk-taking rather than simply collecting the living wage. But in an economy where machines do most of the work, much of a producer’s output comes from the nation’s common inheritance of knowledge, infrastructure, and order. His reward should be generous, but not unlimited, because his work has become, in part, a public service.
Over time, if this works, the economy produces more with fewer workers. Most people receive a living wage, some work because they want what it pays, and the transition moves the nation toward a society in which the machines’ fruits are broadly shared.
The moral justification
Every public policy should answer four questions in the affirmative: 1) Is it righteous? 2) Would my neighbor feel loved by this act in the public square? 3) Would I want this done to me? 4) Is this the way that Jesus Christ would act, legislate, or command as an expression of love and righteousness?
Consider the man whose job a machine has taken. He did nothing wrong. He showed up, learned his trade, and did it well. The nation chose to replace him because the machine was cheaper, and the nation as a whole will be richer for that choice. If we tell him he’s on his own now, he will feel discarded and punished by poverty because of the prosperity his work helped build. A nation that reaps the gain of automation owes something to the men who bear its cost.
But Paul’s rule still stands: “If any would not work, neither should he eat.” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). But notice whom it addresses. It addresses the man who will not work, not the man for whom there is no work. That is why this plan ties the living wage to retraining. Of course, retraining is sometimes inappropriate, and that shall be judged. This societal directive still applies to the man who refuses to learn, refuses to work when work is offered, and refuses to participate; he is in a different position from the man the economy has released. A just system keeps that distinction.
Consider also the entrepreneur who took the risk of debt and loss to build a business. To make his business more profitable, he automated tasks that fit the skills and capabilities available to AI agents and robotics. At some point, the economics will let him produce more and pay less by replacing employees with AI agents and robots. If all employees are let go, have no money, and still need the products he produces, then, as a solution to the distribution problem, giving all his products to the market would leave him little motivation to innovate further. The market would stagnate and fall into the productive doldrums of the centrally planned state, as we have seen repeatedly in communist/socialist/communal economies. Thus, we take this as a data point as we develop a theory of what will work, and what will not, as we attempt to engineer a new economy where work cannot be the societal gesture that determines what share of the wealth we can appropriate for our own use. The goal of the new plan is to give those who risk, innovate/invent, and solve problems more money (the ability to accumulate/consume goods and services) for making their business more productive or for starting businesses that compete to create better or new products. The reward for work and incentive for entrepreneurship must be retained.
What will change is that some of the profits generated by replacing employees with robots will go to those who were replaced. This will require a tax increase; the entrepreneur’s employee expenses will go down, but taxes will go up. But to retain incentive, the tax increase must be less than the savings from automation. Thus, the numbers don’t justify fully compensating displaced workers with pre-job-loss wages, but unemployment benefits should provide a living wage for the area of the country where they live. Unemployment benefits and the cost of training for a new job will be financed through a combination of taxes and deficit spending. The deficit in this case is an investment in newly trained workers, and the payoff is an economy that is productive enough to give full
America did something like this after the Second World War; the GI Bill paid millions of returning servicemen to go to college and trade school. The nation financed it while it was carrying the war debt. Those veterans became engineers, teachers, builders, and businessmen, and the investment repaid itself many times over in the productive capacity it created. The plan I propose is the same idea applied to a different kind of transition. Even some of the strongest defenders of free markets have proposed an income floor. Milton Friedman argued for a negative income tax, a payment to those below a set income, as a simpler and less intrusive alternative to the maze of welfare programs.
The hard parts
A plan is only as good as its answers to the strongest objections. Here are the ones I take most seriously.
Printing money and the honest measure
The largest risk is financing. If the government borrows or creates money to pay people who aren’t producing, and the machines haven’t yet produced the goods those dollars will chase, prices rise. This is where austerity applies: living below our wants while meeting our needs. Inflation is a hidden tax. If money increases and demand stays the same, prices will rise. Inflation takes from every man who saved, without a vote and without a law authorizing it. I have called it the modern form of clipping coins, the “divers weights” the Bible condemns: “Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD.” (Proverbs 20:10).
The principle that resolves this is that the true limit is not dollars but real goods. Money created to pay a living wage is honest only if the goods it buys actually exist. When AI/robots produce more food, housing, and power than the people who still work can buy, putting money in the hands of those who can’t work, it doesn’t raise prices; it lets the abundance reach the people it was made for. When robots haven’t yet produced that abundance, the same money only bids up prices on what exists. So the pace matters. The living wage should grow as productive capacity grows, and borrowing should go first to what increases that capacity: training, equipment, and infrastructure. That is the same rule a prudent family follows: borrow to build, not to consume. Debt that builds a workshop can be repaid from what the workshop produces. Debt that pays for this month’s groceries cannot.
How ownership broadens without confiscation
Ideally, every person would own a piece of the economy simply by being born a human. The goal of broad family ownership is good, but the communist method of redistributing wealth in land, goods, and services to everyone has universally produced poverty, and if the autocrat was sufficiently adamant in his mandate, death followed and fell on all who resisted. Of course, I reject taking anyone’s property to reach the goal of a living wage for every person.
But an honest path exists. When the nation borrows to finance new productive capacity, the people who carry that debt should own a share of what it builds. If public credit finances a robotic factory, a power plant, or a training program that makes a company more productive, the public should hold a stake in the return. A citizens’ fund that pays dividends to every family is similar to what Alaska has done since 1982 with its oil revenue: the fund is owned in common, and every resident receives a dividend as a return on that ownership.
No one’s existing property is taken. The owner of today’s factory keeps it. But the new capacity of the robot age, to the extent the public finances it, belongs in part to the public that financed it. Over a generation, that is how the living wage could become a dividend on ownership rather than a transfer from producers. That is the transition from a wage economy toward distributism, accomplished by building rather than seizing.
Fairness to producers
If producers carry the tax burden while most citizens receive a living wage, producers may feel like they are the nation’s only workers and will stop producing, move to a nation where no such appropriation is law, or simply stop innovating and investing in quality and efficiency improvements. Competition and survival keep people sharp. The plan has to keep their reward real. Their tax burden should rise as a percentage of how much their labor costs fall. There must be a financial incentive to automate. The public stake described above should come from new capital the public helps finance, not from a claim on what they built alone. And the reward limit should be a gentle slope, not a ceiling, because a ceiling tells the most capable people in the nation that, past a certain point, their work is worthless, or that work, risk, and innovation have no payoff. Humans are motivated by the material rewards of leisure, finery, and stimulation.
Motivation
A guaranteed wage weakens the most ancient motivator: hunger. Some men will take the living wage and do nothing. That is why the wage is tied to retraining and participation, and why work must still visibly pay more than the living wage. But I do not think hunger is the motivator God intended. Before the fall, God put Adam in the garden to dress it and keep it. Work was given as stewardship and delight, and the curse added toil and the threat of want. A nation that works only because it is hungry will decay when it is no longer hungry. A nation that works because it loves God, loves its neighbor, and loves the world He made will flourish. No economic plan can create that heart. But a plan can avoid crushing it, and it can give a man time and training to find the work he was made for.
Whether retraining works
Government retraining programs have a mixed record. For example, programs for workers displaced by trade have shown uneven results in studies of afterward earnings. Training works best when it ties to real jobs employers need filled and when employers help design it. The plan should pay for training that leads to work, measure what happens to the men who take it, and drop what doesn’t work.
Conclusion
The robot age will force a choice. We can leave the distribution of its abundance to whoever owns the machines, and watch a growing share of our people fall outside the game. We can seize the machines and hand them out, and destroy the motivation and property that built them. Or we can build a bridge: a living wage for those the machines release, training to bring them back into productive work, public debt used to build rather than consume, a public stake in what that debt builds, and markets left free to decide what gets made.
I favor the bridge. It keeps the free market working while the nation crosses. It honors the man who lost his job through no fault of his own, and it honors the man who took the risk to build. It moves us toward broad ownership by building new capacity rather than taking existing property.
I hold this the way I hold every position I take: as the best argument I have found so far, and I am open to a better one. The hardest questions are the pace of the living wage increase, the honest limits of public borrowing, and how to keep the producer’s reward real. I propose that these problems will yield to accounting and statistical analysis and are merely managerial, not philosophical or intangible. Those deserve the nation’s best minds, and I invite the debate.
Notes
- John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930).
- Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), chapter 12, on the negative income tax.
- G. K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity (1926), on distributism.
- The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the GI Bill).
- The Alaska Permanent Fund was established in 1976 and has paid an annual dividend to residents since 1982.
- Genesis 2:15; Genesis 3:17–19; Leviticus 25 (the Jubilee); Micah 4:4; Deuteronomy 25:13–15 and Proverbs 20:10 (divers weights); 2 Thessalonians 3:10.
Plain Language summary
As robots take over most work, people still need a way to claim a share of what the machines produce. This plan pays a living wage to people whose jobs are automated, ties it to retraining for work that still needs doing, and funds it through taxes on producers and public borrowing to build productive capacity. Markets still decide what gets made, and producers still earn more than the living wage. The essay names the biggest risk: printing money causes inflation unless the goods actually exist, so the wage should grow only as robotic output grows, and public austerity should be a voluntarily adopted discipline with news and email alerts indicating which areas of the economy are experiencing the most shortages, and offering advice to reduce consumption until the productive capacity is restored. Such economic management is informational and voluntary, not coercive. This program/blueprint for a new economic order offers a non-coercive path to broad ownership: when public money finances new productive capacity, the public owns a share and receives dividends, as Alaska’s oil fund does.
Notes
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932). Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (1904). “Do What You Like” was written by Ginger Baker and recorded by Blind Faith (1969).
Proverbs 21:20; Proverbs 22:7; 1 Timothy 6:6; Galatians 5:22–23; Exodus 16:16–30; 2 Corinthians 8:15.
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, chapter 2. Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850).
Cost estimates: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, excessive alcohol use (about $249 billion, 2010), cigarette smoking (more than $600 billion, 2018), obesity medical costs (about $173 billion, 2019), and sexually transmitted infections (about $16 billion in lifetime medical costs for infections acquired in 2018); American Diabetes Association (about $413 billion, 2022); Joint Economic Committee of Congress, opioid epidemic (about $1.5 trillion, 2020, including the value of lives lost); Institute for American Values, The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing (about $112 billion a year, 2008); Federal Reserve Bank of New York, household credit card balances (above $1 trillion since 2023); U.S. Department of Agriculture, food waste (30 to 40 percent of the food supply).
From the Wage Economy to Distributed Economic Equity
Edits to this point: Chapter 7-8, Sunday, 9 AM, Pacific, 10/19/2026
Chapter 9 — Where Does God Get the Most Joy?
We had been talking about sexuality and the family, and about what binds people together. I wanted Isak to see why I kept coming back to sexuality, when there are so many other things a government might concern itself with.
THOMAS: We’re trying to make life good. I brought up sexuality because we were talking about ordering the world so that everybody acts right: we punish people who do harm, and we leave alone people who do good. Doing good is its own reward, or we give each other a pat on the back. We don’t have a government Department of Congratulation.
ISAK: They have that in schools: the participation ribbon.
THOMAS: We don’t need a government Department of Applause. We have government agencies over all kinds of things. Whether we need bureaucracies to run energy, education, commerce, agriculture, labor, and the rest is another topic.
Sexuality comes up as an issue because when a society’s sexuality is unregulated, this isn’t the only arena where people have character weaknesses. When people can’t stay in their lane under great temptation, it indicates immaturity and a failure to do the right thing. Sexuality is intimately connected with family and character. If the standard of life under pressure is “do what you like,” society will likely be made up of people who are easily swayed by other passions. The best society doesn’t arise when everyone follows their strongest urge every moment. People living in uncommitted sexual lifestyles usually don’t form stable families, and if they do, the family is likely shaped by that pattern. I believe that heterosexual monogamy is the ideal family structure and the ultimate root, and other lifestyles modify society at its root.
Then the question is: if embracing alternative sexuality changes society, should we push against the agenda to embrace and accept the rainbow of changes? If my postulate is correct, that the society built on heterosexual monogamy produces the happiest children, parents, and families, then yes, we should resist the pressure to give blanket endorsement to every alternative sexual lifestyle and practice. If sex shapes the person and the family, and heterosexual fidelity is the optimum, we should openly declare what the highest and best way of ordering our passions is. It takes discipline to live a life of heterosexual fidelity, and to endorse any other standard is to encourage living a life that is either immature or disordered.
I consider homosexuality to be a type of arrested growth. I have no doubt that some people truly have an erotic sexual desire for members of their same sex and suffer from SSAD (Same Sex Attraction Disorder). I do not know the cause, nor do I know how to treat it, but I do believe that people can be restored to having a normal heterosexual passion. It may take a miracle of God. It may be a lot of work. It may require the person’s genuine desire to overcome it. I do know that the Bible reveals that God is displeased by this behavior, and I believe God withdraws His blessing from a nation that endorses that which the Bible condemns as an abomination.
I believe there are a number of ways that people can be drawn into alternative sexual lifestyles. Some are molested. Some are hurt in love. Some are born with a desire. Some are imprinted young. Some are seduced. Some are lonely. Some see the lifestyle as fashionable or rebellious. Some have not grown out of a life stage. Everyone has his own particular way of growing up, and his own particular desire. I believe the path to normal attraction should include abstinence, fidelity, hard work, long devotion, and relationship. Everyone has desires that they must control and simply choose not to act on.
If a society embraces/endorses/celebrates alternative sexuality, then it risks ending up with large communities of people who have made that choice, and the society changes. The argument is that people are a rainbow and that diversity is our strength. But that is only true if people are living Godly lives and everyone serves as part of a body working to build a Godly society. There are two issues. 1) If it is true, the Bible says that God is displeased with sexuality other than heterosexual monogamy. 2) A society that embraces non-family relationships, whether it be unmarried, serial monogamy, polygamy, adultery, fornication, or the vast array of alternative sexual relationships, weakens the family unit. The Kingdom of Heaven is composed of the souls of individuals, and it will come only when His people achieve perfection in His way. Achieving perfection may be impossible, but we can try to live up to His standard. To the extent of the deficiency in our perfection of His way, the dynamic of society is less happy and joyful.
I put all of this under one question: Where does God get the most joy living in every single person? If one person isn’t enjoying his life the way that makes God happy, then there is one less experience of God being fully satisfied in this world. It shows up in people who are dissatisfied with their lives and go out to do things that are destructive, irritating, or impoverishing. Not living the way God wants us to live has a cost. That’s the bottom line. It diminishes life a little for all of us when any of us lives outside that perfection.
We’re all pulled toward the animal side of our sexuality. The same is true of all of our animal passions. We are pulled toward overconsumption: of money, control, and sensation. All of those things are good in the proper time and place. Money is important as a medium of exchange, to trade my labor for your labor. Control is important to guide large forces that would otherwise be damaging. Sexuality is supremely important because our very existence depends upon reproduction, and its desire must be strong, and God has designed us to desire it, perhaps as much or more than any other sensation. Sensual experience matters, as life is composed of it; the senses are our interface with reality; feelings/emotions give us joy, peace, and love. We need highs and lows to recognize that the high is better.
Herbs are the original drugs, with a wide spectrum being available in nature. They are poisonous in large doses and medicines in small doses. There is a time for stimulation and a time for sedation. There is an appropriate time for medication and a time to abstain. The mind- and mood-altering drugs isolate circumstances from the mental and emotional real-world experience. The drug highs are higher than you would ever experience in life without them, and the lows can be lower than you would ever go. Chronic use of mind- and mood-altering drugs can make the normal variations of mind and mood where normal life happens seem boring. The result is that life on drugs can be unsatisfying because the subtle shades of normal life are missed. It’s easy to miss enjoying the feelings of life where: “This is all right.” Like your experience on the porch the other day when you felt, “This is just good.”
ISAK: I was thinking about that while you were talking: the highs and lows, and what I used to chase without really knowing it was, “I need to feel good.” You’re like a fish chasing a hook. It’s over there, and it’s going to be so good. You’re swimming against the current, and you don’t know where it is, but you saw it in this water before. It becomes a kind of chaotic search in itself, an offering to the night. “I’ll give my time to the evening and let it take me.”
What I have now is the ability to sit back and say, “I’m bored. This is nice. Nothing’s on my mind. I’m emptying my mind. I’m just here, and this is enough. This is peace.” It’s a momentary peace, and I know what to do with it. I can just sit here and be here. You don’t get that in a low or in a high.
In a high, you might say, “I dedicate my life to this,” but it doesn’t stay unless it’s real. You lose it quickly. I do think spiritual things can happen in altered states, so I’m not talking about your experience. I mean, you think you know something, you feel amazing, you think this is the best, and then you come down and see the toll it’s taken on you.
Sex is great until you find out it’s meaningless. The whole reason you go into it is, “I don’t have to see this person ever again. It’s going to be fun.” Then you move on, and it isn’t something you wanted or feel good about. If you don’t care, you can brag about it and add to your count. But it won’t take you anywhere. If anything, it can make you sick. It isn’t sustainable. It isn’t “the more sex, the better,” any more than it’s “the more food, the better.” After a while you’ll be–
THOMAS: Fat or impotent.
ISAK: Fat from pleasure, or impotent from exhaustion. Exactly.
The question I asked Isak that morning is important. What is the measure of happiness? When should we be satisfied?
God’s joy as the measure
I believe that God is not only the Creator standing outside His creation. He experiences it. As the source of everything that exists, all substance and experience arise in some way from within His consciousness. I believe He holds and experiences it all, and He lives in every person, sharing that person’s life from the inside. That means every human life is, among other things, an experience God is having. To love God, in the sense of expressing our love in action, is to give Him the experience of a life lived the way He would live it perfectly. And the Bible, with its stories, proverbs, commandments, and parables, is the instruction manual for what God enjoys being and experiencing.
That changes how we should think about sin. Sin is not a pleasure that God forbids. It is a short-term thrill with long-term consequences. It is ice cream instead of a meal, which leads to diabetes instead of health and strength. It is a thrill followed by pain, instead of the soft joy that lasts. God’s commandments are not arbitrary restrictions on our fun. They describe the shape of the fullest life, the one in which He and we find the most joy. When a man lives faithfully with his wife for fifty years, raises children who love God, works hard, gives freely, and grows old with grace, God has had that life, from the inside. When a man chases the next thrill, the next high, the next body, and ends up alone, God has had that life too. It hurts Him, and it is not an expression of love.
So when I ask whether the nation should care about sexuality, my question is not “How do we stop people from having fun?” It is “How do we help each person have the life that is actually the most joyful, for him and for God?” That is a question a nation should ask. As in the 10 commandments, we should honor our father and mother, and likewise honor our heavenly Father by giving Him a good experience of living life in His way.
Why one person’s life is everyone’s concern
The libertarian objection to regulating sexuality or drug use is that a man’s private life is private, personal, owned by the man, and if a man engaged in a contract with a mutually willing partner, and no one is harmed, then the contract is no one else’s business. If a man wants to choose a lesser happiness, that’s his business, and the State should not interfere with the individuality, free will, and personal responsibility of that choice.
But we are not that separate. Paul wrote that the church is one body, and that “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” A nation is not the church, but the principle holds for any people bound together. When a man abandons his children, the whole community raises them, pays for them, or suffers when they grow up wounded. When hearts break, they harden, and hard-hearted people make the country colder for everyone. When appetite goes unchecked, we all pay the cost. The lesser happiness is never entirely private. It diminishes everyone’s life a little.
The porch
In Isak’s testimony, he described the old life: fish chasing the hook, evenings given to whatever they brought, a high that felt like the truth until it wore off. Then he described the new one: sitting on a porch with nothing on his mind and knowing this is enough.
That is what the lesser happinesses can never give. They offer intensity, but life lived with too much intensity inevitably exhausts our reserves. Our minds and bodies are not infinite reservoirs of energy and neurotransmitters. At some point, our reserves are depleted, and we feel the mental-emotional crash after excess intensity. Excess emotion and stimulation of the body-mind, as in with the highs of meaningless sex, mind-altering drugs, and heart-pounding rock and roll, which have no underlying corresponding body reality associated with them, cannot give the long-lasting contentment of joy, peace, and satisfaction of ordinary accomplishment from hard work, close relationships, and find it sufficient. The fullest life is not a life of constant highs. It is a life in which the ordinary is good: a meal with family, a day’s honest work, a marriage that has lasted, an evening on the porch. That is where God’s joy is most at home.
The posture this requires
One more thing needs to be said here, because what I have said about homosexuality and the other alternatives will be heard by many as contempt. It is not.
I believe these patterns are a lesser happiness, because I think it is true and because a nation that cannot say what it believes about the good life cannot help anyone find it. But the people living those lives are not my enemies. They are children of God missing a joy meant for them, just as I miss joys meant for me whenever I choose my own appetites over God’s way. We all have our ice cream. I’m not offering condemnation, but an invitation to a better meal. I return to this at the end of the book because everything depends on it: we love the sinner and hate the sin, including our own.
If the nation’s happiness really depends on these choices, then the nation has an interest in helping its people make better ones. The question is how it can do that without becoming the thing Isak feared at the start of this book. That is where our conversation turned next.
Notes
1 Corinthians 12:26.
The phrase “giving God the experience of life lived the way He would live it perfectly,” and the description of the Bible as “the instruction manual… for what God enjoys being and experiencing,” come from Thomas’s remarks to the Christos Fellowship on September 6, 2026.
Chapter 10 — A Department of Morality or a Godly King
If a nation’s happiness really depends on how its people live, then the nation has an interest in encouraging them to live well.
THOMAS: Government has many departments. There are fifteen at the cabinet level, including State, Treasury, Justice, Energy, Commerce, and Education, and it is tempting to add a Department of Morality, an agency that acts like a church. But good and bad kings come and go. Machinery built to encourage godliness will be used to counsel ungodliness (tolerance, multiculturalism, and compliance) when the next king is elected. So while I would like to establish an office, agency, or Department of Morality, the king’s counsel should rest on sanctifying the nation. David had Nathan, who counseled him to confess and repent of his sin. The god, or God, to whom Israel’s kings held allegiance dramatically affected the nation’s moral state. When Israel had godly kings, the nation prospered, and when it had ungodly kings, it declined. The President should encourage people to act right, and he should direct his administration’s departments, agencies, and offices to support godliness. My program is to encourage godliness from the top of the government. I want every department, agency, and office to feel authorized to say what the right thing is. Government has plainly been willing to counsel ungodliness, and there is no reason that should be the only counsel it is allowed to give. I’m not proposing throwing people in jail for being morally impure. I’m proposing that government feel free to call on the community to support those who are having trouble. Welfare, prisons, and child protective services already work along these lines, but people need to feel free to support one another openly in godliness. Churches, counselors, mental health clinics, and associations should be strongly connected.
What I’ve just described is what church is supposed to be. Church isn’t that, but it should be. And the government has, in a way, allied itself with “do what you like,” and “do what you like” doesn’t produce a stable social order.
If one of the state’s important functions is to survive and maintain social order, and its survival depends on the health and general welfare of its people, then a state that tolerates, or promotes, ungodliness risks its own collapse. Thus, promoting the character of its people is a vital part of promoting the general welfare. The Constitution speaks of providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. Punishment should serve the social order, which exists for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (which, in one version of its drafting, was property). So: life, liberty, happiness, and property.
We should be happy. If you’re having sex outside marriage, being unfaithful, and so on, you are in some way not contributing to everyone’s happiness. If nothing else, you broke a heart. If nothing else, you helped make another heart callous and hard. Do we want hard-hearted, callous people in a society? Such traumas and feelings oppose flourishing. We’re trying to build a nation with the best possible life experience. It’s a trivial observation that a society filled with many who do not connect with others because of hurt and trauma, who follow their own impulses, creates a society that is colder and more brutal. A society populated by people who focus on themselves, take what they can from others, and react to others based on their own experience of hurt doesn’t bring the most happiness. We could let people work it out on their own, but it could take a long time before they learned to move toward goodness. As a society, we could let people live that way because it’s what they like, and most don’t change when confronted. But such indifference and avoidance is not love. We want people to actually care, help, and grow.
ISAK: It’s like thinking about the country the way you think about your family. What do you want for the people in it? A hard-hearted person who hides from the world won’t benefit anybody.
Think of it this way: you can treat everybody in the world well. Treating him well is treating your own child well. It’s treating God well. They’re all interchangeable; only the way you treat them differs. So how do you build a country where people are soft-hearted? It’s a country where people treat each other well and don’t expect to be stabbed in the back, or cheated, or abandoned with a child. Those have become the expectations. Sometimes people take the risk and commit to somebody, and sometimes it works. Or they don’t think about it at all, and they end up not knowing who the father is.
All of that leads to a decaying society, not through any one person’s choice, but through a way of life: “It’s okay to leave. Nobody’s shaming me for it. Or if they are, they’re in a different state, and I’ll get out of paying child support.” That’s the generational decay of support, confidence, and the ability to open your heart to each other. We really wrecked the family, didn’t we? It has to be restored. Is anybody really unaware of how good it is to have a family that stays together?
Of course there are complications. The dad beats the mom, and she has to leave. Or he cheats, or she cheats. But I always think of the story in the Bible about a man whose wife went off and became a prostitute. I don’t remember whether he was a king.
THOMAS: That was Hosea and Gomer.
ISAK: He asks, “What do I do?” And God says, in effect, “Let her wash and wait a while, and then take her back, because I’ve done the same for you. I’ve done the same for this nation.” In my mind, that’s everybody. It’s just the nature of things: we act against what God would want, or what your wife would want.
That story always stood out to me because it bothered me as a child. I thought, “I would never take anybody back.” It’s what the world teaches: “This is sin. Don’t take them back. They’re defiled.” That story really shaped how I understand forgiveness. Being betrayed by the person closest to you may be the worst pain there is. But that pain isn’t new. God has felt it billions of times, and it’s okay. The only way forward is forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance.
Keeping families together, not mistreating each other: I wonder whether we could change hearts in a generation or two. “This is how we should be treated. This is how we should treat others. This is how we forgive, and how we ask for forgiveness.” How many times do you forgive somebody? Seventy times seven. It’s about the heart. Seventy times seven is ridiculous on purpose. It means don’t stop.
Why not a department
The phrase “Department of Morality” frightens people. Orwell’s Ministry of Love was a torture chamber. The Soviet Union committed dissidents to psychiatric hospitals and called their disagreement a mental illness. China today runs camps it calls “vocational education and training centers.” Every one of those regimes said it was helping people become better.
My objection to a department is not that its first director would be a tyrant. My objection is that its tenth director might be. An agency is a machine, and a machine serves whoever holds the controls. Remember the G-men. We created them to stop the robbers, and once the robbers were caught, they needed something to do, so they started watching everybody. Every agency wants to grow, and every agency outlives the people who founded it. If I built a Department of Morality with the best intentions and the strictest safeguards, the next administration could rewrite the safeguards and keep the department. The offices, budgets, files, and staff would all still be there, ready to teach whatever the new king believed. A department built to teach godliness would, in the wrong hands, become the most efficient machine ever built for teaching its opposite.
So I will not build one. The nation’s moral leadership should come from a man, not a machine. When a godly President speaks, his counsel carries the weight of his office for as long as he holds it, and it leaves with him. A bad successor inherits the chair, but not the conscience. He can say what he likes, and the people can judge his counsel by its fruit, as they judged mine. That is the American design: power checked, and a free voice.
The king’s counsel
This is not a new idea. It is the oldest idea in the Bible’s account of nations. Israel’s kings had no Department of Morality, but the nation’s moral life rose and fell with the allegiance of the man on the throne. When Hezekiah and Josiah turned to God, they led the people back by example and proclamation, and the land had rest. When Ahab served Baal, the nation followed him down. The king’s counsel was not a program. It was the direction his life and words gave to the nation.
America’s founders understood this. In his Farewell Address, Washington told the nation that religion and morality are the indispensable supports of political prosperity, and that a man who undermines them has no claim to be called a patriot. He held no power over anyone’s conscience, and he needed none. He spoke as the father of his country, and the country listened. In the darkest year of the Civil War, Lincoln proclaimed a national day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer, and told the nation it had forgotten God and needed to confess its sins. He did not create an agency to enforce repentance. He called for it, and he led it.
We have a modern example of how far a voice can carry. The Surgeon General has no police. He cannot arrest a smoker or fine a restaurant. In 1964, his advisory committee reported that smoking causes lung cancer, and the nation began telling that truth with one voice. Nobody was jailed. Yet the share of American adults who smoked fell from about 42 percent in 1965 to under 12 percent by 2021. That was accomplished by persuasion: a nation telling the truth consistently and making help available to anyone who wanted to quit. If one voice in government could do that for the lungs, the President’s voice can do it for the heart.
What the President would do
First, he would speak. The President would state, in plain words and often, the moral law the nation holds in common: the commandments on which all Christians agree, and the two great commandments on which they hang. That means the moral foundation, not doctrine, and not any church’s teaching about baptism or the end times. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Do not commit adultery. Honor your father and mother. Keep your vows. Love your neighbor as yourself. He would name, as I described in Chapter 6, what falls short of that standard. And he would do it the way Roosevelt spoke to the nation in his fireside chats: not as a bureaucrat issuing guidance, but as a man talking with his neighbors at the end of the day about what is true and what is worth doing.
Second, he would judge the laws in public. The prophets of Israel were not the king’s chaplains; they told the king what God thought of his laws. A godly President has to do that for himself, and he has a power Nathan never had: the veto. When a major bill reaches his desk, he explains to the nation, in moral terms, why he signs it or refuses it. Whom does this help? Whom does it harm? Would the neighbor on the receiving end feel loved by it? A nation that hears its laws judged by that standard year after year will begin to judge them that way itself.
Third, he would set the tone of his administration. The departments already speak to the nation every day. Health agencies publish advice, schools publish curricula, and courts and prisons shape the men who pass through them. Right now much of that speech counsels “do what you like.” The President would not add a new department; he would change what the existing ones say. Each would be free, within its existing mission, to tell the truth it already knows. The health agencies know what fatherlessness does to children. The justice system knows what restitution does for a victim and for the man who pays it. The schools know that children raised to keep their word do better than children raised to keep their options open. None of this requires a new office, a new budget, or a new power. It requires a President who gives his people permission to say what is true.
Fourth, he would call on the churches and the communities, and hold the door open. Most people who are going wrong don’t need a lecture. They need someone who can see what is actually happening in their soul and tell them the truth in a way they can hear. I have practiced that kind of counsel for years, and I believe it can be taught. The method is rapport, confrontation, and change. Rapport comes first because a man has to trust you before he will listen. Then comes confrontation, tentatively, asking for enrollment, self-confession, acknowledgment of the need to change: “When you do this, here is what it does to you and to the people you love.” Then comes an invitation to change. The diagnosis opens the door, but each of us must walk through it willingly. The government should not train or certify counselors, but it may speak to a counselor’s character and the end toward which he counsels. The President should call on pastors, teachers, coaches, and the older men and women of every community to take up the work, and on the churches and associations to train them. The help should be free, close to home, and offered in groups small enough for people to actually know each other. That could mean a couple on the edge of divorce, a young man who can’t stop drinking, a father who wants to be a better father and doesn’t know how because he was abused or abandoned, or a woman who was used and discarded and may have hardened her heart against further hurt. The government’s part is to say clearly that this help exists, that it hopes people will use it, and that it will never stand in the way.
Fifth, he would push for rehabilitating the convicted. For a man who has actually committed a crime, who has stolen, assaulted, or defrauded, a court should be able to offer or require counsel, through chaplains, missions, churches, clinics, and faith-based organization volunteers, as part of his sentence, alongside restitution to his victim. A prison that releases a man harder than it received him has failed at the one thing that would actually protect the next victim.
What the President’s counsel must never become
A voice can still be abused, so it is important to know the limits.
It must never watch. No surveillance, no files on anyone’s private life, no informants, and no neighbor reports about what goes on in a man’s home. The flashlight in the back of the parked car is exactly what this is not.
It must never compel. No one could be required to receive counsel unless a court had convicted him of a real crime against a real victim. No one could be penalized for refusing help, disagreeing with the President, or telling him he is wrong. A forced conversion is no conversion, and forced counseling of a free man is only a softer prison.
It must never use the sword against the conscience. The President’s counsel would have no power to arrest, fine, or deny anyone a job, a license, or a benefit because of his moral views. The sword belongs to the courts and is limited to crimes that harm victims.
It must never pry. What a man tells his counselor should stay with the counselor, protected as what he tells his priest or his lawyer, with only the exceptions the law already recognizes: a child in danger or a clear threat to someone’s life. If a man fears his confession will reach a prosecutor, he will never come.
It must never impose doctrine. The President would speak the moral law on which Christians agree and leave everything else to the churches. When a man is ready to go further, he belongs in his own church, or in one of his choosing. The President has no business telling a Baptist what to believe about baptism or a Catholic what to believe about the Mass.
And it must never build anything that outlives its purpose. That is why I take this approach. When I leave office, nothing I have said should remain behind as machinery for someone else to use. The fruit should remain: marriages that held, fathers who stayed, men who came out of prison and did not go back. The President should report that fruit to the nation every year. Are fewer marriages breaking up? Are fewer children growing up without fathers? Are fewer men returning to prison? If his counsel is not bearing fruit, the people should know.
Why the President, and not just the church?
One might ask: if what I am describing is what the church is supposed to do, why should the President say anything at all?
The honest answer is that the church should do it, and mostly isn’t. And the state is no longer neutral. It has allied itself with “do what you like.” Through its schools, it teaches children that no moral center exists. It pays for the consequences of the collapse and says nothing about its causes. Every broken marriage, abandoned child, addiction, and heart made callous by being used and discarded is paid for by all of us, in prisons, in welfare, and in children who grow up without fathers and pass the wound along. The government spends enormous sums treating the results of moral collapse and almost nothing encouraging the character that prevents it. That is like paying nothing for the fence at the top of the cliff and everything for the ambulance at the bottom, and nations have collapsed that way before. The choice is not between a government that teaches morality and a government that stays neutral. The government is already teaching. The only question is what it teaches.
But the order of responsibility matters. The family comes first, the church second, the community third, and the state last, and the state’s job is to strengthen the first three, not replace them. A department would always be tempted to take over the work. A President’s voice can only send people back to their fathers, their churches, and their neighbors. If he succeeds, the work will belong to them, and it will not depend on who sits in the White House next.
What it looks like when it works
Let me make it concrete. A young husband hears the President say, on a Sunday evening, that a marriage is worth fighting for and that people in every town are ready to help. He thinks about it for a week. Then he goes to a counselor in his own town: maybe a deacon in his church, maybe a retired teacher, someone who answered the President’s call and learned the work through his church. He says his marriage is falling apart and he is thinking of leaving. The counselor builds rapport and listens. Then he tells him the truth: “You’re not getting your needs met, and neither is she, and neither of you has ever asked the other for what you need in a way the other could hear.” They work on it, in the way I describe in the next chapter: asking for what you need without demanding it, and serving by requiring service in return. Maybe the marriage survives. Maybe it doesn’t. But no one watched him, no one reported him, no one forced him to come, and no one punished him for leaving. His President simply told him the truth, made clear what he hoped he would choose, and his neighbors made it easy for him to find help.
Multiply that by a million homes, and you have a different country.
That is what I mean by a godly king. He is not a man with a department, but a man with a voice, who tells the nation the truth and then holds the door open. It is what Hosea did for Gomer, and what God has done for every one of us: not throwing us away, but coming after us, over and over, seventy times seven, without ever forcing us to come home.
Notes
The Preamble to the Constitution speaks of providing “for the common defence” and promoting “the general Welfare.” “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence; John Locke’s earlier formula was “life, liberty, and estate.”
Hosea 1–3; the instruction to wait “many days” before restoring Gomer is in Hosea 3:3. Matthew 18:22. 2 Samuel 12:1–7 (Nathan). Hezekiah: 2 Kings 18; 2 Chronicles 29–31. Josiah: 2 Kings 22–23. Ahab: 1 Kings 16:29–33.
George Washington, Farewell Address (1796). Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day (March 30, 1863). Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his fireside chats by radio from 1933 to 1944.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Soviet punitive psychiatry is documented in Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (1977).
U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee, Smoking and Health (1964). Adult smoking prevalence: about 42 percent in 1965 and 11.5 percent in 2021 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
The rapport–confrontation–change method and the “rifle shot” are from Thomas’s essay “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (February 2026).
Chapter 11 — Everything Is God: Marriage, Service, and the Two-Way Street
Isak had said that the only way forward is forgiveness, seventy times seven. I told him that what he was describing is exactly what this whole work is for.
THOMAS: These things are the end goal of what we’re trying to do. This ministry is about creating that for the nation.
Why do you believe in God? Because look at the physics. At the bottom of it, you can see that everything is God. Once you’ve seen that, how does it fit your life? If everything is God, then I’m a part of God. Certainly not the whole thing; I can see I’m just a tiny speck of it. But I have a point of view, and it’s one God has, because I have it and God is everything. If I have a God point of view, so do you. You have your particular desires, the things that make you feel good, and I have mine. If you like good things, and I can give them to you without destroying my own life, if it’s within what one person can actually do for another, something that doesn’t destroy me but does help him, then I should do it.
I keep coming back to a line about marriage. It says not to be discouraged by the duties or the hardships of married life. It admits marriage is hard and that some parts of it aren’t pleasant. But don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. Don’t be resentful. Do what marriage requires, and do it with a good spirit. The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Do it as unto the Lord, with a giving heart.
If everybody did that all the time in their own marriage, people wouldn’t get divorced. People divorce because their needs aren’t being met. If you give to meet her needs and she gives to meet yours, even if your needs are very different, both people feel that this is all right. If that doesn’t satisfy you, and you want something else because it’s more exciting, faster, smoother, cooler, the latest model, then you’re living on ice cream. You just want sugar. You want another dopamine hit. That’s a maturity problem. So learn to be at peace. Learn to sit on the porch and rest. Learn to appreciate what is. It comes down to a heart that’s regulated.
If everybody has that, everybody is being served by everybody else. “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” That’s because he’s made so many people happy. But you’re also supposed to love yourself, and loving yourself means you need to be served too. The person who only serves others isn’t keeping the Great Commandment. You love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t have a body and not have needs; that’s a given. So what do you need? How can I help you? What do I need to be served? Maybe all I need is a cup of water and a crust of bread. That’s very little, but I do need it.
Most people need much more than that. But if we all give and receive, and focus on the joy of giving to people who perhaps can’t give back yet, who can only take right now because that’s what they need, then we give them that. When they’ve had enough, we say, “Now it’s time for you to learn to give. I’m going to serve you by letting you serve me, by asking you to serve.” That is serving him, because he’s learning how to serve. So correction is a very important part of teaching. Training other people to give is an important part of giving. It’s another kind of service: we serve them by requiring them to serve.
So it isn’t self or other. It’s self and other, and it can’t be any other way. If it’s self or other, then someone is not important, and that is not true; God lives through everyone, and everyone should have a good experience of living life. It can’t be that “I just serve.” That is wrong. You still need to learn the ways of the world if you think that only giving is the correct attitude toward life. It is important to let other people help and server you. And the other way is true; if you’re surrounded by takers, you need to train them to be givers, and that is giving to them and serving them.
ISAK: Yes. You can serve them and serve yourself at the same time, and ideally, in a harmonious society, that’s how it goes. But not everybody knows how to do each part.
THOMAS: That comes down to being able to ask for what you want. It’s rapport, confrontation, and change. “When you do this, it makes me feel bad. I’d like it if you did it this way. Wipe the countertop. Take out the trash. Get up and take care of the kids.” Whatever it is. “Rather than my doing it all the time, I need to be served too. It hurts when I have to do it all the time. Would you do this for me?”
When you ask to be served, you’re speaking the truth, and you speak the truth in love. Love doesn’t demand its own way. It isn’t proud, arrogant, boastful, or angry. It’s patient. It asks for what it wants, but in a way that pleases. If that isn’t answered, then you may need to be angry. But you don’t sin, and you don’t carry the anger with you. You keep faith and you forgive. You’re angry because you were sinned against. You were hurt. You were trespassed against. There was a debt, and you’re asking for it to be settled. So it’s necessary to use anger when sugar doesn’t work. You try the stick. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but every now and then you need a fly swatter.
ISAK: Good point. Honey doesn’t work for everything.
THOMAS: Honey works really well most of the time. But you need the fly swatter too.
That exchange may seem like a detour from national politics into marriage counseling. It isn’t. It is the foundation under everything else in this book.
From the physics to the kitchen
I began that morning with the claim that at the bottom of reality, everything is God: every conscious point is a point of His own consciousness. That can sound like an abstraction, the kind of thing a man says about physics and then forgets when he goes home. But if it is true, it changes how I have to treat the person across the kitchen table.
If God has a point of view in me, He has one in my wife. Her desires, her tiredness, and her need to be helped with the dishes are not interruptions to my spiritual life. They are part of the life God is living through her. When I serve her, I am serving Him, not as a pious metaphor but as a plain description of what is happening. Christ said it directly: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The physics and the Gospel say the same thing, and they say it about the kitchen as much as about the church.
Self and other
But the same truth that obliges me to serve her obliges her to serve me, and obliges me to ask for it. This is where many sincere Christians go wrong. They hear “the greatest among you shall be your servant” and conclude that the holiest life is one of endless self-erasure. It isn’t. The Great Commandment says to love your neighbor as yourself. It assumes self-love, and it measures love of neighbor by it. The man who only gives, who never asks, who lets himself be used until he is empty and bitter, is not keeping the commandment better than anyone else. He is keeping half of it. And he is doing the takers around him no favors, because he is teaching them to take.
That is why correction is a form of love. When I ask someone to serve me, to carry his share, to give back, I am not being selfish. I am teaching him to give, which is the best thing I can teach him. A parent who never asks anything of his children raises people who cannot love. A spouse who never asks anything of the other ends up either resentful or gone.
The method
The method is the same in a marriage, a family, a congregation, or a nation: rapport, confrontation, and change. First, establish trust, so the other person knows you are for him. Then tell the truth precisely: this is what you are doing, and this is what it does. Then invite change, and leave room for it. This is what I described in the last chapter as the work of a trained counselor. But every husband and wife, every parent, every friend needs the same skill. A country of people who can ask for what they need, and hear a request without taking offense, is a country that needs far fewer laws.
Anger that doesn’t sin
And sometimes the gentle request doesn’t work. Paul says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” Anger is not always sin. It is the right response to real wrong. Christ Himself made a whip of cords and drove the money changers out of the temple. What makes anger sinful is not its heat but its aim. Anger that seeks to destroy, to humiliate, or to repay evil with evil is sin. Anger that says, “This must stop, and I love you too much to let it continue,” and then lets go of the grudge once it is heard, is not.
So honey first, and honey most of the time. But a love that never uses the fly swatter is not stronger than one that does. It is only less honest.
A nation of households
Everything this book proposes for the nation rests on this. Safeguards, a Department of Morality, the jury, the republic: none of them can work in a nation whose homes are battlegrounds of unmet needs and silent resentment. And all of them become nearly unnecessary in a nation whose homes are schools of mutual service, where each person gives, asks, corrects, forgives, and gives again. The kingdom of heaven on earth is not first a political arrangement. It is millions of kitchens where people have learned to serve each other cheerfully. The government can’t create that. But a nation can decide it wants it, say so, and help its people learn.
Notes
The line Thomas recalls about not being discouraged by the duties or hardships of married life has not been traced to a specific source. The nearest scriptural acknowledgment of those hardships is 1 Corinthians 7:28 (“such shall have trouble in the flesh”).
2 Corinthians 9:7; Colossians 3:23; Matthew 23:11; Matthew 22:37–40; Matthew 25:40; Ephesians 4:15, 26; 1 Corinthians 13:4–5; John 2:15.
Chapter 12 — A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State: Systemic Injustice and the Chain That Must Be Broken
Isak had come into the conversation worried about Christian nationalism, and by now I thought he could see what I actually meant by it. I wanted to say it plainly.
THOMAS: So the Christian nationalism question sounds as though it’s about a nanny state, but it isn’t. It’s about a church. It’s about a kingdom. It’s about making the kingdom of heaven on earth. It isn’t about going out to raise hell, or going out tonight to find some sinners and string them up. It’s about actually loving other people. Be angry, and sin not. You overcome evil with good. A lynching is not overcoming evil with good. It’s taking part in evil, being evil yourself. All the things that have been done in the name of Christianity that aren’t Christian need to be called what they are. You can call that Christian nationalism all you want, but it isn’t Christian. It might be national, but it isn’t the kind of nation I’d want to live in, so it isn’t even a good nation.
ISAK: Ultimately, we’re trying to make a nice place for nice people.
THOMAS: And if you’re not a nice person, you need to rehabilitate yourself. That’s really important. We’re not only into punishment; we’re into rehabilitation. If you need to sit in the corner, or be away from people for a while to soften your heart and get some perspective, we’ll do that. But it’s about rehabilitation, and that’s why we forgive people. We give another chance. How many times do you forgive? It’s turning the other cheek: “Let’s try again. The way you did that wasn’t good. Let’s try again.” It doesn’t mean, “You slapped me here; now slap the other side.” It means, “I’m not going to retaliate and repay evil with evil. I’m going to repay this with good.”
To me it all seems so simple. It isn’t some big, complicated routine. But if you try to explain how it applies to every part of life, it becomes quite a tome. If you try to address every injustice, it gets very long, because the number of ways you can put a watch together wrong is enormous. There’s one way to put it together right. Any other way is just another wrong way, and there’s no end to them.
ISAK: And we’re seeing it compound from one evil decision: the lynching, then the eye-for-an-eye, and it keeps going and compounding. So it isn’t as though there’s one righteous side. When I see a war, and this may be controversial, I don’t see a right side. I see that both sides have their issues, historically and now. It seems we’re so far gone that it isn’t about being right anymore. It’s about who can forgive. How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?
Isak had put his finger on the question that hides behind one of the most contested phrases of our time. At the start of our conversation he had asked, “What does any of this do with systemic injustice?” and then left it there. Here he answered his own question with an image: evil compounding from one decision, link by link. It deserves a real answer, because the phrase “systemic injustice” means two very different things, and one of them is true.
Two meanings of one phrase
The first meaning is simply this: sin doesn’t stay where it was committed. It gets built into laws, customs, institutions, and families, and it goes on doing damage long after the people who committed it are dead. That is true. The Bible taught it long before any sociologist did.
The second meaning is the one most young Americans have been taught to hear in the phrase. It says that every difference in outcome between groups is proof of oppression, that people are guilty or innocent according to the group they were born into, and that the world divides into oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized. That meaning is not true. It is the worldview without a center, which I describe in Chapter 16, dressed up as justice.
I want to affirm the first as firmly as I reject the second. Christians who deny the first because they dislike the second have made a serious mistake, and they have handed the whole subject to people who will use it badly.
What the Bible says about inherited sin
In the Ten Commandments, God says He visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I read that first as a description of how sin actually works, not as an arbitrary punishment. Abuse produces abusers. A father who abandons his children raises sons who don’t know how to stay. A community that was robbed stays poor, and poverty has consequences of its own. The wound is passed down.
The Bible also recognizes sin written into law. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people.” That is systemic injustice in the most literal sense: injustice made into the system. The prophet Amos condemned Israel for selling the righteous for silver and turning aside the poor “in the gate,” where the courts sat. And the New Testament calls the whole order of human society organized apart from God “the world,” and says that “the whole world lieth in wickedness.”
But the same Bible draws a line that the modern ideology erases. Ezekiel says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Consequences are inherited. Guilt is not. The son of a thief may inherit poverty because his father’s stolen goods were taken back, or wealth because they weren’t. But the son is not a thief. You cannot put a man in the dock for what his great-grandfather did, or for what people who looked like him did.
That one distinction settles most of the argument. The consequences of injustice are real, and they travel down the generations. The guilt belongs to the man who committed it, and to no one else.
America’s own record
Isak told me he is cynical about his country’s history. He deserves an honest answer, not a flag-waving one.
America has written injustice into its law. Slavery was protected by the Constitution itself, through the clause requiring escaped slaves to be returned and the clause counting three-fifths of the enslaved population for representation. After slavery ended, the Southern states wrote Jim Crow into their statute books. As I said in Chapter 6, lynchers were acquitted by juries of professing Christians for the better part of a century. In the 1930s the federal government’s own mortgage programs marked black neighborhoods as bad risks and refused to insure loans there, so a generation of families could not build wealth through their homes the way their white neighbors did. Treaty after treaty with the Indian nations was signed and broken. Those were not merely the private sins of bad individuals. They were the law. They were the system.
But there is another half, and the ideology leaves it out. The people who ended those systems were overwhelmingly Christians acting on the Bible. The abolitionists were largely evangelicals quoting Scripture. The civil rights movement was led by preachers from black churches. Martin Luther King Jr. did not quote Marx. He quoted Amos: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The remedy for America’s systemic sin came out of the same book that is now blamed for it.
That is the pattern. When Christians do evil, they must disobey their own book to do it, and the book is what convicts them. So I don’t answer Isak’s cynicism by denying the sins. I answer it by pointing to where the repentance came from.
Why injustice outlives the unjust
Isak originally asked what Conscious Point Physics has to say about this. Here is the one thing I think it adds, by analogy.
The order of the universe is conservative. Disorder does not heal itself with time. It persists until a remedy is actually applied to it. That is the principle behind everything I believe about the cross: nothing is simply forgotten. A debt does not disappear because the creditor died. A wound does not close because the man who inflicted it is gone.
That is why systemic injustice outlives the unjust. The slaveholders are dead. The Jim Crow legislators are dead. The lynch mobs are dead. But the disorder they introduced did not die with them. It is still moving through families and neighborhoods, and through the way people look at each other. Waiting won’t fix it. Something has to be done.
And it is why political fixes alone keep failing. When the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them. You can abolish one unjust arrangement, and if hearts are unchanged, another grows in its place, the way a tumor grows back when the cancer is still in the body.
Two wrong remedies
There are two wrong remedies, and they mirror each other.
The first is denial: “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with me.” It is true that it is not your guilt. It is not true that it has nothing to do with you. You inherited a country, and a country is responsible for its own laws. Pretending the consequences aren’t there is not righteousness. It is the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side of the road.
The second wrong remedy is the one Isak described: the eye-for-an-eye. It punishes children for the sins of their fathers. It assigns guilt by race, which is exactly the thing it claims to oppose. It turns grievance into an identity, a permanent anger that no longer seeks to fix anything, because the anger has become the self. It redistributes by group, a new form of the Pleasantville robbery of Chapter 5. And it produces a new generation of wounded people who feel, correctly, that they were punished for something they didn’t do. So the chain continues. Every injustice done to remedy an old injustice is simply the next link.
This is what Isak meant when he said he doesn’t see a right side in so many conflicts. Once both sides have committed injustice in the name of redressing injustice, each side has a real grievance. Each can point to the other’s latest link. Arguing about who struck first stops being useful. The only question left is who will stop.
Six remedies that work
So what does a Christian nation actually do about systemic injustice? I see six things.
First, it repeals unjust laws and applies the law equally. This is the part that truly belongs to the state, because the state is responsible for its own laws. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.” One law for all, the same at the courthouse door for every man, whatever his color or his bank balance. That is the systemic remedy for systemic injustice, and it is the government’s job.
Second, it makes restitution where the victim and the wrongdoer can actually be identified. When Zacchaeus met Christ, he did not say, “I’ll be a better man from now on.” He said, “If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” Where a particular institution defrauded particular people, and the record shows it, justice requires repayment. What justice does not require is charging people who did nothing for debts owed by people they never knew.
Third, it confesses its national sins. Nehemiah and Daniel both prayed on behalf of their nation: “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity… we and our fathers.” They didn’t claim personal guilt for what their fathers had done. They confessed that the nation had sinned, and asked God to restore it. I have said that America must repent of its national sins, and this is part of what I mean. A nation that confesses the sin of slavery, of broken treaties, and of the lynching tree is not humiliating itself. It is doing what Nehemiah did.
Fourth, it rejects every form of racial nationalism. That answers the worry Isak raised about Christian nationalists who want the black and brown people out of the country. God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free.” He “hath broken down the middle wall of partition.” A nationalism built on race is not Christian nationalism. It is the same idolatry of the tribe that the gospel came to destroy. The Christian nation is defined by allegiance to Christ and His law, not by blood.
Fifth, it transforms relationships inside the system from within. Paul did not lead a slave revolt. He sent Onesimus, a runaway slave, back to his master Philemon with a letter telling Philemon to receive him “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” A church that treated slaves as brothers planted a seed that would eventually undo the whole idea of one man owning another. When master and slave kneel at the same table, the institution cannot survive the meal.
Sixth, and underneath all the others, it forgives. Forgiveness is not forgetting, and it is not excusing. It is the decision to absorb the blow instead of passing it on.
Who will stop
That brings us back to Isak’s question: how do we stop, forgive, and move forward?
Somebody has to take the blow and not return it. That is the only thing that ends a chain of retaliation. It is what Joseph did when his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, came to him in Egypt, and he had all the power in the world to repay them. He said, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” The chain stopped with him.
And it is what Christ did on a scale no one else could. He took the whole weight of human injustice, systemic and personal, the fathers’ and the sons’, into Himself on the cross, and He did not pass it on. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” That is the remedy from outside the system, the one the system can never produce for itself, because the system only knows how to pass things along.
So the Christian answer to systemic injustice is neither to deny it nor to repay it. It is to repeal the unjust law, restore what can be restored, confess what the nation did, refuse every idol of blood, change the relationships from within, and then let the chain end with us, because it ended with Him first.
That is the difference between a kingdom and a nanny state. A nanny state manages symptoms forever and keeps the grievances alive, because grievance is what it runs on. A kingdom ends the chain.
Notes
Ephesians 4:26; Romans 12:21; Matthew 5:39; Matthew 18:22.
Exodus 20:5; Ezekiel 18:20; Isaiah 10:1–2; Amos 2:6–7, 5:12, 5:24; 1 John 5:19; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17; Luke 10:31–32; Luke 19:8 (Zacchaeus); Exodus 22:1; Nehemiah 9:2, 33–34; Daniel 9:5–8; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Philemon 16; Genesis 50:20; Luke 23:34.
U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 2, clause 3 (the three-fifths clause) and Article IV, section 2, clause 3 (the fugitive slave clause), superseded by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Federal mortgage redlining: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps (1935–1940) and Federal Housing Administration underwriting practice in the 1930s.
The observation that “when the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them” is from Thomas’s Christos Fellowship discussion of Charles Eisenstein, February 24, 2026.
Chapter 13 — War and the Moral Side: When a Nation May Fight, and the Lunch Money It Must Not Take
Isak had said that when he looks at a war, he doesn’t see a right side. Both sides have their sins, historically and now, and the only question left seems to be who can forgive. I pushed back.
THOMAS: Usually one side doesn’t want to stop and forgive. It wants to dominate, and to dominate for evil. So you really do have to look for the moral side. Who is in the right here?
Look at Russia and Ukraine. On the surface, one country was just being itself, and another came along and tried to take it over because it had always wanted to. That isn’t the right way to do things. But the way it actually happened was more complicated. A new government came to power in Ukraine with our backing, and the people in the Donbas and in Crimea wanted to go with Russia. And Ukraine shelled the Donbas. Thousands of people were killed.
Then Russia says, “Now we want the rest of it.” And Ukraine says, “No, you don’t have the right to take us over just because you want to.” So one side harassed the people who chose to leave, and the other side said, “We’ve had enough. We’re coming to stop you from harassing the people who wanted to be with us.” But Russia didn’t stop there and say, “We’ve got our part; now we’re going home.” It said, “Since we’re here, we’ll take the rest.” So both sides escalated, and both lost the moral high ground.
This is the kind of situation where somebody ultimately has to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” If nobody will say that, then the only thing left is, “If you won’t stop, I’ll have to defeat you.” When one side is doing wrong and won’t stop, unconditional surrender, complete defeat, is the only thing possible.
That’s basically what the president said last night about Iran, and it’s why the market went down today. He said, in effect, “If you don’t stop completely, disarm, and give up your nuclear program, we’ll annihilate you.” But the cost of annihilating Iran without destroying the world is a price America can’t pay. America doesn’t have the will to send in, I’d guess, five or ten million men to destroy the regime in a country of some ninety million people. Iran is huge, and it’s mountainous. And using atomic weapons would kill so many innocent people that it’s completely unacceptable. There are people there who are friendly to us, and we’d be wiping them out to get rid of the cancer in their midst. Can we use nuclear weapons against a society like that? No. Even to consider it is immoral.
So if you rattle your saber and say you’re going to annihilate them, that means either nukes or ten million men. They know you won’t send ten million men, and they know you won’t use nukes. So they’ll thumb their noses at you. “You’re just talk. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing.”
ISAK: They’re calling the bluff.
THOMAS: They’ll call our bluff, and it is a bluff. And if it isn’t a bluff, that’s even worse.
ISAK: God forbid.
THOMAS: God forbid. The ten-million-men option isn’t workable, and the nukes aren’t workable.
ISAK: And dropping ten million people into a country isn’t good for your own economy, unless you’re tearing the other country apart and taking all its resources. And even then we’re still in that moral fight. Even if we kill all the right people—
THOMAS: No, I think that part is moral. You’ve stood up and said, “Your leaders want to bring about the end of the world. You don’t mind bringing destruction on everyone. The way you treat your people is unacceptable. And you have nuclear weapons, or you’re building them.” They probably have a stockpile. Imagine that they couldn’t develop nuclear weapons in the thirty years since we first went after them. Either they’re the most incompetent nuclear scientists in the world, or they have them. It would be naive to think otherwise.
ISAK: And we haven’t been able to stop them in all that time, so clearly they’re not incompetent. They’re not a nothing adversary.
THOMAS: It is moral to take them over. But if we’re going to make a claim like that, we have to be prepared to send troops. You won’t win by blowing up this and that. You go in and change the regime completely, and that’s nation-building. And there’s no point in doing it unless you’re going to make it a Christian nation. Otherwise you do what we did in Afghanistan: “We took Bagram. We overthrew the Taliban. Now we’re tired of this. This is the longest war we’ve ever had, and we’re out of here.”
ISAK: Then you get out, like you were saying about Vietnam, and the people you sided with, the allies you fought alongside, are left defenseless and get destroyed, because there are no more American lives to spend, and the other side cleans up.
THOMAS: Absolutely. Those are among the most immoral things we’ve done as a country. And we pretended the problem was anything but what it was. “We’re culturally diverse. We honor diversity.” Why were they acting that way? Because of Islam. Not because they were Buddhists or Baha’is. There’s an element of Islam that’s toxic, and its teaching carries the seeds that let that toxic strain grow. Now we have the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Sharia law. To pretend we have to honor that as diversity is nonsense. Would you put a black widow spider in your bed? That’s a stupid thing to do. You’ll get hurt.
ISAK: It’s like the scene in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. A meteor is coming, and everybody’s going to die in a few days. Steve Carell is brushing his teeth, sees a spider in the sink, and is about to kill it. Then he thinks, “The world’s ending. I’ll let it live.” Next scene, he’s driving to work with a big spider bite on his face.
What I said, and what I hold
I said something that morning that I need to correct. I told Isak it would be moral to take Iran over: to send in the troops, change the regime, rebuild the country, and make it a Christian nation. I said it in the heat of a conversation about a real threat, and I have thought about it since. I no longer hold it, and I want to say why, because a leader who cannot be corrected, even by himself, has no business asking a nation to follow him.
Here is what I believe about when a nation may go to war.
First, in its own defense. A nation may defend its people, its territory, and its allies against attack. That is the purpose of an armed force, and the name Congress gave its department in 1949 said so: the Department of Defense. As I write, Congress is considering changing it back to the Department of War. I think the old name was right. A name states a purpose. A nation that calls its military the Department of War has told itself what its army is for.
Second, against aggression by one nation against another. When a strong nation invades a weaker one to take its land, its people, or its government, other nations may rightly help the victim, as a man may rightly stop another man from beating his neighbor.
Third, against a government committing genocide against its own people. A government that sets out to exterminate a people has forfeited any claim to be left alone. The nations that stood by at Auschwitz, in Cambodia, and in Rwanda carry that on their consciences.
Those are the occasions when intervention may be just. They are not a list of wars that must be fought. Christ said that a king going to war should first sit down and count whether he can win, and if he can’t, send an embassy and ask for terms of peace. A just cause does not make a war wise, and a war that cannot be won, or whose cost would destroy the innocent it is meant to save, should not be started.
Outside those occasions, we do not send armies into other nations to change their governments or their religions, even governments and religions I believe are gravely wrong. That includes Iran. I still believe its rulers are dangerous, and that a nuclear weapon in their hands would be a threat to the world. If they attacked us or our allies, or set out to exterminate a people, we would have every right to act. But changing their regime is not our right, and making Iran a Christian nation is not the army’s work. No soldier can convert anyone. A church planted by conquest is not a church. It is an occupation with a steeple.
The weapons of the kingdom
What, then, does a Christian nation do about the nations it believes are wrong? It uses the weapons of the kingdom. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”
It sends missionaries, teachers, doctors, and builders. It educates. It builds bridges between peoples. It cares for the widow and the orphan, which James calls “pure religion and undefiled before God.” It shows other peoples that whatever is true and good in their own moral and religious traditions comes from the One God who made all things, since “without him was not any thing made that was made.” Every people has some portion of the truth about God, some fragment of His law written on its heart. We go to them not to erase what they have, but to show them the whole of which they hold a part, and to invite them to the One who is its source. I take this up again in Chapter 15.
That is slower than an invasion, and less satisfying to the part of us that wants the problem solved by next year. But it is the only thing that has ever actually transformed a nation. The Roman Empire was not converted by an army. It was converted by people who cared for the sick during the plagues when everyone else fled, who took in abandoned babies, and who died for their faith without killing anyone. That is what overcoming evil with good looks like at the scale of nations.
Turning the test on ourselves
Isak’s question at the start of our conversation was not really about Iran or Ukraine. It was about us. He said America seemed to have been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: going out to get oil and other resources, snuffing out political cultures it didn’t like, and funding regimes that crushed their own people’s movements. And he asked, “At what cost that I don’t know about? Are the good guys really the good guys?”
If I am going to tell him to look for the moral side in Russia and Ukraine, I have to be willing to look for it in America. So here it is.
What the record shows
Some of what Isak suspects is true, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
In 1953, after Iran’s elected prime minister nationalized the country’s oil industry, the CIA and British intelligence helped organize the coup that removed him and strengthened the Shah. The CIA has since acknowledged its role. The next year, the United States backed the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president after his land reform threatened the holdings of an American fruit company. In Chile in the early 1970s, the United States worked to destabilize an elected Marxist government. During the Cold War we supported more than one regime that tortured its own citizens, because those regimes opposed communism. And in 2003 we invaded Iraq on the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction, and the weapons were not there.
That is the playground-bully part of the record, and a Christian cannot look away from it.
But it isn’t the whole record, and if you see only that part, you will see something false. After the Second World War, the United States held more power than any nation in history. It did not annex Germany or Japan. It rebuilt them, and within a generation they were free, prosperous, and our friends. The Marshall Plan fed and rebuilt Western Europe, including our former enemies. The Berlin airlift flew food and coal into a blockaded city for more than a year rather than fight for it. And for most of the past eighty years, the American navy has kept the world’s sea lanes open to every nation’s ships, not only our own. Empires have not usually behaved that way. Rome did not rebuild Carthage. It destroyed it.
So the honest answer to “Are the good guys really the good guys?” is that America has done both. It has done great good and real wrong. The wrongs follow a pattern, and the pattern is worth seeing clearly.
The sin has a name
Every one of those wrongs has the same root: the tenth commandment. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house… nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” James tells us where wars come from: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain.”
Remember Naboth’s vineyard from Chapter 2. King Ahab wanted it. Naboth wouldn’t sell, so the queen arranged Naboth’s death and the king took the vineyard. God sent Elijah to ask him, “Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?” Nations are held to the same law. When a powerful nation overthrows a smaller nation’s government because that government decided its own oil or its own land belonged to its own people, that is Naboth’s vineyard. It doesn’t matter that the smaller nation’s decision was foolish, or that the foreign owners had a contract, or that the new government would be friendlier. A nation that takes by force, by an arranged coup, or through a puppet it installed what it could not obtain by fair trade has done what Ahab did. Paul says God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The borders of nations are not ours to rearrange for our convenience.
It is also the cancer picture from Chapter 3. A tumor makes the body build blood vessels to feed it; it captures the common supply for itself. An empire of plunder does the same beyond its borders: it arranges for other nations’ resources to flow to it on its terms, not theirs. And like a tumor, it doesn’t stay in one place. It spreads.
Trade is not tribute
Here is the distinction that answers Isak’s worry about capitalism.
Capitalism doesn’t need conquest. It needs trade. Trade is two owners each saying yes. You have oil and want tractors; I have tractors and want oil. We agree on a price, and both of us are better off. That is the free market working exactly as it should, across a border just as across a street. It is the good-roads principle applied to the whole world. Everybody wants the sea lanes open, and a nation that keeps them open for everyone is doing something like building good roads.
Tribute is different. Tribute is when the stronger party sets the terms by force, or arranges for the other side’s “yes” to be spoken by someone it installed. That isn’t capitalism. It is the captain of industry buying up the mousetrap company, done with gunboats instead of contracts. It is the same centralizing perversion we saw in Chapter 3, at the scale of nations.
So Isak’s worry is aimed at the right thing but blames the wrong cause. The problem isn’t that a growing economy needs resources. The problem is a nation that stops trading for what it needs and starts taking it.
And the premise has changed. For a generation, the argument was that America had to secure foreign oil because it didn’t have enough of its own. That is no longer true. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of petroleum. And we have domestic energy we have barely begun to use: nuclear power, whose so-called waste is mostly unused fuel that could be recycled. A nation that produces its own energy has no excuse for resource wars. If we ever go to war again, we will not be able to pretend it is for survival. We will have to state the real reason, and that is exactly as it should be.
The ends did not justify the means
Isak also raised the Cold War: funding regimes that crushed socialist or communist movements in their own countries. That one is harder, and I want to be fair to both sides of it.
Communism was not a harmless difference of opinion. It killed tens of millions of people in the twentieth century, through famine, purges, and prison camps. Resisting it was right. Keeping it from spreading was right. The people of Eastern Europe said so as soon as they were free to speak.
But Paul warns against saying “Let us do evil, that good may come,” and says the condemnation of those who reason that way is just. A good end does not sanctify an evil means. When America armed men who tortured prisoners, made dissidents disappear, and massacred villages because those men were anti-communist, it was doing evil so that good might come. And it planted exactly the resentment that anti-American movements have fed on ever since. The Shah we helped restore in 1953 fell in 1979 to the Islamic revolution, and we have been dealing with that regime for nearly half a century. Evil means don’t just stain a good end. They tend to destroy it.
The purchase of policy
Why does a nation that has done so much good keep doing these things? I think the deepest reason is the one in the Pleasantville story of Chapter 5: we pay the government to rob for us, and then the robbers get paid by others too.
Weapons makers profit from war. Intelligence agencies grow when there is an enemy. Politicians need campaign money, and some of it comes from people whose business depends on conflict, and some from the friends and lobbies of foreign governments. When a legislator trades his vote on war for campaign money, he is selling what must never be sold. America’s foreign policy may be advised by friends, but it must be purchased by no one. An alliance is a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney.
So the reforms I propose are concrete. No sustained military campaign without a congressional declaration or authorization that states its objective in one sentence, the conditions under which it ends, and a date on which it expires; if the objective can’t be written in a sentence, nobody knows what winning is. War-industry profits audited and capped while hostilities last, so that no company’s earnings depend on a war continuing. The revolving door between the Pentagon, the agencies, and the contractors closed. And foreign-influence laws enforced equally against every nation’s lobby, friend and adversary alike.
But I will say what I believe most deeply about it. A bought government is the symptom. A people who can be bought is the disease. The lobbyist’s check only has power over a man who has a price.
The test for American power
So what should America do with its power? What I would tell any strong man to do with his strength.
Use it to protect, not to take. Defend your own. Stand with the weak when they are invaded, and with a people when its own government sets out to destroy it. Keep the sea lanes open for everyone. Keep your word, to allies and enemies alike, because a nation’s word is a moral act: the righteous man “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” Count the cost of every war before you start it. Trade, don’t take. Send teachers, doctors, and missionaries where you once sent coups. And when you have done wrong, say so.
Apply to every act abroad the same test I apply at home: would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize this as love? Not flattery, and not always pleasant, because correction isn’t always pleasant, and neither is defending a nation against an aggressor. But love: the Iranian student, the Guatemalan farmer, the Russian conscript, and the Ukrainian mother, each treated as a child of God whose good is being sought. The 1953 coup fails that test. The Marshall Plan passes it.
America doesn’t need to take other nations’ lunch money to be great. It needs to be good. A good nation does not covet its neighbor’s vineyard, and it does not feed young men into a meat grinder for someone else’s profit.
So, are the good guys the good guys? Sometimes. Our job is to make that true more often, beginning by telling the truth about the times it wasn’t. That is what repentance is for a nation. It is the same thing it is for a man.
Notes
In 2014 Crimea held a referendum on joining Russia that most of the world did not recognize, and Russia annexed it. Separatist forces in the Donbas declared independence, and the war there from 2014 to 2022 killed about 14,000 people on all sides, including more than 3,000 civilians, according to United Nations estimates. The role of the United States in Ukraine’s 2014 change of government is disputed.
“Last night” refers to statements about Iran on the evening of September 22, 2026, summarized as Thomas described them. Iran’s population is roughly 90 million.
The War Department was reorganized under the National Security Act of 1947, and the Department of Defense received its name by act of Congress in 1949. A September 2025 executive order authorized “Department of War” as a secondary title, and in June 2026 the House and Senate Armed Services Committees advanced a formal renaming in the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.
Luke 14:31–32; Romans 12:21; James 1:27; John 1:3; Exodus 20:17; James 4:1–2; 1 Kings 21:19; Acts 17:26; Romans 3:8; Psalm 15:4.
Iran, 1953: the CIA acknowledged its role in documents released in 2013. Guatemala, 1954 (President Jacobo Árbenz and the United Fruit Company). Chile, 1970–1973: documented in the 1975 reports of the Senate’s Church Committee.
U.S. petroleum: the Energy Information Administration reports the United States as the world’s largest crude oil producer and a net total petroleum exporter since 2020.
The reforms and the phrases “advised by friends, but purchased by no one” and “a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney” are from Thomas’s “The Ambassage of Peace” (August 2026).
Chapter 14 — The Room and the Sofa: Islam and the Limits of Free Exercise
When Isak and I talked about safeguards, he mentioned Sharia law almost in passing. It was his example of the authoritarian version of religion: “You will obey by command, and if not, you’re done.” Then he said something honest: “I don’t know what that looks like in reality. I haven’t been there. I only know what I’m told, and I’m trying to be critical of it, even though it may be true.”
That is the right posture, and it is more than most Americans bring to the subject. It also tells me that I owe him, and every reader like him, a careful account. When I told Isak in the last chapter that there is an element of Islam that is toxic, I made a strong claim. A strong claim needs reasons, and it needs limits. This chapter gives both.
I also want to say why this belongs in a book about transforming America. Every movement to restore a nation has front lines, the places where the real resistance gathers and where a stand has to be taken. In our time there are two. One is sexuality and the family, which I have been discussing, and whose sharpest point, abortion, I take up in Chapter 18. The other is the place where freedom of religion meets a movement that uses that freedom as cover for a political program. That is this chapter.
Why the subject closed
For most of my adult life, I did not say publicly what I am about to say. I don’t think I was unusual. Two prices closed the subject in the West, and neither required anyone to win an argument. The first was lethal: the novelist with a price on his head, the filmmaker murdered in the street, the cartoonists shot at their desks. The second was social: the word Islamophobe, which ends a career or a friendship as surely as a threat ends a conversation. Between the two, the subject was simply dropped. People stopped examining it, not because they had been persuaded, but because they had been frightened.
That is not a healthy state for a free people. A question that cannot be asked is a question that has already been answered by whoever made it dangerous to ask.
The room is not the sofa
The key to the whole subject came to me from a man who knows it from the inside. Danny Burmawi was born in Jordan, raised a Muslim, studied Islam deeply, and became a Christian. He cannot go home. When an interviewer raised the obvious objection, that America has freedom of religion and the government doesn’t critique theologies, Burmawi answered with a short sentence: Islam has a religion.
A room has a sofa, but the room is not the sofa. A house has a kitchen, but the house is not a kitchen. Islam contains prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and a creed. That is a religion. But it contains them inside a legal, political, military, and civilizational program whose stated goal is the rule of Allah’s law over all mankind. Call the whole thing a religion, and you have used the word to smuggle the program past the Constitution’s gate on the sofa’s ticket.
The word “religion” names a relation between the soul and God, and the practices that express it. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of that. It does not protect a program to replace the Constitution, because a program to replace the Constitution is not a relation between a soul and God. It is a relation between a party and a state. If a Communist Party declared Marx a prophet and the Communist Manifesto holy writ, no serious person would grant it religious protection for seizing power. The label would not change what it was doing.
This is the same line I drew in Chapter 7. Conduct between man and man, and between man and the state, falls under the state’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive. The relation between a man and God does not.
So here is what free exercise means. The state may not forbid a man to pray, to fast, to teach his children his creed, to build a mosque with his own money, to wear what his faith prescribes, to change his religion, or to try peacefully to persuade others to change theirs.
It does not mean that a legal system in which those who leave the faith lose their children is a protected religious practice. It does not mean that an organized effort to substitute the law of a god for the law of the land is a protected religious practice. It does not mean that a demand to punish criticism of a prophet is a protected religious practice. And it does not mean that the state must pretend not to know what a movement’s own texts say its goals are.
Muslims are not the enemy
Now the other half, which matters just as much.
The word Islamophobia was built to attach the ideology to the persons, so that criticism of the one becomes hatred of the other. We have to separate them again, and say which we mean. Contempt for Muslims as persons is sin. It violates the second great commandment, and I will say so as strongly as any imam. Criticism of Islam as a system of ideas is the ordinary use of the mind God gave us, and in this country it is protected speech.
I have had Muslim patients whom I thoroughly enjoyed, and I have shared Thanksgiving tables with Muslim families. They are wonderful people. They are children of God, and I am commanded to love them. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands of young Iranians held candlelight vigils in the streets of Tehran for the American dead, at real risk to themselves. The people paying the highest price today for opposing the Islamist program are Muslims and former Muslims. The line does not run between Muslims and everyone else. It runs through the middle of the Muslim world, and many of the bravest people on the right side of it were raised in the faith.
Ezekiel says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. Collective guilt is pagan. No American Muslim who did not fly a plane is guilty of what the hijackers did. But Ezekiel is speaking of guilt, not diagnosis. Ideas have consequences. The neighbor is innocent of the bomb, and the book that inspired it is not thereby cleared.
The standard and the execution
Why do I say there is something in Islam itself, and not merely in some of its followers, that produces the toxic strain? Because of the difference between a faith’s standard and its execution: between what it teaches and what its followers have done.
Christianity’s standard is Christ, who conquered nothing, killed no one, and told Peter to put away his sword, “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Christianity’s execution includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of Servetus, and the wars of religion. But every one of those can be condemned by Christians from inside Christianity, by the standard, without abandoning a single verse. That is what I did in Chapters 6 and 12, and it is what Christians have done for centuries.
In Islam, the standard is Muhammad, “the perfect man,” the pattern for all conduct. So the caravan raids, the killings of his critics, the massacre of a Jewish tribe, and his marriage to a child cannot simply be called wrong. They must be justified, or explained away, or blamed on later forgers. In that structural sense, Islam’s standard is its execution. There is no higher court to appeal to. And every Muslim who is a good man, and many are, is good by a standard his own tradition did not give him: the law written on the heart that Paul says every people has by nature.
That is also why the phrase “moderate Islam” has to be handled carefully. The Muslim who reads the hard verses as bound to their seventh-century setting is welcome, and he is not the problem. But if he uses his reading as a shield, forbidding anyone to examine the texts that produce the extremist, he is protecting the source, whatever his intentions. My request to him is fair: if you read it that way, you are not the problem, so step aside and let us deal with the reading that is.
What the state should not do
Burmawi wants the State Department to run a program to combat Islamic theology. I don’t. A government competent to judge theology will, on some later Tuesday, judge mine. The truth about Islam is the church’s to teach, not the government’s. When I argue from the pulpit that Allah is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as Christ revealed Him, that argument belongs in the pulpit. It must never be brought to the immigration counter.
And the state must not impose a religious test. A law barring anyone who calls himself a Muslim from citizenship or office would be a religious test, and I oppose it. It would punish the man for his relation to God rather than for his conduct or his politics. It would also bar the very Muslims who are our allies, the ones who reject the program at personal cost.
What the state should do
The state’s proper work is narrower, and it rests on law already on the books. The question it asks is not what a man believes about God, but whether he is loyal to the Constitution. The state may not test his religion. It may, and must, test his allegiance.
At the gate. A nation has the right to decide whom it admits and whom it makes a citizen. The Supreme Court has recognized that power as nearly complete where admission is concerned. Our naturalization law already requires an applicant to be “attached to the principles of the Constitution,” and it already bars those who advocate establishing a totalitarian dictatorship here. So I would ask every applicant for citizenship, whatever his religion, a direct question: Will you affirm that no religious law, Sharia included, should ever replace the Constitution as the law of this land? That is a renunciation of a political program, not a religion. A Muslim who answers yes is welcome, and I mean it. A man who answers no has told us, without our asking a single question about his God, that he does not accept the Constitution he is asking to live under. This test applies at the gate, not inside the house. It governs whom we admit and naturalize, not how we treat citizens.
In government service. Federal law already provides that no one may hold a federal position who advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government, and every federal employee swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The courts have rightly held that mere membership in an organization cannot disqualify a man, because membership sweeps in the passive, the unaware, and even the member who opposes the group’s goals. Guilt by association is a sin against the ninth commandment before it is a constitutional problem. But what a man himself advocates is his own. So I would refuse federal employment to anyone who will not renounce the program of replacing the Constitution with religious law. And where this matters most, in the granting of security clearances, the government already has broad discretion, and its guidelines already make “allegiance to the United States” the first question. The lesson is to screen at entry and at the clearance, because removing a man afterward is slow and nearly impossible.
For the apostate. The state should protect those who leave Islam from the families and communities that would punish them, and should grant asylum to apostates as a named class of religious persecution. A religion whose members cannot leave it is not being practiced freely.
Against blasphemy law. The state should refuse every law, in every form, that makes criticism of a religion a crime. That includes laws against “Islamophobia” that define criticism of Islam’s teachings as hatred. A faith that cannot bear examination has confessed something about itself.
What the law cannot reach, and must not
Here I have to be honest about the limit of all this. A determined movement can pursue its goals by lawful means: by having large families, by persuading converts, and eventually by voting, even for an amendment to the Constitution. No statute can reach those means, and none should. They are the same freedoms that protected the abolitionists, the early Christians under Rome, and every minority that has ever changed a nation by conviction. If I would not want the government to stop Christians from having children, winning converts, and voting their consciences, I cannot ask it to stop anyone else.
So the laws I have described are door locks. They are worth having. But a lock does nothing for a house nobody is living in. The real defense is not legal.
The real program: tell the truth, and ask one question
The main work belongs to the press, the pulpit, public opinion, and the neighbor. It is exposure: saying plainly, and without fear, what the program is.
It begins with a prepared answer to the charge of Islamophobia, because the charge works mainly on people who have no answer ready. Here is mine, and I recommend saying it exactly this plainly:
I am not afraid of Islam, and I do not hate Muslims. I am opposed to a political project. Your movement has a religion, and it also has a program to replace the Constitution with Sharia. I have no quarrel with the religion. Pray five times a day, build your mosque, raise your children in your faith, and I will defend your right to all of it. I am opposed to the program. Call me an Islamophobe as often as you like. It will not stop me from describing the program accurately, and it will not make the program go away.
And then there is one question, which anyone can ask at any dinner table, with no law required. Ask a Muslim neighbor, respectfully and directly:
“Will you say that Sharia should never replace the Constitution as the law of this land? And will you say so to your friends?”
If the answer is yes, then he is not part of the problem, and I mean that without reservation. He is a fellow citizen, and I will stand beside him against anyone who troubles him for his prayers. The second half of the question matters most, because a man who will say it to his own community is doing work no government program could ever do.
If the answer is no, then he has told me where he stands, without my asking him one thing about his beliefs about God. I did not test his religion. He volunteered his politics. And the door stays open. When he changes his mind, he is welcome.
Notice what that question is. It is answerable. It is not a religious test; no government asks it, and nothing attaches to the answer but the truth. It is polite. A fourteen-year-old can ask it. It requires no knowledge of the Qur’an. And it produces more real information than a thousand op-eds.
The church’s work
Beneath all this lies the work that only the church can do.
Christians should read what Islam says about itself: the Qur’an, the traditional biography of Muhammad, and the major collections of his sayings. Not to become scholars, but as the Bereans read, searching “whether those things were so.” A Christian who has never read what Islam teaches is defenseless against both the imam who misrepresents it and the commentator who misrepresents it the other way.
Christians should practice hospitality. The man at the mosque down the road is not an ideology. He is a neighbor who may have been told all his life that Christians secretly know Islam is true and reject it out of rebellion. He has probably never met a Christian who loves him and can also tell him, gently, what the cross means. Be that one. Relationship first, questions before arguments, and Jesus before any discussion of Muhammad.
And Christians should offer the thing that answers the whole problem at its root. The fury behind blasphemy laws is the fury of people whose worth rests entirely on their adherence to a system, so that every criticism of the system feels like an attack on the self. The Christian’s identity is not his ideology. It is Christ: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Because his standing rests on a Person and not a program, he can hear his church’s history criticized and lose nothing. The way out for our Muslim neighbors is not to demand that they grow thicker skin. It is to offer them the ground we stand on: adoption as sons of a Father who paid what we owed. “Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”
The real defense
I will not read the ledger of any nation’s calamities and announce which one was God’s judgment for what. When people asked Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices, He refused to say they were worse sinners than others. He said, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”
That is the last word on national security, too. A nation that has emptied itself of the faith that held its liberties in place doesn’t need a special act of wrath to lose them. It only needs to keep going the way it is going. The laws I have proposed are door locks. Repentance, and the return of a people to the God who made them free, is the house itself.
Joshua compelled no one. He laid out what was on offer and declared where his own household stood: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” That is the model for a Christian nation facing Islam: no coercion, no religious tests, no hatred of persons, and no pretending. Tell the truth about the program, protect the Constitution at its gates, love the neighbor, and make plain whom we serve.
Notes
The interview is Jeremy Boreing’s PragerU conversation with Danny Burmawi of the Ideological Defense Institute, engaged at length in Thomas’s essay “The Room and the Sofa” (September 12, 2026). The legal program follows “The Trench” (September 17, 2026).
Candlelight vigils for the victims of the September 11 attacks were held in Tehran in the days following the attacks.
Ezekiel 18:20; Matthew 26:52; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:11; Galatians 2:20; Romans 8:15; Luke 13:1–5; Joshua 24:15.
U.S. Constitution, Article VI, clause 3 (no religious test for office). Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753 (1972). 8 U.S.C. § 1427(a) (“attached to the principles of the Constitution”); 8 U.S.C. § 1424(a) (bars to naturalization, including advocacy of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States); Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118 (1943).
5 U.S.C. § 3331 (federal oath of office); 5 U.S.C. § 7311 (bar on federal employment for one who advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government); Elfbrandt v. Russell, 384 U.S. 11 (1966), and Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967) (membership alone insufficient); Cole v. Richardson, 405 U.S. 676 (1972) (affirmative oath upheld); Department of the Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988) (security clearances). Adjudicative Guideline A concerns allegiance to the United States.
Chapter 15 — Believing We Are Right: The Gentle Yoke and the Unreached
We had covered a great deal of ground: economics, government, sexuality, war. I wanted Isak to understand what all of it requires of the people who would carry it.
THOMAS: The point of all this is that we have a lot of work to do, and we have to actually believe in what we’re doing. We have to believe we’re on the side of right. Otherwise we’ll be double-minded, and a double-minded man receives nothing. We have to be willing to impose this on the world, and it’s imposed by saying, “This is a really good thing. Won’t you do it?” It’s a very gentle kind of imposition. “Good is good. Listen to this argument. Take this yoke on yourself. It’s easy. Its burden is light. You’re going to have to serve somebody. Take this one. It’s a good one to serve.”
ISAK: Those are very reasonable standards, and strong ones. Not strong like a heavy yoke, but strong as in having strength, something that could make individuals, families, and countries stronger.
There’s so much growing for people to do, and for me to do. But I feel like I’m growing. I’m learning and developing my worldview and where I draw my lines. I’m paying more attention to what I think God wants to feel and experience, and being sensitive to that. Hopefully that spreads to other people, the way you’re doing with your group: spreading these ideas and trying to live them out, and seeing where they go. I think we could change the world.
THOMAS: It’s the only hope I see. I don’t see anybody else doing it, so I figure I’d better do it myself. And I can’t do it alone, so I have to bring other people along. Bringing other people along is changing the world. That’s what changing the world is. Everybody has to bring everybody else along. You bring people along, and then you teach them to bring people along, and they teach others. It only takes a spark to get a fire going.
[Thomas recited the words of Kurt Kaiser’s 1969 song “Pass It On”: a single spark starts a fire that warms everyone around it; God’s love, once experienced, is as fresh as spring and has to be shared; the singer wishes his friend the same happiness and wants to proclaim from the mountaintop that the Lord of love has come to him.]
ISAK: It’s a really good song. Well, let’s go pass it on.
Passing it on raises the question behind every mission, and Isak had asked it at the start of our conversation. I say that the moral law is real and can be discovered, and that Christ in the heart is what brings a person into alignment with it. But most human beings who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman I had told Isak about, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to meet Christianity in order to change. What about the billions who never did?
That question is not new to me. It is the question that first sent me searching through the religions of the world. I want to say where I have come to rest, and where I have deliberately stopped.
Two truths that careless people collapse into one
The first truth is that there is only one way. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I hear that verse first as a statement about how reality is built, before it is a statement about religion. It says there is one and only one way the thing works: one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. There is no second door, no Buddhist door and Muslim door and Christian door leading into the same room. The Son is the only way in.
The second truth is that the Son’s light has been going out since the beginning. John calls Him “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, not every man who has heard a sermon. Paul says that Gentiles who never had the law of Moses still “do by nature the things contained in the law,” because its work is “written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” The early Christian teacher Justin Martyr spoke of the “seeds of the Word” scattered among every people, and said that Socrates, reasoning his way toward the good, was responding to Christ without knowing His name. And when Paul stood in Athens before an altar inscribed “To the Unknown God,” he didn’t tell the Athenians their worship was nothing. He said, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”
This is what I meant in Chapter 13 when I said that every people has some portion of the truth about God. Nothing was made that was not made by Him, and whatever is true and good in any tradition came from Him. When a sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. His moral knowledge is real. His conscience is real. That is why the moral law can be discovered: the One who wrote it has been speaking into every heart all along.
Consider Cornelius in the book of Acts. He was a Roman army officer, not a Jew, and he had never heard the gospel. But he feared God, he gave generously, and he prayed. God did not tell him, “You’re fine as you are.” God sent an angel to tell him to send for Peter, and at the same time gave Peter a vision to prepare him to go. That is the pattern. The seeker who responds to the light he has is not left where he is. God arranges for him to hear the name. The woman I told Isak about is the same. The fervor was always in her. She gave it to communism because communism was what she had been shown. When she met Christ, the same hunger found its true object.
Why the name still matters
Here I have to correct something, including a conclusion I once reached myself. It would be easy to say: if the seeker can come through the Son without knowing His name, then the name doesn’t really matter, the missionaries can stay home, and everything will work out. That doesn’t follow, and two hard facts forbid it.
The first is that entering is a relationship. The sharpest words Jesus ever spoke were not aimed at pagans. They were aimed at people whose works were impressive, who prophesied in His name and cast out devils and did many wonderful works. To them He said, “I never knew you.” Good works, whatever else they show, are not by themselves the one thing He is seeking, which is a soul He knows. And a relationship is entered with open eyes.
The second is that the light can be misread. The seeker who perceives the good without knowing its source can bend it, add to it, and build a religion around the bent version. The seeds of the Word are real, but seeds grow into whatever the soil allows. That is why Paul did not leave the Athenians at their altar. He preached the resurrection to them.
So the honest position is narrower than the comfortable one, and truer. The light is universal. It is genuine wherever it is received. The way in is the Son, named or not. And none of that is a reason to stop preaching His name. The Great Commission is two things at once. It is map-making: we carry the fullest map of country that many people are already stumbling across. And it is rescue: some of them are walking toward the edge of a cliff, and we are sent to pull them back.
What we are not appointed to do
What about those who never heard in time? Here I stop, and I stop on purpose.
I am certain of one thing: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” God will not condemn a man for failing a test he was never given. The Judge is exactly fair. But what He does with each soul is His to decide, not mine to announce. There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition has usually allowed: that God “will have all men to be saved,” that in Christ He is reconciling all things to Himself. I hold those threads, and I hold them as hope. I will not preach them as a promise. A man who is told he will certainly arrive has been given a reason never to set out. I think God left those passages as hints rather than headlines for exactly that reason.
The physics doesn’t settle it either. When I first explored these questions through Conscious Point Physics, I reasoned toward a confident universalism, as though good would spread through all of creation automatically, the way ice crystals spread through supercooled water until none of the liquid is left. That was an error. The order of the universe is conservative: disorder does not heal itself. It persists until a remedy is applied, and the remedy is applied only where it is willingly received. So the physics tells us something about how the remedy works. It tells us nothing about how many will receive it. That silence is honest, and I intend to leave it there.
We are not appointed to rule on the hard cases. We are appointed to go.
The unreached among us
This matters for this book, and not only for missions overseas.
It matters first for how a Christian nation treats those of its citizens who are not Christians. Recall what I said about good roads, and about the atheist and the priest agreeing that you shouldn’t take my things or hurt me. Why do they agree? Because the law is written on every heart. The atheist knows theft is wrong, not because he has read Exodus, but because the Light that lights every man has lit him too. That is why a nation can hold the moral law in common without requiring every citizen to be a believer, and why the civil law of a Christian nation can be just to the Muslim, the Hindu, and the unbeliever. It asks of them only what their own consciences already know. They are our neighbors and fellow citizens, and they are owed love, not coercion. They are not the enemies of a Christian nation. They are its mission field.
And America has its own unreached, and they are not in the jungle. They are the millions who have heard the name of Jesus all their lives, as a curse word, a cliché, a political party’s brand, or the religion of their grandmother’s church, and have never once heard the gospel. In some ways they are harder to reach than a man who has never heard the name at all, because they think they already know what it means. They have been inoculated with a weak dose of the thing, and the weak dose protects them from the real one.
That is the field for Transforming America. We are not trying to reach America by taking over its government. We are trying to reach the unreached who live on our own streets, with the real thing instead of the caricature.
Why it can’t wait
Isak gave my Fellowship something important when we discussed this last summer, and it belongs here. He pointed out that the urgency of the Great Commission isn’t only about the life to come. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” is present tense. A soul that is out of alignment is suffering now, in this life, from the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces. Isak knows that from his own experience, the fish chasing the hook, and so do I. And the way back to harmony is open now.
So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat. It combines a physician’s urgency with a shepherd’s. “You are suffering, and you need not be.” And also: “You are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall.” Both are true. They are the same love, looking at the same person, across two horizons.
That is why it only takes a spark. The seeker is already there, with the light he has, looking for its source. Our part is to be the Peter who goes when Cornelius sends for him, and to go even before we are sent for. We bring people along, and we teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. And it is the only answer I can give Isak about the billions: God is fair to every one of them, and He has told us to go.
Notes
James 1:6–8; Matthew 11:29–30. “You’re going to have to serve somebody” echoes Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979). Kurt Kaiser, “Pass It On” (1969).
John 14:6; John 1:3, 9; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:22–31; Acts 10 (Cornelius); Matthew 7:21–23; Genesis 18:25; 1 Timothy 2:4; Colossians 1:20; Matthew 4:17; Matthew 28:19–20.
Justin Martyr, Second Apology 8 and 10, and First Apology 46 (the “seeds of the Word” and Socrates).
The correction of the earlier universalist conclusion, the “map-making and rescue” framing, and Isak’s point about present-life urgency are from Thomas’s Christos Fellowship essay “The Architecture of Mercy” (July 10, 2026).
Chapter 16 — The Worldview Without a Center
Isak thanked me for going down the road with him. He had come into the conversation troubled, and I could hear that some of the trouble had lifted.
ISAK: Thanks for going down that road with me. In the political climate we’re in, and I feel like I keep saying “climate,” there’s a lot of confusion and chaos, and centuries and decades to learn from about where we are and how we got here. As a young person, I feel like I’m getting my bearings, getting my sea legs: what’s happening, what came before, what’s likely to come after. Unfortunately, I’m pretty ignorant about past generations. I’ve read enough history to have an overall view, but the details get filled in as you get older. I guess that’s how it happens.
THOMAS: I’ve always thought what was missing for you was the right framework. I think you’ve been taught the woke worldview: diversity, oppressor, colonizer, imperialist. “What about the pygmies? What about other people’s viewpoints? Who’s to say what’s right?”
That worldview isn’t new. It’s eternal. It’s the satanic worldview, the worldview of the rebel against God. It dresses itself in the clothing of caring about other people, about fairness, about doing right and letting people be. “Who’s to say what’s right?” It’s a worldview without a center. Everybody has his own world, and who’s to say whose world is right? If everybody has his own world, and everybody feels he’s doing the right thing, who are we to tell him what the right thing is?
It’s a libertarian kind of perspective, and it’s really common. I actually think the libertarian philosophy is the most dangerous ideology, because it seems so right. “I’m not hurting anybody.” Non-aggression, contract, consent. Add a market economy where everybody produces what he wants, and you’re not imposing anything on anybody. That openness to everything is very attractive. It seems intuitively obvious: “I’m not hurting anybody, and if I think this is right, who are you to stop me? Who are you to tell me what’s right or wrong?” It’s very hard to argue against, because it’s so close to being right.
About the only thing that needs to be added is this: “By the way, there is a God, and some things actually are right. Most of what you want to do is right. Most of what you feel is good. But there are a few things that aren’t, even though you probably enjoy them.” You want to smoke a joint; you’re not really hurting anybody. Shooting up is harder, and you’ll probably die, but who am I to tell you not to enjoy yourself on the way out? Who you sleep with, which sex, for how long: if people agree, who am I to tell them what to do? At some point we have to ask: If there is a God, does God care about these things?
Has your dad ever told you his story about the eternal happy family?
ISAK: Remind me. I’m not sure I know it.
THOMAS: I wish I could tell it as well as he does. It’s one of the most profound stories I’ve ever heard. He was at BYU, studying child development. He’d been immersed in it, and he came out and sat down on a bench, and something came over him. I think he heard a voice. It was as if all the wisdom of the universe opened up to him. He went into one room, and either it was spoken to him or he realized it: family. And behind it was this unfathomable wisdom and beauty and eternity. Then he went into another room, and it was the room of eternal family. Then he went into another room, even grander, and the depth and magnitude of it was eternal happy family.
ISAK: That’s the goal.
THOMAS: That’s the goal.
ISAK: It’s a good goal. It isn’t a power-hungry goal. It isn’t self-serving. It’s literally loving others the way God loves us. It’s a beautiful story.
THOMAS: That vision really is the top. It’s the kingdom of heaven on earth. Have him tell you the story again. I didn’t tell it nearly as well as he does.
ISAK: Firsthand beats secondhand.
I called the worldview Isak had absorbed satanic, the worldview of the rebel against God. That is a strong statement, and I want to explain it, because I don’t mean that the people who hold it are wicked. Most of them are sincere, and many are more compassionate than the people who argue with them. What I mean concerns the shape of the idea, not the character of the people who hold it.
The oldest idea in the world
The first temptation in the Bible was not to steal or to kill. The serpent told the woman, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The offer was not a particular pleasure. It was the authority to decide for oneself what is good and what is evil, without reference to the One who made us. That is the root of every other rebellion, and it is the root of the worldview without a center.
The book of Judges ends with a sentence that describes a whole society living that way: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Notice that it does not say every man did what he knew was wrong. It says every man did what was right in his own eyes. Each one had his own center, and so the nation had none. The chapters just before that verse describe what followed: kidnapping, rape, murder, and civil war. A people with no shared center does not become tolerant. It becomes a collection of private worlds, and when the private worlds collide, there is nothing above them to settle the conflict except force.
That is why I say this worldview is not new. It is the oldest idea in the world, and it always arrives dressed as freedom and kindness. “Who am I to judge?” sounds humble. But it quietly assumes that there is no one above any of us who can judge, and that is not humility. It is the removal of the King.
Why the libertarian version is the most dangerous
I told Isak I consider libertarianism the most dangerous form of this idea, and I should say why, because I agree with much of it. I believe in free markets, as Chapter 2 made clear. I believe in limited government, as every chapter since has made clear. I believe no one should be forced to believe anything.
The danger is precisely that it is so nearly right. A system that is obviously wrong, like communism, eventually discredits itself in its failures. A system that is ninety percent right can carry its missing ten percent a long way before anyone notices. The libertarian principle, “Do what you like as long as you don’t hurt anyone,” gets most of life right. But it quietly defines “hurt” to include only the harms that are immediate and visible: the broken window, the stolen wallet, the punch in the face. It cannot see the harm of the broken heart, the abandoned child, the hardened conscience, or the slow erosion of a people’s ability to love and be faithful. Those are the harms this book has been about. By the time they are visible, they are everywhere.
And the principle has no way to answer “Who’s to say?” because it has already agreed that no one is. That is why the one thing it needs added is so simple and so decisive: there is a God, and He has said. Add that, and most of what the libertarian loves survives: free markets, limited government, and freedom of conscience. But now it survives inside a world with a center.
The center
What is the center? Not a program, not a party, and not a nation. It is a Person. Paul says of Christ that “by him all things consist,” or hold together. That is not only a spiritual statement. I believe it is a physical one. Everything that exists is held in being by the One who made it, and everything finds its meaning in relation to Him. A worldview with a center is one that begins there.
That does not make everything simple. It does not mean every question has an obvious answer, or that the people who hold the center always hold it well. We have seen in this book how badly Christians have sometimes held it. But it means the questions have answers. “Who’s to say?” has a reply. And the reply is not “I say,” or “the majority says,” or “the state says.” It is “He says, and we are all under Him, including me.”
The eternal happy family
And when the center is in place, what is it all for? Isak’s father saw it on a bench at BYU, in three rooms, each larger than the last: family, eternal family, eternal happy family.
That is the answer to what the worldview without a center can never supply. The libertarian can tell you what you may do. He cannot tell you what life is for. The progressive can tell you whom to be angry at. He cannot tell you where the anger is supposed to lead. The vision Charlie Gutierrez saw tells you both. Life is for love that lasts: love between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and neighbors, and God and His children, and love that is not only lasting but joyful.
Paul bowed his knees “unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” The family is not an arrangement human beings invented for convenience. It is named after God’s own household, and our families are meant to be small pictures of it. Everything in this book serves that purpose. Property is for the family’s stewardship. The republic is built up from families. The Department of Morality exists to help families stay together. The economy of enough is an economy of households. Even war, rightly limited, is the defense of homes.
So when I say I want to transform America, this is what I mean. Not a nation where the right party wins, or where the right laws are passed, though some laws matter. A nation that has recovered its center, and that understands what the center is for: an eternal, happy family, beginning now, in ten thousand kitchens and on ten thousand porches, and never ending.
Notes
Genesis 3:5; Judges 17:6, 21:25 (and chapters 19–21); Colossians 1:17; Ephesians 3:14–15.
Charlie Gutierrez is Isak’s father and Thomas’s friend and business partner.
Chapter 17 — The Sacrifice a Nation Must Make
Isak had said that the vision of an eternal happy family was a good goal, not a power-hungry one. I agreed. But I wanted him to see that the goal has a price, and to know what it is.
THOMAS: That’s what we’re moving toward. This isn’t about a Christian-Nazi, Handmaid’s Tale, Scarlet Letter world. It isn’t an Inquisition. It isn’t a revival meeting. It’s living life, living it in holiness, enjoying life, and having a life that’s really good.
But we do have to sacrifice something. We have to sacrifice sexual diversity. It won’t happen without that. We’re going to have to be pleasing to God in our sexuality. We’re going to have to take a stand as a nation. We’re going to have to take a stand for Christ. We’re going to have to say, “No, we are not a nation of every religion and every morality.” We aren’t establishing a national church. But we pray at everything. We use the Bible, and we quote it.
John Adams said this nation was founded on the general principles of Christianity, and that’s what we teach. The general principles of Christianity come from the Bible. We speak its language and use its metaphors. When we talk about Romans 1, we talk about the fact that there are sexual acts God does not allow, that God actually hates.
The other thing we’ll have to do is recognize, fully and completely, that God exists, and that God rewards and punishes nations. We have to apologize for our national wrong, for our worship of the Pride movement. It was really a shame movement. It should be called the Shame movement.
ISAK: I’m examining my own inclusivity: “all are welcome,” toward people and toward ideas. I’m having to do a lot of inner work, stopping at any reluctance or pushback I feel against an idea and inspecting it. “Why is that? Where did I learn this?” There’s a lot of work to do, and that’s why I’m quiet. I’m thinking. It’s really interesting to break things down and see where they came from. And if you can’t tell where they came from, you ask what fruit they bear.
THOMAS: The theory is all wonderful, blue skies and roses, until you say, “And by the way, you have to say no to certain sexual behaviors.” Then it’s no longer fun and games. Now it’s personal. “Sorry, that isn’t welcome here.” “I believed in all that other stuff; it was great. But you want me to live sexually in one particular way, the way the Bible authorizes, within marriage between a husband and a wife? No, I’m sorry. We’d rather live in hell. We want our sexuality the way we want it, and we’ll sacrifice everything for it.”
That’s essentially the bargain America has made. We held the line pretty well, at least on the surface. People never actually behaved well, but on the surface we had blue laws. Adultery was a punishable offense. And in the church, divorce was the one unforgivable sin. You’re probably not old enough to remember that, but it’s a phrase people actually used.
ISAK: Divorce as the unforgivable sin. I’ve heard that. I’m not the wisest person in the world, but it never quite made sense to me, because of the circumstances of divorce and the reasons for it. I think people should be allowed out of an agreement in some cases. But culturally, divorce was the “D word.” You didn’t say it. You didn’t hear about it. “Where are his parents?” “We don’t talk about that.” It was very taboo, very scary, and reasonably so. If you’re going through it, somebody did something wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean the person leaving did wrong, or the person staying. But it was, “That family fell apart. We don’t know what will happen to them. It’s just the baby and the mama now,” or the dad and the baby.
THOMAS: The context for “the only unforgivable sin is divorce” was the church. It was a Christian idea. “You were a homosexual? A drug addict? A murderer, a robber, a liar, a thief? We can forgive you. Welcome in, dear brother. You’re divorced? No, we don’t accept people like that.” That’s the taboo I mean. These were people who could forgive sin, who knew sin was sin, and they couldn’t forgive divorce. That was the era I grew up in.
But my point was about sexuality at the national level, after the fall we’ve taken. We could have turned it around forty years ago. Homosexual acts were illegal in many states, and some of those laws may still be on the books. Adultery was illegal. Pedophilia is still illegal; we’re still willing to do that much. Now we’d be saying that fornication, adultery, homosexual practice, the whole list, are recognized by us as a nation as sins against God and a threat to the social order.
And the Department of Morality would counsel people and help them: help them overcome confusion about their sex, about their attractions, about fidelity, about using their sexuality too early. It would help people with the thing at the center of life, because sexuality was made for a purpose. Now you get to use it as God intends, because God is our center. He’s our source. More than our source, He’s our being. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” I don’t know how to make it any clearer. You can’t separate God from who you are, or from who anyone else is.
ISAK: You can’t hide.
THOMAS: You can’t hide.
That last exchange ended the way I began Chapter 7: “Separation of state and truth.” I won’t repeat that argument here. But I do owe the reader a clear statement of what I mean by the sacrifice, because it is the part of this book most likely to be misunderstood, and the part where honesty matters most.
What the nation gives up
The sacrifice is not a person. It is a permission.
For sixty years, American law and culture have increasingly treated sexuality as a private matter with no public meaning: any arrangement between consenting adults is as good as any other, and the nation has nothing to say about it. I am asking the nation to give up that permission. Not to give up any of its people. The people stay. What goes is the pretense that how we use our sexuality doesn’t matter to anyone but ourselves. Chapters 8 through 10 argued that it matters to everyone: to children, to spouses, to the hearts that harden, and to the whole people’s capacity for faithfulness and joy.
In our conversation I spoke of the laws that once made homosexual acts and adultery crimes, and I said we could have turned things around forty years ago. I want to be precise about what I now propose, because it is not a return to those laws. The nation would name these acts, officially and publicly, as falling short of the moral standard it aspires to. Not as private preferences, and not as identities to be celebrated, but as sins against God and harms to the social order. That is the stand. But the nation would not prosecute consenting adults for them. There would be no stocks, no scarlet letters, and no police at the bedroom door. The work of turning people toward a better life belongs to families, churches, counselors, and communities, supported by the kind of Department I described in Chapter 10. The one exception is the act in which a third person’s life is taken, and I turn to it in the next chapter.
Some readers will think that is too little. They will say that naming a sin without punishing it is toothless. I don’t think so. Most of the moral change in any society happens not through prosecution but through what a people honors and what it is ashamed of. The Surgeon General jailed no smokers. What changed was what the nation said out loud. I am asking America to say out loud, again, what it once believed about marriage and faithfulness, and to mean it.
Other readers will think it is far too much. They will say that any public judgment on sexual conduct is hatred. To them I say what I said in Chapter 9: I am not describing enemies. I am describing a lesser happiness, which every one of us settles for in some part of our lives. A nation that cannot say what it believes about the good life cannot help anyone find it.
Pride and shame
I called the Pride movement a shame movement, and I meant it as a diagnosis, not an insult. Pride is the oldest sin. It is the refusal to be corrected: “I am what I am, and no one may tell me otherwise.” When a nation sets aside a month to celebrate that refusal, flies its flag on public buildings, and teaches its children to honor it, the nation has done something it will one day need to repent of.
Nations can repent. When Jonah preached in Nineveh, the king himself put on sackcloth, and God relented. God told Solomon, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” I believe God rewards and punishes nations, not by a formula I can read off the evening news, but in the long arc of their histories. And I believe a nation’s repentance begins where a man’s does: by calling its sin by its right name.
The church’s own sin
But honesty requires me to turn to my own house first. The story Isak and I told about divorce shows what went wrong in the church before it went wrong in the nation.
A church that could forgive the murderer and the thief but not the divorced was not holding a high standard. It was holding a selective one. It was severe where severity was socially easy and lenient where leniency was convenient. And it made the sin that ended marriages unspeakable rather than dealing with it, so that when the culture changed, the church had nothing to say but silence or condemnation. The families that were falling apart needed neither. They needed help.
So the church has two opposite sins to repent of. The first is laxity: blessing what God does not bless, and saying nothing about the permission our culture has taken. The second is selective harshness: making some sinners unwelcome while overlooking others, and treating shame as a substitute for help. The way forward is to hold the standard high for everyone, including ourselves, and to forgive and restore everyone who turns back, including the divorced. That is not a compromise between the two errors. It is the gospel.
What it looks like in practice
What would the nation actually do? Several things, all of them consistent with what I have said so far.
It would speak. Its laws, its schools, and its leaders would describe marriage between a man and a woman, lifelong and faithful, as the standard the nation honors, and would describe what falls short of it truthfully and without contempt.
It would strengthen marriage in law. When California adopted the first no-fault divorce law in 1969, it made marriage the easiest contract in America to break. States could restore the option of covenant marriage, which Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas already offer: a marriage entered into with premarital counseling and a commitment not to seek divorce without counseling first and without serious cause. And the counseling I described in Chapter 10 would be free and close to home for any couple who wanted it.
It would stop teaching children the opposite. Schools that receive public money would not teach young children that every sexual arrangement is equally good, or that their sex is something to be chosen.
It would help. Every person struggling with attractions he does not want, or with confusion about his sex, or with faithfulness, or with the damage done by sexuality used too early without commitment would find counsel without contempt, and a community ready to welcome him.
And it would not humiliate anyone.
What the sacrifice buys
Isak said he had started examining where his own reluctance came from, and that when he couldn’t tell, he asked what fruit an idea bears. That is the right test, and I invite every reader to apply it to the last sixty years. Look at the fruit of the permission: the marriages, the children raised without fathers, the loneliness, the hearts made hard. Then look at what faithfulness produces where it is actually lived.
The sacrifice is real. It asks every one of us, not only some of us, to give up the idea that our appetites are nobody’s business. But what it buys is the eternal happy family of the last chapter, beginning here. And that is worth far more than what it costs.
“In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” We cannot separate God from who we are. A nation that stops trying to will find it has not lost its freedom. It has found its center.
Notes
John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813 (“the general Principles of Christianity”). In the recording, Thomas attributed the phrase to Washington.
Romans 1:24–27; Jonah 3:5–10; 2 Chronicles 7:14; Acts 17:28; Matthew 7:16–20.
State laws against consensual homosexual acts were held unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). California’s Family Law Act of 1969 was the first no-fault divorce statute. Covenant marriage is available in Louisiana (1997), Arizona (1998), and Arkansas (2001).
Chapter 18 — The Front Line: Abortion
Isak and I did not talk about abortion that morning. I did not bring it up, and neither did he. That is not unusual. Abortion is the third rail of American politics: touch it, and your political life ends. Candidates learn to speak of it in the vaguest possible terms, or not at all.
But I promised in Chapter 6 that I would make the argument in full, and a book about transforming America that avoided it would not be honest. Every movement to restore a nation has front lines, the places where resistance gathers and where a stand has to be taken. I named two in Chapter 14. This is the other one. It is where the question of sexuality, which I have said is the heart of our disagreement, reaches its sharpest point.
What changed
Consider what the sexual revolution actually changed. For all of human history, a sexual act between a man and a woman carried a possible consequence that fell very unequally. The man could walk away. The woman could not. She might carry a child for nine months and then raise it, often alone, and society held her more accountable than it held him. That inequality was unjust in many ways. But it also meant that women, and the families and communities around them, had every reason to guard sexuality closely, and to insist that a man who fathered a child marry its mother.
Two technologies changed that. The birth-control pill, approved in 1960, made pregnancy far less likely. Legal abortion, imposed nationwide by the Supreme Court in 1973, made pregnancy something that could be undone. Together they lowered the stakes of uncommitted sexuality for women to nearly what they had always been for men. The economist George Akerlof, later a Nobel laureate, and his colleague Janet Yellen, later chair of the Federal Reserve, showed in 1996 that this change helped end the expectation that a man who got a woman pregnant would marry her. The result was not fewer children born outside marriage, but far more, raised by mothers who had been left to do it alone.
So abortion is not an isolated issue. It is the backstop of the sexual revolution, the guarantee that sexuality can be separated from its consequences. That is why the fight over it is so fierce. For many people, giving up abortion means giving up the promise that sex need never cost them anything. The real issue is not abortion so much as the ungodly sexuality it protects.
What abortion is
I said in Chapter 6 that the state’s sword is for the sins that make victims, and that I count the child in the womb among the victims. Here is why.
From conception, the child is a distinct, living human organism, with his own genetic identity, different from his mother’s and his father’s. That is not a religious claim. It is what any embryology textbook says. He is at an early stage of development, as a newborn is at an early stage of development compared to a teenager. But he is not a part of his mother’s body, as her kidney is. He is a separate human being living inside her.
Scripture says the same thing in its own language. “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb… my substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret.” God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” When Mary, carrying Jesus, came to her cousin Elizabeth, the unborn John “leaped in her womb.”
If that is true, then abortion is not a private choice between consenting adults. There is a third person in the room, and his life is taken. It is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. The law has a name for that, and the name is murder.
The hardening of hearts
A nation that permits this does not stay where it started. It hardens.
At first, abortion was defended as a tragic necessity: “safe, legal, and rare.” Then it became a right. Then it became something to celebrate. Some people now say they are proud of their abortions. Meanwhile the boundary has moved outward. A Philadelphia abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, was convicted in 2013 of murdering infants who had been born alive in his clinic. In 2019, a sitting governor described on the radio a case in which an infant born alive after a failed late-term abortion would be kept comfortable while the mother and her doctors discussed what to do. Most abortions happen early, and I don’t claim these cases are typical. But they show the direction of travel. When a people decides that a child’s life depends on whether he is wanted, it will not stop at any particular week.
The effect is a cheapening of life. And I think it goes deeper than policy. In ancient Canaan, parents offered their children to Molech, and God called it an abomination. I believe something like that has happened among us. Abortion has become a kind of sacrament to the god of personal satisfaction without consequence, the rite by which our culture covers the sins it has decided not to give up. That is why it is defended with a fervor that looks religious. It is religious. It shows how far we have fallen, and how fully we have come to worship gods other than the One God.
A better way: family, prosperity, and adoption
The answer to abortion is not only to forbid it. It is to build a nation where it is unthinkable, because there is a better way for every child.
A child conceived in fornication or adultery is still a living being, still a child of God. He did not choose the circumstances of his conception, and he should not pay for them with his life. And there are, at this moment, many married couples who long for children and cannot have them. Far more couples hope to adopt an infant than there are infants placed for adoption in this country each year. The appropriate thing, when a mother cannot or will not raise her child, is to give that child to a family who will.
So the nation’s program must be positive as well as prohibitive. It means making adoption easier, faster, and less expensive. It means supporting the thousands of pregnancy centers that already care for mothers in crisis. It means an economy in which a young couple can afford to marry and have children, which is part of what Chapter 8’s economy of enough was about. And it means churches and communities that surround a frightened young mother with help, rather than shame. A nation that says to her, “Your child is a life, and we will help you carry him, and if you cannot raise him, a family is waiting,” has earned the right to say that abortion is wrong.
The law
I believe the law should define abortion as the taking of a human life and prosecute it as such. A law that says “this is murder” and then attaches no consequence to it is not a law. It is a sermon.
Who is prosecuted? The doctor and the mother. The doctor is the one who does the killing, and he is the principal. The mother who seeks it out and consents to it is an accessory to the killing of her own child. I know that nearly every abortion law now on the books in America exempts the mother from prosecution, and that most pro-life organizations support that exemption. I understand why. They want to treat her as a second victim, and they fear, rightly, that prosecuting mothers will be the hardest thing in this whole program to win. I disagree with them anyway, and I want to give my reasons plainly.
Either the killing of an unborn child is wrong or it is not. If it is, then the one who arranges it cannot be simply innocent. We would never say that of anyone who hired another person to kill a born child. Consequences are how people learn. People move in the direction of least pain, and pain is one of the main reasons anyone changes. As things stand, abortion continues because people want to sin without paying for it. They cover one sin that has consequences, an unwanted pregnancy, with a second sin that has far greater ones, the death of a child. If the law names the act for what it is and holds everyone who chose it accountable, the behavior will change. If it doesn’t, it won’t.
That does not mean the law should be cruel, or that it should humiliate anyone. Everything I said in Chapter 6 still holds. In weighing a mother’s guilt, a court should consider what our law considers in every case of accessory to homicide: coercion, fear, deception, and the man who pressured her and then disappeared. He, too, should answer for what he did. The jury still stands between the statute and the sentence. And the purpose of the whole law, here as everywhere in this book, is not vengeance. It is repentance: a change of heart and mind in the people who did this, and in the nation that permitted it, so that the nation can be sanctified, brought back to holiness, and blessed by God again.
No exception for rape
The first question every reader will ask is about rape. My answer is that there is no exception, and I want to explain why, because I know how hard that answer sounds.
Rape is a grave crime, and the woman who suffers it is a real victim. Her attacker should be punished severely, and she should be surrounded with every kind of help: medical, spiritual, financial, and practical. If she cannot raise the child, a family is waiting for him.
But the child did not commit the crime. He did not cause his own conception, and he cannot be the cause of his own death. He was conceived as a result of the crime, not as a participant in it. He is not a criminal, that he should be killed because a crime took place. Killing him does not undo the rape. It adds a second crime to the first. Killing a person because he was present when a crime was committed against someone else is a reassignment of the punishment from the guilty to the innocent, and there is no justice in it.
The child conceived in rape is formed as much in the image of God as the most wanted and cherished child who ever lived. I believe the reason so many people cannot see this is that we have lost our understanding of the holiness of life. The Christian answer to a terrible wrong is not to commit another so that we need not be reminded of the first. It is to forgive, which is the hardest thing God asks of anyone, and to let the innocent live. Preventing a larger crime is itself an act of compassion, toward the child and, in the long run, toward the mother who would otherwise carry that second wound. And a law that holds this line, even here, will teach the nation how much a human life is worth. Perhaps someday the depth of that will be understood.
Where the mother’s life is truly at stake, as in an ectopic pregnancy, a treatment whose aim is to save her life is not an abortion, and the law should say so clearly.
Where the war is fought
I will not pretend this program is politically easy. Holding mothers accountable, and refusing an exception for rape, will be the two positions most bitterly opposed, even by many who agree that abortion is wrong. It is the kind of stand that could sink everything else in this book. Any legislation will be opposed with a ferocity no other issue produces. Many people have grown so attached to what abortion protects that the attempt to take it away will feel to them like an assault on their very selves.
And the most troubling part is not passing a law. It is enforcing one. America learned during Prohibition that a law too far ahead of the people’s hearts is either ignored or repealed. If a law against abortion were passed tomorrow in a nation that still believed in the sexual revolution, it would not hold. That is where the real war will be fought: not mainly in legislatures, but in the hearts of the people, in their willingness to see the child, to take responsibility for their sexuality, and to accept the consequences of their choices.
So the order matters. Persuasion first, and always alongside the law. Show the child, through ultrasound and truth-telling and the testimony of those who were nearly aborted. Build the alternatives: adoption, support, and strong families. Change the culture of sexuality that makes abortion seem necessary. And as hearts change, let the law follow, and then hold.
But a stand must be taken somewhere. Every battle has a front line, and this is one of them. I would rather lose this fight honestly than win the rest of the argument by pretending it doesn’t matter.
Moses set two ways before Israel: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” That is the choice before America. It is not only a choice about law. It is a choice about what kind of people we will be, and whether our children, all of them, will live.
Notes
The oral contraceptive Enovid was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), which returned the regulation of abortion to the states.
George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, no. 2 (1996).
Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5; Luke 1:41; Leviticus 20:2–5; Genesis 1:27; Ezekiel 18:20; Deuteronomy 30:19.
State abortion laws enacted since Dobbs almost uniformly exempt the pregnant woman from criminal liability, and major pro-life organizations, including National Right to Life, have opposed prosecuting women.
Kermit Gosnell was convicted in May 2013 of three counts of first-degree murder for killing infants born alive. The 2019 radio remarks were made by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in January 2019. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 defines an infant born alive at any stage of development as a person under federal law. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that about one percent of reported abortions occur at or after 21 weeks of gestation.
Chapter 19 — Why I Run:
The Righteous Society
We were near the end of the morning. Isak had been quiet for a while, thinking, and then he began to sum up.
ISAK: This has been really intriguing. I’m going to learn more about political science and the nature of the universe and how they overlap. Not which ideology is right, but where the truth is and what we do with it now. What is good, and what do we do with it? I don’t think picking through all the world’s ideologies and asking which brand of capitalism or socialism is most like Jesus is the way. That will come as a byproduct of people and their hearts. It won’t come from “I have this whole plan, and I’m going to change everything right now.” The Bible says a man makes his plans, but the Lord directs his steps. We can have all the plans we want, but really we’ll watch it happen by taking part in it, by being part of the play, so that we can hear applause at the end.
THOMAS: As you can see, this is the vision I’ve carried for forty years. It’s why I’m running for president. It isn’t that I want to be president. I want the world to be better, and I don’t hear anybody else carrying the message I have.
ISAK: If somebody else were saying it, you’d say, “Great, let’s do that.”
THOMAS: You do that.
ISAK: But nobody’s doing it. There isn’t a vote I can cast and say, “This is a vote for this way of life.” It’s a vote for the same thing we’ve always had.
THOMAS: It’s a vote for the righteous. I used to call it the Righteous Society. That was one of my first names for it. It was the Christian nation. I’m just trying to get people to get with the program. It’s an important thing to do.
ISAK: Thanks for answering my questions and going on that journey. These are goals with merit. It isn’t a self-serving goal. You see a need in the country and what could fix it, and it’s something God saw a long time ago. What can we do to inspire people and help them change their lives?
THOMAS: That’s what we’re doing: showing people how to change their lives, how to live in a godly way. It’s simple, really.
ISAK: I don’t know what all the chaos is about. I don’t know what the problem is.
THOMAS: As far as I can tell, the whole fight is about being able to do what you want sexually without anybody interfering. In America we opened the floodgates and said everybody can do whatever he wants. Now we’re saying, “That thing where everybody does what he wants? We’re taking it back.” And people say, “No. We’ve seen what it’s like, and we don’t want to leave it. It was too good. Our bodies, ourselves. We’re not going back.” At this point we’re dealing with rebels, hardened rebels, and some of them are willing to kill the people who stand against their sexual freedom.
I think the Charlie Kirk assassination was exactly that. There’s a big conspiracy theory about Israel and all that, but I don’t think that’s it. I think we had a young man who didn’t like being told what he couldn’t do, and who believed Kirk was attacking his tribe, and so he killed him. And we’re not saying that loudly enough. We have people who, when their sexuality is threatened, go out and kill. The fruit of this sexual anarchy is death.
ISAK: Anarchy.
THOMAS: What makes this bearable is that you love the sinner and hate the sin. If you can just get that across: “No, we don’t hate you. You’re a child of God just as much as I am. You just haven’t learned to control one of your appetites. Maybe I don’t control my appetite for ice cream as well as you do, and you don’t control your sexual appetite as well as I do. We both have our problems. We’re both imperfect. We both need to master our appetites.” That’s really what this is: appetite control.
It’s a heavy burden for people who live with same-sex attraction. Or for people who have given in to their appetites long enough that they’ve become addictions. Addiction doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s fed, by people who didn’t control themselves well enough, until the appetite was out of control. I’m sorry, but abstinence is the start. You start with nothing. You just stop. You say no. You don’t do it a little; you just say no. If you fall, you say, “I’m sorry. That was wrong. I shouldn’t do it anymore. I’ll try again.” And you do it one day at a time, and on the hard days, one minute at a time.
ISAK: Self-control.
THOMAS: Self-control over desire. Desire is the issue, and controlling desire is most of what maturity is. Get your desires under control and you won’t sin. You know what sin is. You know your desire to sin. You simply say no. Then we don’t have to worry about a diversity of sins. We don’t take pride in our sins. We don’t honor them. We just don’t sin. We say no, and that’s what matters. You have these desires? Learn to control them. You have them, I have them, everybody has them. Mine are different from yours, but we all have them, we all have to work on them, and we all have to control them. That’s your job.
And there’s a reward for it. There’s a payoff. We won’t live in this body forever, and living for Christ brings gain. “Are you doing it for the reward?” As a matter of fact, I am. No need to apologize for that. If there were no reward, why would I be doing it?
ISAK: You only work the job because you’re getting paid.
THOMAS: Right.
ISAK: How embarrassing, to have to have a job. “What do you mean, you need money?”
THOMAS: “What do you mean, you sell your time for money?”
ISAK: “Your valuable life, for money!”
We laughed, and the conversation ended there, and we went back to the business we had set aside two hours earlier. But I want to finish what Isak and I started, because he asked a question at the beginning of that morning that this whole book has been trying to answer. He asked: What does God do with groups of people?
What God does with a people
Here is my answer, as plainly as I can give it.
God makes a people the way He makes everything else: from the bottom up, not the top down. He does not govern the universe by moving every particle directly. He gives each part its law and lets it move itself, and order rises out of countless faithful local motions. He governs a people the same way. He writes His law on their hearts. He sets them in families. He gives them neighbors who can say “enough,” and communities small enough for everyone to know each other. And He asks them to choose freely whether to live by His law, because a love that cannot refuse is not love.
When a people chooses to live that way, it becomes something like the eternal happy family Charlie saw on that bench. It is not perfect; no people ever is. But it has a center. Its laws protect the innocent and name what falls short. Its government is small, because its people mostly govern themselves. Its economy is honest, because its people know what is enough. Its families hold together, because its people have learned to serve and to ask for service, to confront and to forgive. And it can face the rest of the world, including its enemies, without covetousness and without fear.
When a people chooses otherwise, God does not usually strike it down. He lets it have what it chose. Its families come apart. Its government swells to manage the damage. Its hearts harden. Its people grow lonely in the middle of plenty. And eventually it learns, at great cost, what it would not learn by persuasion.
America is standing at that choice now. That is why I wrote this book.
Why I run
I am not running for president because I expect to win. I am not on the ballot, I accept no donations, and I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win, and otherwise to vote for the best man on the ballot. I call it a witness candidacy. It is a way of putting a vision in front of the nation that no one else is putting there: the Righteous Society, the Christian nation as I have described it in these pages.
I held that vision for forty years before I said much about it publicly. I wish someone else were carrying it. As Isak said, if someone else were, I would say, “Great, let’s do that,” and go back to my other work. But no one is, and I cannot find a ballot line that means “this way of life.” So I am doing what I can, which is to describe it, give my reasons, and hold every position open to a better argument. I cannot compel anyone, and I would not if I could. I can only invite.
The hardest part
The hardest part of this vision, as I have said throughout the book, is sexuality, and I will not pretend otherwise at the end. The deepest resistance to what I am proposing comes from people who have tasted a freedom they do not want to give up. Some of that resistance has turned violent.
I do not know what was in the heart of the young man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, and a court will judge the facts, as it should. But I believe that the rage directed at people who speak for traditional sexual morality is real, and that it grows from the same root as everything else I have described: a people told that its appetites are its identity, and that anyone who questions them is attacking the self. When your appetites are your identity, correction feels like violence, and some people answer it with violence.
That is exactly why the answer has to be love. Not a soft love that says nothing, but the love that says, “You are a child of God, just as I am. You have an appetite you have not mastered. So do I. Let us both learn.” We love the sinner, and we hate the sin, beginning with our own. If there is one sentence I would want every reader to carry away from this book, it is that. It is the only posture from which a Christian nation can be built without becoming the thing its critics fear.
Enough, and the reward
The whole program of this book comes down, in the end, to one small word that every person has to learn to say for himself: enough. Enough food. Enough money. Enough power. Enough of whatever appetite is pulling at you. The rich man said “just a little more,” and was never satisfied. The man who learns to say “enough,” and to say “no” one minute at a time when he must, finds that he has been given everything.
And there is a reward. I don’t apologize for saying so. “He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Paul said, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” We are not doing this for nothing. We are doing it for the life that is actually life, now and forever: the life God wants to live in every one of us, and the eternal happy family He is gathering.
What you can do
So what can one reader do?
Start at home. Govern your own appetites. Love your wife or your husband, and serve and be served, cheerfully. Raise your children to know God. Forgive, seventy times seven.
Then go one step out. Know your neighbors. Be the brother who can say “You’re getting out of line,” and the one who can hear it. Find or build a group small enough that everyone knows everyone, and meet together, and argue honestly, and pray.
Then speak. Tell the truth about what is good, in the plainest words you can, without contempt for anyone. Vote your conscience. Serve on juries and judge the law as well as the facts. Ask your representatives the hard questions, and ask your neighbors the one question from Chapter 14.
And bring people along, and teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. It only takes a spark.
Isak said at the end of that morning that he didn’t know what all the chaos was about. I think he does now. The chaos is what a people looks like when it has lost its center. The answer is to find it again, one heart, one home, and one neighborhood at a time, until a nation remembers whose it is.
That is what I mean by transforming America.
Notes
Proverbs 16:9; Hebrews 11:6; Philippians 1:21; Matthew 18:22.
Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. On September 2, 2026, a Utah judge ordered the accused, Tyler Robinson, to stand trial on a capital murder charge. He has not been convicted. Thomas’s account of the motive is his own reading of the case.
On the witness candidacy, see Thomas’s essay “Why I Run When Winning Is Unlikely” (August 2026) at drthomasforpresident.com.
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38