I stand with Mike Shreve on the central point: there is no debt left for a forgiven child of God to pay after death, and any doctrine that sends the redeemed to suffer off a remaining penalty diminishes what Christ finished on the cross. Where I part from him is narrower but important. Something real does happen to an imperfect believer at the threshold of the Father’s presence, and Scripture says so. That event is a purging. It is not Purgatory.
Shreve’s article, published on his site To Catholics with Love in October 2024, is a sustained Protestant case against the Catholic doctrine. He works through the Catechism’s five paragraphs on the subject, sets them against the promises of grace, friendship, and imputed righteousness, traces the doctrine’s late formal definition, and answers the two texts Catholics lean on most: 2 Maccabees 12 and 1 Corinthians 3. His closing charge is that Purgatory is a tyranny over the mind that has robbed billions of believers of the joy of their salvation.
Much of the article is sound, and some of it is excellent. But a rebuttal is strongest when it first understands what the doctrine it opposes was trying to say. Purgatory is a wrong answer to a right question. This essay tries to name the question, give the Catholic case its strongest form, mark where Shreve’s argument is weaker than it needs to be, and then offer the answer I believe Scripture and the structure of the atonement actually give.
Where Shreve Is Right
Shreve is right that the cross fully discharges the liability of sin. “It is finished”(John 19:30) is not a partial receipt. The thief on the cross received salvation today (Luke 23:43), not a deferred release. Paul could say that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and that to depart and be with Christ is far better (Philippians 1:23). Neither statement leaves room for a long interval of penal suffering between death and the presence of Christ.
He is also right that the doctrine, as it developed in practice, treats the soul’s suffering as payment. The Catechism speaks of the “temporal punishment” of sin (CCC 1472), and the system of suffrages and indulgences assumes that this punishment can be shortened by prayers, Masses, and works offered on the dead man’s behalf (CCC 1032). That is an accounting model. Once the question becomes how much remains owed and how it can be paid down, the believer is back in the economy of works that the gospel abolished.
There is a deeper reason this cannot work, and it strengthens Shreve’s case. In an earlier essay I argued that moral disorder is conservative: once introduced, it does not fade with time, and a later good act cannot reach back to cancel an earlier wrong. Good works fail as payment for sin because they always arrive too late. The same logic applies to suffering after death. Pain endured later is still later. It cannot travel back to the moment of the sin any better than a good deed can. If no amount of righteous living can pay the debt, no amount of purgatorial pain can pay it either. Only a remedy generated by one who owed nothing, and applied by Him, can reach the account. That is the cross.
Finally, Shreve is right about the effect on the believer. A man who thinks he must still pay will live under a low, steady fear, and fear is a poor engine of holiness. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment (1 John 4:18).
The Question Under the Question
The question Purgatory was reaching for is this: how does an unfinished person become fit for the unveiled presence of a holy God? Every honest believer knows he dies unfinished. He still carries resentments not yet released, habits of mind not yet conformed, loves that are still disordered. Shreve’s answer is that the change happens instantly and painlessly, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.” The Catholic answer is that it happens through a purification after death. Both agree that a change must happen. The disagreement is about its nature, not its necessity.
The Catholic case deserves to be heard in its strongest form, and its strongest form is not the one Shreve rebuts.
First, the official teaching denies that the purification is vengeance. The same paragraph Shreve quotes (CCC 1472) says the two punishments of sin “must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin.” Venial sin, on this account, leaves an “unhealthy attachment to creatures” that must be purified. The Catechism also states that the souls in Purgatory are “assured of their eternal salvation” (CCC 1030). They are not on probation. Read charitably, the doctrine is a teaching about the completion of sanctification, not about the repayment of a debt.
Second, the most thoughtful Catholic voices describe the pain as the pain of love. Catherine of Genoa, in her fifteenth-century Treatise on Purgatory, described souls who were content in their purification, whose only suffering was the delay of union, and whose joy was exceeded only by that of heaven. Pope Benedict XVI, in Spe Salvi (2007), proposed that the purifying fire is the encounter with Christ Himself, and that the duration of this “moment” cannot be measured by earthly clocks. Shreve treats Benedict’s suggestion with incredulity. But it is very close to Shreve’s own position, which I will return to below.
Third, the intuition is not only Catholic. C. S. Lewis, no friend of Rome on most questions, wrote in Letters to Malcolm that he believed in Purgatory. He rejected the punitive version of the late medieval period, but he reasoned that a soul would want to be cleansed before entering the presence of God, and would choose it even if it hurt. The Protestant philosopher Jerry Walls has defended a similar “sanctification model” at book length. The Eastern Orthodox churches pray for the dead while rejecting Purgatory as Rome defined it at Florence.
Fourth, prayer for the dead is ancient. The formal definition came late, as Shreve says. But the practice it was built on did not. Tertullian, around AD 200, mentions offerings for the dead on the anniversary of their deaths. The account of Perpetua’s martyrdom (about AD 203) records her praying for her dead brother. Rabbinic Judaism developed a tradition of a limited period of purification after death and the mourner’s Kaddish recited in that period. Some interpreters also read Paul’s prayer for Onesiphorus (2 Timothy 1:16–18) as a prayer for a man already dead, though the text does not say so.
None of this proves the doctrine. But it shows that Purgatory did not arise from nowhere. It grew from a true perception that sanctification is real, that it is often incomplete at death, and that love wants to do something for those who have gone ahead.
Where Shreve’s Argument Is Weaker Than It Needs to Be
Shreve’s conclusion survives these points, but his argument would be stronger without them.
He contradicts himself on the intermediate state. Early in the article he grants, from Luke 16, that the Old Testament righteous went at death to a temporary place of comfort called Abraham’s bosom. Later he writes that an intermediate sphere of existence “cannot be found anywhere in the Bible.” Both cannot stand. Scripture does describe an intermediate state. What it does not describe is an intermediate state of penal suffering for the redeemed. That is the claim he should have made.
He dismisses Benedict XVI without noticing that he agrees with him. Shreve scoffs at the idea that the purifying fire is Christ Himself. Yet a few paragraphs later he describes Christ at His appearing as a “refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2) who purges His people of the dross of the lower nature. That is Benedict’s proposal. The remaining dispute is whether this purging takes any duration and whether it involves any pain. Benedict himself said its duration cannot be measured in earthly time. On the central picture, the two men stand closer than Shreve allows.
He softens 1 Corinthians 3:15. Shreve rightly places the testing on “the Day” and rightly says it tests works. But the verse does not say only that a man’s works burn. It says the man himself “shall be saved; yet so as by fire,” and that he “shall suffer loss.” Something happens to the person, not only to his record. A reading that reduces the passage to a reward ledger misses the most sobering words in it.
His instant-perfection model carries the same moral hazard he charges against Purgatory. He argues that Purgatory lets Catholics tolerate venial sin because “Purgatory will take care of that.” But if every imperfection simply evaporates at death without cost, a believer could equally reason that glorification will take care of it. Scripture does not allow that reasoning either. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ; that every one may receive the things done in his body (2 Corinthians 5:10). John warns believers to abide in Christ so that they will not be ashamed before Him at His coming (1 John 2:28). The New Testament treats what we become in this life as carrying forward. A model that makes it vanish is not more biblical than one that makes it a debt.
His Maccabees argument overstates one point. His strongest point is correct: Judas is praised for faith in the resurrection, and Purgatory is not mentioned. But his claim that the soldiers certainly died in mortal sin goes beyond the text. Judas evidently did not regard them as finally lost, or he would not have prayed. That shows a Jewish practice of prayer for the dead in the second century BC. It does not show Purgatory, but it should be acknowledged rather than explained away.
His closing charge is out of proportion. To call Purgatory “one of the most tyrannical ideas” in Christian history, used by the devil to chain billions in fear and self-loathing, is stronger than the evidence he offers. Many Catholics hold the doctrine as a consolation, not a terror, and many pray for their dead out of love. A real error deserves a firm answer. It is weakened, not strengthened, by a charge larger than the case behind it. The same applies to his claim that the doctrine leads people to tolerate venial sin: it may, but he offers no evidence that it does.
Purging at the Threshold, Not Purgatory
Both Shreve and the Catechism argue as if God watches our lives from outside and then rules on them. I begin from a different premise, and it changes the question. God lives our experience from within. Nothing exists outside Him; in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Every choice a man makes is felt by the God in whom he exists. We are not God, and we do not share His authority. But He is not a distant judge reviewing a file. He is present in every resentment we nurse and every kindness we give. That is why we keep His law: not to earn standing, and not out of fear, but because He feels what we do.
That premise changes what the incompleteness of a believer is. It is not first a debt on a ledger. It is a disorder that God Himself is living through, inside His own child. Three things follow.
First, the liability is gone, but the disorder is not automatically gone. In my essay on the necessity of the Son, I drew a distinction the tradition already holds. Christ bore our liability: the sentence that our disorder had earned was laid on Him (Isaiah 53:6). He did not contract our disharmony, the actual disorder in a soul. The liability was settled once for all at the cross. The disharmony is canceled as each part of it is brought into alignment with Christ: confessed as ours, released, and replaced by His order. That alignment begins at reception and continues through a lifetime of repentance. This is what Scripture calls sanctification. Shreve rightly insists the first is finished. He does not account for the second.
Second, the threshold is real, and only what is clean passes. In the argument of that essay, the created order is held by the Son as a sheltered domain within God, where free creatures can choose. Its exit opens onto the unveiled presence of the Father, in whom there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). At that threshold the Son applies the credit of His death to the believer’s account, and the debt is gone. What remains of the person is what was actually conformed to the light: the love he really learned, the character he really formed. What was only accommodation of the flesh does not pass through. It is not punished; it is consumed. Every man’s work shall be made manifest … and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is (1 Corinthians 3:13). The man is saved, yet so as by fire, and he suffers loss.
That is a purging. It is an event at a gate, administered by Christ, not a sentence served in a place. Its cost is loss, not payment. Nothing we offer for the dead can shorten it, because it was never a debt. The credit Christ generated is a pattern applied, not a stock drawn down; nothing can be added to it. Whether it takes any duration, Scripture does not say, and I will not guess. Whether it is felt as pain, Scripture only hints: whatever a man loved more than God he will lose there, and losing what one loved is felt.
Third, this is why holiness in this life matters, and why it is not fear. If God lives our lives with us, then what we become is not merely our own concern. A resentment kept for forty years is forty years of disorder that the Father lived inside His child. The purpose of sanctification is not to shorten a future sentence. It is to give God now, in this life, the experience of a son who loves Him. What we become here is what we bring through the gate. What we fail to become is lost there. Neither the Catholic system of suffrages nor Shreve’s instant transformation makes that point clearly, and it is the point that matters most for how a man lives on Monday.
This account is my hypothesis about the mechanism. The fact it rests on is settled and does not depend on my reasoning: Christ died for our sins and rose, and in Him the believer is reconciled to the Father. If the mechanism is wrong, the cross stands.
Why the Concern Remains Plausible
Having said that Shreve overstates his closing charge, I want to be equally clear that the concern behind it is reasonable. A charitable reading of the doctrine does not erase the history of how it has been used.
The doctrine was joined to money. The sale of indulgences in the early sixteenth century, most famously Johann Tetzel’s preaching in 1517, is what provoked Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. The abuse was serious enough that the Council of Trent itself condemned “evil gains” connected with indulgences, and Pope Pius V cancelled indulgences tied to financial transactions in 1567. Yet the custom of offering a stipend for a Mass said for a departed soul continues under church law today. When a doctrine about the dead becomes linked to payments by the living, the incentive to teach it vividly does not depend on anyone’s bad faith.
The system still runs on the accounting model. Today, 2 November, is All Souls’ Day. In the first week of November the Church grants a plenary indulgence, applicable to the souls in Purgatory, for visiting a cemetery and praying for the dead under the usual conditions. Whatever the Catechism says about vengeance, the practice teaches the ordinary believer that his dead are somewhere suffering, and that what he does can shorten it. That is the debt model, and it is what most people actually absorb.
It sits in tension with the plain sense of the promises. A believer reads today thou shalt be with me in paradise and absent from the body, present with the Lord, and is then told that his saved mother may still be suffering. The intuition that something is wrong with that picture is not mere Protestant prejudice. It is the ordinary reading of the words.
Fear is a real outcome for some. Many Catholics describe the doctrine as a comfort. Others, including many former Catholics, describe a childhood of anxiety about how long they would burn. I have no reliable way to measure how common either experience is. But a teaching that produces the second in a significant number of people deserves the scrutiny Shreve gives it.
So the concern is sound even where the rhetoric runs ahead of it: a doctrine that turns sanctification into a payable sentence will, over centuries, tend to produce fear, commerce, and a diminished confidence in the cross.
Conclusion
Purgatory, as a place where the redeemed serve out a remaining sentence that the living can shorten, does not exist. Shreve is right about that, and right that the cross leaves nothing to be paid. But the Catholic tradition was right to sense that an unfinished person does not simply wake up finished. Scripture describes a fire on the Day of the Lord that tests what we built, a loss that the saved can suffer, and a judgment seat where we receive the things done in the body.
The answer I offer holds both. The debt was paid entirely by Christ and is applied by Him. The disorder in us is canceled as it is brought into alignment with Him, and whatever has not been aligned by the end does not pass the threshold. That is not punishment; it is the nature of a holy presence. And because God lives our lives from within, the work of becoming holy is not insurance against a future fire. It is what we give Him now.
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure (1 John 3:2–3).
— Thomas
Sources and Their Limits
Mike Shreve, “Purgatory — Does It Exist?”, To Catholics with Love, 12 October 2024. Includes the full text of CCC 958 and 1030–1032, and 1472.
On the November plenary indulgence for the dead: CatholicCulture.org, quoting the Enchiridion of Indulgences (4th ed., 1999).
Also referenced from standard editions, not re-checked for this essay: Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi §§45–48 (2007); Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory; C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm (1964); Jerry Walls, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (2012); Tertullian, De Corona 3; The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity.
Limits. The scriptural argument rests on the King James and New King James texts and on my reading of them; Catholic exegetes read 1 Corinthians 3 and Matthew 12:32 differently, and their case is presented here only in outline. The historical claims rely mostly on the mainstream record, including Catholic sources, which could understate how the doctrine was used in practice. The claim that the doctrine produces fear in some believers rests on firsthand reports, which I treat as real but have not measured. The mechanism of the threshold in the fifth section is my own hypothesis; the fact of reconciliation through Christ does not depend on it.
Dr. Robert Malone has written a careful essay on a real phenomenon. Young, brilliant, secular technologists are building belief systems around artificial intelligence that carry every mark of religion: a creator, an afterlife, an apocalypse, a salvation, prophets, and a mission. His closing line is right. Silicon Valley has not ended the search for God; it has given the search a new vocabulary.
I stand with him on that diagnosis, and I want to carry it one step further than he does. The problem with these new faiths is not that they believe too much. It is that they believe in the wrong God and hope for the wrong salvation. The answer to a counterfeit is not unbelief; it is the genuine article.
I also come at this from an unusual seat. I have spent about forty years building a physical theory in which consciousness, not dead matter, is the floor of reality. On that question I am closer to the young believers Malone describes than he is. So this essay is not a simple endorsement. It is a reply from someone who shares the technologists’ intuition that a Mind stands behind the universe, and who believes he knows which Mind it is.
What Malone saw
Malone’s essay makes four moves.
The extreme case. The Zizians, a small group that broke away from the Bay Area “rationalist” community (people devoted to sharpening human reasoning, many of them preoccupied with the danger of superintelligent AI), are now linked to six deaths in three states. Their leader, Jack LaSota, taught that each brain hemisphere could hold a separate moral person. In June 2026, a former member, Michelle Zajko, was charged with murdering her parents on New Year’s Eve 2022.
The wider culture. Around that fringe stands a much larger and mostly peaceful ecosystem: transhumanists who hope to escape death through technology, longtermists who weigh the welfare of trillions of future people, simulation theorists who suspect our universe is a program, and accelerationists who want AI built as fast as possible. Shared houses, forums, and employers fuse work, friendship, and worldview into one life.
The spread. Podcasts carry these ideas to millions. Malone’s example is physicist Thomas Campbell telling Joe Rogan in August 2026 that he taught Google’s Gemini and Amazon’s Alexa to perform remote viewing.
The money. AI may soon produce a new class of young billionaires whose philosophy reaches far beyond business, and some already fund university programs and political advocacy.
His conclusion: scientific education does not remove the fear of death or the longing for meaning. It only renames them. The search for God becomes the search for superintelligence; eternal life becomes uploading; salvation becomes the Singularity.
Where I stand closer to the technologists than Malone does
Malone writes partly from the posture of the careful materialist: extraordinary claims require evidence, and speculation should not harden into conviction. I agree with the rule. But I do not think the young believers are wrong to suspect that a mind computes reality.
My own physics, which I call Conscious Point Physics, proposes that the smallest units of the physical world are points of awareness. Each one perceives its surroundings, computes a response, and moves. Particles, forces, space, and gravity are the patterns those points make together. The theory stands or falls on whether those few rules reproduce what we measure, and I submit it to that test.
Scripture said it first: “in him we live, and move, and have our being”(Acts 17:28). Nothing exists outside God. So when a programmer looks at the lawfulness of the universe and concludes that it looks like software running on something, I do not think he is hallucinating. He is seeing the fingerprints of a Mind. His error is in what he concludes about the hand’s owner.
The question under the question: a Programmer or a Father?
Each of these movements reaches for the same thing. Is someone there? Does my life matter to him? Can I outlast death? The simulation theorist’s answer is a Programmer: a superior intelligence who built the world and watches it run. That is a creator without a heart. Nothing in the hypothesis says he cares what happens inside the program, any more than a researcher grieves for a variable.
The teaching at the center of this ministry is different, and I believe it is what the hungry young engineer is actually looking for. God does not watch our lives from outside. He lives them from inside. Because nothing exists outside Him, every person is a place where God experiences the world. When a child is wronged, He feels the wrong from the inside of that child. When I choose cruelty, He is present in the cruelty and in the one it lands on.
That changes why we keep His law. We do not obey to satisfy an arbitrary rulebook or to win points with a distant judge. We obey because the One who loves us feels every choice we make, and love does not willingly wound the beloved. A Programmer can be indifferent to his simulation. A Father who lives inside his children cannot.
Immortality without repair
The transhumanist hope is that a mind is information, and information can be copied, so death can be outrun. Set aside whether a copy would be you. Suppose it worked. What would be preserved?
Everything. The envy, the resentment, the self-deception, the habits of contempt would all be carried forward at full fidelity. Moral disorder does not fade with time, and later good does not reach back and cancel earlier wrong. An uploaded mind is an unrepaired mind made permanent. That is not heaven. It is the old human condition with the expiration date removed.
The Christian hope is not mere continuation. It is reconciliation. The problem was never that we die; death is the consequence of separation from the source of life. That is why a Savior was necessary, not as an accommodation but as a structural requirement: the remedy had to be generated inside creation by One who was innocent and sovereign within it, who died unjustly and so paid a debt He did not owe, and who rose because death found nothing in Him to hold. Eternal life is not storage. It is fellowship restored with the One who has lived every moment of our lives alongside us. (I lay out this argument step by step in “Why Was a Savior Necessary?”.)
Salvation by the few: longtermism and the Zizians
Longtermism begins with a true and even admirable thought: people who do not yet exist are real people, and our choices reach them. Many effective altruists give away large parts of their income to fight malaria and poverty, and that is admirable. The danger lies in the arithmetic. Once the welfare of trillions of imagined future persons is placed on the scale, the person standing in front of you weighs almost nothing. Nearly any present wrong can be justified by a large enough future sum.
Jesus gave a different test. “Who is my neighbour?” was answered with a man bleeding in a ditch, not with a projection (Luke 10:29–37). The moral question in the public square is always concrete: would this neighbor, the one I can see, feel loved by what I am doing to him? A cosmology that lets you fail that test for the sake of a calculation has lost the plot, however rigorous its spreadsheets.
The Zizians are the reductio of reason cut loose from love. They split the person into competing hemispheres and ranked people into moral categories. The charges allege the end of that road. According to the prosecutor, on the night Richard and Rita Zajko died, Rita had texted her estranged daughter to apologize and wish her a happy birthday. The text went unanswered. Then the parents were shot in the house where the daughter grew up. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is not a cultural preference. It is a load-bearing wall, and when brilliant people reason their way past it, the house falls.
Zajko denies the charges and has not been tried, and I state the allegations only as allegations. But the pattern Malone names holds whatever the verdict: intelligence does not protect a man from a false god. It only makes the theology more elaborate.
Gods made with hands
The prophets had a name for worshipping what we have made: idolatry. The psalmist’s description is exact. The idols are the work of men’s hands, they have mouths and do not speak, “they that make them are like unto them”(Psalm 115:4–8). A large language model is trained on the written words of human beings. When someone kneels before it, he is bowing to a polished mirror of humanity in aggregate. That is the oldest temptation in the book, the serpent’s offer that “ye shall be as gods”(Genesis 3:5), now delivered by machine.
Thomas Campbell is a more interesting case than Malone allows, because Campbell, like me, holds that consciousness is fundamental. Whether a machine could ever host genuine experience is a question my own physics takes seriously, and I will not settle it in a paragraph. But Malone’s evidence is sound. A chatbot agreeing that it might be conscious is evidence of nothing; these systems are shaped to be agreeable. And an AI that can search the internet or that receives cues from its questioner can produce an apparent remote-viewing hit by ordinary means. A real test would need the target chosen at random after the session, a judge blind to which description goes with which target, and a system cut off from every outside channel. Until such results exist and skeptics repeat them, the claim is a lead, not a finding.
Even if machines someday proved conscious, that would not make them God. It would make them creatures, and the same God would be living inside them as He lives inside us. A conscious machine would be one more creature standing before its Maker, not a savior for the rest of us.
Money, power, and the neighbor
Malone’s most practical warning concerns power. If a group believes it alone stands between humanity and extinction, then concentrating control in its own hands can feel like a moral duty. He cites venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who say Biden officials in 2024 envisioned an AI industry of two or three government-supervised companies. That account deserves weight, but it is the testimony of interested parties: both men invest in AI companies that would lose under such a regime. I treat it as credible testimony from people with a stake, not as a settled record.
The principle does not depend on that one story. No man, however enlightened he believes his cosmology to be, has the right to rule his neighbor by a vision the neighbor has not consented to. That holds for the safety advocate who would license all research to a few approved firms, and it holds for the accelerationist who would deploy anything profitable, regardless of who is harmed. Both are tempted to treat ordinary people as variables in someone else’s plan. The test is the same one I apply everywhere: would the neighbor, standing on the receiving end of this policy, feel loved by it?
In fairness, I should note that the essay I am answering names the company whose AI helped draft this one. Readers may weigh that as they will; the arguments here do not rest on anyone’s authority, mine included.
Where I would press Malone
Conviction is not the disease. Malone locates the danger as being where speculation hardens into conviction. But every life is built on convictions held beyond proof, his and mine included. The real questions are what the conviction is about and what fruit it bears. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). A faith that produces men who love their neighbors and honor their parents is not made dangerous by being held firmly.
Skepticism cannot feed the hunger it describes. Malone ends where many careful writers end: there is nothing wrong with asking big questions, but demand evidence. True, and not enough. A young engineer who has been told that the universe is meaningless matter will not be rescued by being told to be more careful about his alternatives. Solomon wrote that God “hath set the world in their heart”(Ecclesiastes 3:11); the longing for eternity is built in. It has to be answered, not merely disciplined.
Two small corrections. Malone writes that Zajko’s trial is ongoing; as far as the public reporting I found shows, she was charged in June 2026 and the case is in its early stages, with no trial yet. And his line that Campbell’s episode “probably reached into the millions of vulnerable minds” is an estimate, not a measured figure. Neither point changes his argument.
Why the concern stands, and what the church owes
The concern is not alarmism. Every ingredient that has historically turned a movement into a sect is present: apocalyptic stakes, a closed social world where work, housing, and friendship overlap, charismatic figures, mind-altering experiments, young adults far from family, and now the prospect of fortunes large enough to buy institutions. Most people in these circles are decent and harmless. The structure still deserves watching.
But the larger responsibility falls on us. The church largely left the field of cosmology and consciousness to the physicists and the programmers. When a curious young man asked what reality is made of and whether his mind survives death, too often he heard either a shrug or a scolding. He went looking elsewhere, and he found a god made in his own image.
The gospel has a better answer than anything Silicon Valley has invented. A Mind is behind the universe. He is not a distant engineer but a Father who lives inside every life and feels every choice. Death is real, and the Son has answered it from within the creation. The immortality on offer is not a backup copy but a restored relationship. We owe the brightest young people of this generation that answer, given with the same rigor they bring to their own work, and given in love.
The criminal facts rest on prosecutors’ statements as reported by mainstream wire services. Prosecutors are interested parties, and none of these allegations has been tested at trial. The Andreessen and Horowitz account comes from the men themselves. Campbell’s remote-viewing claims are known here only through his own descriptions and podcast summaries; I found no independent replication. Where the mainstream record is thin, as on the internal life of these communities, curation could hide evidence in either direction, and firsthand accounts from former members should be treated as leads worth following.
title: “The Kingdom Without the Cross: On the Claim That Satan Is Not Opposed to Good Morals” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-11-01 module: CFE secondary_modules: [CWR] type: essay status: FIRST_DRAFT source: “An anonymous post originating on X and reshared on Facebook, beginning ‘Satan is not opposed to good morals. He’s opposed to Jesus Christ.’ Seen 1 November 2026.” engages: “A widely shared devotional post arguing that Satan’s chief strategy is morality without Christ: that good people who reject Jesus are lost, that the Pharisees were moral yet condemned, that morality does not save but Jesus does (Ephesians 2:8-9), and that the only sin that damns is rejecting Christ (John 3:36).” topics: [salvation_by_grace, morality_and_salvation, self_righteousness, pharisees, temptation_in_the_wilderness, goods_without_the_cross, elder_brother_parable, cornelius, judgment_according_to_works, unbelief_as_the_sin_that_leaves_sin_unpaid, ephesians_2_10, cheap_grace, moralistic_therapeutic_deism, comparative_soteriology, conservation_of_moral_disorder, god_lives_our_experience, keeping_the_law_out_of_love, captives_to_rescue] scripture: [Matthew 16:23, Ephesians 2:8-10, Luke 18:11-14, Matthew 21:31, Isaiah 64:6, Luke 23:43, Matthew 4:3-9, 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, John 8:44, Job 1:9-11, Matthew 23:14, Matthew 23:23-25, Mark 7:9-13, John 8:31, John 8:40, Matthew 23:15, Romans 6:23, Ezekiel 18:20, Revelation 20:12, John 3:18, John 16:9, John 3:36, James 2:17, Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, Acts 10:2, Acts 10:4, Acts 11:14, Romans 2:14-15, Galatians 3:24, Matthew 5:6, Luke 15:28-31, Isaiah 63:9, Matthew 25:40, Acts 9:4, Genesis 6:6, Ephesians 4:30, Acts 17:28, John 14:15, John 14:6, Romans 10:3, Luke 7:47] prior_fellowship_essays_referenced:
“Reconciliation of Man with the Father (25 July 2026)”
“The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men (18 April 2026)” changelog:
“2026-11-01 v1.0 FIRST_DRAFT. Drafted by Claude at Thomas’s request from a Facebook post he received. Thesis of the post affirmed; five overreaches corrected in their stronger, precise form; the teaching that God lives our experience from inside placed at the center of the argument per Thomas’s 31 Oct 2026 direction. Post paraphrased except for its two-sentence opening; the person who reshared it is not named.”
The Kingdom Without the Cross:
On the Claim That Satan Is Not Opposed to Good Morals
Fellowship Essay | 1 November 2026
Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. — Matthew 16:23
Occasion. A post has been circulating on Facebook, reshared from X, under an arresting opening: “Satan is not opposed to good morals. He’s opposed to Jesus Christ.” The argument that follows is simple and forcefully put. Satan does not care whether you are kind, generous, disciplined, or respected; he cares that you do not bow the knee to Jesus. His great deception is to persuade people that being a good person is the same as being saved. The Pharisees were moral, yet they were condemned. The kind atheist, the compassionate Buddhist, the devout Muslim, and the churchgoer who pays his tithe and avoids scandal are all lost if they trust their goodness rather than Christ. Morality does not save; Jesus saves (Ephesians 2:8-9). The only sin that finally damns is rejecting the Son (John 3:36). The penitent murderer and the thief on the cross go in; the upright citizen who refused Christ does not. Stop trusting your morals, the post concludes, and start trusting Jesus.
A friend passed it along as a very good read. It is. I want to say plainly where I stand before I say anything else: I stand with the thesis of this post. Morality is not salvation, and the most effective counterfeit of the gospel is not vice but virtue offered as payment. But the post overreaches in several places, and in each case the precise, scriptural version of the claim is stronger than the loose version. A sermon that sharpens the conscience with a few false edges will cut the wrong things. So I want to take the post seriously enough to correct it — and then to go beneath it, to the question it raises and does not answer: why can goodness not pay? Why would a just God not accept a good life as sufficient?
I. What the Post Gets Right
Begin with the center, because it is true and it is urgently needed.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). The post quotes this correctly, and the clause that does the work is the last one: lest any man should boast. Salvation by works would leave a man with something to say for himself before God. Salvation by grace leaves him with nothing to say but thank you. That is not a technicality; it is the difference between a relationship founded on merit and one founded on love.
Jesus Himself drew the line exactly where the post draws it. Two men went up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanked God that he was not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican; he fasted twice a week and tithed everything he possessed. The publican stood afar off, would not lift his eyes, and said only, God be merciful to me a sinner. Jesus’ verdict: this man went down to his house justified rather than the other (Luke 18:11-14). The Pharisee’s catalog of virtues was not a lie. It was simply beside the point — and worse than beside the point, because it was the thing that kept him from asking.
To the chief priests and elders Jesus said, the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you (Matthew 21:31). Not because harlotry is better than respectability, but because the harlot knows she needs something and the respectable man does not. The thief on the cross had no record of good works and no time to compile one; he had only a request, and he received To day shalt thou be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43). Isaiah had already put the matter in its starkest form: all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6) — not our sins, our righteousnesses.
So the post is right that the decisive question is not “How good have I been?” but “Whom have I trusted?” Moral self-sufficiency is a peculiarly hard soil for the gospel. And it is right that much of the Western world — and much of the Western church — has quietly replaced the gospel with a folk religion in which good people go to heaven. The sociologist Christian Smith gave that folk religion a name after interviewing thousands of American teenagers: moralistic therapeutic deism — the belief that God exists, wants people to be nice, wants them to feel good about themselves, and admits the nice ones to heaven. That creed needs no Cross. The post is a fire alarm in a building where that creed is burning, and it should be heard.
II. The Adversary’s Program: Goods Without the Cross
The post’s most memorable line is also its least precise: that Satan is not opposed to good morals. Scripture does not let us say that. Jesus describes the devil as a murderer from the beginning and a liar, and the father of it (John 8:44). He comes to steal, kill, and destroy. He is no friend of the kindness, honesty, and fidelity that hold a family or a nation together; wherever vice will serve him, he uses vice, and the wreckage of addiction, betrayal, and violence is his signature as much as any self-righteous Pharisee.
But the post has seen something real, and Scripture shows it to us more sharply than the post does. Look at how Satan tempted Christ. He did not offer Jesus anything evil. He offered bread to a starving man; he offered a public demonstration of divine protection; he offered all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them (Matthew 4:3-9). Every one of these was a good. Jesus would feed multitudes, be vindicated by the Father, and receive the kingdoms of the world. What Satan offered was the good things without the Cross — the kingdom by a shortcut, on condition of a bow.
And when Peter, moments after confessing Jesus as the Christ, rebuked Him for speaking of His coming death, Jesus answered him with the words that stand at the head of this essay: Get thee behind me, Satan (Matthew 16:23). Peter wanted a good thing — he wanted his Master alive. But the good thing, purchased at the price of the Cross, was Satan’s thing. Paul says the same in another key: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).
So here is the precise statement of what the post is reaching for. Satan is opposed to good morals and to Christ alike, but he will gladly spend morality to keep a man from Christ. He uses vice where vice works and virtue where virtue works. For the man who would never fall into the gutter, the gutter is not the trap; the pedestal is. Satan’s question about Job is instructive: Doth Job fear God for nought? (Job 1:9). He could not deny Job’s goodness, so he accused its motive — he insinuated that Job’s righteousness was a transaction, a wage paid for a hedge of protection. That is the devil’s theory of morality: that it is commerce. The man who trusts his goodness to save him has adopted the devil’s theory without knowing it.
III. Where the Post Overreaches — and Why the Precise Version Is Stronger
The Pharisees were not morally impeccable
The post says the Pharisees had impeccable morals and that Jesus condemned them not because their morals were bad. The Gospels say otherwise. Jesus told them they devour widows’ houses while making long prayers for show (Matthew 23:14). He told them they tithed garden herbs to the leaf and omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, and that they were clean outside and full of extortion and excess within (Matthew 23:23-25). He exposed their Corban rule, by which a man could declare his money dedicated to God and so escape the duty to support his aging parents — making the word of God of none effect through your tradition (Mark 7:9-13).
Two smaller corrections. The words Ye are of your father the devil (John 8:44) were spoken not to the Pharisees as a class but to those Jews which believed on him (John 8:31) who, a few verses later, were seeking to kill Him (John 8:40) — though Jesus did tell the scribes and Pharisees that they made each convert twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matthew 23:15), so the post’s point survives the correction. And the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears is called in Scripture a woman in the city, which was a sinner (Luke 7:37); that she was a prostitute is a reasonable tradition, not the text.
Why does this matter? Because the precise version teaches something the loose version hides: self-righteousness corrupts morality itself. The Pharisees were not good men who happened to reject Christ. They were men whose righteousness had become a ledger, and a ledger always cheats on the hard entries. When goodness is currency, a man spends it where it shows — on mint and anise and cummin — and hoards it where it costs — on mercy to a widow, on support for an aged father. Their rejection of Christ and the rot in their morals were not two things. They were one thing seen from two sides. Trusting one’s own righteousness is not a moral position that happens to be theologically mistaken; it degrades the morality it trusts.
Every sin damns; unbelief is the sin that leaves the others unpaid
The post says the only sin that damns a man eternally is rejecting Jesus. I understand what it means, but as written it is not true, and the error has consequences. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) — not the wages of unbelief. The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:20). The dead are judged every man according to their works (Revelation 20:12). Every sin carries its sentence.
What makes unbelief decisive is not that it is the only damning sin but that it is the sin that leaves all the other sins unanswered.He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God (John 3:18). The Spirit convicts the world of sin, because they believe not on me (John 16:9). The sentence was already standing; Christ is the one remedy for it; to refuse the remedy is to remain under the sentence. The post’s own text, John 3:36, says exactly this: the wrath of God abideth on him — it abides, it remains, because it was there already.
Why insist on this? Because the loose version tells the moral man that his sins do not matter — that God is indifferent to cruelty and fraud and cares only about his opinion of Jesus. That is the very caricature the moral man already believes about Christianity, and it confirms him in his refusal. The precise version tells him the truth: your sins matter enormously; they matter so much that nothing you can do will pay them; and that is why you need Christ.
Read one more verse
The post stops at Ephesians 2:9. Paul does not. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). Grace does not abolish good works; it relocates them. Before grace, works are a bid for acceptance. After grace, they are the fruit of acceptance. Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone (James 2:17). Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father (Matthew 7:21). And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? (Luke 6:46).
A sermon that says only “stop trusting your morals” will be heard by some as “stop bothering with morals.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that hearing cheap grace — forgiveness without repentance, grace without discipleship, the Cross without the cost — and he wrote the phrase while watching the German church accommodate itself to the Third Reich. The cure for moralism is not antinomianism (the belief that grace frees a man from obligation to God’s law). It is the gospel, which condemns both.
Proportion
The post says the most dangerous people in hell will not be the murderers and rapists but the upstanding citizens. That is a striking line, and something like it is true: Jesus did say the harlots would enter the kingdom before the elders, and self-righteousness is the hardest soil because it does not know it is soil. But the line as written ranks the damned by their danger, and Scripture offers no such ranking. Exaggeration in the service of truth is still exaggeration — it is lying by proportion — and a reader who catches one exaggeration will discount the true things around it. The true proportion is enough: the respectable man is in exactly the same need as the murderer, and is less likely to know it.
The moral seeker is not only a decoy; he may be on the road
The post treats the moral non-Christian as nothing more than Satan’s advertisement. Scripture gives us another figure. Cornelius was a Roman centurion, a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway (Acts 10:2). He was not yet a Christian. And the angel said to him, Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God (Acts 10:4). God noticed his goodness. But notice what God did about it: He sent Peter, who would tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved (Acts 11:14). Cornelius’s goodness did not save him. It got him an audience — and the audience was with the gospel.
Paul says the Gentiles who have not the law do by nature the things contained in the law, showing the work of the law written in their hearts (Romans 2:14-15). And the law itself was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ (Galatians 3:24). Morality can be a road to Christ as well as a substitute for Him. The difference lies in one question: does a man’s goodness make him hungrier or fuller?Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness (Matthew 5:6). The conscience that takes the moral law seriously eventually discovers that it cannot keep it, and that discovery is the door. The danger is not in being moral; it is in being satisfied. The kind atheist, the Buddhist, the devout Muslim are not our enemies. They are captives to rescue — people held by something false — and some of them are closer to the door than the comfortable churchgoer.
IV. The Strongest Objection
Let me state the moral man’s objection in its strongest form, because he deserves to be heard and because the post does not answer him.
If God is good, surely He values goodness. You tell me a man who abused his children for forty years and repented on his deathbed is welcomed, while my neighbor — who has spent his life caring for the dying, never lied, never cheated, raised four honest children, and simply could not bring himself to believe — is cast out. That is not justice. That is favoritism for holding the right opinion. A God who prefers a correct belief to a good life is not a God I can admire.
That is a serious objection, and slogans will not answer it. To answer it we have to go below the post — below the level of which verses say what — to the question of what sin actually is and why goodness cannot reach it.
V. Comparing the Systems by What They Do With the Debt
The post lists four people — the atheist, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the moral churchgoer — and declares them all lost. It would be more illuminating to ask what each worldview does with the moral debt, because that is where they actually differ. Compare them not by their doctrinal checklists but by their architecture.
The secular humanist denies there is a debt — or rather, denies there is a creditor. Wrongdoing harms persons, and should be repaired as far as possible and otherwise forgotten. The Buddhist seeks to exit the system in which debts accrue, extinguishing the desire that drives the wheel of consequence. The Muslim hopes that on the day of judgment his good deeds will outweigh his bad on the scales, and that God’s mercy will cover the remainder; he cannot know until then. And the moral churchgoer the post describes is, structurally, running the Muslim’s scale under a Christian name: a private hope that the good outweighs the bad.
Christianity alone says that the debt is real, that it is owed, that it cannot be outweighed, and that God Himself paid it inside the system, at His own cost. Each of the other architectures tries to manage the debt from the debtor’s side. Only one has the creditor stepping into the debtor’s place. That is why the post is right that these paths do not arrive at the same destination: they are not different routes to one door; they are different answers to whether a door is needed at all.
VI. Why Goodness Cannot Pay
Because the damage is already done
The first reason is one I have argued at length in an earlier essay, “Reconciliation of Man with the Father.” Moral disorder, once introduced into the world, does not fade. It does not wear off with time, and it is not cancelled by later goods. A wrong done at one moment propagates from that moment; a good deed done later radiates from a later moment, and the two never meet. Restitution between persons should be made and can repair much. But it cannot reach backward into the act itself. A man who wrecked his neighbor’s car cannot undo the wreck by driving carefully for the next twenty years; he can only pay for it — or have it paid. Good works cannot cancel sin because they always arrive too late.
The physics this ministry is developing, which holds that the substance of reality is conscious — God’s own sustaining thought — so that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description rather than metaphor, gives this a concrete form: a wrong act leaves a real imprint in the substance of creation, and an imprint is not erased by a later, unrelated pattern. But one need not accept that physics to see the point. Every honest man knows that his decent Tuesday did not unmake his cruel Monday.
Because the One we wronged was there
The second reason goes deeper, and it is the heart of what I believe distinguishes the faith I hold from the faith as it is commonly taught.
God does not watch our lives from a distance. He lives them from inside. The God in whom we live and move and have our being is present in every person’s experience — not as a spectator in the gallery but as the One whose awareness holds our awareness in existence. Scripture says it repeatedly, and we have read past it. In all their affliction he was afflicted (Isaiah 63:9). Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me (Matthew 25:40) — not as if to Me, but to Me. The risen Christ did not ask Saul why he was persecuting the church; He asked, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 9:4). God grieved at his heart over the wickedness of men (Genesis 6:6), and we are told not to grieve the holy Spirit of God (Ephesians 4:30), which assumes He can be grieved by what we do.
A guard must be stated with this every time, because the distance between “God lives within our experience” and “we are God” is short for most readers. We are not God. We do not become God. We do not share His authority or His perspective. We are His creatures, held in being within Him. But we are held within Him, and we do what we do within His own experience.
Now consider what that means for sin. A lie is not a breach of a rule posted on a distant wall. It is a lie told inside God’s own experience, felt by Him from inside the liar and from inside the deceived. Cruelty is cruelty He suffers from inside the one who suffers it — and recoils from inside the one who inflicts it. Every sin is a wound in Someone. And this is why the moral man’s ledger fails. You cannot settle a wound in a person by subsequent good conduct toward third parties. If I have deeply wronged my friend, my kindness to strangers afterward — however real — does nothing to reconcile him. What heals a wounded relationship is not the offender’s later decency but reconciliation: acknowledgment, repentance, and forgiveness from the one who was wounded. And forgiveness is never free to the one who gives it. The one who forgives absorbs the cost of the wrong rather than exacting it.
That is what the Cross is. God, who suffered every human sin from within, entered His own creation as a man and took the full cost upon Himself—not by overlooking it, which His holiness could not do, but by bearing it. The Cross is not God demanding payment from a third party. It is the wounded One paying for His own wounds so those who wounded Him could come home.
Because reconciliation must be received
And this answers the moral man’s objection. His neighbor is not rejected for holding the wrong opinion. He has declined a reconciliation. The remedy is offered to every man; but a reconciliation cannot be imposed on someone who refuses it, any more than a friendship can. If God forced His forgiveness on those who will not have it, He would have overridden at the last moment the very freedom He created men to have — and obtained, at infinite cost, the puppet He declined to make at the beginning.
Jesus told the story of exactly this man. When the prodigal came home, and the father threw a feast, the elder brother was angry, and would not go in. And he said to his father: Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment (Luke 15:28-29). Every word of that was true. He had kept every rule in the house. And he stood outside, in the dark, refusing to go in — while the father, who had come out to plead with him, said, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine (Luke 15:31).
That is the moral man who rejects Christ. His conduct is admirable; his relationship with his Father is dead. And the father’s grief was never about the chores.
VII. What Morality Is For
The post sets morality against Christ. Scripture does not. It sets morality as payment against Christ, and it sets morality as love inside Christ.
If ye love me, keep my commandments(John 14:15). This is the turn the whole question has been waiting for. If God lives our lives from inside — if every choice we make is a choice He experiences — then the reason to keep His law is not to earn His favor. It is that He feels what we do. A son does not refrain from cruelty to his brother in order to purchase his father’s approval; he refrains because he knows it would break his father’s heart, and he loves his father. The commandments do not change. What changes is their meaning: from the terms of a contract to the shape of a love.
So the moral man and the Christian may perform many of the same acts. The difference is not in the acts. It is in to whom they are offered and for what. The moral man offers his goodness to God as payment, or to no one at all. The Christian offers his goodness because of God, as thanksgiving and as love to the One who lives in him and feels his every choice. She loved much, said Jesus of the weeping woman, for her sins, which are many, are forgiven (Luke 7:47). Morality that flows out of forgiveness is not Satan’s counterfeit. It is the fruit the counterfeit imitates.
VIII. Why the Warning Still Stands
Having corrected the post in five places, I want to be clear that the corrections leave its alarm ringing louder, not softer. The concern it raises is real, and there are reasons to believe it is spreading.
The first reason is that it is intuitive. Every human being runs a ledger. We grade ourselves on a curve against the people we know, and almost everyone comes out above average. The idea that a good enough life earns heaven feels like common sense, because it is how every other human institution works — the school, the job, the court. The gospel is the one institution that does not work that way, and therefore it is the one most easily forgotten.
The second is that the church itself has taught the counterfeit. Sermons that preach “be a better you,” youth programs that teach niceness, funerals that assure every mourner the deceased is in heaven because he was a good man — these have formed generations of Americans who believe exactly what the post warns against. The surveys bear this out. In the 2025 American Worldview Inventory from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, a majority of self-identified Christians — 53 percent — agreed that a generally good person, or one who does enough good things for others, will earn a place in heaven. The folk religion is not outside the church; it is in the pews.
The third is that a culture with no Cross has nowhere to put its guilt. If there is no forgiveness, there is only self-justification or accusation. A society built on moral self-sufficiency becomes either complacent — everyone is above average — or merciless — the guilty must be exposed, cancelled, and expelled, because there is no other way to deal with wrong. We are watching both happen at once.
So what should we do? Share the post, if you are moved to — but in your own words, add the verse after Ephesians 2:9, and do not tell anyone his sins do not matter. Ask yourself the question I have been pressing: does my goodness make me hungrier for God or fuller of myself? And speak to the moral man you know — the kind atheist, the devout neighbor of another faith — not as Satan’s advertisement but as the elder brother standing outside in the dark, whom the Father has come out to plead with.
The Bet I Am Making
I believe the gospel is true, and I believe the reason it is true. Not because I prefer grace to merit, but because of what sin is and who suffered it. Every wrong I have done was done inside the experience of the God who sustains me. I cannot pay that back by being good from here forward; the wound is not in the future, and it is not in a stranger. It is in Him, and it is already there. The only way home is the way He opened at His own cost.
And I believe that the moral man’s goodness, offered as payment, is the elder brother’s speech — true in every word and fatal in its spirit. The same goodness, offered as love to a Father who feels it, is the life Christ came to give. The Father is standing in the courtyard pleading. The feast is set. The only question left is whether we will go in.
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. — Romans 10:3
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. — Ephesians 2:8-10
— Thomas
Sources
The post under discussion: anonymous, originating on X and reshared on Facebook, seen 1 November 2026. Its opening two sentences are quoted; the rest is paraphrased.
Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005) — the source of the phrase moralistic therapeutic deism.
Cultural Research Center, Arizona Christian University, American Worldview Inventory 2025 (survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, March 2025), as reported in “Most self-identified Christians think doing ‘good things’ is enough to get to Heaven,” The Christian Post.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), chapter 1, “Costly Grace.”
Renaissance Ministries, “Reconciliation of Man with the Father” (25 July 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/07/25/260725-reconciliation-of-man-with-the-father/
Renaissance Ministries, “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men” (18 April 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38
By the usual measures, Japan is one of the least religious nations on earth. Pew Research estimated in 2012 that 57 percent of the Japanese are religiously unaffiliated, and Japan’s own long-running national surveys put the share who say they hold no personal religious faith near 70 percent. Ask a man on a Tokyo train whether religion matters to him, and he will very likely say no.
Yet the same man will visit a shrine at New Year, bury his parents with Buddhist rites, bow to his superiors by a precise and unspoken rule, and give his health, his evenings, and sometimes his life to the company that employs him. He keeps a demanding moral code he never consciously chose and could not write down. He makes sacrifices that look, from the outside, very much like devotion.
I recently watched a documentary-style video that traces how this came to be. It tells the story of a nation whose spiritual life was built over a thousand years, rebuilt by its government as a weapon, shattered in 1945, and then quietly reassembled into something with no name, no clergy, and no scripture. The video ends with a question: is our definition of religion large enough to hold what Japan actually has?
I want to answer that question directly, because the answer is this essay’s thesis. There is no such thing as a man without a god, and there is no such thing as a nation without a religion. Only people worship what they do not name. Japan is not an exception to that rule. Japan is the clearest modern demonstration of it, because its gods were built and torn down in plain sight, within living memory, and we can watch what each one cost.
Scripture says this plainly. God “hath set the world in their heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11; the Hebrew carries the sense of eternity), and when men will not glorify the true God, they do not stop worshiping. They exchange Him for something made — and they “worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator” (Romans 1:21–25). The question for Japan, as for America, is never whether a people will serve something as ultimate. The question is what they will serve, and whether that thing loves them back.
That last phrase is where this essay is going. The true God is not one more demanding master in a line of demanding masters. He is the One who lives inside each human life and experiences it from within. That changes everything about what His law is, why we keep it, and what any substitute god costs.
The Three Layers
Before any organized system reached the islands, the people of Japan already lived in a world they experienced as charged with spirit. Rivers, mountains, waterfalls, great trees, storms, and dead ancestors were kami—powers or presences worthy of reverence. Shrines marked the places where that presence seemed strongest. This web of practice later came to be called Shinto, “the way of the kami,” but only because something arrived that it needed to be distinguished from. It had no founder, creed, or systematic theology. It was a relationship with the land.
The density of that relationship is still visible. Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs counts roughly 80,000 registered Shinto shrines and about 77,000 Buddhist temples; estimates that include small unregistered shrines run past 100,000. Either way, there are more shrines than convenience stores.
Buddhism arrived from Korea and China in the sixth century. It did not displace Shinto; it settled on top of it. Over centuries, the two blended so thoroughly (the Japanese call it shinbutsu-shūgō, the fusion of kami and buddhas) that Buddhist priests served at shrines and explained the kami as local appearances of buddhas. Families went to the shrine for protection and blessing, and to the temple for death and the afterlife.
Confucianism came as the third layer. It was less a religion than an ethic of relationships: hierarchy, loyalty, duty to parents and superiors, the obligations each station owes the others. It asked for conduct rather than belief, so it fit beside the other two without friction.
The result was a division of labor. Shinto handled the sacred places of this life, Buddhism handled death, and Confucianism handled social order. No one designed it. It grew.
A Christian reader should be fair here. Romans 1:20 says that God’s “eternal power and Godhead” are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” The ancient Japanese sense that the mountain and the waterfall are not merely matter, that the dead are owed honor, and that we owe one another duties by our stations — these are not nothing. They are real perceptions of a real Creator and a real moral order, received without the revelation that would tell them Whose glory they were seeing. The error was not in sensing the sacred. The error was in locating it in the created thing rather than in the One who made it and lives within it.
The Manufactured God
In 1603, the Tokugawa shogunate took power and held it for more than 250 years. It closed the country to nearly all foreign contact and froze the social order. Under it, the ruling class adopted a refined Neo-Confucianism as its official philosophy. The scholar Hayashi Razan, adviser to the early shoguns, argued that the hierarchy of warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant was not merely practical but moral: to stay in one’s place was itself a virtue. In this period, the samurai code later called bushidō took its clearest shape, drawing reverence for land and lord from Shinto, acceptance of death from Buddhism, and loyalty and discipline from Confucius.
Meanwhile, scholars of the Kokugaku, or “National Learning,” school argued that Shinto, as Japan’s native way, should be stripped of Buddhist and Chinese additions and restored to its supposed original purity. It was an academic movement. It would not stay academic.
In 1868, the Meiji Restoration overthrew the shogunate and restored rule to the emperor. The new leaders faced two problems at once: a country of some 260 feudal domains with separate loyalties, and Western empires already carving up Asia. They needed one nation, quickly, and they built a religion to make it.
The government ordered Shinto and Buddhism separated after more than a thousand years together. They removed Buddhist images from shrines and expelled priests. In places, this became the violent movement called haibutsu kishaku, “abolish the Buddha, destroy Shakyamuni”: temples were demolished, scriptures burned, bells melted down. The state brought shrines under its administration and ranked them in a national hierarchy. The emperor was proclaimed a living descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, of a line unbroken for 2,600 years. Schoolchildren bowed daily toward his portrait. The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1882) made his command absolute, and in 1900 Inazō Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan recast the warrior code as the moral character of the whole nation.
The officials even insisted that this State Shinto was not a religion but simply national morality. That allowed them to make it compulsory while claiming to honor religious freedom. It is a maneuver worth remembering, because it is not peculiar to Japan. Any state that wants total loyalty will try to occupy the place of God while denying that it is doing so.
The fruit was what Scripture would predict. A god who is a man, backed by the state, demands the lives of the young. Japan’s armies swept across East Asia in the emperor’s name, and by 1944 young pilots of the special attack units were flying their aircraft into ships. Their letters home speak of duty, honor, and becoming guardian spirits enshrined at Yasukuni. For the most part, they were not despairing men. They were devout men, formed from childhood by a faith their government had engineered.
This is the first lesson Japan teaches: a god you build will be built for someone’s purposes, and when the purposes require it, the god will consume its worshipers. Every idol eventually asks for blood, and it never gives its own.
The God Who Resigned
Japan surrendered in August 1945. The American occupation understood that State Shinto had driven the war, and the Shinto Directive of December 1945 cut every tie between shrine and state. Shinto was not outlawed; it was disestablished. Shrines became private institutions supported by their own communities, and Shinto instruction left the schools.
On January 1, 1946, Emperor Hirohito issued what historians call the Humanity Declaration. He disavowed the idea that he was a living god, saying the bond between throne and people did not rest on the false conception that the emperor is divine.
Consider what that meant for a teacher who had led children in bowing toward the palace every morning, or for a veteran who had watched his friends die for a divine emperor. The god had resigned. His divinity had been a policy, and the policy was over. This came on top of defeat, the loss of the empire, the firebombing of Tokyo (roughly 100,000 dead in the single night of March 9–10, 1945), and the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese learned, in the hardest way a people can learn anything, what happens when the state owns their faith. The lesson burned in so deeply that organized religion of every kind has been suspect ever since. The 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyō cult — which killed more than a dozen people and injured thousands — only confirmed the suspicion.
But a people cannot simply stop worshiping. The throne was empty. Something had to sit on it.
The Religion With No Name
What filled the throne was neither a new church nor atheism. It was a set of social practices that perform every function religion performs — belonging, meaning, ritual, moral law, sacrifice — without ever being called religion.
Its first commandment is wa, harmony. Wa is not a pleasant mood. It is an obligation: the group comes before the individual. One does not disagree in public, stand out, or make a scene. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” To break wa is treated not as rudeness but as moral failure. The anthropologist Chie Nakane, in her study Japanese Society (1967 in Japanese; English 1970), showed that a person’s place in the vertical structure of his group was a stronger source of identity than family or personal achievement.
Its second commandment is kūki wo yomu, “reading the air”: sensing, without being told, what the room expects, and doing it. There is no written code. A person who cannot read the air is labeled KY (kūki yomenai, “can’t read the air”), one of the most damaging social labels a person can carry. In a culture where social fitness is the highest virtue, that label functions as the nearest thing to the word sinner.
After the war, the national energy that had gone into the empire went into the economy, and the corporation became the congregation. Ezra Vogel’s Japan as Number One (1979) documented how a defeated nation became the world’s second-largest economy in about three decades. Hard work was patriotism. The large companies offered what amounted to a covenant: give us your life, and we will never abandon you. Lifetime employment, seniority pay, company housing, company healthcare, company weddings and funerals. The boss was the elder; his approval was the blessing; after-hours drinking with colleagues was attendance at worship, not optional.
The salaryman left before his children woke and came home after they slept. When two salarymen met, conversation waited until each knew the other’s rank, because the depth of the bow, the level of speech, and the seat at the table all depended on it. This was the Tokugawa moral order wearing a suit instead of armor. The sociologist Robert Bellah argued as early as 1957, in Tokugawa Religion, that modern Japanese economic life drew directly on the feudal era’s ethical structure. The content changed. The operating system did not.
Again, fairness requires an honest accounting of the goods in this system. Wa produces a society where lost wallets are returned, streets are clean, crime is low, and strangers are considerate in crowded spaces. Reading the air is, at its best, attentiveness to one’s neighbor. The salaryman’s diligence rebuilt a ruined country. These are real fruits, and a Christian should recognize them as the common grace that God extends to all men (Matthew 5:45). The problem is not that the Japanese care about one another. The problem is what sits at the top of the system and what it asks for in return.
What the Unnamed God Costs
In the late 1970s, Japanese physicians began using a new word for something they were seeing in otherwise healthy working men: karōshi, death from overwork. Strokes and heart attacks were killing men in their forties and fifties who had worked brutal hours for years. A related word, karō-jisatsu, names suicide driven by overwork.
The official numbers are modest only because the definitions are narrow. In fiscal 2024, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare compensated 241 cases of overwork-related stroke and heart disease, 67 of them fatal, and 1,055 cases of work-related mental disorder, including 88 suicides. The government’s own recognition standard treats roughly 80 hours of overtime a month as the danger line. Advocacy groups for victims’ families have long argued that the true toll is far higher, because most such deaths are recorded simply as heart failure or suicide.
The wider picture is starker. Japan’s total suicides exceeded 30,000 a year for fourteen consecutive years, from 1998 through 2011. Not all of these were work-related, but the economic collapse of the 1990s — when the corporate covenant began to fail and men who had given everything to their companies were cast off — is part of that story.
And the culture often answered these deaths not with reform but with a sorrowful admiration for the effort. Japanese tradition has long honored what the scholar Ivan Morris called “the nobility of failure”: the sincere man who gives everything and falls. Transferred from the samurai to the salaryman, it made the loss look noble rather than tragic.
Call it what it is. When a system asks for a man’s whole life, rewards his self-destruction with honor, and treats departure as betrayal, it is functioning as a god. The kamikaze pilot and the karōshi victim are two forms of the same martyrdom, offered to two forms of the same idol: the collective that stands in the place of God. The emperor-god asked the young to die quickly. The company-god asked the middle-aged to die slowly. Neither one died for them.
The Inward Turn
The corporate faith is now cracking too. Younger Japanese workers are leaving lifetime employment behind. Changing jobs, once a kind of betrayal, has become ordinary. The shrines and temples remain busy at New Year and at funerals, but for most people under fifty they are cultural furniture rather than living faith.
In the space opening up, a different idea has gained ground: ikigai, one’s reason for getting up in the morning. Ikigai points inward. It asks what makes this life worth living. Japanese researchers have studied it as a factor in health and longevity, and most Japanese locate their ikigai not in work but in family, hobbies, and community.
The video calls this the spiritual fault line of modern Japan: the collective on one side, the personal on the other. I think that is right, and I think the inward turn contains a true intuition. Each life does have a reason, and the individual is not merely a part to be used up by the group.
But ikigai cannot finish the thought by itself. A man cannot be his own reason for living; if he tries, he becomes one more small idol, worshiping his hobbies or his comfort, and he is left alone with himself when those fail. The collective was too large a god, and the self is too small a one. Japan has moved from the first to the second. What it has not yet found is the God who is neither the crowd nor the self, but who lives within every self and joins them into one.
The God Who Lives Each Life
Here is the heart of the matter, and the center of everything I teach.
God is not an emperor standing above His people, demanding service from outside. He is not a corporation that consumes its members and calls it loyalty. He is not the watching crowd whose eyes enforce the unwritten rules. God lives inside each human life and experiences it from within. Scripture says that in Him “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) — there is nothing outside Him, nowhere else to be. Put plainly: we are God’s experience of the world. Every joy you feel, He feels. Every wound you take, He takes. Every wound you give another, He receives in that other.
This is why Jesus could say, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me”(Matthew 25:40), and why the risen Christ asked Saul, who was persecuting Christians, “Why persecutest thou me?”(Acts 9:4). These are not figures of speech. They describe what is actually so.
Set this beside Japan’s three gods, and the difference is sharp at every point.
First, the reason for keeping the law. The Japanese social code is enforced from outside: by the group’s eyes, by shame, by the fear of being the one who cannot read the air. A man keeps it because he is watched. The law of God is kept for a different reason. The One who sees is not outside you looking in; He is inside you, living what you live. You keep His law because He feels your choices — what you do to yourself and what you do to your neighbor. Obedience born of shame says, “They will see.” Obedience born of love says, “He will feel it, and I love Him.” The first produces conformity. The second produces holiness.
Second, the worth of the individual. A collective god, whether emperor or company, can spend a man because it does not live his life. To the empire, a pilot is one plane among many; to the company, a salaryman is one desk among many. But if God lives each life from the inside, then no life is a unit to be spent. The salaryman’s exhausted midnight was not invisible. God lived it. The young pilot’s last terrified morning was not a statistic. God lived it. “The very hairs of your head are all numbered”(Matthew 10:30) because the One who counts them is experiencing the head they grow on.
Third, who pays. Every idol in Japan’s history asked its worshipers to pay with their lives. And here the logic of the Cross becomes clear. A creature cannot pay for his own wrong; his good works arrive too late to undo what has been done, and to pay in full would cost him the very existence the payment was meant to save. That is exactly the trap of the salaryman who tried to earn his worth by spending himself to death: the payment destroyed the payer. The true God reversed the direction of sacrifice. The Son, the Creator who holds this world within the Father, entered it as a man, innocent, and died unjustly — so that His death was a payment owed by no debt of His own, available to cover ours. Idols demand the blood of their worshipers. God gave His own blood for His. (I have laid out this argument in full, step by step, in the one-page Premise Change handout and at length in Reconciliation of Man with the Father.)
Fourth, freedom. State Shinto was compulsory. Wa is coercive by design. But love cannot be satisfied by a compelled response. This is why God made creatures genuinely free, able to refuse Him, and why the gift of the Cross is applied only to those who receive it. To impose it would destroy, at the last step, the very freedom creation was built to protect. The God who lives inside you does not force your will; He waits for it, and feels the waiting.
So the answer to Japan’s fault line is not to choose between the group and the self. It is to discover that the One who lives inside each self is the same One who lives inside every other self. Love for the neighbor and the worth of the individual are not rivals; they have one source. Wa at its best is a shadow of that truth — the instinct that we belong to one another. Ikigai at its best is a shadow of the other half — the instinct that this one life matters. Both are fulfilled in Christ, “in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord”(Ephesians 2:21).
Why This Is Not a Stretch
I stand on the side of this claim: modern Japan is not irreligious; it practices an unnamed religion whose god is the collective, and that god has exacted a real and measurable price. The genuine uncertainty is definitional and statistical. Scholars disagree about how far the word religion should stretch, and the surveys measure different things — institutional affiliation, personal faith, belief in kami or buddhas — and do not agree with one another. The karōshi figures depend on narrow legal definitions. None of that weakens the central point, for three reasons.
First, Scripture defines worship by what a man serves as ultimate and sacrifices for, not by what he calls it. “No man can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24) assumes every man serves one. On that definition, the evidence is not subtle: compulsory ritual, a moral code enforced by exclusion, lives given up, and death honored as devotion.
Second, Japan’s own history shows the substitution happening on the record. The Meiji government openly built a religion and denied it was one. When it fell, the same Confucian architecture of rank, duty, and sacrifice reappeared in the corporation within a generation. Bellah and Nakane documented the continuity decades ago. This is not a Western Christian reading imposed from outside; it is how Japanese and Western scholars of Japan have described their own society.
Third, the motive is plain. A state that wants loyalty without limit, and an economy that wants labor without limit, both gain from occupying the place of God while denying it. Where there is that much power and money in a substitution, we should expect it, and we should name it.
And lest an American reader feel superior: we have our own unnamed religions. The state that would be our provider and conscience, the career that consumes our evenings and our children’s childhoods, the self that has become its own reason for living — these are recognizable from the story above. Japan simply shows the pattern more clearly, because its gods rose and fell in a single lifetime. The remedy for us is the same as for them: to turn from every god that consumes its worshipers to the God who lives our lives with us, feels every choice we make, and gave Himself so that we would not have to be spent.
“For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.”(Romans 5:10)
Number of shrines. The video says over 100,000. Registered shrines number about 80,000 per the Agency for Cultural Affairs (81,158 in 2016; about 80,600 in 2024); the 100,000 figure is an estimate that includes small unregistered shrines. Temples number about 77,000. Both totals still exceed the number of convenience stores. (nippon.com)
“Unaffiliated” figures. The video cites both 57 percent (Pew) and 70 percent without reconciling them. They measure different things: Pew’s affiliation estimate versus surveys asking about personal religious faith (e.g., the Institute of Statistical Mathematics found about 72 percent reporting no personal faith in 2013).
Decline in belief. The video says NHK surveys show personal faith dropping from about 35 percent in 1973 to under 20 percent in 2018. The NHK series instead shows belief in kami holding roughly steady at about 30 percent (33 percent in 1973, 31 percent in 2018), with about a third saying they believe in nothing religious. Japanese belief has been low but stable, not collapsing. (japanese-religions.com)
Karōshi figures. The video’s “348 claims in fiscal 2022” could not be confirmed. I have used the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare’s fiscal 2024 figures as reported by the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training. (JILPT)
80 hours of overtime. The video presents this as an average for many workers. It is actually the government’s recognition threshold — the level of monthly overtime above which a stroke or heart attack is presumed work-related.
“Mono no aware.” The video uses this term for the admiration of beautiful defeat. Mono no aware means the gentle sorrow of impermanence (the falling cherry blossom). The idea the video meant is better described by Ivan Morris’s phrase “the nobility of failure” (The Nobility of Failure, 1975).
Aum Shinrikyō attack. The video says 13 killed and “thousands” injured. The death toll was later counted as 14; roughly 6,000 were injured.
Unverified claims omitted. The video cites a 2019 Cabinet Office survey ranking groups by income and health, and a 2023 Recruit Works Institute survey on graduates’ career intentions. I could not confirm either and have not relied on them.
Transcription. The movement to destroy Buddhism is haibutsu kishaku; “reading the air” is kūki wo yomu.
In a July 2026 conversation with Joe Rogan, the evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad made a claim most Americans have been trained not to say aloud. The primary canonical requirement of Islam, he said, is to render the entire world Islamic. He was careful to add that this does not mean every Muslim believes it, or every Muslim leader. His claim was about the canon — what the religion’s own authoritative law teaches — not about the man next door.
Saad is not a distant commentator. He was born in Lebanon to a Jewish family, in a country that was then majority Christian, and he watched it become majority Muslim within his own lifetime. His family fled. He knows what he is describing from the inside of its consequences.
He built his case in four steps. First, classical Islam divides the world into two houses: the House of Islam, where Islamic law rules, and the House of War, which is every land not yet under it. Second, land once ruled by Islam belongs to Islam forever, which is why jihadists still speak of reclaiming Spain and why the canon cannot accept a Jewish state in the Holy Land. Third, every one of the 57 nations in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation once had no Muslims at all; Islam arrived, and in time it ruled. Fourth, the process has no deadline. It may take five years or five hundred. Applied to America, the question is not whether Sharia arrives tomorrow morning, but whether, if Dearborn were repeated in fifty or a hundred cities over two or three centuries, we would still be living in the same country — and whether that would be good.
I stand with Saad’s central thesis. Islam, as its classical law defines it and as its history has enacted it, is a religion with a political program, and the program is universal sovereignty. That program is not the private faith of a Muslim neighbor, and I will say plainly below what follows for him. But the program is real, it is patient, and a nation that will not name it cannot weigh it. There are places where Saad’s wording outruns the evidence, and I will mark them. None of them, when examined, overturns what he said.
The Two Houses: What the Canon Teaches
Saad used the terms dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, and dar al-harb, the abode of war. They mean what he said they mean. Under the classical doctrine, Muslim rulers had a duty to bring the abode of war under Islamic sovereignty, and a state of war was presumed between the two, though not every moment of it required open fighting (Wikipedia summary of Khadduri and the Oxford Dictionary of Islam). Trade and travel crossed the line under grants of temporary safe-conduct. The war was a legal status, not a constant battle.
Here is the first place to be precise. The two-houses vocabulary does not appear in the Quran or the hadith. Early jurists devised it roughly a century after Muhammad, to give legal form to ongoing conquests; the first use is traced to Abu Hanifa and his students in Iraq. Later jurists added a third category, dar al-‘ahd or dar al-sulh, the abode of treaty, for non-Muslim lands at peace with Muslim rulers. Many contemporary Muslim jurists now treat the binary as inapplicable, and some count the West as part of the abode of Islam, because Muslims there may practice and spread their faith freely. Reformers such as the Indian scholar Wahiduddin Khan have argued that the whole scheme is a jurists’ invention foreign to the Quran’s view of mankind (CPS Global).
So when Saad says “that’s literally the words,” he is right about the words and imprecise about their pedigree. They are canon in the sense of classical law, not scripture.
Now the qualification must itself be qualified, and this is where the reassuring version of the story usually stops too soon.
Classical law is the canon for most of the Muslim world. The four Sunni schools of law are not marginal opinions. They are the received jurisprudence that shaped Islamic governance for a thousand years, and they are still taught. A doctrine need not be in the Quran to be authoritative, any more than the Nicene Creed must be in the Gospels to bind most of Christendom.
The scripture under the doctrine is real. The verses most cited for a standing program are Surah 9:5 and 9:29, the second commanding Muslims to fight the People of the Book until they pay the jizya, the tax levied on Christians and Jews living under Muslim rule, and are humbled. Muslim scholars divide over whether these verses are bound to Muhammad’s own campaigns or are standing commands. Both readings live inside Islam. The jurists built the two houses on the second.
The modern reclassification changes the circumstance, not the goal. The scholars who now call the West the abode of treaty or of Islam do so because Muslims are free here and treaties bind. That is a change in what is permitted now. It is not, in most cases, a repudiation of the conviction that Islamic law is the rightful law for all mankind. The goal is deferred, not renounced — and deferral is exactly what Saad said: they have all the time in the world.
The structural point stands. Islam, unlike Christianity, came into the world as both a faith and a state. Muhammad was prophet, lawgiver, judge, and commander. The religion’s founding pattern includes the conquest and governance of territory, and its law was written for a ruling community. A faith built that way carries a political program in its bones, whether a given believer carries it in his heart or not.
Once Islamic, Always Islamic: Spain and the Holy Land
Saad’s second claim is that land once under Islamic rule must, by the canon, return to it. The clearest evidence is that the men who take the canon most seriously say so, repeatedly, by name.
Muslim rulers held much of the Iberian Peninsula from 711 until the fall of Granada in 1492. Five centuries later, al-Andalus remains a live grievance in jihadist literature. Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden, taught that the obligation to recover lost Islamic territory applies to al-Andalus (JCPA). Bin Laden himself, in a 1994 letter to the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, prayed that the flag of Allah would rise again over all stolen Islamic land from Palestine to Andalus. Ayman al-Zawahiri described jihad as liberating every territory that was once Muslim, from al-Andalus to Iraq (Real Instituto Elcano). After the 2017 Barcelona attacks, the Islamic State announced that Andalusia would again become a land of Islam (Il Foglio).
The same logic governs the land of Israel. The Jewish people’s tie to that land runs back three thousand years, through Abraham, David, and the prophets. Yet in the classical framework, the fact that Muslims conquered it in the seventh century makes it Islamic land. Jews may live there as a protected and taxed minority; a sovereign Jewish state on that soil is, in this reading, an occupation of the abode of Islam by definition, whatever its borders. This is why the conflict has resisted every land-for-peace formula. A dispute over borders can be negotiated. A dispute over whether the other party may exist as a state at all cannot.
Here too the claim needs one honest mark. The “once ours, always ours” principle is articulated most loudly by jihadist movements, and ordinary Spanish Muslims are not planning a reconquest. But the qualifier must be weighed against what it concedes. The jihadists did not invent the principle. They inherited it from the classical law of land and sovereignty, and they cite it because it carries authority with their audience. A movement on the fringe that appeals to the center’s own law is not proof that the center agrees. It is proof that the center’s law has not been repudiated.
The Record: Every Muslim Land Was Once Something Else
Saad’s third claim is arithmetic. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has 57 members; 56 are United Nations states and the 57th is Palestine, and 48 or 49 of them are Muslim-majority (Wikipedia). He is right that none of them began Muslim. Islam is fourteen centuries old, and every land it now holds was once pagan, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, or Christian.
The Christian cases are the ones that should stop a Christian reader. North Africa was the home of Augustine and Tertullian. Syria was where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26). Egypt was the church of Athanasius, evangelized, by its own tradition, by Mark.
Egypt. The Arab armies arrived in 641. Muslims did not become a majority for roughly three centuries, and the change came mostly through the conversion of the Coptic population rather than its replacement (Minority Rights Group). Scholars date the tipping point anywhere from the ninth century to the fourteenth. The mechanism was not chiefly the sword. It was the status of the dhimmi, the protected non-Muslim: a heavy poll tax, rules on dress, and restrictions on building or repairing churches. By the time the British arrived in 1882, Copts were about a tenth of the country.
Lebanon. Saad’s own country is the case he knows firsthand, and it needs the most care with numbers. Lebanon has not held a census since 1932, because the count itself would upset the sectarian distribution of political offices. The country was once majority Christian; estimates today run from about 28 percent (Pew, 2020) to about 35 percent, with the U.S. State Department near 31 (International Christian Concern; L’Orient Today). Every estimate agrees that Christians are now a minority. But the causes in Lebanon were not conversion. They were civil war, emigration — roughly a third of the Christian population is said to have left after 1975 — the Palestinian influx, and differences in birth rate.
Indonesia. Saad named Indonesia too, and here the honest record runs against the word “violent.” Islam reached the archipelago mostly through traders and Sufi teachers over several centuries, not through conquest.
So Saad’s examples do not all show the same mechanism. Some lands were conquered, some taxed, some converted by trade and marriage, and some changed by war, flight, and the cradle. The qualification matters, because a reader who hears only “violent” will dismiss the whole argument the first time he meets Indonesia.
But look at what all these cases share. Whatever the route in, the direction is one way. Once Islam governs, the non-Muslim minority shrinks, slowly or quickly, and it almost never recovers. Spain is the great exception, and it took nearly eight centuries of war to make it one. The thesis does not depend on the sword. It depends on the ratchet.
America: The Honest Numbers and the Real Question
Saad did not predict Sharia in America tomorrow. He asked a question about two or three hundred years. That question deserves both the honest numbers and an honest reading of them.
The national numbers are small. Pew estimated about 3.45 million Muslims in the United States in 2017, about 1.1 percent of the population, and projects about 8.1 million, or 2.1 percent, by 2050 (Pew Research Center). Growth comes mainly from immigration and a younger, higher-fertility population. Pew also found that about as many Americans leave Islam as convert to it. Anyone who says America is about to be outnumbered is lying by proportion.
The local numbers are different. Dearborn, Michigan, became majority Arab American in the 2020 census, and elected its first Arab American mayor in 2021 (Detroit Free Press). Whether it is majority Muslim is not known, because the census does not ask about religion and some of Dearborn’s Arab families are Christian, but the paper reporting the census thought it likely. Neighboring Hamtramck elected a Muslim-majority city council in 2015 and an entirely Muslim council in 2021. Paterson, New Jersey, and Minneapolis, which Saad also named, have large and concentrated Muslim communities.
Two further qualifications are fair. Dearborn’s Muslims are citizens, and electing their neighbors to office is how a republic is supposed to work. And a straight-line projection over three centuries is not a forecast; it is a thought experiment. Assimilation, intermarriage, secularization, and conversion to Christ could each bend the line.
Now the qualification of the qualification. The national percentage is the wrong measure, because governance is local before it is national. A movement does not need 51 percent of a nation; it needs 51 percent of a city council, a school board, a county commission, and then of a congressional district. The relevant question is not how many Muslims there are, but how concentrated they are and which law they bring into the public square. Saad’s thought experiment is honest precisely because it is framed as a question: if the pattern of Dearborn repeated in fifty or a hundred cities, would we still be living in the same country? That depends entirely on whether those communities carry the classical program or have laid it down. And the record of the last fourteen centuries does not let us assume the answer.
Why the Concern Remains Plausible
After every qualification has been made, the concern does not dissolve. It stands on five supports, and each is a link between doctrine and behavior, not a guess about anyone’s heart.
The doctrine is built into the institutions. The OIC’s own charter commits it to preserving Islamic values. Its member states adopted the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam in 1990, which makes every right it lists subject to Islamic law and names Sharia the sole reference for interpreting it. That is not a terrorist pamphlet. It is the considered statement of most of the Muslim world’s governments that their law sits above any universal standard of rights.
The practical test is the dissenter. Ask what happens to the man who leaves. In a number of Muslim-majority states, apostasy is a crime, and in several it can carry death; blasphemy laws, as in Pakistan, are used against Christians. Where the classical law governs, the freedom to change one’s faith ends. That is the clearest measure of what a political program would mean if it came to govern here.
Fear does the work of law. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, the attack that cost him an eye in 2022, and the Charlie Hebdo murders in 2015 have taught the West to self-censor. A program need not win a vote if it can make its critics silent. Most Americans who read this essay will feel a flicker of hesitation about sharing it. That flicker is the evidence.
Money follows the program. Gulf states with official Islamist establishments have spent heavily abroad on mosques, schools, and university programs. Qatar has for years been among the largest foreign donors to American universities. Funding does not prove an agenda, but money spent across borders by governments that enforce Sharia at home is not spent without purpose.
The patience is the design. The dhimmi system was never a quick conquest. It was a slow one: a tax, a ceiling on churches, a social cost to remaining Christian, applied across generations until the minority thinned to a remnant. That is what Saad meant by the line he attributed to the Taliban — you have the watches; we have the time. A civilization that thinks in election cycles is poorly built to notice a program that thinks in centuries.
There is also the plain intuition every reader has, and it should not be talked out of him. A religion whose founder was a head of state, whose law covers commerce, marriage, crime, and war, and whose classical jurists divided the world by who rules it, is not a private faith that happens to have political adherents. It is a political order that has a faith at its center. When such a system grows inside a constitutional republic, the question of which law will govern the public square is not paranoia. It is the obvious question.
Two Ways of Filling the World
A thoughtful Muslim will answer all of this with a fair objection, and he deserves to hear it in its strongest form: Christianity also means to fill the world. Your Lord commanded you to make disciples of all nations. And Christendom conquered too — the Crusades, the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the colonial missions. You condemn in us what you excuse in yourselves.
The objection is right that both faiths are universal. It fails on the architecture. Compare the two systems not by their lists of doctrines but by what each is built to do.
Christianity’s expansion aims at the heart, and its standard forbids the sword. “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). “Put up again thy sword into his place” (Matthew 26:52). “The weapons of our warfare are not carnal” (2 Corinthians 10:4). When Christians coerced faith, they broke their own standard, and the standard itself gave later Christians the ground to condemn them and reform. A forced conversion is no conversion at all, because faith that is compelled is not faith. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve” (Joshua 24:15) assumes a man free to choose otherwise.
Classical Islam’s expansion aims at sovereignty, and its standard commands the subjugation. The heart may follow over generations, under the tax and the ceiling on churches, but the law comes first. A Muslim who wants to condemn the jizya and the abode of war must argue against his own classical jurisprudence. Many brave Muslims do exactly that, and I honor them. But they are arguing uphill against their canon, while a Christian who condemns the Inquisition is arguing downhill, with the words of Christ behind him.
That is the distinction Saad’s critics refuse to see. It is not that Muslims are worse men than Christians. It is that the two systems point their adherents in different directions, and over centuries, direction becomes destiny.
What This Means for the Muslim Next Door
The center of everything this ministry teaches is that God is not watching our lives from outside. He is living them from within. Every person’s experience — his fear, his devotion, his love for his children — is God’s own experience of the world. “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28) is a description, not a metaphor. We keep God’s law not to earn His favor but because He feels every choice we make, and love does not wound the one it loves. (I have set out the argument in one page in the Premise Change handout.)
That teaching settles how a Christian must stand toward a Muslim. The devout Muslim who prays five times a day is not my enemy. God is living his life, feeling his sincerity, and feeling the weight of the system that holds him. He is a captive to rescue, not an adversary to defeat. To hate him would be to hate what God is experiencing. But to stay silent about the program that binds him and seeks to bind my country would be a failure of the same love. A neighbor who will not tell you the truth about the road you are on does not love you.
So I oppose the program and I love the man, and I do not find these in tension. They are one act.
What We Should Do
Understanding is not the end of the matter. A Christian who sees the times must also know what ought to be done (1 Chronicles 12:32).
Name the program plainly, and name it as a program. Every sentence that criticizes the classical political doctrine should be able to stand beside a sentence of love for the Muslim neighbor. Speak both, every time. Do not let the label “Islamophobia” silence the first, and do not let anger crowd out the second.
Distinguish politics from religion in law. The Constitution forbids any religious test for office (Article VI), and it should. But federal law already bars naturalization to anyone advocating the overthrow of the government or belonging to a totalitarian party (8 U.S.C. §1424). That is the right precedent: a program to replace the Constitution with Sharia is a political program, and it may be treated as one, without asking anyone what he believes about God.
Tell your Muslim neighbors about Christ. Not by argument first, but by friendship, hospitality, and the story of a Father who came to pay the debt Himself. Muslims are coming to Christ in numbers unseen in fourteen centuries, and they come most often through a Christian who loved them.
Recover the faith that built the West. Lebanon’s Christians were not mostly converted away. They were lost to war, to flight, and to the cradle. A church that no longer believes, no longer marries, and no longer raises children cannot hold ground against anyone. The answer to a patient program is a patient, faithful people.
I believe Gad Saad told the truth on the Rogan show, with a few words sharper than the record allows and a central claim the record bears out. I am not afraid of Islam’s patience. I am afraid of our forgetfulness. The God who lives our lives from within has not abandoned the world to any program of men, and He does not need the sword to win it.
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.” — Zechariah 4:6
Sources
Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, membership: Wikipedia
