260927 – Recap – Transforming America – Chapters 1-2

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 27, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Stewards, Markets, and a Common Standard

PART ONE — The Conversation, Point by Point

1. Turning to the Book

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Thomas: The Parallel with the First Hour

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

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

5. Leonard: Competition, Innovation, and The Fountainhead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Charlie: Christ as Creative Artist

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

8. Thomas: Monopoly, Cartel, and Monoculture

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Charlie: Lonely Are the Brave

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Susan Steers to Chapter 2: Ownership and Stewardship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

15. Susan: Change from the Bottom — The Plumber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. Thomas and Armond: Chasing Rabbits

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

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

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

20. Armond: Where Is the Black and White?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21. Armond: The Bible Is Not Christianity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25. Thomas: Jesus All the Way Down

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

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

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

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

26. Media and Omission

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

27. The Individual as the Point of Attack

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

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

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

28. Armond: A Conversation with His Family

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

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

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

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

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

29. Thomas: Triangulation and the Voice in the Wilderness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Conscious Point Picture as a Social Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. The Buyer as Moral Agent

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

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

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

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

5. The Art-Market Idea for the Walker

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

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

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

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

6. Stewardship and Ownership

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

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

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

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

7. Finance as the Moral Gateway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. Media, Omission, and the Individual

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16. Resolutions and Open Questions

Resolutions reached, or nearly reached, in the session:

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

Open questions for the book and for future sessions:

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

260927 – Recap – Islam, Coexistence, and the Constitutional Order

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 27, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Islam, Coexistence, and the Constitutional Order

PART ONE — The Conversation, Point by Point

1. Michael’s Opening: The Mirror Between Extremes

Michael opened by saying he had a list of points written down in response to Thomas’s essay of the previous week, and that he saw a parallel in it that was stark and significant.

He began with Thomas’s references to Islamic writings that call for violence and for the imposition of Islamic belief. When 9/11 happened, Michael said, he had several friends in New York City who worked in ecumenical cooperation among mosques, churches, and temples. They pursued, ardently, the work of letting everyone know that the attack was not about the religion of Islam but about a group of extremists. President George W. Bush, for several days afterward, repeatedly sent the same message: this is not about Islam; it is about these extremists. Michael said that message mattered because violence was being done to Muslims simply for being Muslim, in something like a racist reaction but directed at religion. The government and the churches — Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian — made a concerted effort, gathering at large public events with imams and rabbis, and he found that heartening. Yet, he said, there was still harsh condemnation of the religion by people who never received the message.

The parallel, Michael said, is this. There are Muslims who look at Christians who want to do what Thomas proposes — restrain, watch, and monitor Muslims — and conclude that Christians are against them. They point to groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whom Michael described as Christian groups that want to murder Muslims outright and at times do, and they conclude that Christianity is evil. Michael said he would answer such a Muslim: remember 9/11; remember how the peacemaking Christians supported you; do not give in to the Christians who say these terrible things about restricting you, because Christians believe in cooperation and in sharing this planet. But those Muslims point to people who speak of a “Christian nation” and say, “See, Christians want to restrict us.”

Here, Michael said, is the contradiction: the very thing Thomas alleges about Muslims — that they are unfair and want to restrict others — is exactly what those Muslims allege about Christians.

Michael said it is an inherent property of his mind to place whatever he hears on a spectrum. The spectrum is really n-dimensional, but for this purpose he kept it to one dimension. At each end are the extremes. Muslim extremists point at Christian extremists and say, “They hate us; they want to do horrible things to us,” and Christian extremists say the same of Muslims. The two ends are mirrors of each other. In between are the people who say, “We differ in our views, but we want to live together.”

That same spectrum, he said, is not only Christian–Muslim. It describes Protestant and Catholic; seven hundred years of Eastern Orthodox and Catholic division; the long Protestant–Catholic history in Ireland; the Mormons, who endured their own horrifying history. Whenever he hears this kind of alienation, he places it on the spectrum: at the far ends, both sides want to kill each other; a little further in, they do not want to kill but, as Thomas proposes, to monitor the other and place government restrictions on them. Muslims face this too: in France there are rules against wearing the hijab, so a person may not wear his own religious garb.

As an empathetic person, Michael said, his answer is coexistence. When he heard Thomas say “Christian nation,” he thought, “You are at the far end of the spectrum, saying about the other exactly what they say about Christians. You cite what they say about Christians; they cite what you say about Muslims.”

Note (Bush’s statements). On 17 September 2001, speaking at the Islamic Center of Washington, President Bush said that the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam and that Islam is peace. In his address to Congress on 20 September 2001 he said the terrorists were traitors to their own faith and that the enemy was not Muslims or Arabs but a radical network. Michael’s summary of the message is accurate. Thomas’s later description of it as “a religion of peace” (see the paired file) refers to the same statements.

Note (Proud Boys and Oath Keepers). Neither organization defines itself as a Christian body. The Proud Boys describe themselves as a “Western chauvinist” men’s club; the Oath Keepers were an anti-government militia organization. Leaders of both were convicted of seditious conspiracy in connection with 6 January 2021. Neither is known primarily for organized violence against Muslims. Anti-Muslim violence in the West has been committed more often by individuals and small networks; the Christchurch mosque shooter (New Zealand, 2019) wrote an ethno-nationalist manifesto, not a Christian one. Michael’s broader point — that some Muslims perceive Western hostility and attribute it to Christianity — stands independently of these two examples.

Note (France). France prohibited conspicuous religious symbols, including the headscarf, in public primary and secondary schools in 2004; prohibited face-covering garments in public places in 2010; and extended the school rule to the abaya in 2023. There is no general French ban on adult women wearing the hijab in public. The rules rest on the French doctrine of laïcité (state secularism) and apply in principle to conspicuous symbols of every religion.

2. Thomas: Resolving Along the Axis of Truth

Thomas answered that he thought the question resolves along the axis of truth. The question is whether Islam contains within it an element that is simply incompatible with Western values. Can Muslims and non-Muslims actually get along, coexist, each doing his own thing, under a single Constitution — rather than having Muslims living as a completely separate body inside the nation?

3. Michael: Where the Origin Sits; Western Values as a Moving Target

Michael replied that the axis of truth depends on where one places the origin, as one says in mathematics. If the axis begins from Christianity, or from Islam, the reading of truth comes out differently — and that is the core of the matter. His own work, and what he enjoys, is finding a way to see a truth that incorporates both, as in the story of the blind men and the elephant. Where you stand determines what you see. He said he did not want to say truth is relative, but that it is relative to the person determining it.

On “compatible with Western values,” Michael said Western values evolve. In the 1500s, a Western value was that the Spanish invaded, enslaved the natives, and killed some ninety percent of the Arawaks and many others; Western values meant going to a country, enslaving its people, taking their gold, killing most of them, and leaving missionaries behind to preach Christianity to people who did not understand Spanish — or, later, English, French, or Portuguese — and so were never going to become Christians. If that is too long ago, take the 1800s: slavery was a Western value; women did not vote; black people did not have citizenship. In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan was at its height, promoting Christian nationalism and opposing the mixing of the races. Those, he said, were Western values in their time.

Michael then said he had been talking too long and would stop, but first addressed something from the prior week: the claim that the First Amendment is not part of the Constitution. The amendments are part of the Constitution, he said. Without them women would not vote and black people would still be counted as three-fifths of a person. We amended the Constitution because we came to believe women should vote and black people should be counted fully. If one wants to hold to the original Constitution alone, those things are not in it.

Note (Arawak/Taíno population). The Taíno (Arawak-speaking) population of Hispaniola collapsed from an estimated several hundred thousand (estimates range widely, from about 100,000 to over a million) to a few thousand within roughly thirty years of 1492. Historians attribute the collapse to epidemic disease, the forced labor of the encomienda system, violence, famine, and social disruption together; disease is generally regarded as the largest single factor, though forced labor and violence greatly compounded it. Contemporary Spanish critics, notably Bartolomé de las Casas — himself a Dominican friar — condemned the conduct on Christian grounds.

Note (terminology). The transcript’s “misogynation” is miscegenation, the term then used for interracial marriage and sexual relations. The second Ku Klux Klan peaked in the mid-1920s with estimates of three to six million members and used explicitly Protestant rhetoric.

Note (amendments). Article V states that ratified amendments “shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution.” The three-fifths clause (Art. I, §2) was superseded by §2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868); women’s suffrage was secured by the Nineteenth Amendment (1920). Michael is correct that the amendments are part of the Constitution.

4. Thomas Summarizes for Charlie

Charlie said he had joined late and did not know how the discussion had begun. Thomas summarized: Michael was responding to Thomas’s essay of the previous week, in which Thomas argued that Islam is a threat and that the nation needs to monitor people who threaten the constitutional order. Michael’s point was that after 9/11 people came together, and President Bush urged everyone to get along, yet the country still made Islam “other” and an enemy, so that people hate Islam because of a few extremists. The problem, in Michael’s view, is not Islam but a few extremists — which, Thomas said, is exactly the opposite of his essay.

5. Charlie: The Historical Record and Sharia

Charlie said the historical record, as far as he could tell, shows that it is “only a few radicals” until Muslims form a majority in a country, and then there is hell to pay. Islam carries an ideology that is incompatible with the West. Michael may think it compatible, Charlie said, and he wished Michael would spend some time living in an Islamic country to see what it is really like. Charlie said he needs to visit someone in Egypt soon, but he would not want to live there; he does not like how it looks. He has lovely Muslim friends, but he does not know whether they would stay so lovely if they were the majority, given what history shows.

Sharia law, Charlie said, is not compatible with the West, and it is not only a few radicals who wish to live under it. It is always described as “a few radicals,” but among the great majority of Christians and Jews, no one is cutting off anyone’s head, and no one is stoned for being gay. That, he said, is a very large difference.

Note (survey evidence on sharia). The Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey The World’s Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society (39 countries) found support for making sharia the official law of the land ranging from 99% in Afghanistan and 91% in Iraq, through 72% in Indonesia and 74% in Egypt, to 12% in Turkey, 10% in Kazakhstan, and 8% in Azerbaijan. Among those who favored sharia, support for specific penalties varied sharply by country: for example, majorities in Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan favored the death penalty for leaving Islam, while in Turkey, Bosnia, and Central Asia only small minorities did. The data therefore support Charlie’s claim that support for sharia is not limited to “a few radicals” in many Muslim-majority countries, and support Michael’s claim that the picture varies enormously by country. Pew’s 2017 survey of U.S. Muslims found that about 92% said they were proud to be American and a majority said there is more than one true way to interpret Islam’s teachings.

6. Michael: American Mosques, Sectarian Division, and Coexistence

Michael said he fully agreed with what Charlie described, but that he has visited many mosques and discussed religion with the people there, and in American mosques he has heard none of it. What happens elsewhere is horrifying; he thought the Afghans have it worst, and the level of horror a woman growing up there endures deflates his heart. But he has found none of that in any American mosque he has visited.

He added that Shiite and Sunni Muslims will kill each other before they go after Christians, because they hate each other so much. So Islam should not be categorized as one thing. That would be like treating Christianity as one thing when it includes Unitarians, Mormons, Methodists, Quakers, and Catholics. They share principles, as Muslims do, but putting them all in one basket misses a great deal.

In Iran, Michael said, one of the large coming transformations is that the young do not accept the sharia regime, because through their phones and connections they are aware of the West. There was significant rebellion against that regime, and it was making good progress until “we put up this war.” Now, he said, Iranians reason: we may hate sharia law, but being bombed and killed is worse, so the sharia people are right that we must defend our families, and we side with them even though we despise their views. If we ever stop bombing, the natural course, he believes, is that Muslims in Iran and elsewhere will evolve to be like Muslims in the United States. If Muslims ever became a majority here, American Muslims would be much like American Christians. The underlying difference would be the name they give to God. If that difference matters greatly to Thomas, Michael said, then it matters; but for a person focused on cohabitation, the important thing is acceptance.

He compared this to Protestants and Catholics, saying that one side holds the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to be one and the other holds them to be three different things, and therefore they must kill each other because God is on their side. Differences of that kind make it laughable that both call themselves Christian while hating each other. What he seeks, deep down, is coexistence — between Christians, and between Christianity and Islam. We give God different names; we can kill each other over it or accept it. There are extremists on both sides who find one another at the ends of the spectrum, but that is not what is really going on. Visit a mosque with an open heart, he said, and you will find no one saying these things; he has looked and has not found it.

Note (Shia–Sunni conflict). Sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims has been severe in modern Iraq (especially 2006–2008), Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere, and the Iran–Saudi rivalry has a strong sectarian dimension. The Iran–Iraq war (1980–1988) was fought chiefly along national lines. Michael’s claim that the sects “will kill each other before they go after the Christians” is a generalization: in many conflicts Christians have been targeted by the same groups (e.g., ISIS attacks on Iraqi and Syrian Christians and Egyptian Copts) that also targeted Shia.

Note (Iran). The largest recent protest wave followed the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody in September 2022. “This war” most likely refers to the June 2025 Israel–Iran conflict, during which the United States struck Iranian nuclear facilities, or to hostilities since. Observers disagree about whether external attack strengthened the regime by rallying the population or weakened it; both effects have been reported.

Note (the Trinity). Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and historic Protestant churches all affirm the doctrine of the Trinity — one God in three Persons. They do not divide over whether God is one or three. The historic Catholic–Orthodox division concerned, among other things, the filioque clause (whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son”) and papal authority; the Catholic–Protestant division concerned justification, authority, and the sacraments. Groups that deny the Trinity (Unitarians, Latter-day Saints, Oneness Pentecostals, Jehovah’s Witnesses) are generally classed as nontrinitarian.

7. “Do You Think They Would Tell You?”

Charlie asked whether Michael thought Muslims would tell him if they held such views.

Michael answered with a question: would Christians tell you? The ones who believe it will, he said, because they think it is righteous — the Christian who wants to kill Muslims, or who wants Christian nationalism and a Christian country, will say so, just as the Muslim extremist will say he wants the country to be Muslim. But Christian nationalists and Muslim nationalists are statistically rare, and they incite each other. Most people have jobs, go to work, raise children, and send them to school.

Michael closed this point by naming the one paradigm he said every religion throughout history has accepted: mathematics, which he teaches. Everyone agrees that two plus three is five. There are other points of agreement — the temperature measured today, for instance. Start with the points of agreement, he said, and build from there, because life is too full, rich, and delightful to spend hating each other.

8. Leonard: Rule of Law and the Constitutional Republic

Thomas asked Leonard for his comment. (Leonard joked that he was looking for a book; Thomas said he had set him up for it.)

Leonard said the genius of the founders was the rule of law — setting men against men in government, controlling them by their own ambitions. Whoever comes to this country, whether naturalized, born here, or converted to any religion, must still conform to the basic understanding of the rule of law. We do not live in a democracy, Leonard said. The United States is a constitutional republic with representative government chosen by a democratic process. He asked Charlie what a democracy is; Charlie answered, “It’s a mob,” and Leonard added: “Mobocracy — two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.”

People who come to this country need to understand that the state of being here is the rule of constitutional law, and anything against it is unlawful and should not be permitted — or the whole structure comes down, which, Leonard said, is what some want: to tear it all down and rebuild it as their own. He agreed that the majority in every group — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu — are peaceful people. But every group has its radicals, and in his opinion, if one compares the radicals of all these groups, those who hold a radical understanding of Islam are the least compatible with the rule of law in this country. That rule of law has held for more than 250 years, he said, and if it is not maintained, the country is finished.

9. Michael: Locke, the Tyranny of the Majority, and the Filibuster

Michael said he agreed completely. The structure of the country and the Constitution, drafted largely by Jefferson’s and Madison’s generation, did not begin with them; Michael recounted that someone asked Madison where he got the idea of the Constitution, and the answer was “Pure Locke.” A century earlier, Locke had been arguing that the rule of kings was intolerable before any alternative was possible. Jefferson, Michael said, wrote about the potential tyranny of the majority — exactly the wolves-and-sheep problem Leonard described. That is where the filibuster comes in: one side gains power and might run roughshod over everything, and the filibuster means that if a third of the Senate says no, the majority faces serious hurdles. He called it an incredible piece of genius. When his side is in the majority he wishes the vote would pass; when the other side is in power, he thanks heaven for the filibuster. That, he said, is how the system was designed — with restrictions. He agreed that a democracy can become a mob without constraints, but said that democracy means that we vote, and that he does not dismiss democracy as harshly as Leonard seemed to.

Note (Madison and Locke). No source is known for Madison saying the Constitution was “pure Locke.” Jefferson, writing to Henry Lee in 1825 about the Declaration of Independence, named Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Algernon Sidney among its sources. Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) strongly influenced the Declaration; the Constitution drew also on Montesquieu (separation of powers), English constitutional practice, colonial charters, and classical republican thought. Leonard’s interjection of “Native Americans” is addressed in the note to Section 11.

Note (tyranny of the majority). The fullest founding-era treatment is Madison’s, in Federalist No. 10 (faction) and No. 51 (ambition counteracting ambition), which is also the source of Leonard’s “pitting men against men” description. Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia (Query XIII), warned that “173 despots would surely be as oppressive as one,” criticizing elective despotism. He did not write poems on the subject. The phrase “tyranny of the majority” was popularized by Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America, 1835) and John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, 1859).

Note (filibuster). The filibuster is not part of the Constitution or the founders’ design; it arose after the Senate dropped its “previous question” motion in 1806, which left no rule for ending debate. The cloture rule (1917) required a two-thirds vote to end debate; in 1975 the Senate reduced this to three-fifths of senators (60). A “third” (34 senators) could block cloture under the old rule; today 41 can. The founders’ structural checks against majority tyranny are bicameralism, the presidential veto, the Senate’s staggered and (originally) state-legislature-selected membership, federalism, judicial review, and the supermajorities required for treaties, veto overrides, and amendments.

10. Pure Democracy, the Article V Convention, and the Difference in Islam

Leonard explained that pure democracy means voting on everything, with the majority ruling: if 51% vote to abolish the police, the police are abolished, which is absurd. That, he said, is why the founders despised pure democracy. They used the democratic process to choose representatives in a constitutional republic, so that everyone is represented — “no taxation without representation” was a central cause then and remains one. He said that with modern technology a pure democracy might be technically possible, but it would need further rules, such as a supermajority for any change, since otherwise 51% could change everything.

He added that the Constitution itself contains a vehicle for wholesale change — a constitutional convention — which he described as carte blanche: gather a majority of the states in convention and they could wipe everything out. He called that a frightening possibility, and said it is truly a miracle the country has lasted as long as it has; after the Civil War, people must have thought it was finished. He was amazed the nation is still viable, despite continuing craziness in government.

Leonard then returned to Islam: one has to acknowledge that there is a difference between the Islamic view of government and the Judeo-Christian view — a difference in the value of the soul. And he said to Michael: you brought up “values” and named a list of things; none of those are values. Look up the word. Those were events and things people did, not values.

Note (Article V). An Article V convention, called on the application of two-thirds of the state legislatures (34), may only propose amendments. Any proposal takes effect only when ratified by three-fourths of the states (38), through their legislatures or ratifying conventions. A convention therefore could not by itself “wipe it all out.” Whether a convention could be confined to a single subject, or could “run away” as some argue the 1787 Convention did, is a genuine and unresolved legal debate; but the ratification threshold is a separate and very high barrier.

11. Democracy, Republic, and Res Publica

Michael began to reply, starting with “Democrats and Republicans.” Leonard interjected that the parties have changed over time — the Democrats of today were the Republicans of yesterday, or the reverse, and the Democrats of today were the communists of yesterday. Michael agreed the parties have gone through full cycles but said he meant the definitions, not the parties.

Michael defined the difference this way: democracy has everyone voting on everything; a republic elects officials who then do the voting. The problem with pure democracy is that no one wants to vote on every street sign. So we elect people and tell them to decide where the street signs go. That is where the republican model supersedes the democratic. But the democratic model applies in that those officials are democratically elected — not appointed by a priest, imam, or rabbi. Leonard supplied the phrase “the consent of the governed.” Michael said that is why it is called a democratic republic: democratically, we vote for those who will make the decisions.

Leonard said nothing in the Constitution says anything about being a democracy; Michael agreed that the word does not appear but said the concept — voting — appears throughout. Leonard said the vote is the one right the Constitution protects and it is under attack. He asked whether anyone knew where the word “republic” comes from. Michael said Plato (The Republic). Leonard, Charlie, and Thomas worked out the Latin: res publica — res, the thing, the matter, the affair; publica, of the people. The republic is “the thing of the people.”

Michael asked who decides the thing; we vote for who decides it — that is democracy. Leonard said no, Michael was conflating two things: it is not a democracy but a democratic process. By that process the governed voice their consent or disagreement. Where does government’s power come from? Thomas said, “The people.” Leonard said, “The consent of the governed” — those who are governed consenting to it, and voicing that consent through a piece of paper placed in a box and counted. It is only a process. Democracy, he said, has been conflated with the idea that everything must be voted on, which some would love, but a society cannot run that way. We find people who will represent our ideas and place them in positions to decide for us while we live our lives and work. Leonard said he thought the founders borrowed much of this from Native Americans, who had a similar concept within their tribes even though they often warred with each other.

Michael said he has studied many Native American tribes and they varied as widely as European nations; the Navajo, Arapaho, and Sioux were very different, and he has trouble making any single statement about all of them. Leonard asked whether he had opened another can of worms; Michael said he had opened one of those Fourth of July cans of spring snakes, and would not address it.

On values, Michael said the values the nation undertakes are determined by the people we elect to choose them; those values have evolved considerably over time, but they are values we vote for.

Note (terminology). In founding-era usage, “democracy” usually meant direct rule by assembled citizens and “republic” meant representative government under law (Madison, Federalist No. 10 and No. 14). Modern political science usually classes the United States as a constitutional (or liberal) democracy and a federal republic; the terms are not exclusive in current usage. Leonard and Michael largely agreed on the substance — elected representatives, limited by a constitution, chosen by vote — and differed on the label. The Constitution itself guarantees to every state “a Republican Form of Government” (Art. IV, §4).

Note (Native American influence). The “Iroquois influence thesis” holds that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy influenced American federalism; Benjamin Franklin referred to the Iroquois union in 1751, and Congress passed a resolution acknowledging the influence in 1988 (H. Con. Res. 331). Many historians regard the direct influence on the Constitution as modest compared with European and colonial sources. Michael’s point about tribal diversity is correct.

12. Armond: Chasing Rabbits

Thomas had muted Armond for background noise and invited him to comment. Armond first joked about taking the Fifth. He then said the discussion was over his head at the moment and that the group was chasing rabbits — trying to herd cats, or catch something elusive. This kind of discussion, he said, is exactly what keeps people separated on principle, because there is nothing finite on which anyone can reach a conclusion — even among respected peers and loved ones — unless everyone agreed that one person was simply right, which no one can claim given the nature of the discussion.

13. Leonard: A Line in the Sand

Leonard said a line could be drawn using the Federalist Papers and the Constitution with its amendments. What the Constitution is about, he said, is preserving the rights of the people so that they can exercise them freely and responsibly, with consequences if they do not. But, he observed, the Constitution does not apply directly to the people: the word “people” appears nine times, but the document does not act upon them, create anything for them, or give them anything. So what did the Constitution constitute? Thomas answered: it is a restriction on the federal government. Leonard agreed: it limited the federal government to specific enumerated powers.

Instead, Leonard said, we have built a vast, out-of-control government with layer upon layer. He said he did not know whether it was true, but it seemed that a majority of employed people now work for government in some way, and that the Biden administration hired large numbers. The line in the sand, he said, would be a shared understanding of the government’s limited powers and of the rights that government protects, enumerated in the Bill of Rights. Once everyone agreed that this is the foundation, it would be easier to understand the other issues that come into conflict with it.

Note (“people” in the Constitution). Leonard’s count is correct if the amendments are included: the Preamble; Art. I, §2; Amendments I, II, IV, IX, and X; and the Seventeenth Amendment (twice). The Constitution does, however, act directly on individuals in several places: Art. I, §9 (habeas corpus, bills of attainder), Art. III, §3 (treason), the Thirteenth Amendment (which binds private persons, forbidding slavery by anyone), and the taxing and commerce powers, which reach individuals directly — the key change from the Articles of Confederation, which acted only on the states.

Note (government employment). Federal, state, and local governments together employ roughly 23 million people, about 14–15% of total U.S. nonfarm employment (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Federal civilian employment is about 3 million. Including government contractors and publicly funded sectors (e.g., parts of health care and education) raises the share considerably, but not to a majority.

14. Susan: Because They Hate

Susan said she basically agreed with Leonard, and also took issue with Michael’s view that the country is a democracy, but wanted to address the question of Muslims living peaceably with Americans before the group turned to its planned topic.

She held up Brigitte Gabriel’s book Because They Hate, which she had recommended before. Gabriel grew up in Lebanon, which Susan described as basically a Christian nation. Muslims moved in gradually and were very peaceable with the Christians, and they gradually rose into positions of authority. They remained peaceable until they were numerous enough to overpower the Christians. Then, Susan said, even those who had not seemed radical united with the radicals in a killing spree to take power. Gabriel, she said, identifies this as a pattern: live peaceably with others until the numbers and positions of power are sufficient to overcome them. Susan asked Michael to read the book and consider whether it changed his outlook.

Note (Lebanon). Brigitte Gabriel’s Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (2006) recounts her childhood in southern Lebanon during the civil war (1975–1990). The 1932 census showed a slight Christian majority, which underlay the 1943 National Pact allocating offices by sect; by the 1970s Muslims were widely believed to be the majority, and no census has been taken since. The civil war involved many factions: Christian (especially Maronite) militias, Palestinian organizations (the PLO had relocated to Lebanon after 1970), Sunni, Shia, and Druze militias, and Syrian and Israeli intervention. Massacres were committed by several sides — e.g., against Christians at Damour (1976) and against Palestinians and Muslims at Karantina (1976) and Sabra and Shatila (1982, by Christian Phalangist militia). Gabriel’s account is valued by supporters as eyewitness testimony and criticized by others as one-sided. The demographic-shift explanation is part of the scholarly account; historians also stress the Palestinian armed presence, Cold War and regional interventions, and the rigidity of the sectarian power-sharing system.

15. The Inquisition and “Mainstream Christianity”

Michael said the pattern Susan described is historically well documented — and began to cite the Spanish Inquisition, which put thousands to death for not professing to be Catholic.

Thomas interrupted to ask: is that the mindset of America now? Does America have any policy that if you are not Catholic and do not pray the proper devotions, you will be put on the rack and in the iron maiden and tortured until you adopt proper doctrine? Is that anywhere in Christendom now? Was it an aberration, or is it what mainstream Christianity is?

Michael began to cite New York in the 1880s, when Catholics and Protestants were at each other’s throats. Thomas asked the same question of that example: did it survive as a general cultural mandate? Would an ordinary Christian today say, “Absolutely, this is how we should do it, as they did in the 1880s, or in 1554”? Did any of that continue as what Christianity is?

Michael answered that it did — in exactly the way Islam does. Islamic extremists cite websites of Christians who want to kill Muslims, as Thomas cites Muslim sources, and present them as Christianity, although Michael and Thomas both reject those views. Christians cite Muslims who say violent things, while most Muslims — no one in any mosque Michael visited — say none of it.

Thomas pressed: when Christianity takes over a nation, does the hate-group ideology permeate the culture and become what Christianity is there? He asked about mainstream Christianity, not extremists. When Christians govern a nation, do they dominate and kill everyone who disagrees with them? Someone answered, “No.”

Michael asked whether that included wiping out the natives in Central America. Thomas said that happened many centuries ago, is not what Christianity is now, and neither of them agrees with it. Michael cited the Klan marches of the 1920s; Thomas said that never became mainstream Christianity.

Michael said the deeper problem is that the concept of “mainstream Christianity” is flawed: there are Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, and many denominations, and at times they have taken up arms against each other. Thomas said that has happened, but in splinter groups, here and there; it does not happen as a culture. With Islam, he said, what Susan described does happen as a culture: when Muslims reach a certain point, sharia is imposed and Christians are killed. That is what mainstream Islam is when implemented in its entirety as national policy.

Michael said that was historically entirely incorrect. Shiite and Sunni Muslims have been more inclined to kill each other than Christians, because each regards the other as infidels, and the loss of life between them is painful to study. There is not one Islam but different factions. The history of Europe, he said, is the history of countries each claiming God is on its side and killing each other — both sides Christian, each saying “I’m the Christian” and killing the other. Where is the Christianity in that? He asked whether the underlying principle is: because my belief is right, I kill you.

Note (the Spanish Inquisition). The Spanish Inquisition operated from 1478 to 1834. Most historians’ estimates of executions run in the low thousands over its whole history (often cited in the range of roughly 3,000–5,000), with the greatest intensity before about 1530; most of the approximately 150,000 cases tried ended in penances or other sentences. Its principal targets were conversos (Jewish converts) suspected of secretly practicing Judaism, moriscos (Muslim converts), and later Protestants. The Catholic Church, through Pope John Paul II’s “Day of Pardon” (12 March 2000), publicly asked forgiveness for the use of violence in the service of truth. Thomas’s point that no mainstream Christian body today defends the Inquisition’s methods is accurate.

Note (New York). The most violent Catholic–Protestant clashes in New York were the Orange Riots of 1870 and 1871, fought between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestant Orangemen; the 1871 riot left more than sixty dead. The 1880s saw sharp tension over parochial schools and immigration but not comparable violence.

16. The New Testament, the Quran, and Surah 9:5

Susan said that if one looks at the New Testament, one will not find that people are to kill others over belief. Michael agreed — and said she was preempting his sermon. Susan said that in the Quran, however, one will find it. Michael objected, saying that otherwise Muslims would not disagree with each other so much. Susan said there is a great deal of violence in the mindset of the Quran, and Muslims even use it on each other.

Michael asked for an example; he wanted to bring it to his imam. Thomas gave Surah 9:5 (Quran 9:5). Michael wrote it down, then said he had to leave. He thanked the group, called the conversation a delight — considering things of importance together — blessed everyone, and said it had been a joy. The group said goodbye.

Note (Surah 9:5). Surah 9 (at-Tawbah, “Repentance”) opens with a declaration of release from treaties with polytheists of Arabia who had broken their agreements. Verse 5 commands that, when the sacred months have passed, the believers fight and kill the polytheists wherever they find them, capture and besiege them, unless they repent, establish prayer, and give alms, in which case they are to be let go. It is often called the “verse of the sword.” Its interpretation is disputed. (1) Classical jurists frequently read it together with 9:29 (fighting People of the Book until they pay the jizya tax in submission) as part of a general doctrine of expansionist jihad, and many held that these later verses abrogated (naskh) earlier, more conciliatory ones. (2) Many modern Muslim scholars read 9:5 as limited to specific Arabian polytheist tribes that had violated treaties, pointing to 9:4 (exempting those who kept their treaties) and 9:6 (granting asylum and safe conduct to any polytheist who asks, and delivering him to safety). (3) Jihadist groups cite 9:5 as a general and permanent command. Susan’s claim that the Quran contains commands to fight is accurate; whether those commands are general and permanent is the central interpretive dispute within Islam itself. The paired meta-essay develops this.

17. Coda: After Michael Left

Leonard remarked that Michael likes to stir the pot. Thomas said that Michael’s view is evidently not a minority opinion but a significant cultural one. Leonard said Muslim advocacy groups have done serious work in propaganda and public relations. Thomas said the real question is whether it is possible to change minds.

Leonard said that in Texas Muslims have effectively taken over a whole community. That is what they do, he said: they gather until they can build a mosque, and then they obtain city or county approval to broadcast the call to prayer five times a day. You do not see Christians doing that. Actually, he said, when Christians gather and build something, the government calls it a “compound” — as it did with the Branch Davidians, which was a church. They had unusual ideas about government, Leonard said, but nothing crazy or radical, and he found it strange how differently the two cases are treated. He then suggested moving on to bigger and better things, and Thomas turned the discussion to his book.

Note (Texas). The reference is most likely to “EPIC City,” a planned residential development associated with the East Plano Islamic Center in Collin County, Texas, which in 2025 drew investigations and statements from Texas state officials over allegations of exclusionary sales and unlawful development; the developers denied the allegations and revised the plan (reportedly renaming it). The status may have changed since. Amplified calls to prayer have been permitted in some U.S. cities, notably Hamtramck, Michigan (2004) and Minneapolis (year-round from 2023), under noise ordinances that also govern church bells.

Note (Branch Davidians). The 1993 standoff near Waco began when the ATF attempted to serve warrants concerning illegal weapons; allegations of child sexual abuse by David Koresh were also reported. The 51-day siege ended in a fire in which about 76 people died, including roughly 25 children. The government’s conduct during the raid and siege remains widely criticized, and Leonard’s point about the term “compound” reflects a real debate over how the case was framed. Characterizing the group’s ideas as “nothing crazy radical” is contested given Koresh’s apocalyptic teachings and the weapons stockpile.

PART TWO — Meta-Essay: Is Islam Compatible with the Constitutional Order?

1. What Was Actually in Dispute

The conversation looked like a single disagreement — Michael’s “it’s a few extremists” against Thomas’s, Charlie’s, and Susan’s “it’s the religion” — but it contained at least five distinct questions that were repeatedly traded for one another:

1. Doctrine: What do Islam’s authoritative sources (the Quran, the hadith, the classical law schools) teach about non-Muslims, apostates, and the relation of religion to the state?
2. Practice: What do Muslims actually believe and do — in Muslim-majority countries, in the West, and in the United States specifically?
3. Trajectory: What happens when Muslim populations grow from minority to majority? (Charlie’s and Susan’s central claim.)
4. Symmetry: Is Christianity’s record comparable, so that singling out Islam is a double standard? (Michael’s central claim.)
5. Policy: What, if anything, should the United States do — monitor, restrict, require renunciation, or simply enforce general law equally?

Much of the talking-past came from answering one question with evidence relevant to another. Michael answered the doctrine question with evidence about practice (“no one in any mosque I visited says this”). Thomas answered the symmetry question by asking about present practice (“is that what Christianity is now?”). Susan answered the practice question with evidence about trajectory (Lebanon). Each piece of evidence was real; each was aimed at a different target. The most useful thing this essay can do is separate the questions and weigh the evidence for each.

2. Michael’s Mirror Argument: What It Gets Right and Where It Breaks

Michael’s opening was a genuine argument, not merely a plea for tolerance. It had three parts: (a) extremists on both sides describe each other in mirror-image terms; (b) people who call for restricting Muslims supply Muslim extremists with the evidence they need that Christianity is hostile; (c) therefore the call for restriction is itself a form of the extremism it condemns.

What it gets right. Part (b) is supported by evidence. Jihadist recruitment literature has for decades used Western anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy as proof that the West is at war with Islam; the post-9/11 effort by President Bush to separate al-Qaeda from Islam was deliberately designed to deny that recruiting narrative, and U.S. counterterrorism officials across administrations have argued for it on those grounds. Part (a) is also partly true: extremist movements do tend to validate one another, and the dynamics of reciprocal radicalization are documented in the research literature on political violence.

Where it breaks. Part (c) depends on the claim that the two “ends of the spectrum” are equivalent — that a Christian who wants Muslims monitored is the mirror of a Muslim who wants Christians subjugated. That equivalence holds only if one ignores content. A mirror argument treats positions as symmetrical because each side accuses the other; but accusations are not self-validating in either direction. Whether a given accusation is accurate is the question, and the spectrum model cannot answer it, because it measures distance from the middle, not distance from the truth. This was precisely Thomas’s reply — “it resolves along the axis of truth” — and it is the decisive logical point of the first half of the conversation.

Michael’s rejoinder — that the axis of truth depends on where you place the origin — is the crux. If truth is simply “relative to the person determining it,” then no claim about Islam or Christianity can be adjudicated and coexistence is the only remaining value. But Michael did not actually hold that position consistently. He believed it was true that American mosques do not teach violence (an empirical claim he had tested by visiting), true that the Spanish killed most of the Arawaks, true that Afghan women suffer horribly. He relied on a shared axis of fact throughout. His own closing proposal — “start with the points of agreement, like two plus three is five, or today’s temperature” — is itself an appeal to a common, non-relative standard. The disagreement is therefore not whether there is an axis of truth but which facts are relevant and how they are weighted. That is a resolvable kind of disagreement.

A fair statement of the asymmetry test, which Thomas was reaching for, is this: Does the tradition’s mainstream — its recognized scholars, its institutions, its states where it governs — currently teach and enforce coercion of outsiders or dissenters as a religious duty? This test does not ask whether a tradition has ever done evil (all have), nor whether its extremists do evil (all traditions have extremists). It asks what the tradition’s living center authorizes now. Applied honestly, it neither exonerates Islam wholesale nor condemns it wholesale; it yields a differentiated answer, which Sections 4–6 develop.

3. “Western Values” and the Difference Between Values and Events

Michael’s catalog — conquest of the Americas, slavery, disenfranchisement of women, the Klan — was offered to show that “Western values” is a moving target, so that asking whether Islam is compatible with them is incoherent. Leonard’s reply — “none of those are values; those are things people did” — was brief but important, and Armond later developed the same distinction in the paired session (principles versus the behavior of those who claim them).

The distinction matters because the Western moral tradition’s own principles were the instruments of every one of those reforms. Las Casas denounced the conquest from the pulpit and before the Spanish crown on Christian grounds in the 1500s. The abolition movements in Britain and America were led overwhelmingly by evangelical Christians (Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, the Quakers, Garrison’s circle) who argued from the imago Dei and the equality of souls before God; the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” was quoted against slavery by Lincoln and Douglass. The civil-rights movement was organized in black churches and argued from Scripture and natural law. In each case, the reform was a recovery of a principle against a practice that contradicted it.

That is the real meaning of “compatible with Western values”: not compatible with whatever Western people happened to do in 1520 or 1850, but compatible with the principles — the equal dignity of persons, the rule of law binding rulers, government by consent, freedom of conscience — by which the West reformed itself. Michael’s list, read this way, actually supports the relevance of the question rather than dissolving it: the West’s record shows that a civilization can carry a gap between principle and practice and close it, provided the principle is present and authoritative. The question for Islam then becomes: does its authoritative tradition contain principles by which its own coercive practices can be reformed from within, and are those principles gaining or losing authority? That is a much better question than “is Islam good or bad,” and it is the one the rest of this essay pursues.

Michael was right on the narrower point that the amendments are part of the Constitution. Article V says so explicitly. His use of this point also cut against his own relativism in an instructive way: the amendments abolishing slavery and enfranchising women were not arbitrary shifts in taste but corrections toward principles already stated in the founding documents. They are an example of the self-correcting mechanism described above.

4. Is Islam One Thing?

Michael insisted that “Islam” is not one thing — Sunni and Shia, Sufi, the schools of law, national cultures — just as “Christianity” spans Unitarians, Mormons, Quakers, and Catholics. This is correct and it matters, but it does not settle the question, because diversity at the level of sect does not by itself tell us what the shared authoritative sources teach.

The main dimensions of variation are:

• Sect. Roughly 85–90% of Muslims are Sunni and 10–13% Shia (most of these Twelvers). Smaller groups include Ibadis (Oman) and the Ahmadiyya (who are persecuted as non-Muslims in Pakistan).
• Law school. Sunni jurisprudence has four surviving schools (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali); Shia jurisprudence is mainly Ja’fari. On apostasy, blasphemy, and the status of non-Muslims, the classical positions of all these schools were broadly similar: apostasy was a capital offense for adult males, and non-Muslims under Muslim rule held a protected but subordinate status (dhimma) involving the jizya tax and various legal disabilities.
• Modern movements. Modernist and reformist scholars (Muhammad Abduh in the 19th century; Fazlur Rahman, Abdullahi an-Na’im, Khaled Abou El Fadl in the 20th–21st) argue for reinterpretation; Salafi and Wahhabi currents argue for return to early practice; Islamist movements (the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamaat-e-Islami, the Iranian revolution) seek to make sharia the law of the state; jihadist movements add revolutionary violence.
• State practice. According to Pew’s 2019 survey of laws, apostasy was a criminal offense in about 22 countries and blasphemy in about 79 worldwide (the latter including some non-Muslim countries), with the harshest penalties concentrated in Muslim-majority states. Many Muslim-majority states — Indonesia, Senegal, Tunisia, Albania, Kazakhstan, Bosnia — govern largely under secular or mixed civil law.

So the honest answer to “is Islam one thing?” is that its sources and classical law are substantially shared, its interpretations and state practices are highly diverse, and the global distribution of opinion (see the Pew data in the Part One notes) includes both very large majorities for sharia in some countries and small minorities in others. Charlie’s claim that support for sharia is not confined to “a few radicals” is correct as a global statement. Michael’s claim that American Muslims do not hold those views is largely supported by U.S. survey data. Both men were describing real populations; they were describing different ones.

5. The Textual Question: Surah 9:5 and the Problem of Normative Violence

Susan made the strongest single argument of the session in one sentence: in the New Testament one will not find a command to kill people over belief; in the Quran one will. Michael agreed with the first half. The second half needs precision, because it is where the asymmetry between the traditions actually lies — and it is not quite where the conversation placed it.

The Christian case. The Old Testament contains commands of warfare and destruction (e.g., Deuteronomy 7 and 20, concerning the nations of Canaan), which Thomas himself later cited in the paired session. Christians did at times use these texts to justify violence — the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion, colonial conquest. What made the renunciation of those uses possible and, eventually, nearly universal within Christianity is structural: the New Testament presents the Old Testament conquest commands as bound to a specific time and people, and it gives the church no civil law code and no sword. “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight” (John 18:36). The apostolic instruction is submission to civil authority, love of enemies, and persuasion (Romans 12–13; 2 Corinthians 10:4, “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal”). When Christians coerced belief, they had to argue against the plain teaching of the founder; the reformers who opposed coercion had the founding texts on their side.

The Islamic case. Islam’s founding period includes Muhammad as both prophet and statesman — lawgiver, judge, and military commander in Medina. The Quran contains both conciliatory verses (“there is no compulsion in religion,” 2:256; “to you your religion and to me mine,” 109:6) and verses commanding fighting (9:5, 9:29, 2:191, 8:39). The classical jurists, working from these texts and the prophetic example, built a comprehensive law (sharia as elaborated in fiqh) that governs the state as well as the individual, including rules for warfare, for the status of non-Muslims, and for apostasy. Many classical jurists held that the later Medinan verses abrogated the earlier conciliatory ones. This means that a Muslim reformer who argues against coercion must argue against a large part of the classical legal tradition — though he can appeal to other texts within the Quran itself and to the historical-context reading of the war verses.

This is the precise asymmetry. It is not that Islam’s texts contain violence and Christianity’s do not; the Bible contains a great deal of violence. It is that Christianity’s founding texts subordinate the sword to the gospel and locate coercion outside the church’s mission, while Islam’s founding texts and classical law integrate religion, law, and state power, so that the question of coercion is internal to the religion’s law. Susan’s intuition was right; the reason it is right is this structural difference, which is more defensible than a verse-count comparison.

What this does not prove. It does not prove that most Muslims, or most Muslim scholars today, hold the classical expansionist positions. Many do not. It proves that the reformist position must be argued against a heavier weight of inherited authority, and that it is therefore more fragile — which is exactly why its advance or retreat is worth tracking (see Section 8 and, in the paired file, the discussion of Muslim renunciations).

Michael’s plan to take Surah 9:5 to his imam is a good one. He is likely to hear the contextual reading (treaty-breaking tribes; see 9:4 and 9:6). That reading is held in good faith by many scholars. The fair follow-up question is not whether the contextual reading exists — it does — but whether the classical abrogation reading has been explicitly repudiated by the authorities his imam recognizes, and what those authorities teach about apostasy and about the civil status of non-Muslims in a Muslim-majority state.

6. The Demographic Thesis: Charlie and Susan

Charlie’s and Susan’s claim is that Muslim communities remain peaceful as minorities and become coercive as majorities, so that present peaceful behavior is not evidence of future peaceful behavior. This is a serious claim and deserves serious evidence on both sides.

Evidence for. (1) Historically, when Muslim polities conquered or came to dominate Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Hindu populations, the dhimma system followed, and over centuries those populations declined, through conversion under legal and fiscal pressure and at times through violence (e.g., the gradual Islamization of Egypt, Anatolia, and Persia; periodic massacres; the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides at the end of the Ottoman Empire, which had religious as well as nationalist dimensions). (2) In modern cases where Christians became minorities in states with rising Islamist politics — Iraq, Syria, parts of Nigeria, Pakistan, Egypt — Christians have faced violence and emigration; Iraq’s Christian population fell from roughly 1.5 million in 2003 to perhaps a quarter of that or less. (3) Lebanon, Susan’s example, did shift from a Christian plurality to a Muslim majority, and the power-sharing arrangement collapsed into civil war. (4) Survey data (Pew 2013) show that in many Muslim-majority countries, majorities support sharia as state law, and among those, many support severe penalties for apostasy.

Evidence against or complicating. (1) Some Muslim-majority states are stable constitutional or semi-constitutional orders with substantial religious freedom — Senegal (about 95% Muslim, whose first president, Léopold Senghor, was a Catholic), Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia’s Muslim community, Indonesia’s Pancasila constitution (though Indonesia has blasphemy prosecutions and regional sharia in Aceh). (2) Lebanon’s war was not a simple demographic takeover; it involved an armed foreign (Palestinian) presence, Syrian and Israeli intervention, and atrocities by Christian militias as well as against them. (3) Where Christian populations declined sharply in recent decades, war and state collapse (Iraq after 2003, Syria after 2011) were the proximate causes, and jihadist groups were the principal perpetrators — groups that also massacred Muslims. (4) In the West, second- and third-generation Muslims show measurable movement toward host-country norms on many questions, though the pace varies and some European surveys show persistent gaps on questions such as homosexuality and the relation of religious to civil law.

Assessment. The historical record supports the claim that classical Islamic governance, when implemented, placed non-Muslims under subordinate legal status and that this status often eroded those communities over time. It supports the claim that Islamist movements, where they gain power, restrict or persecute religious minorities. It does not establish a law that any Muslim population, on becoming a majority, will turn coercive, because there are counterexamples, and because the outcome appears to depend heavily on which interpretation of Islam has institutional authority, on the strength of the civil state, and on regional conflict. The demographic thesis is best stated not as a law but as a risk that rises with the authority of Islamist interpretations and falls with the authority of reformist ones. That formulation is both more defensible and more useful, because it points to something that can be measured and influenced.

For the United States specifically, the numbers are relevant. Pew estimated about 3.45 million Muslims in the U.S. in 2017 (roughly 1.1% of the population), projected to reach roughly 2% by 2040–2050. A national Muslim majority is not a realistic scenario in any foreseeable period. Local concentrations (Dearborn and Hamtramck, Michigan; parts of Minneapolis; the Texas case Leonard raised) are the practical sites where the questions arise. Hamtramck’s all-Muslim city council’s 2023 vote to bar Pride flags on city property is often cited by both sides: by some as evidence that majority Muslim communities impose their norms, and by others as ordinary democratic politics within constitutional limits (the ban applied to flags on government property only, and was framed as a neutral rule allowing only national, state, and certain other official flags).

7. Rule of Law as the Common Ground: Leonard’s Line in the Sand

Leonard offered the most promising point of agreement, and Michael accepted it immediately: whatever anyone believes, everyone in the United States must conform to the rule of constitutional law, and whatever violates that law is not permitted. Michael and Leonard agreed on the danger of majority tyranny, on representative government, and on constitutional limits; their disagreement over “democracy” versus “republic” was largely terminological (see the note in Part One).

This common ground has concrete content in existing law:

• Free exercise is not a license for conduct that violates general law. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), the Supreme Court upheld the prohibition of polygamy against a Latter-day Saint’s free-exercise claim, distinguishing belief (protected absolutely) from conduct (subject to neutral laws). Employment Division v. Smith (1990) confirmed that neutral, generally applicable laws apply regardless of religious motive, while the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) and later cases restored heightened protection for religious exercise against federal burdens. No religious law — Islamic, Christian, or Jewish — can override criminal law, constitutional rights, or family-law protections.
• Religious arbitration is permitted only within the limits of ordinary arbitration law: parties must consent, and courts will not enforce outcomes that violate public policy or constitutional rights. Several states passed “anti-sharia” or “foreign law” statutes around 2010–2017. Oklahoma’s amendment, which named sharia explicitly, was struck down in Awad v. Ziriax (10th Cir. 2012) for discriminating against a particular religion; later statutes framed neutrally (“foreign law that violates constitutional rights”) have generally survived.
• Advocacy of overthrow of the government is already a bar to naturalization (8 U.S.C. §1424), and incitement to imminent lawless action is unprotected speech (Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1969).

Leonard’s line in the sand therefore already exists in law. The real disagreement is not over whether the constitutional order binds everyone — everyone in the conversation agreed it does — but over whether (a) that general law is sufficient protection, and (b) whether particular belief systems should be singled out for additional scrutiny. Thomas’s essay of the prior week answered (b) yes; Michael answered no. That is where the next round of the conversation (in the paired session file) takes up the question, with Thomas’s proposal of a renunciation requirement for naturalization.

Leonard’s distinction between the Constitution as a restriction on the federal government and the Constitution as a grant to the people is broadly correct and is the classical reading (Federalist No. 84, where Hamilton argued a bill of rights was unnecessary because the government had only enumerated powers). His claim that the document never acts on individuals needs the qualification given in the Part One note: acting directly on individuals rather than only on states was one of the Constitution’s defining innovations over the Articles of Confederation.

8. “Would They Tell You?” — The Problem of Evidence and Sincerity

Charlie’s question to Michael — “Do you think they would tell you?” — is the epistemological center of the entire dispute, and it recurs in the paired session as Thomas’s discussion of taqiyya. It deserves careful treatment because it can function either as a reasonable caution or as an unfalsifiable claim.

As a caution it is reasonable. Visitors to a congregation hear what is said to visitors. Surveys depend on candor. Any community under suspicion has an incentive to present its most moderate face. Michael’s evidence (personal visits) is real but limited in the way all anecdotal evidence is limited.

As an unfalsifiable claim it becomes a problem: if peaceful words are evidence of peacefulness, and peaceful words are also evidence of concealment, then no possible evidence could count against the hypothesis. A claim that no evidence can refute cannot be established by evidence either; it can only be assumed. Michael’s reply — “would Christians tell you?” — was aimed at exactly this point: the extremists on every side tend to announce themselves, and most people are not concealing a program but simply living their lives.

The resolution is to look for evidence that is costly to fake: (1) what institutions teach their own members in their own languages (curricula, Friday sermons, fatwas, textbooks, which are increasingly documented by researchers on all sides); (2) behavior over time, especially behavior when concealment would be advantageous; (3) public repudiations that carry a real cost to the one who makes them; and (4) how communities treat their own dissenters and apostates. These are observable. They produce a differentiated picture — some institutions and communities pass, others do not — rather than a verdict on 1.9 billion people.

9. Mainstream Christianity and the Question Thomas Kept Asking

Thomas’s repeated question — “Is that what Christianity is now? Did it endure as a cultural mandate?” — was the right question, and Michael did not answer it directly. Michael’s answer (“the same way Islam does”) asserted symmetry without addressing the test. The test has a clear answer for Christianity: no Christian denomination of any size today teaches the coercion of belief, the execution of heretics, or the conquest of non-Christian peoples as a religious duty; the major bodies have explicitly repudiated those practices (the Catholic Church’s Dignitatis Humanae at Vatican II in 1965 affirmed religious freedom as a right grounded in human dignity; John Paul II’s apology of 2000; the Southern Baptist Convention’s 1995 resolution on slavery and racism; the formal renunciations of the Klan by denominations).

Michael’s strongest point in this exchange was about the past: Christian Europe’s history is full of Christians killing Christians, each side claiming God. That is true, and it is the historical origin of the Western doctrine of religious liberty — which was forged in large part by Christians (Roger Williams, the Baptists, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, William Penn) out of the experience of the wars of religion, and argued from Christian premises: that faith coerced is not faith, and that the magistrate has no commission from Christ over conscience. Michael’s question — “is the underlying principle that because my belief is right, I kill you?” — was answered, within Christianity, by Christians, over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries: no, because the gospel itself forbids it. That answer is the reason Thomas can truthfully say the Inquisition is not what Christianity is now.

The question the Christian tradition’s history poses to Islam is whether an equivalent internal answer is available and is gaining authority. That is an open and live question; the paired session file surveys the evidence both ways.

10. The Coda: Local Concentrations, Public Symbols, and Equal Treatment

Leonard’s closing observations raised the equal-treatment question in a concrete form: Muslims obtain permits for amplified calls to prayer, while a Christian group that gathers is labeled a “compound.” Two points follow.

First, on public symbols, the constitutional rule is neutrality: if church bells are permitted under a noise ordinance, the call to prayer must be treated the same way, and vice versa. A community that wants neither may regulate both by volume and hour. The real grievance many people have is not unequal law but unequal public sympathy — a sense that expressions of Christian identity are treated as threatening while those of minority religions are treated as diversity. That perception is widespread, and it is a legitimate subject of cultural argument; but the legal remedy is consistent neutrality, not a reciprocal restriction.

Second, the Waco comparison cuts in more than one direction. The government’s conduct there is widely criticized, and the use of loaded words such as “compound” to frame a religious community does shape public judgment — a point that applies equally to how Muslim communities are described. The Branch Davidian case also involved illegal weapons and credible abuse allegations, which is the kind of conduct-based evidence that justifies state action against any religious group. The principle that emerges is the same as in Section 7: act on conduct and on credible evidence of planned lawbreaking, and describe all communities in the same terms.

11. Resolutions Reached and Open Questions

Points on which the participants agreed, explicitly or implicitly:

• The constitutional order and the rule of law bind every resident regardless of religion (Leonard, Michael, Thomas, Susan).
• Majority tyranny is a real danger that the constitutional structure was designed to check (Leonard and Michael).
• The New Testament does not command killing over belief (Susan and Michael).
• The conditions of women in Afghanistan and under harsh sharia regimes are horrifying (Charlie and Michael).
• Past Christian atrocities — the conquest of the Americas, the Inquisition, the Klan — were wrong and are not endorsed by mainstream Christianity today (Thomas and Michael).
• Islam is internally diverse, and American Muslims as a population differ substantially from populations in several Muslim-majority countries (acknowledged by Charlie’s “lovely Muslim friends,” and by the survey evidence).

Points still in dispute:

• Whether Islam’s authoritative sources, rightly read, require the subordination of non-Muslims and the fusion of religion and state (Thomas, Susan, Charlie: yes; Michael: no, or not as practiced in the U.S.).
• Whether peaceful minority behavior is predictive of majority behavior (Charlie and Susan: no; Michael: yes, given assimilation).
• Whether the symmetry Michael drew between Christian and Muslim “extremes” is valid (Thomas: no, because of the mainstream-practice test; Michael: yes).
• Whether “Christian nation” language is itself the Christian equivalent of Islamist ambition (Michael: yes; Thomas: no — a claim developed in the paired session as “Jesus all the way down”).
• Whether truth is relative to one’s standpoint (Michael’s stated view) or whether a shared axis of truth exists (Thomas’s view, and — as argued above — the view Michael relied on in practice).

Open questions worth pursuing in a later session:

1. What exactly do the imams Michael has visited teach, when asked directly, about Surah 9:5 and 9:29, apostasy, and the status of non-Muslims in a Muslim-majority state? This is testable, and Michael has offered to ask.
2. What would count, for Charlie and Susan, as sufficient evidence that a given Muslim community is committed to the constitutional order — and what would count, for Michael, as sufficient evidence that one is not? Agreeing on the evidence in advance would convert the argument from assertion to inquiry.
3. Is there a distinction, acceptable to all participants, between Islam as a faith (belief, worship, personal morality) and Islamism as a political program (sharia as state law)? If so, the policy question narrows to the political program, which can be addressed by conduct-based and advocacy-based law rather than by religious classification.
4. What does “Christian nation” mean in Thomas’s usage — a nation whose people are Christian by conviction, a nation whose laws reflect Christian morality, or a nation with an established church? Michael heard the third; the paired session suggests Thomas means the first two, pursued by persuasion. Clarifying the term would resolve much of the mirror argument.
5. Michael proposed starting from points of agreement (mathematics, measurement). Can the group identify moral points of agreement of the same kind — the prohibition of murder, the duty of honesty in weights and measures, the equal dignity of persons — and build from them toward the disputed questions? Armond’s contribution in the paired session (“where is the black and white?”) takes up exactly this project.

260924 – Transforming America – The Book

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 24, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Transforming America

by Thomas Lee Abshier, ND | 24 September 2026

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 — A Young Man’s Questions

On a Wednesday morning in September 2026, Isak and I had our usual early morning business meeting. Isak is the son of my friend and business partner, Charlie. Isak is my right-hand man and working collaborator. He builds and maintains my websites, manages the technical side of my research, and helps with the mobility devices our company is developing. We had a list of company matters to get through: bank accounts, insurance, suppliers, invoices. We got through them. Then Isak said he wanted to ask me about something that had been bothering him, and we talked for two more hours. By the end of that conversation, I knew the material was so important and complete that I had to share it with the world.

This is that book. It is built on Isak’s questions. Isak is a young man who grew up in the same culture every young American has grown up in for the last generation. He learned what the schools, the entertainment industry, and the internet taught him about capitalism, about America’s history, about Christianity and its place in public life. He realizes that some of it was true, and some of it was not, and he has spent the last few years sorting out which was which. He is not a partisan. He is suspicious of both political parties. He is honest about what he doesn’t know. And when something doesn’t make sense to him, he won’t let it go until it does. He asks the questions a thoughtful young person actually asks. He is not a debater trying to win an argument or persuade me that he is right; he is a truth seeker who sincerely wants to understand how the universe was made, the right way to live, and what is fair.

This book attempts to answer those questions across a broad swath of social, personal, and existential issues. What I believe about God, this nation, and how a people ought to live is put to the test of an honest young man’s honest doubts. I hope in the fire of close examinations, we will forge a program for transforming America that will be worth asking a nation to adopt.

One more word before Isak speaks. Some of his questions came out of an exercise he had been doing with Claude (the artificial intelligence system by Anthropic that we use to organize our business). He has been helping me organize my theory of everything that I have been developing for about forty years, which I call Conscious Point Physics. I have been explaining the principles of CPP as I have discovered them. Isak has access to the entire database of the theory and its development on its website at www.hyperphysics.com. The theory describes the foundation of the physical universe as built from elemental points of view, each a unit of God’s consciousness.

I call each unit a Conscious Point. Each one perceives other Conscious Points, and they move depending on how close they are to other CPs. The CPs move on a grid made of points that I call Grid Points. The GPs are also conscious points, but their function is to give the CPs a background that they can move upon. The CPs communicate with each other using messenger bits that I call DI-bits, which are also conscious points. So there are three types of conscious points: 1) the Conscious Points that move, 2) the Grid Points, which are fixed in space and give the markers of distance, and 3) the Displacement Increment bits, which communicate between Grid Points.

[Additional detail: (not necessary to understand the analogies used in the book). Each CP lands on a GP at the end of each Moment. The GPs communicate their local state to other GPs in a small sphere, to the other GPs in that sphere, via DI-bits). Each GP integrates the messages it gets, and it communicates that state to the CPs around it through the messenger bits. Each CP moves according to how it should move. Thus the CPs move because of the small set of rules God gave them.]

Everything in the universe is composed of Conscious Points; electrons, stars, living bodies are all built from CPs, and they move and interact because of the rules that govern their interaction. You don’t need to know anything more about the physics than that to read this book. If you need to know a physics concept to understand a concept while reading this book, I will explain what I mean so you can understand how things work at this deep level.

Some of the lessons are analogies (life reflects the patterns present at this fundamental level), and some are simply fundamental patterns of how the universe works. Life at the human level is complex. There are no simple solutions. I will let you know which is which when we discuss the various principles. Analogies are powerful teaching tools because they compare known phenomena with unknowns, and fundamental principles with complex combinations. I will use both methods in my explanations. Fundamentals describe reality and analogies make connections.

Isak was skeptical that physics could settle political questions because, on the surface, they have very little causative relevance to ordinary political concepts. But on closer examination, we see strong analogical resonance. The fundamental fact about life is that everything is composed of Conscious Points, and the CPs fundamentally depend on God’s consciousness for their existence. That is the foundational perspective of the book and life. Getting it that God is omnipresent in a way even more fundamental than the normal “God is watching everything you do.”

The fact that God is present in the substance of our being should guide every political, psychological, religious/spiritual, and physical question; every moral consideration; and every question of meaning and purpose. So, while the detailed study of particles, fields, relativity, and quantum mechanics is not particularly relevant to solving political problems, understanding the basic premise that the physical-spiritual universe is composed of God’s mind-spirit-perspective is necessary.

Without understanding the foundational nature of reality, we will be distracted by appearances (God out there watching and judging us vs. God inside feeling us as we live life). God is other in every practical sense, in that we have a relationship with Him, but the fundamental reality is that He has loaned us His consciousness, and we are living for Him. Many incorrect conceptions of reality contain an element of truth, but when used as a foundation, they produce bad results.

Examples of partially true conceptions include: living as though we are under scrutiny and our lives are separate from Him; living as though no transcendent companion lives with/within us; God will forgive me, so I’ll do what I want, and ask forgiveness later. When we try to solve life’s problems using these models, we solve problems that differ from reality; such solutions will not produce lasting relief from the pain of misalignment between God’s goals and our own.

All this matters because we must understand/hold/apply the proper model of what life is to address the reality-based problem and to solve the various political dilemmas. The proper perspective is that we walk on holy ground. In Him we live and move, and have our being. He witnesses and experiences everything we think, see, feel, and do. This perspective is reality, and it should frame all political solutions. Without this perspective, some of what I advocate in my Presidential run, as a program for transforming America/ordering society/behaving as individuals and citizens and family members, seems radically politically incorrect and socially impossible. But from this perspective, we can solve political conundrums that are otherwise insoluble. By living within Jesus’ new commandment to love as I have loved you, we could create on Earth what it is like in Heaven.

Here is what Isak said:

ISAK: I’ve been working on something on my own, for my own understanding. I’ve been trying to understand the forces at work in this country’s politics: socialism and capitalism, empires and rebellions. It’s like trying to see how the world actually functions.

To understand these issues, I ran my questions through Claude and asked him to frame political ideologies using physical processes in the Conscious Point Physics paradigm as an analogy for how human systems should work. I wanted to see how it would evaluate a list of ideals and ideologies. I wanted to know how the processes underlying the universe correspond to cultural movements. How does group consciousness respond to different ideologies? I’ve been developing it with Claude as a thought experiment.

I’m trying to analyze the political spectrum of social problems without bias. I’m reevaluating everything I’ve learned over the years about capitalism and socialism. I think the right and the left are both missing the mark, and neither one is carrying out its agenda of service. They’re both part of the system. I think both parties need reform. There isn’t an obvious party where you can say, “This is going to be right for the country.”

So I’ve been asking: What would God do with a group of people? What does God do with groups of people?

Here are some questions the conversation raised.

Question: The first one is about the Constitution. If the universe organizes itself, why does a society need a constitution? Conscious Points don’t have a written constitution; they just have their built-in rules. If we’re made of the same stuff, why can’t human society organize itself the same way? Maybe the answer is that humans can do something Conscious Points can’t: we can override our built-in rules. A particle can’t choose to ignore electromagnetism, but a man can choose to ignore his conscience. So maybe the Constitution is how a society preserves the good arrangements it has found, like freezing meat and vegetables to keep them from breaking down and decaying. But then who decides what gets preserved? God decides what’s preserved in nature, and that’s safe because God is good. When men and the state decide what to keep and what to destroy, that’s pretty much the whole history of political abuse. Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good.

Which leads to the question I asked you before: What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding God’s law with man’s erroneous interpretation of law? And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?

I think that question comes from my hesitation about Christian nationalism. I see your point and what your intention is, but I’m so used to hearing “Christian nationalist” as an insult that I have to reprogram my reflexive concern about Christian nationalism. I’m trying to develop an understanding rather than just have an opinion. I would rather have a considered and informed opinion than just believe something I read or was told. Regardless, I trust that if something is true, it will come up.

Question: The next question was about property. Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. Does the physics say anything about property ownership? Every conscious point has its own position, its own place in the structure. Does that mean having a place of your own is built into existence? Or does “it’s all God’s substance” mean ownership is an illusion, because everything belongs to the Creator? I don’t know that the physics argument has to be made there. I may be trying to apply physics where only a metaphor is appropriate.

Question: Then there’s the failure of self-organization. Order can emerge without anyone in command, but self-organizing systems also produce cancer: cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the body. Monopolies and cartels are the social version of cancer. That’s basically the critique of capitalism: left to itself, it produces tumors. So is cancer a violation of the rules, or is it the rules working without any moral alignment? If it’s the second, then that’s capitalism without a conscience.

Question: Then there are the people who never hear. You say the moral law is real and can be discovered, and that letting Jesus into your heart is what brings a person into alignment with it. But most people who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman you told me about, who was once a communist but is now as fervent a Christian as she was once a revolutionary, had to meet Christ to change. What about the billions who didn’t?

Question: Then there are questions about democracy. If a constitutional republic is supposed to be the political form closest to how reality works, is that something you derive, or just something you prefer? A monarchy with a good king might fit just as well: one wise ruler preserving the good. And in your own framework, God is a king, not an elected president. So why should human government be democratic? The only answer I could find is that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions around works better than putting them all in one man’s hands. That makes sense. But it’s an argument from human weakness, not from the physics.

Question: And the last question: How does this relate to systemic injustice?

I think a lot of these are answered by having “Jesus in your heart and studying the Bible.” If we’re all hearing from the same God, the same high command, we can move together in harmony. But I wanted to see whether the physics framework could answer these questions, or whether they are still open.

And it won’t leave me alone. What’s right and what’s wrong? Every point you’ve made about God and the nature of the universe is well taken. I just find this troubling. I’m not sure about capitalism, and I feel like I sound like one of those woke idiots. But capitalism seems to need to keep growing. A growing economy needs oil. We need to go out and get resources. So it seems like we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out political cultures we didn’t like, funding regimes that crushed their own people’s socialist or communist movements.

Maybe that was a good thing. I know there’s a lot of nuance: how many people died under communist governments, and how “eat the rich” takes over when the tide turns toward communism. I’m seeing all these sides and trying to understand them. If I were with somebody on the other side, I’d probably argue more. But here I’m trying to understand, and I feel like you understand these things.

There’s so much nuance. How can anything be black and white? Maybe I feel responsible for seeing the black and white in everything, but I only see gray. Lighter and darker shades of it. I don’t see God as gray. But I see the world and humanity as an extension of God, and in that case, gray.

I don’t believe we have the right to do anything we want in another country. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing. I’m just more cynical about our history and our motives. Yes, we have gasoline and no wars at home, and that’s a beautiful thing. But at what cost? Are the good guys really the good guys? Are the bad guys really the bad guys? Or is it civilians paying the price for a few bad men at the top?

That’s where my fevered brain has been, trying to figure out socialism, capitalism, and empires.

Thomas: I want to answer Isak’s comment about everything being grey because that is a central concept in this book.

When Isak says he sees only gray. I understand why. The world, as it actually is, looks gray because it is a mixture. Every nation has done good and evil. Every economic system contains something true and something false. Every political party is right about some things and wrong about others. If you look at the mixture, you will see gray, and you will be tempted to conclude that there is no black and white, only shades.

But gray is what you get when you mix black and white. It doesn’t prove that black and white don’t exist. It proves that they are mixed. The work is to separate them: to find the principle that is true, and then to look honestly at where it has been followed and where it has been betrayed. Isak said he doesn’t see God as gray. Neither do I. The principles are clear. What is complicated is the history, and our own hearts.

So this book will do two things with every question Isak asked. It will try to state the principle plainly. And it will try to look honestly at the record. Christians have done evil in Christ’s name: the inquisition, the witch trials, and our judgmental vs. compassionate attitude toward the souls in the clutches of sin. America has done evil in its pursuit of oil and friendly governments. All the evil America has done is not inevitable. We were founded on Christian principles, but we did not apply them in these situations. We have walked away from them, or never fully understood and incorporated them into our group psyche – the divine Law under the laws and acts of man. We can change, and it will turn out much better for America if we actually apply those principles. But we will have to pay for those benefits to get the wonderful world we want. The cost will be that we must stop yielding to our desire for the pleasures and short-term payoffs of sin. We must acknowledge God’s existence, the sacrifice of His Son to reconcile us with Him, and incorporate His way into our individual and group lives.

We will consider these questions in the chapters that follow. The next four chapters take up the economic and political systems: why capitalism and communism each fail when taken to their pure form, why property is real but held in trust, why monopolies grow like tumors, whether self-government is derived from the order of creation or merely chosen, and how every remedy for human corruption gets corrupted in its turn. Chapter 6 states the rule of life I believe a nation should live by, and answers his question about safeguards: who decides what “Christianity done right” is, and what keeps a Christian majority from becoming a theocracy of clerics. Chapter 7 takes on the objection most people will raise first, the separation of church and state. The chapters after that go to where agreement ends: sexuality and the family, and what a nation might do about moral collapse without becoming the thing it fears. Chapter 12 answers Isak’s question about systemic injustice. Chapter 13 turns the moral test on America’s own conduct in the world, including the oil and the playground. Chapter 15 answers the question about those who never heard of Jesus, where it belongs: in a chapter about passing the fire on.

I don’t expect every reader to agree with every answer. I hold each position the way I hold any claim I make: as the best argument I have found, and I am open to a better one. But I think the questions deserve answers. Establishing a Christ-centered, righteous, and Holy nation is not the answer either party usually gives.

Isak asked what God does with groups of people, and we will keep returning to that question throughout this book.

Chapter 2 — Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism, Communism, and the Steward

Isak had put a great many questions on the table at once. I started with the one underneath most of them: capitalism and communism, and why neither works in its pure form.

THOMAS: The flaws and strengths of communism and capitalism are really good topics. You raised a broad spectrum of issues, and we need to address them together.

Start with capitalism. All of these systems (capitalism, communism, monarchy) are like a single rule in Conscious Point Physics. They have no nuance. Capitalism in its pure form is this: whatever makes the most money, you invest in, and when it stops making money, you move your resources into something else that does. It is driven by a goal. It has no particular concern for the environment, the poor, or minorities. The environment has no economic value unless you put a price on restoring it after resource extraction or waste disposal, or living among it rather than creating a steel, glass, and asphalt monoculture. When you do the repair, it actually becomes a moral system, and a measurable one. How much does it cost to care for the land by doing cleanup and replanting? Can we live among green zones? Who will pay for the farmer’s land so that it isn’t converted into strip malls and industrial zones when he retires or needs cash? How can forests and mountains remain remote?

Communism has a different goal. In its pure form, everybody produces as much as he can so there is a world of plenty, but there’s no comparative system available to price products or judge need so that each person gets what he needs. So everybody has to decide for himself what’s needed and what it’s worth, without any real idea what the price should be. There’s no incentive to take risks, or to do the hard work of getting the most production from the least labor and cost. People are supposed to be altruistic saints who work their hardest for others, with no more reward than the man who stays home and plays video games.

So communism suffers from a pricing problem, a lack of a way to determine need, and a motivation problem. “They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work,” was a well-known phrase from the Soviet era. People don’t work hard, are not innovative, and don’t strive for efficiency because there’s no payoff for working, excelling, or economizing. It all pays the same. Everybody becomes, in essence, a government worker, punching a clock and doing as little as he can to fit in and get by. This breeds corruption because people want more, and the top-down/central control makes access a commodity that can be turned into personal profit. Every thought and effort is supposed to be for “the people,” but the rewards of group benefit are too abstract to satisfy the hunger for nicer, more functional, and more quantity. Communism doesn’t allow for individual differences in temperament, industry, and taste.

And the moment you say, “Somebody will start poking you if you’re not working hard enough,” you’ve brought in elements of capitalism and fair play, and those are Christian values. You’ve had to bring in Christianity and capitalism to overcome communism’s deficits.

Socialism is a step toward the communist pole. It still has a remnant of pricing, efficiency, coordination, innovation management, and accountability.

Capitalism is at the other end of the polarity from communism because every individual decides what he wants, how hard he wants to work to get it, and gets the rewards of his labor. In capitalism, division of labor and specialization naturally arise because specialization creates jobs for those who want to provide a needed service. Specialization refines every aspect of production, distribution, and consumption. Innovation to meet new needs provides rewards to the innovator/entrepreneur. Individual tastes and motivation shape what we want, how hard we want to work for it, how much risk we want to take, and what reward we are willing to work for. Management, privately administered (not by government), is motivated by reward because both managers and workers are rewarded for the team’s achievement. Businesses are group, cooperative experiences, but the whole team experiences the reward of the team accomplishment, and everybody specializes for efficiency. The market sets the price, how much gets made, what people will pay, and whether a business survives at all. There’s an automatic adjustment. Capitalism has a self-regulating governor built in for motivation, pricing, production, and phasing out with new products and technologies.

That was the core of my answer in response to Isak’s question about pricing and motivation. Communism discards private property; capitalism is built on it. Does the order of creation say anything about which is right? Does Conscious Point Physics offer a metaphor we can apply to understand how life should be properly understood?

As we would expect, we can see elements of the universe’s fundamental nature peeking through.

The first physics metaphor:

The question, as Isak posed it, offered two pictures. In the first, every Conscious Point has its own definite place in the structure of the universe, so perhaps the concept/principle/precedent/pattern of having a place of one’s own is built into existence itself. In the second, everything is made of God’s own substance, so perhaps ownership is an illusion, because it all belongs to the Creator.

This means that we see patterns of individuality and communal oneness at the fundamental level of existence.

Each Conscious Point perceives itself in relationship to its own small sphere of other Conscious Points. From the perspective of an individual Conscious Point, in its own location, with its own identity, following a single, uniform rule set, each CP computes its next location for the beginning of the next Moment, then moves to that new location. Each CP proceeds through a sequence of Perceive, Compute, and Displace (move) each Moment (each unit of processing). It acts on the spot it occupies and on nothing else directly. It doesn’t perceive the whole universe, and it doesn’t move anything but itself. So each point is a real, bounded center of perception and action. It has its own viewpoint and its own move to make, and nobody makes that move for it. Individuality is built into the lowest level of what exists.

But the Conscious Point does not own the place it sits on. The structure of space is common to all of them. Points pass through the same locations; two can even land in the same place for a moment before they both move on. Neither the Conscious Point nor Grid Point is self-made. Both the Individual and the property are parts of God’s own consciousness. The individual and the property both exist because He exists and created both for His pleasure. He has rules by which the individual and the property interact – rules which He developed. Thus, in the ultimate sense, everything belongs to, and is of, the Creator, both the individual (the Conscious Points) and the Property (the Grid Points).

Put those together, and you get neither absolute private ownership nor the abolition of the individual. You get stewardship: a real, bounded domain of action, with real responsibility for one’s own moves, inside a whole that belongs to Someone else.

The physics has no concept of “property,” and I am not deriving a law of ownership from the motion of particles. What the physics does is dissolve a false choice between Capitalism (choice based solely on economic factors) and Communism (choice directed by the State based on the judgment of a single external director).

• The communist promotes his program as superior because everything is owned in common and everyone has an identical experience of satisfaction, and that is good because it is fair.
• The capitalist chooses what is most profitable to sell and least expensive to buy. This is relatively benign if isolated from the ability to appeal to others’ greed for more money, more power, and more pleasure, and from people’s willingness and ability to segment the market to capture supplies, influence legislation and officials, and propagandize. Thus, the rich get richer because they can create an environment for self-growth. Extreme wealth can come from providing better service, or it can be accumulated by manipulating the market in ways that do not provide value but allow market domination; this can show up as cartels and monopolies, which enrich more than would otherwise be possible.
• The third choice is Libertarian: The Libertarian perspective allows any interaction between contracting adults (competent parties) and actions that do not initiate aggression.
• The anarcho-capitalist abolishes government because the market provides the governmental services that people are forced to accept through voting, and all products and services are produced and consumed based only on price considerations.
• The polarities are: 1) self alone as an island and getting what you get because of your effort, ambition, and luck; 2) the group as the important survival entity and fairness for every person as the only expectation.

The picture at the bottom of reality says that life cannot be strictly segmented into these two polarities. Every person has a place and an environment, and a group of others who are self-interested and also dependent upon the group for survival and prosperity. Thus there is no possibility of isolating the self from the group, or the group disregarding the welfare of the individual. The two are interconnected on a level that is logically impossible to separate.

This reflects the ultimate reality that the One who created all individuals and the group of individuals is the Source of both. Scripture merely restates the proposition that both are true: all property is His, because “in Him we live and move and have our being,” and we are separate from Him because He calls us to invite Him in, and He will dine with us. The physics says why both are true; the mind of God created all the Conscious Points (the CPs, GPs, and DI-bits), and they were gathered together as the dust of the earth and fashioned into man and woman and made in His image, and He desires to commune with us when we are pure (Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God; blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God). God does truly want us all to get along.

What Scripture says

On one side, “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” God says of the land He gave Israel, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” The silver is His, and the gold is His. Nothing we hold is ours in the final sense.

On the other side, the same Bible guards private property fiercely. “Thou shalt not steal” makes no sense unless some things are rightly yours and not your neighbor’s. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark,” the boundary stone of his field. The prophets’ picture of peace is “every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” not every man under the collective’s vine. And when King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, and Naboth would not sell his father’s inheritance, the king’s wife arranged Naboth’s death, and the king took the land. God sent Elijah to pronounce judgment on him. The most powerful man in the nation had no right to a small farmer’s field.

People like to cite the early church as Christian communism. In Jerusalem the believers sold their possessions and held everything in common. But when Ananias sold his land and lied about the price, Peter said to him, “While it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” The sharing was voluntary. Ananias’s sin was not keeping part of the money. He lied to God about it. The church held all things in common because hearts were given, not because property was abolished. That is the difference between the Kingdom and communism. The Kingdom produces generosity by changing hearts. Communism tries to produce it by taking property, and it cannot, because no one can confiscate a heart.

Christ’s parable of the talents completes the picture. The master gives his servants real money and real authority over it, and then he leaves. They are free to trade, to invest, or to bury it in the ground. When he returns, he holds each of them accountable for what they did with what he entrusted to them. That is stewardship: real property, real freedom, and real accountability to the true Owner.

Why a steward needs property

This isn’t only theology. It is how things actually work, and it connects directly to communism’s pricing and motivation problems.

A steward needs a domain he answers for. If everything belongs to everyone, then nothing is anyone’s responsibility. The common pasture is overgrazed, because every herdsman gains by adding one more cow and no herdsman bears the cost alone. The public restroom is dirtier than the one in your house. Nobody washes a rented car.

We have run this experiment many times, and it always comes out the same way. The Plymouth colonists began with a common store: everyone worked the common land and drew from the common supply. By Governor William Bradford’s own account, it bred confusion and discontent, and the young men resented working for other men’s wives and children without pay. In 1623 the colony gave each family its own parcel of land, and the harvest improved so dramatically that women who had pleaded weakness now went willingly into the fields, taking their children with them.

The Soviet Union ran the same experiment on a continental scale and got the same result. Collective farmers were allowed to keep small private plots, usually less than an acre. In 1966 those plots made up only slightly more than three percent of the country’s sown land. Yet they produced about two-thirds of the Soviet Union’s potatoes and eggs, more than forty percent of its vegetables, and about forty percent of its meat and milk. Defenders of the Soviet system point out that the plots relied on feed and equipment from the collectives, and that’s partly true. But no accounting trick closes a gap that wide. Men worked their own ground differently from the way they worked the state’s.

This is also why property can’t be separated from pricing. A price is what happens when owners say yes or no. When I own something, I decide what I’ll accept for it, and you decide what you’ll pay, and that exchange tells everyone what things are worth. Abolish the owners, and you abolish the yes and the no. Then the planner has to guess. That is why the Soviet planner never knew how many shoelaces to make.

The limits of property

But property is not absolute. God’s law laid duties on the owner.

The farmer in Israel was not to reap the corners of his field, or go back for the gleanings, or strip his vineyard bare. The poor and the stranger were to gather those with their own hands. Notice the design. The owner was not taxed, and an official handed out the proceeds. He was required to leave room for the poor to work for their own bread on his land. The land rested every seventh year. In the year of Jubilee, land returned to the families it had originally been given to, so no family could be permanently dispossessed, and no man could accumulate field after field forever. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”

So a steward’s property is bounded by two duties. The first is to the home: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,” and what we do for the least of these, we do for Christ. The second is the duty not to use one’s property to destroy other men’s stewardship. The man who buys up every mousetrap company so that no one else can build a better mousetrap is not exercising his property right. He is using it to abolish everyone else’s. That is where the next chapter begins.

So the question to ask of any arrangement of property is this: Does it enable faithful stewardship, or does it concentrate control in ways that prevent stewardship by others? Communism fails that test by concentrating everything in the state. The monopoly fails it by concentrating all productive capacity in a single company. The Jubilee passes it. So do the small farm, the family business, and the home a man owns outright.

Taxation, and the quieter kinds of theft

Where does taxation fit? Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The government has a legitimate claim to what it needs to do what it is actually for: the common defense, the courts, and the good roads everybody wants. A just tax for the common good is not theft.

But when the government takes from one man to give to another, not because the second man is helpless but because he votes, that is robbery done by proxy. The citizen hires the government to do the robbing he would be ashamed to do himself. I will say more about that in Chapter 5. The Bible’s corrective for greed is not confiscation. It is voluntary generosity, the obligation of family to family, and the gleaning principle.

There is also a quieter theft. The Bible condemns “divers weights and divers measures,” the merchant who keeps one weight for buying and another for selling. When a government expands the money supply faster than the goods it measures, every dollar a man has saved buys less. His property has been taken without a law being passed or a tax being levied. It is the ancient practice of clipping coins, done with a printing press. A steward cannot plan to be faithful if the measure itself is dishonest.

The answer

So is ownership an illusion because everything belongs to God? No. It is real, but it is delegated. The illusion is not that the field is yours. The illusion is that it is only yours: that you answer to no one for it, and that no poor man has a right to glean its corners.

And is property built into the structure of existence? In the sense that matters, yes. Each of us has a place and a move that are truly his, and no one can perceive, choose, and act for him. That is why the collective cannot replace the individual, and why every system that tries to abolish the individual’s domain ends in the planner’s guess, the empty shelf, and the gun. From an absolute perspective, the place one lives and works is on loan, and so is the identity/beingness of the one who holds that property.

Stewardship holds both halves together: the dignity of ownership and the humility of accountability. It is a pattern we will keep finding. Every system without nuance takes one true thing and makes it the only thing. The communist takes “it all belongs to God” and hands it to the state. The libertarian takes “this is mine” and forgets Whose it is. Christ’s way keeps both.

Notes

Psalm 24:1; Leviticus 25:23; Haggai 2:8; Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 19:14; Micah 4:4; 1 Kings 21 (Naboth’s vineyard); Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–5:4 (Ananias); Matthew 25:14–30 (the talents) and 25:31–46; Leviticus 19:9–10 and 25 (gleaning, the sabbath year, and the Jubilee); Isaiah 5:8; 1 Timothy 5:8; Matthew 22:21; Deuteronomy 25:13–15 and Proverbs 20:10 (divers weights).

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, entry for 1623.

Soviet private plots: “The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture,” Slavic Review (1969), reporting 1966 output from Soviet sources: 64 percent of potatoes, 43 percent of vegetables, 40 percent of meat, 39 percent of milk, and 66 percent of eggs, on slightly more than 3 percent of the sown land. The Soviets stopped publishing many private-plot statistics in 1980.

End of Edit for 9/27/2026 Fellowship essay

Chapter 3 — The Perversion of Centralization: Cartels, Monopolies, Captains of Industry, and Cults

I just described the governor built into capitalism, the way price and demand keep a free market in balance. Isak brought up the obvious objection.

ISAK: But the exercise raised the problem with that. It was talking about cancer. Self-organizing systems also produce cancer cells, cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the body. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent.

THOMAS: You brought up cults in that list. I have a particular definition of a cult, and I don’t know whether it’s correct, because it’s the definition we used when I was in one. We said we weren’t a cult, because we didn’t have a guru over us; we were a religion. But we did have a guru, and he interpreted the religion for us, bringing his particular version of Sikhism from India, and we practiced it the way he instructed us. I don’t think the Indian Sikhs accepted this American version of Sikhism or us completely. I think they were puzzled by our group, and I heard there were factions who did not accept our leader. It was probably different than the religion as it was practiced in India. I know we tried to do it as perfectly as the 10 Sikh Gurus practiced it. I think we fit into the category of unreformed purists. We had a battle cry: someone would call out, “Bole So Nihal,” and everyone would answer, “Sat Sri Akal.” We adopted the dress, turban, hair, comb, bracelet, the food, free Sunday meals, and reading the holy book (Sri Guru Granth Sahib). But we added things the Indians did not: yoga, probably an addition from Hinduism. We tried to do everything perfectly. The Indians had been practicing Sikhism for centuries, and their attitude seemed more relaxed and practical.

To me, the essence of a cult is a single-minded idea of how things should be following the revelation of a man. In a true and mature religion, the revelation comes from God, and men’s interpretations get averaged out. In Christianity, many people received different aspects of God’s revelation over several millennia. In a cult, a single person gets the revelation, and then everyone follows it, and the guru sets a single direction. In Sikhism, 10 gurus led over several centuries, and the scriptures are collections of writings by several authors considered holy men. Because this pattern follows that of Christianity so closely, we must closely examine the veracity of Sikh history and the holy book. We shall do that in another essay.

But I’d put your list differently. A cartel is a group of companies allied together to create a unified price structure that prevents competition. A monopoly is one company that has dominated the market. I would replace the category of “cult” with the term “captain of industry. Examples of such people are the Carnegies, the Mellons, the Morgans, the Rockefellers; we have modern equivalents to an extent: Gates, Jobs, Diamond, Welch, Zuckerberg, etc. The equivalent of the cult they share is a single will pushing everyone in one direction.

And we should add one more to the list: government. So we have government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry. Those are the four poles people can be pulled toward. Communism is the pole where government takes over. The government decides how many shoelaces, ballpoint pens, or computers, etc., because it’s in control.

The perversion in every one of them is centralization. All four are the opposite of free-market capitalism. In each case, competition has been suppressed. The captain of industry undercuts his competitors to put them out of business, uses force of personality to intimidate, or buys out the competition so that he can control it. In some way, he overtakes the market that would have let somebody else build a better mousetrap and take market share. He says, “I’ll buy your mousetrap company. Then I’ll raise the price of my mousetrap because there are no competitors you can purchase from.” It’s nearly always some perversion of the free market, carried out by a group or a man.

There’s another place for the cults: the ecological cult. In California, water that could have irrigated the San Joaquin Valley is sent out to sea to protect the habitat of a small fish, the delta smelt, and in dry years farmland goes fallow. In the Northwest, it was the spotted owl. Logging on federal land was cut back drastically, and forest management cutbacks followed. Undergrowth was allowed to grow without being cleared, and forests were not harvested. The result is so much fuel on the forest floor that when fire comes, it burns hundreds of thousands to millions of acres at a time, without cleared firebreaks to stop it.

A cult is a group or way of thinking that hasn’t reckoned with the rest of reality. There is a time for growing and a time for harvesting, a time for clearing the undergrowth, and a time to leave places wild. There should be islands of wilderness, not a whole world of it.

All of these (the captain of industry, the monopoly, the cartel, the government, and the special-interest cult) corrupt the market by artificially modifying the market. All of them say, “My way is the right way,” which points to a religious cult, where one particular way of acting is the only right way. Cults can form around Ideologies.

That answered part of Isak’s question. It named the players in the spectrum of market forces. But it didn’t answer the question underneath.

The question was this: self-organizing systems produce order without anyone in command, but they also produce cancer. Is cancer a violation of the rules, or the rules operating without alignment with the body’s overall purpose and function? And if it’s the second, perhaps this is the objection/criticism of capitalism: a system operating without integration with the larger purpose of life?

Capitalism is a set of rules that has arisen that reflects human nature. Referees have been designated (government, associations, guilds, and authors/writers/speakers), and they have codified the rulebook (the body of Federal, state, county, and local laws) that people follow. The question of whether the capitalism-government alliance is an inherently inhumane driver of men and an exploiter of resources and nations is important because nations have been overthrown and cultures put into extreme oppression and poverty because of the rebellion against the golem (the mindless spirit) of capitalism. So, yes, Capitalism has become an inextricable melding of needs, producers, rules, and government enforcement. Some claim the problem is government, and some claim that government is the solution. The second consideration concerns capitalism’s integration with the larger system. Has capitalism become its own entity that grows without connection and regulation with the larger purpose of the system? If so, how can this system be integrated with the purpose of life and meaning?

Two levels of law

To illustrate the principle of lawful, rule-based operation, let us begin with the most fundamental level of reality as the prototypical example of lawful operation: the Conscious Points. A conscious point cannot break its rules. It perceives, computes, and moves every instant, exactly as it was made to. A particle cannot decide to ignore electromagnetism. At that level, no action/behavior/function of the Conscious Point violates the rules of physics/reality. On this level, everything that happens happens lawfully. We could call this the law of function.

Now go up to the cell. A cancer cell doesn’t break chemistry either. Every reaction inside it obeys the same laws as the reactions in a healthy cell. Nothing in a tumor violates physics. So at the lowest level, the answer is the second one: cancer is the rules operating without alignment with the goals of the larger purpose.

The body is a system operating in a larger reality. Likewise, each cell is operating in a larger system. We could call this the law of the whole. A healthy cell lives inside a web of signals from its neighbors and from the body. Those signals tell it when to divide and when to stop, when to specialize, and when it is damaged beyond repair and should die for the body’s sake. A healthy cell constantly listens to its environment, and that environment listens to its environment, all the way up to the point where this chain of cause and effect integrates the whole. Each cell has regulators that adjust its function to respond to its environment and maintain functional homeostasis. No obvious coordinator of health sets the body’s function, but the most likely candidate is DNA: the stored pattern of structures, production methods, and rate adjustment that coordinates internal cellular processes with the cell’s external environment. The perfectly programmed cell maintains its function and production relationship to meet the requirements of its environment, repairs or replaces itself if damaged. When repair is needed, it does so by specializing general function cells into the type of cell needed for that function in that part of the body. If that coordination with the local environment is lost, the cell can begin to multiply without regard to the needs of the local tissue. So at the level of the body, the answer is that cancer is a violation of the law of the whole, a violation of the law of coordinated relationship that results in diminished function of the whole because of uncoordinated action with the parts.

That is exactly the situation of a man in a society. The man is the cell, and the rules of society and market demand that he adapt to maintain his survival and prosperity, and the survival and flourishing of the larger economic-social organism. The laws of economics work in him the way chemistry works in a cell. Supply and demand, incentive, scarcity: the monopolist obeys them perfectly. The captain of industry who buys up his competitors breaks no law of economics. But a second law stands above him: the moral law, the law of the whole: love your neighbor as yourself. The question is whether putting other companies out of business by lowering prices falls in that category. Does the monopoly/cartel/COI provide better service to customers by lowering prices and reducing supplier diversity? Is serving more people, at the cost of product diversity, a necessary tradeoff for low prices? Is it possible to have both?

The question comes down to what ethical capitalism is. Capitalism has no conscience; it is a system of relationships that produces goods and services for consumers in exchange for payment (a fungible scrip in a market economy). Capitalism is a set of rules, like chemistry. It is lawful and powerful, and by itself it has no idea about the larger function of the participants, either the consumer or producer. It doesn’t produce tumors because its rules are broken. It produces them when the men operating it stop listening to the law of the whole.

What a cancer cell does

Look at how cancer actually works. Cancer researchers describe a set of capabilities a cell must acquire to become a tumor. Here are the ones that matter for us, with their social equivalents.

A healthy cell should stop dividing when it touches its neighbors and the structural gap is filled. This is called contact inhibition. The neighbor’s presence says “enough,” and the cell listens. A cancer cell ignores its neighbors and keeps multiplying. That is the man who hears his brother say, “You’re getting out of line,” and keeps going to satisfy his desire for “just a little more.”

A badly damaged healthy cell destroys itself for the body’s sake. A cancer cell refuses to stop multiplying even though it is damaged. In an economy, a failing business is supposed to fail, so its people and capital can go somewhere more useful. When a failing giant must be kept alive at taxpayer expense because it is “too big to fail,” it signals that the system and its components have not been properly regulated to meet the contingencies of changing market conditions. The problem is that regulation can look like market interference; better preparedness calls for government regulation, voluntary corporate diversification, or consumer discretion. All these solutions likely have failure modes. This is why free markets have historically gone through periodic booms and busts. The free market does work to correct itself, but the cycle of irrational exuberance and hopeless despair reflects the psyche of men operating with low awareness of the whole, the trends, and regulating appetites. Government intervention can regulate the economy, but it is typically myopic, or agenda-driven, rule-bound, or subject to industry capture by the industries it regulates. What I am looking for is a solution to smooth the booms and busts while retaining the incentive for production by the captains of industry and their desire for monopoly and huge profits. In some way the animal spirit of the market must be allowed to run free to produce the abundance that the desire for profit brings.

A tumor can’t grow beyond a small size on its own. To grow, it sends out signals that make the body build new blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply and redirects it to itself. That is the cartel or monopoly that lobbies for subsidies and favorable regulation, and the special interest that gets resources, taxes, or funding to promote its cause.

The body has an immune system that patrols constantly and destroys abnormal cells, most of them long before anyone would ever know they existed. A successful tumor learns to hide from it. It displays signals that say, “I am part of you; leave me alone.” That is the cartel dressed up as free enterprise, and the megachurch with a message that appeals to the senses without the gospel and the discipline of holiness. The disguise is always the same: the perversion wears the clothes of the healthy thing it is destroying.

The most dangerous tumor is the one that spreads. It leaves its place and sets up colonies in other organs. The economic equivalent is a company that grows large enough to influence regulators through campaign contributions or other favors that bend the will of government to favor its interests. This influence may come from being a first mover, being the inventor who dominated a market sector, mergers and acquisitions that enable market domination, or cartels (alliances to fix prices) and market domination. So the pattern is market domination through various means, and then influence on governmental regulation and public opinion through the press.

The end goal of cults, monopolies, and cartels can be social, political, or economic, but the bottom line is that these players can have significant, non-integrated influence on the public in some domain. The question is how to control these players so that they are regulated, internally and externally, so that the public is well served in its needs and desires for functionality, diversity, and low prices, while the initiative of the entrepreneur is maintained/preserved/nourished.

Government solutions and monopolistic market control are examples of centralization. The healthy body is made of trillions of cells, each in its place, each limited by its neighbors, and none of them in charge. A tumor is one line of cells that has become self-focused and lost connection and mutual regulation with the whole. That is what I meant when I said the perversion in every case (government, cartel, monopoly, captain of industry) is centralization. A monopoly suppresses competition through low pricing to clear the market, then charges market-maximizing prices for essential (high-desire) items. Governments restore competition by breaking up large companies. It seems like there should be some type of business ethics that could be applied internally to ensure that the methods of market domination were ethical, that is, caring about the customers. Lowering prices to eliminate competition, then raising them, is simply unethical. Government-industry collusion that influences law through campaign contributions to produce regulation that favors one market competitor is a moral failure. Other competitive practices are arguably simply doing good business to get market share.

A failure of perception

Here we shall examine the pattern of Conscious Point Physics, the cell, and the market to establish a metaphorical parallel.

A Conscious Point computes its move from what it perceives. What it can perceive determines what it can consider. Now consider what the cancer cell has lost. It hasn’t lost its ability to act; it acts with enormous energy. It has lost its ability to perceive the whole. Signals from its neighbors still arrive, but it no longer responds. It computes its move as if it were alone.

Greed is the same failure in a man. It is not mainly a failure of will. It is a narrowing of perception. The greedy man computes his next move from a sphere that has shrunk to himself. His neighbor is still there, still sending signals: “I need to eat.” “You’re hurting me.” “That was mine.” When greed has overtaken a man, he no longer takes them into account.

This is an analogy, not a result the physics proves. It explains why the remedy can’t consist only of outside constraints. You can cut out or poison a cancer cell, but health is a body whose cells can recognize aberrant cells and contain, eliminate, or restore them to the healthy function of listening to the whole. And that is what “love your neighbor as yourself” is: a command to widen the sphere of perception until your neighbor’s good is an equal part of what you weigh when you decide your move. The corporate/community conscience depends on the conscience of the individuals who compose larger institutions/groups.

Challenging the analogy

The analogy between cancer and monopoly is that both are unregulated aggregations of functional cells within a larger body or economy. The cancer cell does not choose to become cancerous; it does so through gene damage, accidents, toxin exposure, infection, etc. A person with cancer may or may not have done something consciously or unconsciously to develop it. Often, the cause can be connected to choosing to smoke, live an unhealthy lifestyle (out of ignorance or anesthetizing the pain of life with food), or work in a toxic environment. Once we know the risk, it becomes a choice, but it still damages us if we choose badly – choice does not sanctify or immunize. Unhealthy food and behavior choices reflect poor internal governance.

A man chooses the actions that put himself and others at risk, sometimes by accident, and other times when fully informed. That is the one thing humans have that conscious points and cells do not: the ability to override the law of the whole. A man may suppress his conscience because of ignorance/naivete, or he may choose to suppress its voice to achieve a specific goal (more money, power, fame, sensual experience). The social pathology underneath the tumor of unethical business growth may stem from childhood pathology. The monopolist may have seared his conscience because of trauma, the pain of difficult circumstances, or by feeding his addictions. He knows his neighbor is there, but has considered his own needs more. That is why we call greed a sin, not a disease. The remedy includes choosing new behaviors and attitudes toward our fellow man. The behaviors may include intoxication, illicit sexuality, conspicuous consumption, desire for fame or power to fill a hunger inside, and other signs of excess or deficiency and dysregulation. Repenting of the old behaviors and attitudes, and adopting the new behaviors will be the larger arc, but the inner work to make such changes will require more granularity.

This perspective also answers the first question Isak asked: why a society needs a written constitution when conscious points don’t. Conscious Points cannot defect, and cells defect only through damage. Men can defect on purpose. A person can choose to stop listening to the whole and suffers from an excessive love of self and a deficient love of others. Such a man, if he is fortunate, will hear the voice of conscience/the still small voice of the Holy Spirit, and heed the counsel of neighbors, clergy, and mental/spiritual health professionals.  When internal warning and intervention fail, he may someday face the harsher counsel of the State. Its machinery of transformation through the cycle of rapport, confrontation, and change is administered by juries and courts that will say “enough” when conscience and personal initiative are insufficient regulators.

How a body stays healthy

How does a body keep cancer from taking over? Not mainly by chemotherapy or surgery. Chemotherapy may be a lifesaving tool for some, for a while, but it is a blunt one; the collateral damage can be significant, the treatment may cease to be effective, and the invasion returns if even a small seed remains. Chemo attacks every rapidly dividing cell, healthy and sick alike, and the patient suffers. The main defense is ultimately the one God gave us: the immune system, distributed everywhere, recognizes the abnormal cell early, while it is small, and removes it long before it becomes a life- and function-threatening tumor. Many newer cancer treatments work by stripping away the tumor’s disguise so the body’s own immune system can see it and do its job.

A society works the same way. When the tumors are already large, the big central remedies have their place: antitrust law, breaking up a monopoly, and prosecuting fraud. But those remedies can be the equivalent of chemotherapy. They are blunt; they harm the healthy along with the sick, and a government big enough to wield them is itself at risk of becoming the largest tumor of all. We will see that happen in Chapter 5.

A society’s real health is distributed. It is a market with many competitors, where no one grows large enough to capture the entire market, and the economy’s survival does not depend on a single supplier. Defenses include neighbors who say “enough” early, while the problem is small; juries who see through a disguise; and churches and families in communion with their neighbors; everyone needs accountability for doing the right thing. The public likely will not recognize the pathology of the individual who walks through the public spaces wearing the demeanor of the sharp-dressed man. Intimate knowledge, accountability, and a relationship with a group of men who are committed to ethical business prevent the lone businessman from sinking into self-obsessed pathology. As with the body, the tumor wears the clothes of healthy tissue, so can the man who hides his inner life from examination by anyone except himself.

Growth for its own sake

Last, Isak’s worry that capitalism has to keep growing, has to keep going out to get more. The writer Edward Abbey said that growth for its own sake is the ideology of the cancer cell. This is correct, but notice that growth is not cancerous; it’s the focus on growth alone at the expense of the larger whole. A child grows. A healthy body grows to its proper size, then keeps renewing itself: cells die and are replaced every day, and the body stays alive through steady, orderly production.

An economy is supposed to be like that: growth is good when it serves the needs of a growing population and a more affluent, prosperous, luxuriant population. Growth is good when it expands to serve those who previously lacked access to goods and services. What makes growth cancerous is the same thing that makes a cell cancerous: when it no longer serves the whole, only itself. When “How much is enough?” gets the answer “Just a little more,” the question is whether that desire for more is blind to its environment. Is this the desire to serve more people with goods and services, or the desire to own everything to satisfy a desire to control, be powerful, be famous, or other drives that center on self more than others?

So self-organization does not fail because its rules are bad. It fails when the beings operating within it stop perceiving the whole. For Conscious Points, that can never happen; God is in control, and He is always Lawful. For cells, it happens by accident or the failure to properly care for the body. For men, it happens by a complex mixture of nature, nurture, and choice. The group must recognize and accurately diagnose the pathology to nourish, teach, discipline, or confine the aberrant actor. As a society, we cannot pretend that all behaviors are justified. There is a remedy that cells don’t have: men can learn the ways of health, repent/renouce the old ways, develop a new heart, adopt the ways of Christ, and be born again. Being born again is sometimes through long, hard labor that almost kills us; sometimes it is quick and relatively easy; it is usually hard work, and eventually everything works out fine. Regardless, a new heart is always available.

Notes

The California water dispute concerns pumping limits imposed to protect the delta smelt, listed as a threatened species in 1993. Federal timber harvest in the Pacific Northwest fell sharply after the northern spotted owl was listed in 1990 and the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted in 1994.

Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg, “The Hallmarks of Cancer,” Cell 100 (2000), and “Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation,” Cell 144 (2011), describe the capabilities cited here: evasion of growth suppressors (including contact inhibition), resistance to cell death, induction of new blood vessels, evasion of the immune system, and invasion and metastasis. The comparison of antitrust enforcement to chemotherapy and of distributed competition to immune surveillance is an analogy, not a medical claim.

Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please (1988).

Chapter 4 — Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and the King

I described the cults of our time as groups that say, “My way is the only right way.” But that is exactly what Christianity does. To resolve this paradox, we must deeply analyze the facts and our standard of truth, since the truth that the cult follows may be false, and the truth that is true is true, regardless of who says it.

THOMAS: The interesting thing is that there is a particular way to think that’s right. There is an old folk saying: “Everybody wants good roads.” That’s just a fact. Nobody wants a road with chasms in it, or boulders that fell across it from the cliff.

ISAK: Or a tree across it.

THOMAS: Everybody wants good roads, and that phrase is the equivalent of absolute morality. Nobody wants bad roads. The only people who want bad roads are highway robbers. They take advantage of a break in the system to victimize people who are vulnerable; the stagecoach comes up to the washed-out road, the robbers jump out and say, “All right, everybody, hands up. Where’s the strongbox?”

ISAK: So your point is that it’s a moral good, a moral truth, that the government should pay for roads. But isn’t that a socialist idea, taxing everybody for a common good?

THOMAS: I didn’t address that, and it’s a really good point. When we talk about government taking one person’s money and giving it to someone else to meet their needs, that is the central planning, authoritarian, communist element. In the case of good roads, we’re saying that in this particular area there’s a common good, and that’s why we have government: to take care of the common good. Libertarians, and a group called anarcho-capitalists, say that if you put a price on everything, somebody will take care of it if they want it badly enough to pay the cost. In this system, everyone pays their share, and only the things that people want done are done. In this system, there is no government; people advocate for themselves. In this way, each person negotiates their own prices. Voting is done by purchasing what you want. Cooperation is required for large purchases. The market handles everything from fire, police, and roads, and no one complains about waste, cost, or service because people pay for what they want and use.

Each of these systems has a good argument. Anarchy even has a place. It lies in letting people experience their own lives and everything that goes on in them. Even anarchy has its place; there is a level of anarchy that is absolutely irreducible. In physics, that’s thermal noise. At its smallest level, nature is anarchic. But that anarchy is tempered by its environment. It only goes so far, and then it passes into a realm where it’s ordered. Things get hotter and hotter, and you get a sun. The sun is extremely chaotic, and yet it’s a very ordered object. It holds itself together at a particular size. So the question is: What size boundary marks where anarchy passes into order?

ISAK: Interesting. Keep going.

THOMAS: Take the anarchy of an individual life. “I want to be free.” What do you want to be free to do? “I want to be free to work, have a family, do recreation, travel on good roads, and go to nice places on them.” That dream sounds like you want a very ordered life.

ISAK: Yeah.

THOMAS: It seems contradictory, but it illustrates the principle of living a compartmentalized life where mutually contradictory things can both exist. For example, I want the anarchy of unrestricted access to all these things, but I want them in an orderly way. An ordered life has many parts, and each part has freedom inside it, which is the unpredictability of anarchy. When I have gotten all the experience I want from one, I move to another. We do not want the disorder of a tornado. That’s too much randomness and disorder. You have a lot of freedom there, as you can walk through spaces that were once houses and trees, but it’s too disordered to experience anything but the disorder. Usually I don’t want the disorder of unlimited boundaries inside of an ordered path. I prefer good roads, recreation, and family.

ISAK: Anarchy gets old.

THOMAS: Anarchy gets old if you get too much of it in areas of life where order is desired. Order gets old if there is too much of it – a prison cell in solitary is very ordered, but it’s too ordered.

Isak’s question stimulated a question for me: where is the size boundary at which anarchy passes into order? The answer turns out to be the answer to one of Isak’s questions.

Isak’s question was about democracy. If I argue that a constitutional republic is the form of government closest to the structure of reality, I have to say whether that’s a derivation (a conclusion that follows from the fundamental nature of the universe) or just a preference. A monarchy with a good king might fit the pattern just as well: one wise ruler preserving the good.

In my own framework, God is a king, not an elected president. So why should human government be democratic? Isak concluded that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions out works better than central command. Then he noticed that this is an argument from human weakness, not from physics.

I think the argument from human limitation and the argument from the physics turn out to be the same argument.

God is King, and the throne is taken

Start with Isak’s evaluation that God is a monarch. The universe is clearly not a democracy. The rules the Conscious Points follow were not put to a vote. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom, and its King is not up for re-election.

I am not a democrat in the sense of believing that the majority is the source of what is right. The majority chose Barabbas. A crowd that shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Crucify him” on Friday. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, and a system that treats the voice of the people as the final authority follows and caters to the will of the mob. Pure democracy is mob rule with a vote count. Fifty-one percent can rob forty-nine, and whether your money or agency is taken with a ballot instead of a six-gun, it is still robbery.

But notice what follows from God being King. If the throne belongs to Him, then no man can rightly sit on it. That is what I mean by the Revolutionary War slogan: “No King but King Jesus.” It is not a slogan against monarchy as a form. It says the office of absolute sovereign is already filled. Every man who claims absolute power over other men is claiming a seat that is not vacant.

That is the Bible’s own verdict. When Israel asked Samuel for a king “like all the nations,” God told Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Then He had Samuel warn them what a king would do. He would take their sons for his chariots and their daughters for his kitchens, their best fields for his servants, and a tenth of everything, until they cried out because of the king they had chosen. It accurately describes centralized government, and it was written three thousand years ago. Little has changed in men’s hearts.

Why not a monarchy with a good king? The question isn’t whether a good king would govern well. Some did. David was a man after God’s own heart. Hezekiah and Josiah led the nation back to God. The problem is what came after them. Hezekiah was succeeded by his son Manasseh, one of Judah’s most wicked kings. Solomon was succeeded by Rehoboam, who split the kingdom in two by promising to be harsher than his father. A monarchy rises and falls with the heir’s character. Even a good king has no one to correct him when he goes wrong, except a prophet like Nathan, willing to risk his life to say, “Thou art the man.” Monarchy puts a nation’s character on one man, and men’s character is inconsistent.

How God governs what He made

Now the physics: Conscious Point Physics does not derive a constitutional republic from first principles, but its principles are consistent with it. No ballot box exists in the structure of space; each Conscious Point follows His rules perfectly. This is how God actually governs the universe He made. This tells us how He intends men to be governed.

God does not move each Conscious Point by direct command. He gave the points their rules, and each point perceives what is within its own small sphere, computes its move from what it perceives, and moves itself. No point commands another. No point perceives the whole universe. Each one sees only its own neighborhood. And out of countless local perceptions and local moves, all obeying the same law, comes everything: atoms, stars, living bodies. No central office issues the order. It emerges from local agents faithfully following a law that stands above them all.

So creation’s structure is neither a monarchy of creatures nor a democracy of creatures. It is a Kingdom whose King wrote the law, and whose subjects govern their own moves, locally, under that law. God alone holds absolute sovereignty at the top. Below it, agency is distributed and local, and no creature rules another by decree.

This is an argument from pattern, not a proof. The physics describes how Conscious Points behave; it contains no theory of government. My claim is that a constitutional republic is consistent with the way God governs creation. The physics doesn’t derive a republic, but it does reflect the pattern of a people governed by the rule of law.

The question is then: why is spreading decisions out better than central command? The answer is, because no human has God’s knowledge. But why doesn’t any human have God’s knowledge? Because every created thing perceives only within its own sphere. That limitation is present in human nature, and it is built into every created point. Only God perceives the whole. So the argument for a Constitutional Republic can be argued from human limitation, and it reflects the structure of creation. Every creature is finite in what it can perceive, and that is exactly why no creature may be trusted with the whole.

James Madison put the practical conclusion plainly. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary. We are not angels, and angels do not govern us. So government must be able to control the governed, and the people must control the government; only people faithful to God’s character are worthy and trustworthy to control government. To do this, we must acknowledge that there is a God, be willing to name our God, study and know His ways, and expect that behavior, and hold each other and government to act according to His ways.

Where anarchy passes into order

That brings me back to the size boundary.

At the smallest scale of human life is the individual and the family. There, government is mostly self-government: a man ruling his own appetites, a father and mother ordering their home – their economics, recreation, their children being raised in the ways of the Lord.

The next boundary is about a hundred and fifty people. That is roughly the number of people a man can actually know: their names, their faces, their families, and how they live. Researchers who study human groups have found that number again and again, in villages, in military companies, in congregations. Below that size, a community can largely govern itself through relationships. Everyone knows who can be trusted. Accountability is personal. When a brother says, “You’re getting out of line,” it means something, because he knows you, and it means more if he knows the Laws of God. That is why I have proposed the group of about a hundred and fifty as the basic building block of the civic network I have been developing. At that size, a community can still feel like a family.

Above that size, you can no longer know everyone, and you need something else: representation. You choose someone you do know, whose character you have seen, to stand for you among people you don’t know. And that is exactly the structure Moses was given. When judging the whole nation was crushing him, his father-in-law Jethro told him to choose able men who feared God, men of truth who hated covetousness, and make them rulers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. They judged the small matters at the lowest level. Only the great matters came up to Moses. In Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, “Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.” The people chose men known among them, and God set them over them under His law.

That is a republic, [Res: (the thing), Publica: (the public)], a government of the people. It was in the Bible three thousand years before Philadelphia: a people choosing leaders they know, organized in nested levels from the smallest to the largest, every level bound by a law written by God, who is the King above them all. It has the same shape as the physics: local knowledge, local decisions, one law above everyone, and no creature on the throne.

No state should reach beyond prosecuting crime.

The republic depends on the King

One more thing: the republic works only if the law above it is real and the people submit to it.

John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and that it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. He was right, and the physics shows why. Distributed agency produces order only when every agent follows the same law. Conscious points can’t help following theirs. Men can refuse. A republic of men who have rejected the law above them is not really a republic. It is a crowd with a constitution, and a crowd will eventually vote itself whatever it wants, including a king. That is how republics have always died. Rome was not first conquered by a foreign enemy. It handed itself to Caesar.

So when someone asks whether I believe in democracy, this is my answer. I believe in the Kingdom of God. And I believe the best form of human government under that Kingdom is a constitutional republic: nested levels of self-government, beginning with the man who governs himself and the family that governs its home, rising through communities small enough for their members to know each other, bound at every level by a moral law no majority can repeal, with every office held as a stewardship under God. That form is not derived directly from the physics, but it is consistent with it. It is the form most in harmony with the way God actually governs what He has made. And it keeps the throne vacant for the only One who can fill it.

It works only as long as the people keep Jesus as King, use Him as the standard of the law, and hold each other accountable for abiding by it. When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, a woman is said to have asked him what kind of government the delegates had made. “A republic,” he answered, “if you can keep it.” We keep it the same way a Conscious Point keeps its place in the order of things: by following the law that we were given from God, in the place we were given, one move at a time.

Notes

“Everybody wants good roads” echoes the Good Roads Movement of the 1880s through the 1910s, which campaigned for paved rural roads across the United States.

1 Samuel 8:5–18; Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (the limits placed on Israel’s king); Exodus 18:13–26 (Jethro’s counsel); Deuteronomy 1:13–15; Matthew 20:25–28; 2 Samuel 12:7 (Nathan); 2 Kings 21 (Manasseh); 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam); Matthew 27:15–23 (Barabbas).

James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788). John Adams, letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798. Franklin’s reply is recorded in the notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Convention.

The figure of roughly 150 is the anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s estimate of the number of stable personal relationships a person can maintain. The 150-member cell is the building block of the Christos Voting Network.

Edit of Edit for Fellowship Essay for 10/4/2026

Chapter 5 — From Pleasantville to the G-Men: How Every Remedy Is Corrupted

Isak and I agreed that too much anarchy is disturbing, and too much order is boring.

THOMAS: Maximum chaos and maximum stability are both intolerable. When applied to social and individual situations, the government’s job is to establish laws that reflect God’s laws so that action is allowed, even encouraged, to motivate people toward Godliness. The State should be limited to enforcement (fines and restraint) of criminal behavior (crimes against person and property). This is a constitutional republic, meaning it is government of the people, and the people are the ones asking for restraint.

Without law and enforcement by the State, no uniform consequence is administered for violating moral or civil law. Those who have been violated, or their clan, will likely seek revenge or retaliation after a judgment of guilt. The problem with such vigilante and revenge justice is that guilt can be misjudged, and excessively harsh punishment can be meted out.

People are driven by the animal passions of sloth (avoiding work), survival (doing what it takes to stay fed, sheltered, clothed… avoidance of pain, cold, poverty, and death), pleasure (satisfaction of the senses), and avoidance (pain, cold, poverty, death). People will choose the easiest path to satisfaction of their desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain. When the pleasures are removed (or unavailable), and the experience of deprivation comes, people are motivated to criminal violations of person and property to satisfy desire. It is the place of the state, as God’s representative, to supply the disincentive to criminal violation.

Enforcement will happen, even in the most lawless society. In response to violation, animal instincts of self-preservation ensure that those who are violated will oppose those who violate the boundaries of person and property. The only difference between vigilante/private justice and a society without centralized government is that the violator of law and standards of law will be a patchwork of judicial standards, tolerance thresholds, and retaliatory punishment.

If society’s standards of law are not God’s standards, and society’s laws are not God’s law, the people will react to the injustice. In a secular- free society, there will be a spectrum of people who respect and disrespect God’s law. The animal within us all desires not working/sloth, as it is easier/less painful than working. Everyone wants to experience less pain. Some people don’t want to work that hard, and they say, “It’s a lot easier to take other people’s stuff.” The criminal, the person who does not want to live according to God’s law, will take a six-gun to Pleasantville, line up the shopkeepers and bankers, and load up their sacks, ride out of town, and enjoy the goods until he needs a refill. Then he goes back to Pleasantville to pull another heist.

Government’s job is to supply disincentive to criminal violation, so they say, “Mr. Capone, we don’t like the way you ride into town and take other people’s stuff, so we’re going to send the G-men after you. We will catch you and won’t let you do it anymore.” Everybody says, “This is great. The disorder is under control.” Now there are G-men everywhere. But when the law arrives and is effective, the G-men don’t have anything to do. They need to justify their jobs, so they find other ways to be useful. They may say, “We’ll go into surveillance and watch everybody.” Maybe they run sting operations, try to prevent crime by infiltrating, or find another enemy. So mission creep can happen. So they decide to monitor everybody and find a crime in everyone. With ammunition against everyone, the G-men can be persuaded to look the other way for a little money on the side. The people can keep doing business, but now there’s both crime and corruption.

So we set up a court to judge the G-men. The courts are good, but they get corrupted too by payoffs for judgments. So we need a government that passes laws, and special agencies to watch the agencies. But that doesn’t solve the problem because crime and corruption never end until our hearts are transformed.

The natural human tendency is toward sloth and greed (exerting energy is painful, and excess energy is desirable). This internal drive leads people to do as little work as possible and be paid as much as possible. We step into criminality when we stop working and start taking other people’s stuff, and when we stop controlling our appetites and use other people’s bodies to satisfy our hungers. Most of us don’t cross the line of theft, murder, lies, and adultery, but the temptation is there, and most feel the pull, even if most don’t act on it.

And while most of us wouldn’t act on our desire to take other people’s stuff, most of us will vote for the project that benefits me and costs others. We have little compunction against using the strong arm of government as our agent of theft, taking money from other people to pay for our stuff. We want the government to provide Social Security, Welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, and pave good roads. But the government has no money other than what it takes from people. It supposedly invests your money so you will have money to retire on and pay for healthcare. But that pretense does not reflect reality.

I have met people who actually believe there is a Social Security Trust Fund. The government perpetuates the deception by saying that the Trust Fund will be out of money in X years, when there is no fund to run out of. The government doesn’t invest money to get a return. The money is not held in an account for your entire life and then returned to you with interest. The money that we give for Social Security is used to pay other people’s Social Security. If we take more out than we put in, then we are taking other people’s money. At the beginning of Social Security, everyone paid, and a few people received. At some point, the amount people paid in equaled the amount they drew out on average. Regardless, no account stores the money we paid in for later withdrawal. Social Security is a transfer payment: one person is working to pay for another person’s expenditures. In effect, we are participating in the government’s theft from other people to pay for our retirement. Those who want to keep Social Security want to keep the cycle of theft going. It’s dishonest.

If we framed Social Security as charity and made contributions voluntary, that would be honest. Giving voluntarily to support the poor retired allows us to rightly feel virtuous. Giving to widows and orphans is a Biblical mandate. Likewise, we could feel the weight of spending our free money on pleasure and survival throughout our lives.

As a halfway measure that would solve the philosophical-economic conundrum of government investing in the private sector economy and choosing winners and losers, we could do something else. We currently let the government deposit our Social Security dollars into the general fund, pay Social Security recipients from the general fund, and spend the extra on various government programs. If we want to keep the Social Security system in place, then we could continue depositing the same amount as we currently pay, but instead of going to the general fund, we put that money into a pension fund that each taxpayer/Social Security participant and the Social Security Administration pension fund managers choose to invest in. Of course, it could be directed to a government-favored investment, but this is an opportunity for people to get educated, support new industries and technologies, and invest in their retirement while also supporting the causes they believe in. This proposal has potential for abuse, misdirection of the economy, and choosing winners in the industrial world, but that is something we have to grow up to do.  The alternative is being children who have taken no responsibility for their survival and support, and leaving an inheritance to their children’s children.

Medicare is not quite as big a fraud as Social Security, because, to an extent, it is like insurance; we pay a certain amount per year for medical coverage. If we get sick, then the government/Medicare/nation-wide-government sponsored insurance company pays for our medical care. This is more in the realm of a government takeover of medicine, so it’s more properly called socialized medicine. It is not fully single-payer, but the difference between our system and single-payer/government-run medicine is almost indistinguishable.

On the other hand, Medicare/Medicaid is the same kind of investment in the private sector that chooses winners and losers, that we were worried about in the Social Security scenario. In Medicare, the healthcare dollars we spend have only allopathic options. Advocacy/direction toward real healthcare that supports healthy living, lifestyle, and exercise is almost non-existent in the Medicare/Medicaid system. The money we put into these systems should go into a Medical Savings account instead of the general Medicare fund. The same principles of self-directed investment should apply as for Social Security.  If a person does not work and deposits nothing into their MSA, and they need medical care, then this should be the domain of the private sector and should be supported by charity. People who care about people should give to support the people they care about.

My point is that we vote for people who promise to direct government money to their district for public works, regulations, and business contracts.  We vote for the robbers we like, so we don’t have to do the dirty work of riding into Pleasantville and holding up the stagecoach.

ISAK: So we don’t have to rob anyone ourselves.

THOMAS: We say, “Government, rob them for us, so we can get what we want/need without working so hard.” Every arrangement ends up with a point of corruption. The trouble is, we don’t know where that point is. We say we want a government, but not too big. We want police, but we don’t want them getting corrupt and charging us for things they should be doing anyway.

Then the politicians say, “If we’re going to regulate you the way you like, you’ll have to pay for our campaigns so people vote for us.”  Or “Send us campaign contributions, and we won’t regulate your business.” So business gets overlooked because it paid not to be regulated, and we call the payoff a campaign contribution. Democracy itself gets corrupted by campaigns. We try to pass laws, but we leave big loopholes: “Everybody has to report everything, except the people with lots of money. They can have super PACs and give huge amounts. Anybody small will be monitored and regulated.” In a corruptocracy, you have to buy access to a politician, and you have to buy the politician.

Everybody needs to survive. To survive, people work, take charity, or steal. Everybody either works for what they have, steals what they need, or has someone else take things for them. People who work are universally subject to the government stealing their stuff (in the form of taxes) and giving it to people who aren’t working. This should be called charity, but instead it is theft of stuff from one person and giving it to others without consent.

Corruption is officials/representatives/executives/judges, etc., selectively enforcing the law for personal benefit. In America, we don’t allow corruption openly. (Note: payoffs for selective enforcement are a normal business expectation in other countries) Honest men pass laws, judge against, and prosecute corruption, but the same government committing it is also tasked with regulating the government that bends the law. Such self-regulatory efforts are ineffective. Laws defining corruption and prescribing prosecution by special prosecutors are ineffective because the “independent” enforcer is subject to corruption. Laws are ineffective barriers to a heart committed to rebellion against the law.

The problem is that everyone wants free stuff because getting stuff requires effort, and the human frame is governed by animal instincts to conserve energy. For those undisciplined in the ways of righteous ownership, everyone wants to get stuff with the least effort. Getting the other guy to pay for it, or taking his stuff after he makes, finds, or buys it, is the way of the animal inside us all.

Another principle is that humans desire security. This means getting and keeping more females to breed and multiply, more territory to graze, and more herds to hunt. Survival is more secure with more resources. In the modern context, the human drive for security shows up as greed, wanting more women, cars, property, and money. The human drive for security, comfort, and luxury drives men to create bigger businesses and the associated power, fame, and sensory stimulation. Pursuing this passion can concentrate the production of goods and services. This concentration can dominate the market, allowing one producer or coordinated group to set market prices for products and labor.

A single dominant business is not inherently bad and should not be eliminated reflexively. But when one player becomes dominant in a space, it can distort product and labor prices, which a single person, business (monopoly), or allied industry (cartel) can set. In a free market, competitors can enter and challenge the captain of industry/monopoly/cartel. But high entry costs and the monopoly’s ability to sustain losses to eliminate competition make overthrowing the monopoly impractical. This has led to the belief that the government needs to intervene to break up dominant businesses.

So the problem is sloth and greed. Instead of saying, “I’ll work hard for my money and get what I need,” people try to have everything and do whatever they can to get more. When Rockefeller was asked how much is enough, he said—

ISAK: Just a little more.

THOMAS: Just a little more. There’s no end. Proverbs talks about things that are never satisfied, like the fire that never says “enough.” Greed is one of them. There’s no top to it. You can’t have enough power. You can’t have enough money. If you’re into destruction, it never ends either. Jim Morrison captured the essence of the eternal hunt for sensory satisfaction when he sang about looking for the next whiskey bar, and the next girl, and if not, we will die. There’s never an end to the hunt or enough.

ISAK: That’s how it feels sometimes. If I don’t find it, I might as well be roadkill.

Every remedy for human wrongdoing that depends only on threat or exercise of force is subject to corruption. The heart desires more, and the heart of one who regulates desires more; the people who hold the power have the same hearts as the people they are supposed to restrain. We hire the sheriff to stop the robber, and the sheriff learns to take a cut. We appoint a judge to watch the sheriff, and the judge can be bought. We elect a legislature to write laws for the judge, and the legislature sells its votes for campaign contributions. The ancient Roman poet Juvenal asked the question two thousand years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guards themselves? Every new guard is a man, and every man desires more; without an internal governor, corruption has no end.

That is not an argument against government. Everybody still wants good roads, and we all want someone to stop the man with the six-gun that came to take your property or life. But this limitation argues that government cannot cure the disease. At best it can contain the symptoms. That is the same point I made about chemotherapy in Chapter 3. A central remedy strong enough to stop every robber is strong enough to become the biggest robber of all.

Notice, too, where the corruption actually starts. It doesn’t start with the G-men who were bought. It starts with human nature: wanting other people’s stuff without paying for it. So, we who vote for “the robbers we like.” We want the government to take money from our neighbors, and then give it to us in the form of welfare and good roads in our area. This is the same heart as the man who rides into Pleasantville with a pistol. The man who votes for his own benefit has only found a more respectable way to rob his neighbor. Rockefeller’s “just a little more” is not the sin of one rich man. It lives in every citizen who votes himself his neighbor’s property, in every contractor who pads a bill, and in every official who looks the other way for a price. We complain that Washington is corrupt, but Washington is made of people like us. A bought government is the symptom. The disease is people who can be bought.

The Bible names the root. Sloth and greed: the unwillingness to work for what one needs, and the residual restlessness when one’s needs are met. They are the two appetites behind every drama in the Pleasantville story. And Proverbs names what makes them so dangerous: they are never satisfied. Fire never says, “It is enough.” A hunger that has no natural end can only be stopped by a decision. Somebody has to say “enough.” Laws can provide a penalty, a consequence for taking other people’s stuff, but we have to regulate the fire that never stops with just saying no.

That leaves only two ways to govern a people. The first is from the outside: more guards, more laws, more agencies watching the agencies, in an endless string of watchers. That is where we have been heading for a century, and it ends where Samuel warned Israel it would end, with a government that takes a tenth of everything and then more. The second is from the inside: a people who restrain themselves, who can hear a neighbor say, “You’re getting out of line,” and answer, “You’re right,” and who need only a small government because citizens mostly govern themselves.

The second way is difficult, but it is the only way that can work in the long term. That is why the American founders said our form of government was suitable only for a moral and religious people. The solution requires knowing the rules, knowing when to apply them, and keeping them. That is where Isak and I turned next.

Notes

The answer “Just a little more” is usually attributed to John D. Rockefeller.

Proverbs 30:15–16 lists the things that “are never satisfied,” including “the fire that saith not, It is enough.”

The whiskey-bar song is “Alabama Song,” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1927) and recorded by The Doors (1967).

Juvenal, Satires VI, 347–348.

1 Samuel 8:15–17 (the king will take “the tenth”).

Chapter 6 — The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You

Isak described the hunger that is never satisfied as: the next whiskey bar, the next thrill, and “just a little more.” This is where value discrimination comes in. What is good and valuable in the short and long term, and what are the consequences? This question intersects with meaning and purpose.

THOMAS: It isn’t what or how much we want that leaves us without peace and satisfaction; it’s that those hungers have no end. That’s what the question of ideology and values implies: that rules and standards exist for how to live right. If society has no rules for living right, and no one holds their brothers to them when no one is watching, people will see a chance to take a little more than they earned.

Everyone should watch out for everyone as though they were a brother. Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And the answer is yes, you are. You watch out for yourself, and you watch out for your brother. If your brother says, “You’re getting out of line,” you say, “Really? Am I? I’ll have to look at that.” Then respond truthfully after introspection: “Yes, you’re right,” and stop it. It’s reminiscent of Archie Bunker telling Edith, “Stifle yourself.” At some point you have to say no. That’s the Nancy Reagan mantra: “Just say no.” Say no to greed. Say no to theft. And say yes to working with a servant’s heart, loving your country to the extent of the Godliness that it is, and the Godliness that it could be.

So the rule that is the moral equivalent of the physics is this. Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. And “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you.” Love God, love your neighbor, love yourself. How do you love as He loved you? That calibrates our love. We know what love looks like, because “love as I have loved you” really means “What would Jesus do?”‘

People thought that slogan was trite, but it was the truth. It’s really the only thing we needed to know. We take “What would Jesus do?” into every part of life, and we live it. That’s how it should be done in government. It should be done that way in business, religion, relationships, work, raising children, and in honoring our parents.

You asked me the other day, “Can you have too much Christian nationalism?” The answer is no, because Christian nationalism has a definition. If you’re living the Witch Trial way, Protestant vs. Catholic war way, the Inquisition way, the Dillinger–Capone way, the Carnegie–Rockefeller–Mellon-Morgan way, the KKK/Jim Crow/Dred Scott way, you’re not doing Christian nationalism. You’re doing captain-of-industry-ism. You’re doing monopolism, cartelism, communism, authoritarianism. You’re doing the religious zealotry of The Handmaid’s Tale, Jonestown, and The Scarlet Letter. There truly are many perversions of Christianity justified by proof-texted verses. But the whole of the Bible, the general principles of Christianity, the life of Christ, the person and heart of Christ, the being and way of Christ lived as an ordinary citizen, businessman, priest, warrior, king, and judge, is incompatible with the Christian nationalism of a nation that is actually Christian. If it’s anything else, then it may be nationalism, but it’s not Christian. I may be Christian in name, and people may be using the Bible as their justification, but saying it’s Christian doesn’t make it so. God judges the heart.

ISAK: I think that’s the worry behind the whole Christian-nationalist debate: the Handmaid’s Tale scenario. I know people who are really concerned about it. What if women’s rights are taken away? Any number of horrible things could come from a group gaining power and deciding, “This is the way things are.”

Ideally, I think the same as you. Acting as Christ wants you to act, “What would Jesus do?”, is the best way to actually meet people, to know who they are, and to know your role in your community. The cartels and the captains of industry are not making a real service connection between people. But there probably are people who believe the Handmaid’s Tale image of religion as authoritarian and suppressive. I know the story is a caricature. But how would it play out? What does it look like when it’s done out of love, not out of control?

THOMAS: As Christians, we honor the principle of non-coercion and free will in matters of belief, thoughts, and inner life. This principle should apply universally and dictate that people change voluntarily because their minds and hearts have changed. This principle allows legal and physical restraint for criminal violations of person and property. Behavior that is non-violative should not be regulated by state mandate and force.

It is improper, and impossible, to force others to manifest the fruit of the Spirit in their inner life. This is the realm of encouragement, teaching, modeling, and convincing by logic and evidence to adopt a behavior. The deeper work uses the same tools to persuade conscious, positive, willful adoption of a new inner life. The government, church, and teacher can’t force it. Threats of force and punishment can force outward behavior. The outward expression of the fruits of the Spirit can be faked, but the inner life cannot be. To some extent, human intention, desire, will, and action can accomplish that transformation and make changes in that direction. Making an intentional commitment to move toward that new inner state is helpful. Using reinforcing self-talk and applauding the new inner reactive habit goes in the right direction. In addition, a change of the inner man by grace, by a literal miracle, is worthy of prayer, hope, faith, and pursuit. Ultimately, grace is unmerited, and it cannot be forced, but personal effort to move in the direction of the new man (expressing the fruits of the spirit) may be given.

Thus, there are two domains: the outer behavior and the inner thought life. Outer behavior can be coerced, but the inner cannot. Mind control/brainwashing/dis-information are efforts to control this inner life externally, but such efforts are fundamentally violative, as they contradict the intent and purpose of God’s creation, which is the expression of love for God from free will.

Choosing to change one’s inner life (reactions, thought patterns, emotional responses) is a crucial step in the right direction, and it will have varying degrees of success. Essentially all such efforts are a form of mind control, and if chosen freely, they are laudable and good if they move toward God’s perfect pattern of loving as Christ loved. Some may receive the transformation of the inner man as a miracle. But others suffer as Paul experienced, with a thorn in the flesh, continuing to struggle against the temptation of the flesh. Such patient endurance results in character, which has a reward. The transformation of the heart, without temptation to return, cannot be expected from a commitment to Christ as Lord, but He has promised His companionship in the trial.

The final step is establishing a relationship with Christ, following the pattern prescribed in the Gospels. Christ invited us to follow Him and His way and be reborn. The specifics of what happens when we are “reborn” are the fruits of the Spirit. The fruits mature internally and are exhibited externally. As many have testified, some are no longer tempted, but others now have a conscience and are tempted but must exercise the character to resist. Either way, the goal is transformation through the will and decision to follow in Christ’s steps. The one thing it is not is the forced route, the Inquisition, and all the other perversions of imposing Christian belief or profession on others. These are all the opposite of the opportunity God gave us and his intention for creating us. He gave us the opportunity to choose His way or follow our own path, and to choose to love Him from our hearts and free will. He gave us free choice and asked us to choose to “Love as I have loved you.”

The Inquisition and Cults use the language of God, holiness, the Bible, and Christ’s name, but hidden inside it is control. It can look like this: “We as a group are all going to love and serve God according to our own revelation of what is true.” Such groups use various enforcement methods: separation through distinctive dress and vocabulary; rituals and practices to please God; separation from close association with anyone outside the group; and enforcement of orthodoxy by expelling people for various infractions or beliefs; harsh punishment for sexual, dietary, speech, or behavioral violations of the code. That’s the authoritarian side of religion that people are worried about. It’s also the version we’re told about in other countries that live under Sharia law, which prescribes practices for many of life’s daily activities. When there are so many prescriptions for what you must do to please God, life doesn’t feel free.

The same evil drives each one. The man who claims to be serving the God of the Bible and tortures people who believe differently has committed the same evil as the man who says, “Give your life for this cause, and you’ll have seventy-two virgins.”

The question is how to influence the world for Christ to bring about a holy society. I think the most effective witness is every individual affecting his circle of influence with his life and his words. Each of us witnesses to God’s standard through how we live. We all desire the Kingdom of Heaven to come on earth—for life to just be good. But much of that depends on how I treat you, and you treat me. Thus, the real challenge is knowing how to act, and acting it, and having everyone else act it out too. That’s when the Kingdom of Heaven has come on Earth. We are promised a dramatic return of Christ with angels and power; all things will be set right, and the New Jerusalem will descend, but that’s a distant and abstract hope we cannot depend on to rescue us from our daily struggles with character and relationship. We cannot wait to be happy until the end times are fulfilled. The real question is: what can we do today?

Serving our fellow man by teaching and demonstrating the goodness of life in the freedom in Christ is the way witnessing and governance should be. The way of Christ is not to control anybody to be holy or force anybody to submit.  Every person is a one-man evangelical witness for the goodness of Christ’s way. Witnessing should demonstrate living in His way. We should bear good fruit daily. It should be pleasant, and people should want it because it looks good and tastes sweet.

I don’t think we should apologize for promoting Christian nationalism in the way we are defining it. People can use a good, true, and right way, cause, and principle in the wrong way. There have been groups who call themselves Christian nationalists who really are racists. I reject that version of Christian nationalism completely.

ISAK: The country needs a unity of mind. Under the Constitution, we’re all supposed to share an agreement, a common belief. “Borders, language, and culture” is the slogan that Michael Savage made popular. Those are elements that make a country a country: a people with faith in something, a shared mission. We probably don’t have much national pride right now because we lack a shared mission. Everybody has their own, and too many perspectives are tearing us apart.

Isak asked two important questions at the start of our conversation: 1) What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law? 2) And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?

Let me begin by describing the fear that people feel.

The fear is justified by history

Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good. In nature, God decides which arrangements of matter endure, and that is safe because He is good. In politics, men decide, and the history of men deciding what to preserve and what to destroy is largely the history of political abuse.

It is worse than that. The juries in the American South that acquitted lynchers for the better part of a century were not made up of atheists. Nearly every man on them was a professing, churchgoing Christian. Many of them believed they were defending a Christian social order. If I had stood at the courthouse door with a test that asked, “Do you hold the Bible as your moral standard?” every one of them would have said yes, and every one of them would have been seated.

So the problem in those courtrooms was not the absence of the Bible. It was a people who held the Bible and read it in a way that permitted contempt for their neighbor. Profession is not discernment. Christ said so Himself: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven,” and “By their fruits ye shall know them.” A test can examine what a man professes. It cannot examine his fruit, and only God examines his heart.

That means no safeguard works by checking labels. Any answer that amounts to “Put Christians in charge and trust them” is not an answer. It is exactly what the Inquisition’s defenders said.

So here is what I actually propose. Safeguards exist at four levels: in the definition of the faith itself, in the limits on what the state may use its sword for, in the structure of the government, and in the character of the people who lead it. None of them is sufficient alone. And all of them together can still fail. I will come to that at the end.

The first safeguard: the faith defines itself by its fruit, and its fruit cannot be coerced

Who decides what Christianity done right is? The first answer is that Christ already decided it, and He did not leave it vague. “As I have loved you.” That is the calibration. We know what the love looks like because we have seen how He loved. He did not conscript anyone. He healed, He taught, He rebuked, He invited, and when the rich young ruler walked away, He let him go. He told Peter to put away his sword.

So the test of whether something done in Christ’s name is Christian is not whether the people doing it say so. The test is whether it looks like what He did. And the simplest form of that test, for anything done in public life, is this: Would the neighbor on the receiving end of this act feel loved by it? Not flattered, not indulged, not necessarily pleased, because correction is not always pleasant. But loved: treated as a child of God whose good is being sought.

A lynching fails that test instantly. So does the Inquisition. So do forced conversion, forced baptism, and the burning of heretics. None of these was Christian nationalism done badly. They were not Christian at all. They were the captain-of-industry spirit, the cartel spirit, the will to dominate, wearing the church’s clothes.

Coercion is ruled out for a deeper reason: God gave man free choice. He didn’t have to. He could have made beings that obeyed Him automatically, like a Conscious Point obeying its rules. He made us able to refuse Him, because love that cannot refuse is not a choice. A forced conversion is no conversion. A man who repents because there is a gun at his back has not repented; he has only been frightened. So a government that tries to compel faith works against the purpose of God’s creation of man. The brake on government coercion is written into the center of the revelation of God’s intent for man’s existence.

Not every creed has that brake. A creed whose founding texts command conquest has no such brake. The moderates who ignore or contextualize these commands are not a threat. Zealots faithful to the literal texts can move the culture of the entire religion if the moderates are not vocally/actively opposing their message.

A creed whose founding text tells its followers to overcome evil with good, to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, and to forgive seventy times seven has a brake written into its first principles. When its followers become persecutors, they have to disobey their own scripture to do it. That is why the right response to factions/sects/movements violating Christian principles in the name of Christ is not less Christianity, but more of the whole-Bible understanding of the general principles of Christianity. And the first people who should stand up and say, “That is not Christ,” are Christians.

The same text answers Isak’s worry about the people who want “all the black and brown people out.” God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek.” A nationalism of blood is not Christian nationalism. It is the idolatry of the tribe, the very thing the gospel came to break down. I return to it in Chapter 12.

The second safeguard: the sword has a limited job

The second answer is about what the State may do. The fear is that the state may do whatever its majority believes.

I have never argued that the government should prosecute every sin. Thomas Aquinas argued centuries ago that human law should not try to forbid every vice, because the attempt produces worse evils than it prevents. He was right. Most sin should be resolved by the sinner, his family, his church, his friends, and his God. Enforcing Godly character is not the business of the man with the badge.

But that does not mean the nation must be silent about sin, or the fruits of the Spirit. Naming a thing is different from punishing it. A nation, like a family, has standards of moral excellence which it aspires to, and it should teach and speak. It can name the opposite of those standards for what it is. It can say, in its laws, in its schools, and in the public speech of its leaders, that adultery, fornication, and every sexual practice outside the covenant of marriage fall short of what this nation holds as good and pleases God. The God of the Bible also condemns a long list of unregulated behavior, including drunkenness, greed, and breaking a child’s spirit. Officially naming sin is not persecution, nor is it establishing religion. It is telling the truth about missing the mark of Godly character. Practices are either good, morally neutral, or neither. When public and private leadership, business, media, art, and sports take a stand against personal and public sin, the nation aligns its morality, character, and heart with God; such is required for His blessing. Naming sin is essential; Identification of the enemy is necessary before he can be defeated.

The nation does not humiliate the sinner. Jesus did not condemn the woman caught in adultery; He said, “Go and sin no more.” A nation that loves as Christ loves does not put the adulterer in the stocks or sew a scarlet letter on her coat. The purpose is not punishment but rehabilitation. The burden of that work starts in the home and is reinforced by society. The partners in personal and national holiness are the family, the community, the counselor, and the church. In Chapter 10, I describe how a nation could support the nation turning toward God and holiness without becoming the thing that Isak fears.

So here is where the State draws the sword.

First, the state punishes the sins that make victims: murder, rape, the abuse of children, theft, fraud, violence. The things that take my property or hurt my person. On these, the atheist and the priest agree. And I count among the victims the one whose voice is least heard: the child in the womb. Abortion falls on the side of violence. It is not a private sin between consenting adults. It is not the right of a woman to do with her body as she wants. There is a third person in the room, and his life is taken. I make that argument in full in Chapter 18.

Second, the state never compels a man to take part in what he believes is sin. A baker should not be forced to bake and decorate the homosexual couple’s wedding cake; a photographer should not be forced to photograph the wedding. When the state punishes a man for declining, the State is a de facto enforcer of a secular religious creed. When a man does not honor another man’s religious creed, he does not violate the other man’s person or property. The homosexual might believe that everyone should honor his ritual of “marriage.” But freedom of thought and belief (inner qualities not subject to observation or enforcement by man) are primary abilities and attributes that God allows. The State should not enforce observance, honoring, or participation in the beliefs, rituals, speech, or sacraments of a man of another faith. Disruptive behavior that interferes with a man’s lawful practice of his rituals, beliefs, sacraments, or speech should be treated as a crime against person or property if such interference is judged unlawful conduct, without knowledge or consideration of the sacramental nature of the behavior.

Third, the state judges men by their actions, never by their doctrine. A man’s view of baptism, of the end times, of which day is the Sabbath, whether he is Catholic or Baptist or neither, none of it should ever carry the force of law. Christians imposing doctrine on one another is as much a sign of immaturity as anything the secularists do. It is also what the Founders feared, and it was the subject of Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. The Association feared the government would intervene in their religious practices. To this, Jefferson replied that a high wall of separation existed between church and State; thus, the Association need not worry about the state’s interference. The modern invocation of Separation of Church and state is not what Jefferson meant. The American founding’s caution about religion was not mainly unbelievers against believers. It was Christians afraid of one another. Baptists and Quakers had been jailed by Christian magistrates, and they were among those who fought hardest for the separation of church and state.

Fourth, speech is free, and the state may restrict it only where it becomes an act in embryo: a threat, an incitement, a fraud. A man advocating a way of life I think is wrong is not threatening me. He is left alone.

So the answer to “Who decides what Christianity done right is?” has a second part. Where Christians disagree on doctrine, the state is silent. Where they agree, on the moral law, on the commandments and the two great commandments on which they hang, the nation has a conscience. That is what John Adams meant when he wrote to Jefferson that independence had been won on “the general principles of Christianity.” A Baptist and a Catholic can both stand under that. They cannot both stand under each other’s catechism, and the state should never ask them to. The next chapter explains how this squares with the First Amendment.

The third safeguard: power is broken into pieces and handed to neighbors

The third answer is structural, and here the American founding did something remarkable. It did not trust anyone with all of the power: not the executive, not the legislature, not the courts, not the majority.

In nature, one Being decides which arrangements endure, and that works because He knows everything and is wholly good. No man is either. So in politics, many hands must decide, and none can do it alone. The Constitution divides power among three branches that check each other. It divides it again between the nation and the states. It reserves a list of rights that no majority can vote away without enormous effort. And it makes the Constitution itself very hard to change: two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. That high barrier is itself a safeguard. You do not write something into a nation’s foundation unless nearly everyone agrees. It means that the amendment I have argued for, declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible, will almost certainly not pass in my lifetime, barring a sovereign act of God. The same barrier that keeps my amendment honoring the God of the Bible out keeps out the amendments of people who would establish Political Correctness into the foundation of the nation.

Federalism is the second structural safeguard. When power sits mostly with the states and counties, a failure in one place does not become a failure everywhere. A man who opposes the moral code of one state’s laws can move to another. And when a community proves unfit to govern itself in some matter, the discipline can be referred to a superior authority for adjudication. The county’s authority can pass up to the state, or the state’s to the nation, for as long as the failure lasts. When Southern juries would not convict lynchers, the nation was right to bring those cases into federal court. That was a wider community’s conscience overruling a narrower one. My objection is only that this judicial/cultural violation made jury nullification its casualty. The remedy for the injustice was permanent and universal. A father who takes the car keys from the son who drove recklessly is right. A father who never gives the keys back to any of his children is no longer disciplining; he is withholding from them the privileges and responsibilities of mature, trustworthy adulthood after they have learned their lesson.

The jury is the third structural safeguard. Every other check on the government runs through the government. Courts review legislatures, legislatures fund courts, the executive appoints judges. The jury is the one place where ordinary neighbors sit in judgment of their neighbor according to the principles of the law, and where their acquittal cannot be appealed. But the jury has a more fundamental duty than judging the facts; it must be able to judge the law. If a legislature passed an unjust law, twelve citizens could still look at the man in the dock and say, “This law, applied to this man, is wrong, and we will not be the instrument of judging his guilt nor imposing its penalties.” John Adams wrote that it was not only the juror’s right but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, even in direct opposition to the court’s direction.

That power still exists. No juror can be punished for an acquittal. What has been taken away is the jury’s knowledge of it. Since Sparf v. United States in 1895, judges have not been required to tell juries they hold it, and a prospective juror who says honestly that he would use it is struck from the panel. I have friends who told the truth in jury selection and were sent home for it. So we are teaching our citizens that they may judge the law only if they hide that they would. I would restore the instruction and stop punishing candor. Jury nullification can be, and has been, abused, as it was in the South. The alternative is a people with no direct influence on the law they must judge by and enforce.

The last structural safeguard is the vote. I propose that the vote should be exercised not only on election day, but every day. I am building a tool to make participatory democracy a reality. The concept rests on a simple idea: every citizen informed, every citizen voting on every issue, and every citizen putting his argument into the public conversation with his name attached. Such votes cast on developing policy are not binding; rather, they give every interested American the opportunity to shape policy at every stage, from infancy to maturity. Opinion, openly argued, produces consensus because at some level, every man knows the truth. The truth is stubborn; it never changes, and it resonates with the heart. A government that knows exactly what its people think, and why, may be influenced by reason, the spectrum of thought, and the outliers of opinion. A State under constant surveillance by an active army of citizens scrutinizing bills, judicial acts, and administrative action will not fall as easily into corruption, incompetence, and tyranny.

The fourth safeguard: leaders who can be corrected

The fourth answer concerns the men who lead. A leader who will not admit error cannot be corrected. So the way a Christian holds public power is itself a safeguard, or its absence a danger.

I have tried to practice what I am describing. I take positions, give my reasons, and hold each position open to a better argument. I cannot claim to speak for the Lord in every position; but I openly admit that I am trying to. That admission is not modesty for its own sake. It is structural. The man who claims to be God’s mouthpiece has put himself beyond correction, and the history of religious tyranny is largely the history of such men.

That is also why I describe my candidacy for president as a witness candidacy. I am not seeking power. I accept no donations. I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win, and otherwise to vote for the best man on the ballot. That is not false humility. It is the only honest position for a man whose platform is attempting to convert a nation’s heart to the way of the Lord. My campaign platform and strategy is to persuade men that the yoke of Christ on the hearts of every soul in the nation is the most effective intervention to solve our social, moral, and economic problems. The yoke I am offering is offered the way Christ offered His: “Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” It is an argument and an invitation.

When all the safeguards fail

Being real, all safeguards can fail. They failed in the lynching South. The courts were there, the Constitution was there, the jury was there, the churches were there, and still innocent men died, and their killers walked free. Structure did not save them, because structure is only as good as the people who operate it.

So the final safeguard is not laws, courts, or a government department. It is the hearts of the people. The jury box, the courthouse, the legislature, and the amendment are all downstream of what a nation actually loves. A people whose hearts are right will operate even a poor structure justly, and a people whose hearts are wrong will corrupt the best structure. That is why the work I am calling for is not mainly political. It is the formation of men, by fathers, churches, teachers, and neighbors, one heart at a time. The government cannot do that work alone. Government can be a pillar of support for people raising their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, for men willing to teach, preach, counsel, and coach the way of Christ in their work, home, and communities. The bottom line is that every man must lead in the salvation and sanctification of the people. Government can support the army’s intervention and coach, encourage, and lead men toward holiness in the fullness of their lives.

When a nation will not listen to its prophets, God corrects it through its history. Every nation that walked the road of cruelty in His name eventually learned, at great cost, what it would not learn by persuasion. Spain learned it. The American South learned it. That is not a comfort, but it is a last-resort safeguard.

So who decides what Christianity done right is? Christ decided it, and showed us. The Bible states it, and every citizen must read it and judge for himself, with the humility to be corrected by his neighbors and by the facts. The nation names what falls short of it, and helps those who fall short to rise. The state punishes only the sins that make victims. Persuasion and example carry the rest. And the people who most need to say “That is not Christ” when Christians do evil are Christians.

That is the only Christian nationalism I have ever meant. If it becomes anything else, it has stopped being what I am describing.

Notes

Genesis 4:9; John 13:34; Matthew 7:16, 21; Matthew 19:16–22 (the rich young ruler); John 18:11; Romans 12:21; Matthew 5:44; Matthew 18:22; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Matthew 11:29–30.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 96, a. 2.

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813 (“the general Principles of Christianity”). Adams’s statement on the juror’s duty is from his diary, February 12, 1771.

Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51 (1895).

The amendment process: U.S. Constitution, Article V.

Chapter 7 — Separation of State and Truth: The Establishment Clause

Near the end of our conversation, Isak and I came back to the objection that hangs over everything in this book. It is the first thing most people will say, and many of them will say it instead of reading any further.

THOMAS: “There are behaviors that God doesn’t like.” You may ask, “How do we know?” To which I reply, “It says so in the Bible.” The immediate response is, “You’re mixing church and state.” To which I reply, “No, by declaring the Bible true, and the standard of morality, the State is not saying you must practice a religion. It is saying that the Bible contains truths which are an absolute moral standard upon which the nation is declaring to be the true, right, and the best standard of human conduct.”

ISAK: It sounds like we are separating the state from truth. What do you have when that happens?

THOMAS: Separation of state and truth.

ISAK: That’s what we’ve been heading toward. It seems so simple when it’s laid out that way. There’s a way of life, and there’s something that protects it, so citizens can keep living it. Then it gets twisted, so that way of life can’t be carried out in government anymore. It’s no longer “In God we trust.” It’s “God, we’ll put You over there.”

Every proposal in this book will meet the same reflexive answer: separation of church and state. The phrase is used less as an argument than as a door slammed shut. Say that the nation should name adultery as falling short of its moral standard, and someone will say, “Separation of church and state.” Say that abortion takes a human life, and the answer is the same. Say that a president should pray in public, or that a law should rest on the moral law of the Bible, and the phrase comes back like a reflex. The whole program of this book can be dismissed with five words, and most people who say them believe they are quoting the Constitution.

They aren’t. So before going further, I want to look at what the Constitution actually says, what the men who wrote it actually did, and what a right relationship between church and state actually requires. I believe that separating church and state, properly understood, is right. What I reject is the separation of state and truth.

What the text says

The religion clauses of the First Amendment are sixteen words long: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

There are two clauses there. The first, the Establishment Clause, forbids Congress from establishing a religion: creating a national church, as England did with the Church of England, supported by taxes, with its clergy appointed by the government and its doctrine enforced by law. The second, the Free Exercise Clause, forbids Congress from prohibiting people from practicing their faith.

The phrase “separation of church and state” appears in neither clause nor anywhere else in the Constitution. It comes from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Baptist association of Danbury, Connecticut. The Danbury Baptists were a religious minority in a state that still had an established church, and they worried about their liberty. Jefferson assured them that the First Amendment had built “a wall of separation between Church & State.” This wall protected the church from the government, not the government from God. The Baptists wanted to be left alone to worship. They were not asking the government to stop acknowledging God.

For nearly a century and a half, Jefferson’s phrase was a line in a letter. Then in 1947, in Everson v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court quoted it and declared that the wall “must be kept high and impregnable.” Oddly, the Court upheld the challenged state program, which reimbursed parents for busing their children to Catholic schools. But the phrase had now entered constitutional law, and over the following decades it grew. In 1962 and 1963, the Court removed official prayer and devotional Bible reading from public schools. In 1971, in Lemon v. Kurtzman, it announced a test under which a law could be struck down if its purpose was religious or if it “entangled” government with religion. For fifty years, that test was used to scrub religious expression from public life.

In 2022, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court abandoned the Lemon test. It held that the Establishment Clause must be read by “reference to historical practices and understandings,” that is, by what the men who wrote it actually meant and did. So the question of what they meant and did is not merely historical. It is now the law’s own test.

What the founders actually did

The Congress that wrote the First Amendment appointed paid chaplains to open its sessions with prayer, and it did so in the same months it was drafting the amendment. The House and Senate have had chaplains ever since.

That same Congress reenacted the Northwest Ordinance, which governed the western territories and declared, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

The day after the House approved the amendment’s final wording, it asked President Washington to proclaim a national day of thanksgiving and prayer. He did, calling on the nation to acknowledge “the providence of Almighty God,” to obey His will, and “humbly to implore His protection and favor.”

In his Farewell Address, Washington told the nation that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports,” and warned against supposing “that morality can be maintained without religion.”

John Adams wrote that the Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people,” and that “it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Several states kept established churches long after the First Amendment was ratified. Connecticut’s lasted until 1818 and Massachusetts’s until 1833. The First Amendment did not touch them, because it applied only to Congress. It forbade a national church, and it kept the federal government out of the states’ religious arrangements. Only in the twentieth century did the Court apply it to the states.

So the men who wrote the Establishment Clause did not think it required the government to be silent about God, or to legislate as though the moral law were unknown. They prayed in Congress. They proclaimed days of thanksgiving to God. They wrote that religion and morality were indispensable to the Republic. What they forbade was a national church: a single denomination given the government’s power and money, with its doctrine enforced by law. That is exactly the thing I, too, oppose.

Why the wall cannot be absolute

The modern idea of an absolute wall fails for a deeper reason, and it has nothing to do with history.

Every law is a moral statement. A law against theft says that taking your neighbor’s property is wrong. A law against fraud says that lying for gain is wrong. A minimum wage law says something about what a man’s work is owed. A law permitting abortion says something about who counts as a person. People say “You can’t legislate morality,” but legislating morality is all a legislature ever does. The only question is whose morality it will be.

And every morality rests on some account of what is ultimately true: of what man is, what he is for, and whether there is anyone above him to whom he answers. The secular state likes to present itself as neutral, standing above all such accounts. But a state that governs as though there were no God has not avoided answering the question. It has answered by a de facto declaration of its allegiance to a secular morality. But secularism is not the absence of a religion. Rather, it functions as one while alternately, passively and vehemently, refusing the fact of its religious form. It has its own account of ultimate reality, its own moral code, its own orthodoxies that may not be questioned, and, as I argue in Chapter 18, even its own sacrament. I describe this worldview in Chapter 16 as the worldview without a center. When the government supports that religion with public money, teaches it to children as the only acceptable view, and requires its practice as a condition of public life, it has established a religion, exactly as the First Amendment forbids. The wall meant to keep a church out of government has become the means of establishing one. The Supreme Court itself once listed secular humanism among the religions that do not teach belief in God.

There is also a deeper reason that the State should acknowledge God. That reason is in the picture of reality I hold: every thought, word, and deed is ultimately a relation between a soul and God, because everything that exists is held in being by Him. No secular corner of life is without God. So we cannot draw the line between church and state by sorting life into sacred and secular compartments. That line does not exist.

We must draw it on other grounds, and I think there is a clear, workable way to do so. Conduct between man and man falls under the state’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive. The relation between a man and God does not. The state may judge whether a man stole, lied, assaulted, or killed, even if he did it for religious reasons. The state may not judge what a man believes about God, how he worships, what he confesses about baptism or communion, or which church he attends, if any. That is the real separation. It is a division of jurisdiction, not a quarantine of truth.

What this means in practice

Here is what this book’s program asks for, and what it does not.

It does not ask for a national church. No denomination would be given the government’s authority. No church would be supported as the state’s church. No man would be required to attend worship, profess a creed, or be baptized. No doctrine on which Christians disagree would carry the force of law. The Catholic, the Baptist, the Orthodox believer, the Jew, the Muslim, and the unbeliever would all worship, or not worship, as their consciences direct.

It asks the nation to stop pretending that a nation’s legislation can be separated from its foundational moral standards, and to name those standards openly. It asks that the nation openly acknowledge God, as its founders did in Congress’s chaplains, in Washington’s proclamations, and in the words “In God We Trust.” It asks that the moral law on which Christians agree, the 10 Commandments and the Great Commandment to love God and neighbor as self, on which they hang, be recognized as the standard the nation aspires to. It asks that the nation openly name its standard of truth as the God of the Bible, and the person of Christ. It asks that leaders be free to pray in public and to quote the Bible when they reason about the common good, as leaders did for most of American history. And it asks that the state protect the victims of wrongs the moral law forbids, including the child in the womb.

None of that establishes a church. All of it separates church and state exactly where the founders separated them: the state holds no power over the soul’s relation to God, and the church holds no government office. It simply refuses to separate the state from truth.

Where free exercise ends

The second clause needs a word too, because the same absolutism has attached itself to it. Some people read the Free Exercise Clause to mean that anything done in the name of religion is immune from the government’s notice. That reading is like taking one verse of Scripture and applying it to every situation in life. “Turn the other cheek,” taken literally and universally, would mean that a man who breaks into your house and harms your family should be shown where the other children sleep. No one reads the Bible that way, and no one should read the Constitution that way either.

The state’s authority comes from God. “The powers that be are ordained of God,” Paul wrote. A state that is responsible for protecting its people is responsible for its own survival, and it cannot ignore a movement that intends to overthrow it simply because that movement calls itself a religion. When a religious body teaches its members to replace the Constitution with its own law, that teaching concerns conduct between man and man, and between man and the state. The state has jurisdiction to examine it, monitor it, and act against any crime committed in its name. I take this up in Chapter 14, where this tension is playing out in the battle for our culture’s standard of true morality.

The honest road

One more thing. I have argued elsewhere for an amendment to the Constitution declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible and to His moral law. I know that such an amendment would go further than anything the founders wrote. That is why I propose to reach it only through persuasion: through Article V, by persuading two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Not by appointing judges who will read it into the First Amendment, and not by any executive decree. If the American people will not choose it freely, it should not be imposed on them. I said in the last chapter that the high barrier to amending the Constitution is itself a safeguard. It protects the nation from my ideals of truth and plans of action as much as from anyone else.

So when someone says “separation of church and state” and expects the conversation to end, I want it to begin. I agree with separation of church and state to the extent of: no national church, no government over the soul, and no church wielding the government’s power. Such separation is right and proper. But separation of the state from truth is wrong. The Constitution does not require that the government must legislate as though God did not exist. The Establishment Clause also does not require legislation that accommodates contradictory religious and cultural standards. We live in reality, and if we ignore the fundamental cause-and-effect relationships that exist, we will suffer the consequences of opposing/violating/ignoring the natural laws of cause and effect. Such flexible, non-offensive, centerless morality is not what its authors practiced. A nation without a true/accurate/God’s-design/reality-reflecting moral standard in prosecuting violations of that standard will not support men living in harmony. Men instinctively, reflexively, and irrepressibly rise up against injustice. A nation whose standards/laws reflect a false god will be inherently unjust; men will rise up against men, and the nation will be torn apart by internal disunity.

Notes

U.S. Constitution, Amendment I. Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association, January 1, 1802.

Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), footnote 11, lists “Secular Humanism” among religions “which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God.”

Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962); Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971); Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. 507 (2022). On legislative chaplains, see Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983).

Northwest Ordinance (1787), Article 3, reenacted by the First Congress in 1789. George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation, October 3, 1789; Farewell Address, September 19, 1796. John Adams, letter to the Massachusetts militia, October 11, 1798.

Connecticut disestablished its church in 1818 and Massachusetts in 1833. The Establishment Clause was first applied against the states in Everson (1947).

Romans 13:1; Matthew 5:39.

The functional division (“conduct between man and man falls under the State’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive; the relation between a man and God does not”) is from Thomas’s September 2026 essay on the Burmawi interview.

Chapter 8 — Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality, the State, and the Economics of Enough

Isak had said that a country needs a shared mission, and that we no longer have one. I told him where I think the disagreement actually lies.

THOMAS: The place where all of this becomes really controversial is one area: sexuality. It really does come down to that. There isn’t much disagreement anywhere else.

We have the state, which makes laws about things that harm other people. You took my stuff; you hurt me. Property and person. As far as enforcement goes, that’s what the state is for. Then comes the question: Should the state concern itself with who I sleep with, and how? That’s where people say, “You’re pushing religion on us.” The answer is, yes, there are religious concepts here, but there are also social ones. If sex is violent, we say clearly that it isn’t allowed. But then there’s consensual sex. In any of its forms, is it the state’s business or not?

That’s exactly where you can tell whether a society is committed to living by the law of God. Up to that point, everybody agrees, from the atheist to the most devout priest. We don’t want people taking our things, and we don’t want people hurting us. Until we get to sexuality, there’s no disagreement. When we get there, people say, “My rights, my body. We agreed.” And you could make a case for that: laissez-faire, a boundary the state doesn’t cross.

Or we could say no. The family is the foundation of the state. If families don’t hold together because of all the kinds of sexuality that aren’t procreative, or that break up stable family life, then we’re looking at the foundation of society, and the state has reason to be concerned, because the common welfare falls apart without the family.

If babies come out at the end of a tube, as in Brave New World, and there’s no bonding, we’re all just feral cats. We’re all Alphas, Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, and we all fit in. The texture of life becomes a caricature. The world isn’t as warm or as meaningful. It’s just industrial, just functional, just convenient. Nothing means very much, and nothing costs very much. Sexuality is tied so deeply to meaning that if the state stays out and says everybody can do whatever he wants, then it’s really just “whatever.”

ISAK: Anything’s good.

THOMAS: It’s all good. Was it Cream or Blind Faith that did “Do What You Like”?

ISAK: Blind Faith. Ginger Baker.

THOMAS: That song is basically Aleister Crowley set to music: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” If sex had nothing to do with family, if it were just a matter of getting a thrill wherever you like and moving on, it would have no significance. It would be like an ice cream cone. You get a real thrill from an ice cream cone. And heroin is the ultimate ice cream cone. It’s an ice cream cone with a bad hangover, and you want another one very badly when you haven’t had one for a while.

ISAK: And eventually you can only eat ice cream, or you get sick.

THOMAS: That’s why drugs are regulated. People don’t control themselves well, and when they don’t, they don’t eat, they don’t work, and they take your things because they don’t have any. It all comes down to this: you have to act right. Otherwise somebody will come along and put his thumb on you, because you’re not putting your thumb on yourself. You’re not stifling yourself. You’re just doing what you like. And people don’t like that, because it interferes with their doing what they like in moderation.

People have to choose to regulate themselves. You can do what you like, but only up to a point. You can’t take it too far. You have to say, “This is enough.” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line was “Stay hungry.” But the real issue is greed: doing more than you need. There’s a Foreigner song with a line about never doing more than you really need. That was the key. But the song wasn’t really saying that. It was a double message. It was basically saying, “Do more than you need, because that’s where the real mojo is.”

ISAK: Do more than you need: drink too much, eat too much, have too much sex.

THOMAS: Too much. Shoot it, snort it, smoke it.

ISAK: So in this case it’s about personal temperance: a man sustaining himself without ridiculous consumption. If we had a culture where people weren’t overconsuming, it would change the economy. But it would also feel less cancerous than using things we don’t need, spending money we don’t need to spend, buying clothes we don’t need, and eating too much. What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich? Would we be spending money on things that actually matter? How much of the society we’re trying to protect is built on overindulgence, beyond sex and drugs?

And it’s interesting: “Don’t steal, don’t kill,” and then sexuality. I’ve heard people argue that everything people do is for sex. You get a job so you can make money, or you get a nice car so you can take girls out. We are driven. As you said, meaning and sexuality are intertwined, because we’re driven to keep the line going, to let whatever is in us continue past our death. Be fruitful and multiply. So it makes sense that we have the urges we have.

But is that the only meaning? I don’t think so. You can find so much gratitude, so much ability to appreciate life, that it doesn’t all come down to sex. But a lot of people do live that way. That’s what they live for, and they don’t know there’s anything beyond it. And the drugs just heighten the feeling. It’s a craving for the next dopamine hit. I think it’s the lazy side of us. You can’t commit to something, so you have the fling, never see the person again, and move on to the next one. You never learn to do the work of connection, of family, of taking on your responsibilities. You don’t grow, because you don’t have to. There’s a perfectly willing person over there, so you break a couple of hearts and keep going.

There can be selfishness in every good thing. You can pervert anything. So do the country’s problems come down to sexual immorality, aside from the stealing and the killing? Or is it greed?

THOMAS: No, that isn’t where it all breaks down, and not everything is about the rush of sex. But there’s nothing that isn’t related to sex, because without sex there would be nothing to relate to.

ISAK: True.

THOMAS: What comes out of sex is all the bondedness: overcoming hard times together, celebrating good times, raising children the right way, helping each other when one goes wrong and getting him back on track, and getting everybody else to do the same, so that it’s good for all of us because we’re all doing the right thing together.

When I asked whether sexuality should be the state’s business, I meant it in the sense I laid out in Chapter 6. The nation should name what falls short of its standard and strengthen the family that sexuality exists to build. It should not send the police into anyone’s bedroom. But Isak had asked a second question in the middle of this conversation, and I passed over it. It deserves an answer, because it is the question an economist would throw at everything I am saying.

He asked what would happen to the economy if overindulgence went away. If Americans stopped eating too much, drinking too much, buying clothes they don’t need, and spending money they don’t have, would we be rich? Or would the whole thing fall apart?

The objection: won’t the economy collapse?

Consumer spending is roughly two-thirds of the American economy. So the argument goes: if Americans stopped overconsuming, businesses would sell less and lay off workers, those workers would spend less, and the economy would spiral down. Economists even have a name for it: the paradox of thrift. What is prudent for one family, saving instead of spending, becomes harmful when everyone does it at once, because one man’s spending is another man’s income.

There is a real point in that. If every American stopped buying anything but necessities tomorrow morning, there would be a shock. Stores would close and people would lose their jobs. I won’t pretend otherwise.

But the argument has three weaknesses, and they are fatal to it.

The first is that money not spent doesn’t disappear. It is saved, and savings are what investment is built from. The dollar you don’t spend on a fourth pair of shoes goes into a bank, a business, a home, or a child’s education. It becomes a machine, a workshop, a house, a skilled worker. Consumption uses things up; investment builds the capacity to make more of them. The nations that rebuilt fastest after the Second World War, such as Germany and Japan, and later South Korea, did it with very high rates of saving. Their people put off consumption, and their savings built the factories.

The second is that the change I am talking about is not sudden. It is a change of culture, one heart and one household at a time, over a generation. An economy adjusts to that the way it adjusts to every other change in what people want. When people stopped buying typewriters, the economy didn’t collapse. It moved.

The third was put best by Adam Smith: what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If it is wise for your household to live within its means, avoid debt, save for the future, and not waste, it cannot be foolish for the nation your household belongs to. A nation is only its households added together.

Temperance moves money; it doesn’t destroy it

Temperance doesn’t mean people stop spending. It means they spend differently. The ice cream becomes vegetables. The money stays in the economy; what it buys changes.

Consider what a temperate household spends its money on. It buys fewer things, but better ones: the tool that lasts thirty years instead of the one that breaks in three, which means more craftsmen and fewer landfills. It owns its home and maintains it. It gives more, because people who aren’t drowning in their own appetites have something left over for others. It invests in education and skills. And above all, it has children and raises them. Family is the largest “consumer” in a temperate life: food, clothing, housing, schooling, and time. A nation of intact, fruitful families does not lack demand. It is building the next generation of workers, taxpayers, and parents, which is the one thing a nation cannot import or borrow.

And notice what happens to debt. American households owe more than a trillion dollars on credit cards alone. “The borrower is servant to the lender.” A nation of temperate households is a nation freed from servitude. Every dollar not spent on interest can be spent on something real, or saved for something that matters.

The ledger of intemperance

Now look at the other side of the ledger, the one the objection never counts: what intemperance already costs us.

Excessive drinking has been estimated to cost the United States about 250 billion dollars a year in health care, lost productivity, crime, and car crashes. Smoking costs more than 600 billion a year once lost productivity is counted. Medical care for obesity costs about 170 billion a year. Diabetes, mostly the kind that diet and activity can largely prevent, costs more than 400 billion a year in medical care and lost work. The opioid epidemic has been estimated at about one and a half trillion dollars in a single year, when the value of lives lost is included. New sexually transmitted infections run to billions in lifetime medical costs every year. Family breakdown, meaning divorce and childbearing outside marriage, has been estimated to cost taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars a year through welfare, courts, and the other programs that step in when fathers leave. And something like a third of all the food produced in this country is wasted.

These figures come from different years and overlap in places, so they can’t simply be added. But even allowing for the overlap, we are spending well over a trillion dollars a year, every year, cleaning up after appetites that were never controlled.

I have practiced as a naturopathic physician for many years, and I can tell you what those numbers look like from the inside. Most of the chronic disease I have treated came from how people ate, drank, smoked, slept, and moved. Much of it was preventable, and much of it was reversible when the patient was willing. The American health care system is largely a system for managing the consequences of intemperance, and it is the largest sector of the economy.

That is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and we all pay for it, whether or not we ever ride in it: in insurance premiums, in taxes, and in the lost work of people who should have been healthy.

The broken window

This is where the objection turns inside out.

The nineteenth-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat told a story about a boy who breaks a shopkeeper’s window. The townspeople console the shopkeeper: at least the glazier will get work. The glazier spends his earnings, and so on, and the broken window looks as though it has stimulated the economy. But Bastiat pointed out what isn’t seen. The shopkeeper was going to spend that money on a new pair of shoes. Now he has a window he already had, and no shoes. The town is poorer by one pair of shoes.

Intemperance is a nation breaking its own windows. The rehab clinic, the divorce lawyer, the prison, the dialysis unit, and the bariatric surgeon all show up in the national accounts as production. They count toward the size of the economy exactly the way the glazier’s work did. But they are not wealth. They are repairs. A nation that spent a trillion dollars less each year cleaning up after itself might even show a smaller economy on paper for a while, and be far richer in fact: more savings, more real goods, more children, more years of healthy working life, and more time on the porch.

It is the same distinction we drew in Chapter 3. A tumor grows fast. Growth is not the same as health. A temperate economy grows the way a healthy body grows: to meet real needs, and then it sustains itself by steady, faithful production. It doesn’t have to keep swelling to stay alive.

Who would lose

If temperance spread, some businesses would shrink, and they should be named honestly: businesses that depend on people not controlling themselves. Gambling apps designed to be addictive, predatory lenders, the pornography industry, the makers of food engineered so you can’t stop eating it, and the marketers whose whole trade is making people feel they need what they don’t. A large share of their profit comes from a small number of people who have lost control.

When those businesses shrink, that is the tumor shrinking. The people who work in them would need other work, and a healthy economy would have it for them, because the money their former customers are no longer losing would be spent and invested elsewhere. The transition would bring real hardship, and a Christian nation should help people through it. But no one should mourn an industry whose profits depended on other people’s ruin.

What rich means

So would we be rich? Yes, but I want to be careful about what that word means.

We would be richer in money. The trillion dollars a year we spend cleaning up after ourselves would be saved, invested, given, or spent on things that last. Families would carry less debt and own more of what they use. Government would be smaller, because there would be fewer messes to clean up. That is the opposite of the G-men: a government that shrinks because there is less wrongdoing.

But we would also be rich in the way that matters more. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Temperance is one of the fruits of the Spirit, listed with love, joy, and peace, and I don’t think that is an accident. The man who can say “This is enough” is the only man who can ever be satisfied. The man who always needs “just a little more” is poor no matter what he owns.

God taught Israel this in the wilderness with the manna. Every family gathered what it needed for the day. “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” Those who tried to hoard it found it spoiled in the morning. And on the sixth day He gave them twice as much, so they could rest on the seventh. That was the first lesson in the economics of enough: gather what you need, trust God for tomorrow, and rest.

“There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.” That is the whole answer to Isak’s question. The temperate nation is not the one that has stopped enjoying life. It is the one that has something left over: money in the bank, oil in the lamp, time for its children, strength in its old age, and the peace to sit on the porch and say, “This is good. This is enough.”

Notes

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932). Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law (1904). “Do What You Like” was written by Ginger Baker and recorded by Blind Faith (1969).

Proverbs 21:20; Proverbs 22:7; 1 Timothy 6:6; Galatians 5:22–23; Exodus 16:16–30; 2 Corinthians 8:15.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, chapter 2. Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850).

Cost estimates: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, excessive alcohol use (about $249 billion, 2010), cigarette smoking (more than $600 billion, 2018), obesity medical costs (about $173 billion, 2019), and sexually transmitted infections (about $16 billion in lifetime medical costs for infections acquired in 2018); American Diabetes Association (about $413 billion, 2022); Joint Economic Committee of Congress, opioid epidemic (about $1.5 trillion, 2020, including the value of lives lost); Institute for American Values, The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing (about $112 billion a year, 2008); Federal Reserve Bank of New York, household credit card balances (above $1 trillion since 2023); U.S. Department of Agriculture, food waste (30 to 40 percent of the food supply).

Chapter 9 — Where Does God Get the Most Joy?

We had been talking about sexuality and the family, and about what binds people together. I wanted Isak to see why I kept coming back to sexuality, when there are so many other things a government might concern itself with.

THOMAS: We’re trying to make life good. I brought up sexuality because we were talking about ordering the world so that everybody acts right: we punish people who do harm, and we leave alone people who do good. Doing good is its own reward, or we give each other a pat on the back. We don’t have a government Department of Congratulation.

ISAK: They have that in schools: the participation ribbon.

THOMAS: We don’t need a government Department of Applause. We have government agencies over all kinds of things. Whether we need bureaucracies to run energy, education, commerce, agriculture, labor, and the rest is another topic.

Sexuality comes up because when a society’s sexuality is unregulated, people aren’t faithful. They aren’t monogamous. They aren’t staying in the proper lanes: the right age, the right sex, real consent within marriage. If all of that is “do what you like,” you end up with a population behaving in every way except the best way of relating. People living in the alternative sexual patterns mostly don’t form families. Or if they do, it’s a family shaped by that pattern. So it changes society. It’s a society-modifier.

Then the question is: if it changes society, should we want a whole rainbow of changes? My answer is that every one of them is a lesser happiness. The people choosing them are eating ice cream all day. They aren’t eating their vegetables. They aren’t living a full life. In my judgment, they’re living a life that is either immature or disordered.

I consider homosexuality a form of arrested growth. Of course, growing up, a boy may be drawn to other boys. Of course he’s drawn to girls. That makes sense. Now let’s grow up. Everybody has his own particular way of needing to grow up, his own particular desire. You have that; now let’s work on developing a taste for a different experience. That different experience includes children. It includes fidelity, hard work, long devotion, relationship, old age, sickness and health, better or worse, richer or poorer, everything that makes up a life. Without fidelity, those things are missed.

If a society embraces those alternatives, it ends up with large communities of people who have made that choice, and the society changes. The argument for it is that it’s a rainbow, and it’s all good. The fact is that a large group of people living immaturely, unable to commit, unable to be faithful, breaking a few hearts, as you put it, changes the whole dynamic of a society. It ends up less happy, less joyful.

I put all of this under one question: Where does God get the most joy living in every single person? If one person isn’t enjoying his life the way that makes God happy, then there is one less experience of God being fully satisfied in this world. And it shows up in people who are dissatisfied with their lives and go out and do things that are heinous, or irritating, or impoverishing. There’s a cost to not living the way God wants us to live. That’s the bottom line. It diminishes life a little for all of us when any of us lives outside that perfection.

We’re all pulled toward the animal side of our sexuality, and toward overconsumption: of money, of control, of sensation. All of those things are good in themselves. Control is important. Sexuality is important. Sensual experience is important, and so is working for things and having highs and lows. But drugs make it so clear. The high is higher than you would ever go without them, the low is lower than you would ever go, and the in-between, where you’d normally live, becomes ho-hum. So life on drugs is never satisfying, because you never get to live in “This is all right. This is good.” Like your experience on the porch the other day: “This is just good.”

ISAK: I was thinking about that while you were talking: the highs and lows, and what I used to chase without really knowing it. “I need to feel good.” You’re like a fish chasing a hook. It’s over there, and it’s going to be so good. You’re swimming against the current and you don’t know where it is, but you saw it in this water before. It becomes a kind of chaotic service in itself, not to you, but an offering to the night. “I’ll give my time to the evening and let it take me.”

What I have now is the ability to sit back and say, “I’m bored. This is nice. Nothing’s on my mind. I’m emptying my mind. I’m just here, and this is enough. This is peace.” It’s a momentary peace, and I know what to do with it. I can just sit here and be here. You don’t get that in a low or in a high.

In a high, you might say, “I dedicate my life to this,” but it doesn’t stay unless it’s real. You lose it quickly. I do think spiritual things can happen in altered states, so I’m not talking about your experience. I mean you think you know something, you feel amazing, you think this is the best, and then you come down and see the toll it’s taken on you.

Sex is great until you find out it’s meaningless. The whole reason you go into it is “I don’t have to see this person ever again. It’s going to be fun.” Then you move on, and it isn’t something you wanted or feel good about. If you don’t care, you can brag about it and add to your count. But it won’t take you anywhere. If anything, you can get sick from it. It isn’t sustainable. It isn’t “the more sex, the better,” any more than it’s “the more food, the better.” After a while you’ll be—

THOMAS: Fat or impotent.

ISAK: Fat from pleasure, or impotent. Exactly.

The question I asked Isak that morning is, I think, the most important question in this book, so I want to say more plainly what I mean by it.

God’s joy as the measure

I believe that God is not only the Creator standing outside His creation. He experiences it. Everything that exists is made of His own consciousness and held in being by Him, and He lives in every person, sharing that person’s life from the inside. That means every human life is, among other things, an experience God is having. To love God, then, is to give Him the experience of a life lived the way He would live it perfectly. And the Bible, with its stories, proverbs, commandments, and parables, is the instruction manual for what God enjoys being and experiencing.

That changes how we should think about sin. Sin is not a pleasure God grudgingly forbids. It is a lesser happiness: the ice cream instead of the meal, the thrill instead of the joy. God’s commandments are not arbitrary restrictions on our fun. They describe the shape of the fullest life, the one in which He, and we, find the most joy. When a man lives faithfully with his wife for fifty years, raises children who love God, works hard, gives freely, and grows old with grace, God has had that life, from the inside. When a man chases the next thrill, the next high, the next body, and ends up alone, God has had that life too. And it is poorer.

So when I ask whether the nation should care about sexuality, my question is not “How do we stop people from having fun?” It is “How do we help each person have the life that is actually the most joyful, for him and for God?” That is a question a nation can ask without apology, because it is the question every good parent asks about his children.

Why one person’s life is everyone’s concern

The libertarian objection is that a man’s private life is nobody else’s business. If he wants the lesser happiness, that’s his affair.

But we are not as separate as that. Paul wrote that the church is one body, and that “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” A nation is not the church, but the principle holds for any people bound together. When a man abandons his children, the whole community raises them, pays for them, or suffers when they grow up wounded. When hearts are broken, they harden, and hard-hearted people make a colder country for everyone. When appetite goes unchecked, the costs I listed in the last chapter land on all of us. The lesser happiness is never entirely private. It diminishes life a little for everyone.

The porch

Isak’s testimony says this better than any argument. He described the old life: the fish chasing the hook, the evening given away to whatever it would bring, the high that seemed like the truth until it wore off. And then he described the new one: sitting on a porch with nothing on his mind and knowing that this is enough.

That is what the lesser happinesses can never give. They offer intensity, and intensity always has to be followed by a crash and then by more intensity. What they cannot give is contentment, the ability to rest in an ordinary good and find it sufficient. The fullest life is not a life of constant highs. It is a life in which the ordinary is good: a meal with family, a day’s honest work, a marriage that has lasted, an evening on the porch. That is where God’s joy is most at home.

The posture this requires

One more thing needs to be said here, because what I have said about homosexuality and the other alternatives will be heard by many as contempt. It is not.

I believe these patterns are a lesser happiness, and I have said so plainly, because I think it is true and because a nation that cannot say what it believes about the good life cannot help anyone find it. But the people living those lives are not my enemies. They are children of God missing a joy meant for them, just as I miss joys meant for me whenever I choose my own appetites over God’s way. We all have our ice cream. What I am offering is not condemnation but an invitation to a better meal. I return to this at the end of the book, because everything depends on it: we love the sinner, and we hate the sin, including our own.

If the nation’s happiness is really at stake in these choices, then the nation has an interest in helping its people make better ones. The question is how it can do that without becoming the thing Isak feared at the start of this book. That is where our conversation turned next.

Notes

1 Corinthians 12:26.

The phrase “giving God the experience of life lived the way He would live it perfectly,” and the description of the Bible as “the instruction manual… for what God enjoys being and experiencing,” are from Thomas’s remarks to the Christos Fellowship, September 6, 2026.

Chapter 10 — A Department of Morality: The State That Pulls for You

If a nation’s happiness really depends on how its people live, then a nation has an interest in helping them live well. I put that to Isak with a phrase that I knew would sound alarming.

THOMAS: One of the things we’re missing as a society, in terms of government, is something we might call a Department of Morality, since we’re so fond of departments. Not an agency that searches out secluded areas with a view and shining flashlights into the backseats of parked cars. It’s almost like church. We encourage people not to do these things. The state is on your side if you’re trying to do the right thing. And if you’re not, we’re here to help you, even if you don’t want help or don’t realize you need it. We’re not going to throw you in jail. But we’d come by and talk, see how you’re doing, see if we can help, see where you are in your journey, and let you know we’re pulling for you.

What I’ve just described is what church is supposed to be. Church isn’t that, but it should be. And the government has, in a way, allied itself with “do what you like,” and “do what you like” doesn’t produce a stable social order.

If the purpose of the state is to survive, and the purpose of its survival is the health and general welfare of its people, then the state is not supporting the general welfare. It isn’t promoting the common good. The Constitution speaks of providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. Punishment should serve the social order, which is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That last should have been property. So: life, liberty, happiness, and property.

We should be happy. If you’re having sex outside marriage, being unfaithful, and so on, you are in some way not contributing to everyone’s happiness. If nothing else, you broke a heart. If nothing else, you helped make another heart callous and hard. Do you want hard-hearted, callous people in a society that’s supposed to be flourishing? We’re trying to grow a nation with the best possible experience of life. Do you want people who don’t really connect with other people? “Whatever. I can use them or take them.” That isn’t the kind of society that brings the most happiness. You could let people live that way because it’s what they like. But those of us on the other side want people who actually care.

ISAK: It’s like thinking about the country the way you think about your family. What do you want for the people in it? A hard-hearted person who hides from the world won’t benefit anybody.

Think of it this way: you can treat everybody in the world well. Treating him well is treating your own child well. It’s treating God well. They’re all interchangeable; only the way you treat them differs. So how do you build a country where people are soft-hearted? It’s a country where people treat each other well, and don’t expect to be stabbed in the back, or cheated, or abandoned with a child. Those have become the expectations. Sometimes people take the risk and commit to somebody, and sometimes it works. Or they don’t think about it at all, and they end up not knowing who the father is.

All of that leads to a decaying society, not through any one person’s choice, but through a way of life: “It’s okay to leave. Nobody’s shaming me for it. Or if they are, they’re in a different state, and I’ll get out of paying child support.” That’s the generational decay: of support, of confidence, of being able to open your heart to each other. We really wrecked the family, didn’t we? It has to be restored. Is anybody really unaware of how good it is to have a family that stays together?

Of course there are complications. The dad beats the mom and she has to leave. Or he cheats, or she cheats. But I always think of the story in the Bible about a man whose wife went off and became a prostitute. I don’t remember whether he was a king.

THOMAS: That was Hosea and Gomer.

ISAK: He asks, “What do I do?” And God says, in effect, “Let her wash and wait a while, and then take her back, because I’ve done the same for you. I’ve done the same for this nation.” In my mind, that’s everybody. It’s just the nature of things: we act against what God would want, or what your wife would want.

That story always stood out to me because it bothered me as a child. I thought, “I would never take anybody back.” It’s what the world teaches: “This is sin. Don’t take them back. They’re defiled.” I think that story really shaped how I understand forgiveness. Being betrayed by the person closest to you may be the worst pain there is. But that pain isn’t new. God has felt it billions of times, and it’s okay. The only way forward is forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance.

Keeping families together, not mistreating each other: I wonder whether we could change hearts in a generation or two. “This is how we should be treated. This is how we should treat others. This is how we forgive, and how we ask for forgiveness.” How many times do you forgive somebody? Seventy times seven. It’s about the heart. Seventy times seven is ridiculous on purpose. It means don’t stop.

I threw out the phrase “Department of Morality,” and I said it isn’t a man with a flashlight. But a phrase like that frightens people, and it should, until they see what it means. Orwell’s Ministry of Love was a torture chamber. The Soviet Union committed dissidents to psychiatric hospitals and called their disagreement a mental illness. China today runs camps it calls “vocational education and training centers.” Every one of those regimes said it was helping people become better. So if I am going to propose anything like this, I owe the reader a clear account of how it would work, and an even clearer account of what it could never be allowed to do.

What it is for

Start with the purpose. The state is supposed to promote the general welfare, and “do what you like” does not produce a stable social order. Hard hearts are a public cost. Every broken marriage, every abandoned child, every addiction, and every heart made callous by being used and discarded is paid for by all of us: in prisons, in welfare, and in children who grow up without fathers and pass the wound along. The government spends enormous sums treating the results of moral collapse, and almost nothing encouraging the character that prevents it. It is the most expensive way to run a country imaginable: pay nothing for the fence at the top of the cliff and everything for the ambulance at the bottom.

So the purpose of a Department of Morality is simple. It is the nation saying, out loud and with its resources, “We are on your side if you are trying to be good. And if you are not, we are still pulling for you, and there is help.”

We already have a model for this, and it works. The Surgeon General has no police. He cannot arrest a smoker or fine a restaurant for serving bacon. What he has is a voice, and the standing to use it. In 1964 the Surgeon General’s committee reported that smoking causes lung cancer, and warnings went onto every pack. Nobody was jailed. But the share of American adults who smoke fell from about forty-two percent in 1965 to under twelve percent by 2021. That happened through persuasion: a nation telling the truth with one voice and making help available to anyone who wanted to quit. A Department of Morality would do the same for the heart.

What it would do

I see five things it would do.

First, it would declare. The nation would state, in plain words, the moral law it holds in common: the commandments on which all Christians agree, and the two great commandments on which they hang. Not doctrine, and not any church’s teaching about baptism or the end times, but the moral foundation. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Keep your vows. Love your neighbor as yourself. And it would name, as I described in Chapter 6, what falls short of that standard. The Department would be the nation’s conscience speaking in public, the way the Surgeon General is the nation’s physician speaking in public.

That voice would speak to the government as well as to the people. The prophets of Israel were not chaplains to the king. They were the men who told the king what God thought of his laws. So the Department would publish a plain moral assessment of every major bill: Whom does this help? Whom does it harm? Would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize it as love? It would have no veto. Its only power would be the power Nathan had over David: the power to say “Thou art the man,” and let the conscience do the rest.

Second, it would teach. It would produce materials for families, for schools that choose to use them, for churches, and for anyone else: on marriage, raising children, handling money, controlling appetite, and forgiveness. “Just say no” was mocked, but it put a simple truth in front of a generation of children. The Department would do that across the whole of life, in the way this book tries to: not “because we said so,” but “here is why, and here is what happens when you don’t.”

Third, it would train counselors, and this is the heart of it. Most people who are going wrong don’t need a lecture. They need someone who can see what is actually happening in their soul and tell them the truth in a way they can hear. I have practiced that kind of counsel for years, and I believe it can be taught. The method is rapport, confrontation, and change. Rapport comes first: a man has to trust you before he will hear you. Then confrontation, but the precise kind, a rifle shot rather than a shotgun: “When you do this, here is what it does to you and to the people you love.” Then an invitation to change. The diagnosis opens the door, but he has to walk through it himself. The Department would train ordinary people in that skill: pastors, teachers, coaches, and older men and women in every community. It would certify them, and then get out of their way.

Fourth, it would offer help to anyone who asks. A couple on the edge of divorce. A young man who can’t stop drinking. A father who wants to be a better father and doesn’t know how, because his own father left. A woman who was used and discarded and has hardened her heart so it can never happen again. The help would be free, close to home, and delivered mostly through churches and community counselors, in groups small enough for people to actually know each other. When I told Isak that we would “come by and talk,” this is what I meant: a knock on the door from someone who cares, like a pastor’s visit, and an open door on the other side. You could walk in, and you could walk out. You could say “No, thank you,” and that would be the end of it.

Fifth, it would help rehabilitate the convicted. For a man who has actually committed a crime, who has stolen, assaulted, or defrauded, a court could offer or require counsel as part of his sentence, alongside restitution to his victim. A prison that releases a man harder than it received him has failed at the one thing that would actually protect the next victim.

What it must never do

Now the other side, which matters more than everything I have just said, because the history of this idea is written in blood.

It must never watch. No surveillance, no files on anyone’s private life, no informants, no reports from neighbors about what goes on in a man’s home. The flashlight in the back of the car is exactly what it is not. The moment it keeps a list, it has become the secret police.

It must never compel. No one could be required to receive its counsel unless a court had convicted him of a real crime against a real victim. No one could be penalized for refusing its help, disagreeing with its teaching, or telling it to go away. A forced conversion is no conversion, and forced counseling of a free man is only a softer prison.

It must never enforce. It would have no police, no power to arrest, no power to fine, and no power to deny anyone a job, a license, or a benefit. The sword belongs to the courts and is limited to crimes that make victims. The Department would hold a voice and an open door, and nothing else.

It must never inform. What a man tells a counselor stays with the counselor, protected the way what a man tells his priest or his lawyer is protected. If a person seeking help has reason to fear his confession will reach a prosecutor, he will never come, and the whole purpose fails. The only exceptions would be the ones the law already recognizes: a child in danger, or a clear threat to someone’s life.

It must never impose doctrine. It would speak the moral law on which Christians agree and leave everything else to the churches. When a man is ready to go further, it would send him to his own church, or to one of his choosing. It would never tell a Baptist what to believe about baptism or a Catholic what to believe about the Mass.

And it must never grow beyond its purpose. Remember the G-men. We created them to stop the robbers, and once the robbers were caught, they needed something to do, so they started watching everybody. Every agency wants to grow. This one would have to be built small and kept small: a small federal office to state the standard and certify training, with the actual work done by states and counties, and mostly by volunteers, churches, and community organizations. And it would have to show its fruit. Are fewer marriages breaking up? Are fewer children growing up without fathers? Are fewer men returning to prison? If after a fixed number of years it could not show that fruit, it would expire. A Department of Morality that couldn’t prove it was making people better would be the most hypocritical agency ever created, and it should not be allowed to outlive its failure.

Why a department, and not just the church?

One might ask: if what I am describing is what the church is supposed to do, why not leave it to the church? Why involve the government at all?

The honest answer is that the church should do it, and mostly isn’t. And the state is not neutral now. It has allied itself with “do what you like.” It teaches children, through its schools, that there is no moral center. It pays for the consequences of the collapse and says nothing about its causes. So the choice is not between the state teaching morality and the state staying neutral. The state is already teaching. The only question is what it teaches.

But the order of responsibility matters. The family comes first. The church comes second. The community comes third. The state comes last, and its job is to strengthen the first three, not replace them. The best measure of a Department of Morality would be how much of its work it could hand off: to fathers who have learned to be fathers, to churches that have learned to counsel, and to communities that have learned to say “enough” to their own members, early and in love. If it succeeded completely, it would nearly work itself out of a job. That is the opposite of the G-men, and the opposite of every Ministry of Love that ever existed. They needed more wrongdoers to justify themselves. This would need fewer.

What it looks like when it works

Let me make it concrete. A young husband goes to a counselor in his own town, someone trained through the Department; maybe a deacon in his church, maybe a retired teacher. He says his marriage is falling apart and he is thinking of leaving. The counselor builds rapport and listens. Then he tells him the truth: “You’re not getting your needs met, and neither is she, and neither of you has ever asked the other for what you need in a way the other could hear.” They work on it, in the way I describe in the next chapter: asking for what you need without demanding it, and serving by requiring service in return. Maybe the marriage survives. Maybe it doesn’t. But no one watched him, no one reported him, no one forced him to come, and no one punished him for leaving. The nation simply made it easy for him to find help, and made it plain what it hoped he would choose.

Multiply that by a million homes, and you have a different country.

That is what I mean by a state that pulls for you: a nation that tells the truth with one voice, and then holds the door open. It is what Hosea did for Gomer, and what God has done for every one of us: not throwing us away, but coming after us, over and over, seventy times seven, without ever forcing us to come home.

Notes

The Preamble to the Constitution speaks of providing “for the common defence” and promoting “the general Welfare.” “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence; John Locke’s earlier formula was “life, liberty, and estate.”

Hosea 1–3; the instruction to wait “many days” before Gomer is restored is in Hosea 3:3. Matthew 18:22. 2 Samuel 12:1–7 (Nathan).

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Soviet punitive psychiatry is documented in Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (1977).

U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee, Smoking and Health (1964). Adult smoking prevalence: about 42 percent in 1965 and 11.5 percent in 2021 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

The rapport–confrontation–change method and the “rifle shot” are from Thomas’s essay “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (February 2026).

Chapter 11 — Everything Is God: Marriage, Service, and the Two-Way Street

Isak had said that the only way forward is forgiveness, seventy times seven. I told him that what he was describing is exactly what this whole work is for.

THOMAS: These things are the end goal of what we’re trying to do. This is a ministry about creating that for the nation.

Why do you believe in God? Because look at the physics. At the bottom of it, you can see that everything is God. Once you’ve seen that, how does it fit your life? If everything is God, then I’m a part of God. Certainly not the whole thing; I can see I’m just a tiny speck of it. But I have a point of view, and my point of view is one God has, because I have it and God is everything. If I have a God point of view, so do you. You have your particular desires, the things that make you feel good, and I have mine. If you like good things, and I can give them to you without destroying my own life, if it’s within what one person can actually do for another, something that doesn’t destroy me but does help him, then I should do it.

There’s a line I keep coming back to about marriage. It says not to be discouraged by the duties or the hardships of married life. It admits that marriage is hard, that some things about it aren’t pleasant. But don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. Don’t be resentful. Do what marriage requires, and do it with a good spirit. The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Do it as unto the Lord, with a giving heart.

If everybody did that all the time in his own marriage, people wouldn’t get divorced. People divorce because their needs aren’t being met. If you give to meet her needs and she gives to meet yours, even if they’re very different needs, both people feel that this is all right. If that doesn’t satisfy you, and you want something else because it’s more exciting, faster, smoother, cooler, the latest model, then you’re living on ice cream. You just want sugar. You want another dopamine hit. That’s a maturity problem. So learn to be at peace. Learn to sit on the porch and rest. Learn to appreciate what is. It comes down to a regulated heart.

If everybody has that, everybody is being served by everybody else. “He that is greatest among you shall be your servant.” That’s because he’s made so many people happy. But you’re also supposed to love yourself, and loving yourself means you need to be served too. The person who only serves others isn’t keeping the Great Commandment. You love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t have a body and not have needs; that’s a given. So what do you need? How can I help you? And what do I need in order to be served? Maybe all I need is a cup of water and a crust of bread. That’s very little, but I do need it.

Most people need a great deal more than that. But if we all give and receive, and focus on the joy of giving to people who perhaps can’t give back yet, who can only take right now because that’s what they need, then we give them that. When they’ve had enough, we say, “Now it’s time for you to learn to give. I’m going to serve you by letting you serve me, by asking you to serve.” That is serving him, because he’s learning how to serve. So correction is a very important part of teaching. Training other people to give is an important part of giving. It’s another kind of service: we serve them by requiring them to serve.

So it isn’t self or other. It’s self and other, and it can’t be any other way. If it’s self or other, it isn’t right. “I just serve.” No, you haven’t got it. You need some education. You need to help other people help you. If you’re surrounded by takers, you need to train them to be givers, and that is giving to them and serving them.

ISAK: Yes. You can serve them and serve yourself at the same time, and ideally, in a harmonious society, that’s how it goes. But not everybody knows how to do each part.

THOMAS: That comes down to being able to ask for what you want. It’s rapport, confrontation, and change. “When you do this, it makes me feel bad. I’d like it if you did it this way. Wipe the countertop. Take out the trash. Get up and take care of the kids.” Whatever it is. “Rather than my doing it all the time, I need to be served too. It hurts when I have to do it all the time. Would you do this for me?”

When you ask to be served, you’re speaking the truth, and you speak the truth in love. Love doesn’t demand its own way. It isn’t proud, arrogant, boastful, or angry. It’s patient. It asks for what it wants, but in a way that pleases. If that isn’t answered, then you may need to be angry. But you don’t sin, and you don’t carry the anger with you. You keep faith and you forgive. You’re angry because you were sinned against. You were hurt. You were trespassed against. There was a debt, and you’re asking for it to be settled. So it’s necessary to use anger when sugar doesn’t work. You try the stick. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but every now and then you need a fly swatter.

ISAK: Good point. Honey doesn’t work for everything.

THOMAS: Honey works really well most of the time. But you need the fly swatter too.

That exchange may seem like a detour from national politics into marriage counseling. It isn’t. It is the foundation under everything else in this book.

From the physics to the kitchen

I began that morning with the claim that at the bottom of reality, everything is God: every conscious point is a point of His own consciousness. That can sound like an abstraction, the kind of thing a man says about physics and then forgets when he goes home. But if it is true, it changes how I have to treat the person across the kitchen table.

If God has a point of view in me, He has one in my wife. Her desires, her tiredness, and her need to be helped with the dishes are not interruptions to my spiritual life. They are part of the life God is living through her. When I serve her, I am serving Him, not as a pious metaphor but as a plain description of what is happening. Christ said it directly: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The physics and the Gospel say the same thing, and they say it about the kitchen as much as about the church.

Self and other

But the same truth that obliges me to serve her obliges her to serve me, and obliges me to ask for it. This is where many sincere Christians go wrong. They hear “the greatest among you shall be your servant” and conclude that the holiest life is one of endless self-erasure. It isn’t. The Great Commandment says to love your neighbor as yourself. It assumes self-love, and it measures love of neighbor by it. The man who only gives, who never asks, who lets himself be used until he is empty and bitter, is not keeping the commandment better than anyone else. He is keeping half of it. And he is doing the takers around him no favors, because he is teaching them to take.

That is why correction is a form of love. When I ask someone to serve me, to carry his share, to give back, I am not being selfish. I am teaching him to give, which is the best thing I can teach him. A parent who never asks anything of his children raises people who cannot love. A spouse who never asks anything of the other ends up either resentful or gone.

The method

The method is the same in a marriage, a family, a congregation, or a nation: rapport, confrontation, and change. First, establish trust, so the other person knows you are for him. Then tell the truth precisely: this is what you are doing, and this is what it does. Then invite change, and leave room for it. This is what I described in the last chapter as the work of a trained counselor. But every husband and wife, every parent, every friend needs the same skill. A country of people who can ask for what they need, and hear a request without taking offense, is a country that needs far fewer laws.

Anger that doesn’t sin

And sometimes the gentle request doesn’t work. Paul says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath.” Anger is not always sin. It is the right response to real wrong. Christ Himself made a whip of cords and drove the money changers out of the temple. What makes anger sinful is not its heat but its aim. Anger that seeks to destroy, to humiliate, or to repay evil with evil is sin. Anger that says, “This must stop, and I love you too much to let it continue,” and then lets go of the grudge once it is heard, is not.

So honey first, and honey most of the time. But a love that never uses the fly swatter is not stronger than one that does. It is only less honest.

A nation of households

Everything this book proposes for the nation rests on this. Safeguards, a Department of Morality, the jury, the republic: none of them can work in a nation whose homes are battlegrounds of unmet needs and silent resentment. And all of them become nearly unnecessary in a nation whose homes are schools of mutual service, where each person gives, asks, corrects, forgives, and gives again. The kingdom of heaven on earth is not first a political arrangement. It is millions of kitchens where people have learned to serve each other cheerfully. The government can’t create that. But a nation can decide it wants it, say so, and help its people learn.

Notes

The line Thomas recalls about not being discouraged by the duties or hardships of married life has not been traced to a specific source. The nearest scriptural acknowledgment of those hardships is 1 Corinthians 7:28 (“such shall have trouble in the flesh”).

2 Corinthians 9:7; Colossians 3:23; Matthew 23:11; Matthew 22:37–40; Matthew 25:40; Ephesians 4:15, 26; 1 Corinthians 13:4–5; John 2:15.

Chapter 12 — A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State: Systemic Injustice and the Chain That Must Be Broken

Isak had come into the conversation worried about Christian nationalism, and by now I thought he could see what I actually meant by it. I wanted to say it plainly.

THOMAS: So the Christian nationalism question sounds as though it’s about a nanny state, but it isn’t. It’s about a church. It’s about a kingdom. It’s about making the kingdom of heaven on earth. It isn’t about going out to raise hell, or going out tonight to find some sinners and string them up. It’s about actually loving other people. Be angry, and sin not. You overcome evil with good. A lynching is not overcoming evil with good. It’s taking part in evil, being evil yourself. All the things that have been done in the name of Christianity that aren’t Christian need to be called what they are. You can call that Christian nationalism all you want, but it isn’t Christian. It might be national, but it isn’t the kind of nation I’d want to live in, so it isn’t even a good nation.

ISAK: Ultimately, we’re trying to make a nice place for nice people.

THOMAS: And if you’re not a nice person, you need to rehabilitate yourself. That’s really important. We’re not only into punishment; we’re into rehabilitation. If you need to sit in the corner, or be away from people for a while to soften your heart and get some perspective, we’ll do that. But it’s about rehabilitation, and that’s why we forgive people. We give another chance. How many times do you forgive? It’s turning the other cheek: “Let’s try again. The way you did that wasn’t good. Let’s try again.” It doesn’t mean, “You slapped me here; now slap the other side.” It means, “I’m not going to retaliate and repay evil with evil. I’m going to repay this with good.”

To me it all seems so simple. It isn’t some big, complicated routine. But if you try to explain how it applies to every part of life, it becomes quite a tome. If you try to address every injustice, it gets very long, because the number of ways you can put a watch together wrong is enormous. There’s one way to put it together right. Any other way is just another wrong way, and there’s no end to them.

ISAK: And we’re seeing it compound from one evil decision: the lynching, then the eye-for-an-eye, and it keeps going and compounding. So it isn’t as though there’s one righteous side. When I see a war, and this may be controversial, I don’t see a right side. I see that both sides have their issues, historically and now. It seems we’re so far gone that it isn’t about being right anymore. It’s about who can forgive. How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?

Isak had put his finger on the question that hides behind one of the most contested phrases of our time. At the start of our conversation he had asked, “What does any of this do with systemic injustice?” and then left it there. Here he answered his own question with an image: evil compounding from one decision, link by link. It deserves a real answer, because the phrase “systemic injustice” means two very different things, and one of them is true.

Two meanings of one phrase

The first meaning is simply this: sin doesn’t stay where it was committed. It gets built into laws, customs, institutions, and families, and it goes on doing damage long after the people who committed it are dead. That is true. The Bible taught it long before any sociologist did.

The second meaning is the one most young Americans have been taught to hear in the phrase. It says that every difference in outcome between groups is proof of oppression, that people are guilty or innocent according to the group they were born into, and that the world divides into oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized. That meaning is not true. It is the worldview without a center, which I describe in Chapter 16, dressed up as justice.

I want to affirm the first as firmly as I reject the second. Christians who deny the first because they dislike the second have made a serious mistake, and they have handed the whole subject to people who will use it badly.

What the Bible says about inherited sin

In the Ten Commandments, God says He visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I read that first as a description of how sin actually works, not as an arbitrary punishment. Abuse produces abusers. A father who abandons his children raises sons who don’t know how to stay. A community that was robbed stays poor, and poverty has consequences of its own. The wound is passed down.

The Bible also recognizes sin written into law. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people.” That is systemic injustice in the most literal sense: injustice made into the system. The prophet Amos condemned Israel for selling the righteous for silver and turning aside the poor “in the gate,” where the courts sat. And the New Testament calls the whole order of human society organized apart from God “the world,” and says that “the whole world lieth in wickedness.”

But the same Bible draws a line that the modern ideology erases. Ezekiel says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Consequences are inherited. Guilt is not. The son of a thief may inherit poverty because his father’s stolen goods were taken back, or wealth because they weren’t. But the son is not a thief. You cannot put a man in the dock for what his great-grandfather did, or for what people who looked like him did.

That one distinction settles most of the argument. The consequences of injustice are real, and they travel down the generations. The guilt belongs to the man who committed it, and to no one else.

America’s own record

Isak told me he is cynical about his country’s history. He deserves an honest answer, not a flag-waving one.

America has written injustice into its law. Slavery was protected by the Constitution itself, through the clause requiring escaped slaves to be returned and the clause counting three-fifths of the enslaved population for representation. After slavery ended, the Southern states wrote Jim Crow into their statute books. As I said in Chapter 6, lynchers were acquitted by juries of professing Christians for the better part of a century. In the 1930s the federal government’s own mortgage programs marked black neighborhoods as bad risks and refused to insure loans there, so a generation of families could not build wealth through their homes the way their white neighbors did. Treaty after treaty with the Indian nations was signed and broken. Those were not merely the private sins of bad individuals. They were the law. They were the system.

But there is another half, and the ideology leaves it out. The people who ended those systems were overwhelmingly Christians acting on the Bible. The abolitionists were largely evangelicals quoting Scripture. The civil rights movement was led by preachers from black churches. Martin Luther King Jr. did not quote Marx. He quoted Amos: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The remedy for America’s systemic sin came out of the same book that is now blamed for it.

That is the pattern. When Christians do evil, they must disobey their own book to do it, and the book is what convicts them. So I don’t answer Isak’s cynicism by denying the sins. I answer it by pointing to where the repentance came from.

Why injustice outlives the unjust

Isak originally asked what Conscious Point Physics has to say about this. Here is the one thing I think it adds, by analogy.

The order of the universe is conservative. Disorder does not heal itself with time. It persists until a remedy is actually applied to it. That is the principle behind everything I believe about the cross: nothing is simply forgotten. A debt does not disappear because the creditor died. A wound does not close because the man who inflicted it is gone.

That is why systemic injustice outlives the unjust. The slaveholders are dead. The Jim Crow legislators are dead. The lynch mobs are dead. But the disorder they introduced did not die with them. It is still moving through families and neighborhoods, and through the way people look at each other. Waiting won’t fix it. Something has to be done.

And it is why political fixes alone keep failing. When the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them. You can abolish one unjust arrangement, and if hearts are unchanged, another grows in its place, the way a tumor grows back when the cancer is still in the body.

Two wrong remedies

There are two wrong remedies, and they mirror each other.

The first is denial: “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with me.” It is true that it is not your guilt. It is not true that it has nothing to do with you. You inherited a country, and a country is responsible for its own laws. Pretending the consequences aren’t there is not righteousness. It is the priest and the Levite passing by on the other side of the road.

The second wrong remedy is the one Isak described: the eye-for-an-eye. It punishes children for the sins of their fathers. It assigns guilt by race, which is exactly the thing it claims to oppose. It turns grievance into an identity, a permanent anger that no longer seeks to fix anything, because the anger has become the self. It redistributes by group, a new form of the Pleasantville robbery of Chapter 5. And it produces a new generation of wounded people who feel, correctly, that they were punished for something they didn’t do. So the chain continues. Every injustice done to remedy an old injustice is simply the next link.

This is what Isak meant when he said he doesn’t see a right side in so many conflicts. Once both sides have committed injustice in the name of redressing injustice, each side has a real grievance. Each can point to the other’s latest link. Arguing about who struck first stops being useful. The only question left is who will stop.

Six remedies that work

So what does a Christian nation actually do about systemic injustice? I see six things.

First, it repeals unjust laws and applies the law equally. This is the part that truly belongs to the state, because the state is responsible for its own laws. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.” One law for all, the same at the courthouse door for every man, whatever his color or his bank balance. That is the systemic remedy for systemic injustice, and it is the government’s job.

Second, it makes restitution where the victim and the wrongdoer can actually be identified. When Zacchaeus met Christ, he did not say, “I’ll be a better man from now on.” He said, “If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” Where a particular institution defrauded particular people, and the record shows it, justice requires repayment. What justice does not require is charging people who did nothing for debts owed by people they never knew.

Third, it confesses its national sins. Nehemiah and Daniel both prayed on behalf of their nation: “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity… we and our fathers.” They didn’t claim personal guilt for what their fathers had done. They confessed that the nation had sinned, and asked God to restore it. I have said that America must repent of its national sins, and this is part of what I mean. A nation that confesses the sin of slavery, of broken treaties, and of the lynching tree is not humiliating itself. It is doing what Nehemiah did.

Fourth, it rejects every form of racial nationalism. That answers the worry Isak raised about Christian nationalists who want the black and brown people out of the country. God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free.” He “hath broken down the middle wall of partition.” A nationalism built on race is not Christian nationalism. It is the same idolatry of the tribe that the gospel came to destroy. The Christian nation is defined by allegiance to Christ and His law, not by blood.

Fifth, it transforms relationships inside the system from within. Paul did not lead a slave revolt. He sent Onesimus, a runaway slave, back to his master Philemon with a letter telling Philemon to receive him “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” A church that treated slaves as brothers planted a seed that would eventually undo the whole idea of one man owning another. When master and slave kneel at the same table, the institution cannot survive the meal.

Sixth, and underneath all the others, it forgives. Forgiveness is not forgetting, and it is not excusing. It is the decision to absorb the blow instead of passing it on.

Who will stop

That brings us back to Isak’s question: how do we stop, forgive, and move forward?

Somebody has to take the blow and not return it. That is the only thing that ends a chain of retaliation. It is what Joseph did when his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, came to him in Egypt, and he had all the power in the world to repay them. He said, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” The chain stopped with him.

And it is what Christ did on a scale no one else could. He took the whole weight of human injustice, systemic and personal, the fathers’ and the sons’, into Himself on the cross, and He did not pass it on. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” That is the remedy from outside the system, the one the system can never produce for itself, because the system only knows how to pass things along.

So the Christian answer to systemic injustice is neither to deny it nor to repay it. It is to repeal the unjust law, restore what can be restored, confess what the nation did, refuse every idol of blood, change the relationships from within, and then let the chain end with us, because it ended with Him first.

That is the difference between a kingdom and a nanny state. A nanny state manages symptoms forever and keeps the grievances alive, because grievance is what it runs on. A kingdom ends the chain.

Notes

Ephesians 4:26; Romans 12:21; Matthew 5:39; Matthew 18:22.

Exodus 20:5; Ezekiel 18:20; Isaiah 10:1–2; Amos 2:6–7, 5:12, 5:24; 1 John 5:19; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17; Luke 10:31–32; Luke 19:8 (Zacchaeus); Exodus 22:1; Nehemiah 9:2, 33–34; Daniel 9:5–8; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Philemon 16; Genesis 50:20; Luke 23:34.

U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 2, clause 3 (the three-fifths clause) and Article IV, section 2, clause 3 (the fugitive slave clause), superseded by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. Federal mortgage redlining: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps (1935–1940) and Federal Housing Administration underwriting practice in the 1930s.

The observation that “when the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them” is from Thomas’s Christos Fellowship discussion of Charles Eisenstein, February 24, 2026.

Chapter 13 — War and the Moral Side: When a Nation May Fight, and the Lunch Money It Must Not Take

Isak had said that when he looks at a war, he doesn’t see a right side. Both sides have their sins, historically and now, and the only question left seems to be who can forgive. I pushed back.

THOMAS: Usually one side doesn’t want to stop and forgive. It wants to dominate, and to dominate for evil. So you really do have to look for the moral side. Who is in the right here?

Look at Russia and Ukraine. On the surface, one country was just being itself, and another came along and tried to take it over because it had always wanted to. That isn’t the right way to do things. But the way it actually happened was more complicated. A new government came to power in Ukraine with our backing, and the people in the Donbas and in Crimea wanted to go with Russia. And Ukraine shelled the Donbas. Thousands of people were killed.

Then Russia says, “Now we want the rest of it.” And Ukraine says, “No, you don’t have the right to take us over just because you want to.” So one side harassed the people who chose to leave, and the other side said, “We’ve had enough. We’re coming to stop you from harassing the people who wanted to be with us.” But Russia didn’t stop there and say, “We’ve got our part; now we’re going home.” It said, “Since we’re here, we’ll take the rest.” So both sides escalated, and both lost the moral high ground.

This is the kind of situation where somebody ultimately has to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” If nobody will say that, then the only thing left is, “If you won’t stop, I’ll have to defeat you.” When one side is doing wrong and won’t stop, unconditional surrender, complete defeat, is the only thing possible.

That’s basically what the president said last night about Iran, and it’s why the market went down today. He said, in effect, “If you don’t stop completely, disarm, and give up your nuclear program, we’ll annihilate you.” But the cost of annihilating Iran without destroying the world is a price America can’t pay. America doesn’t have the will to send in, I’d guess, five or ten million men to destroy the regime in a country of some ninety million people. Iran is huge, and it’s mountainous. And using atomic weapons would kill so many innocent people that it’s completely unacceptable. There are people there who are friendly to us, and we’d be wiping them out to get rid of the cancer in their midst. Can we use nuclear weapons against a society like that? No. Even to consider it is immoral.

So if you rattle your saber and say you’re going to annihilate them, that means either nukes or ten million men. They know you won’t send ten million men, and they know you won’t use nukes. So they’ll thumb their noses at you. “You’re just talk. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing.”

ISAK: They’re calling the bluff.

THOMAS: They’ll call our bluff, and it is a bluff. And if it isn’t a bluff, that’s even worse.

ISAK: God forbid.

THOMAS: God forbid. The ten-million-men option isn’t workable, and the nukes aren’t workable.

ISAK: And dropping ten million people into a country isn’t good for your own economy, unless you’re tearing the other country apart and taking all its resources. And even then we’re still in that moral fight. Even if we kill all the right people—

THOMAS: No, I think that part is moral. You’ve stood up and said, “Your leaders want to bring about the end of the world. You don’t mind bringing destruction on everyone. The way you treat your people is unacceptable. And you have nuclear weapons, or you’re building them.” They probably have a stockpile. Imagine that they couldn’t develop nuclear weapons in the thirty years since we first went after them. Either they’re the most incompetent nuclear scientists in the world, or they have them. It would be naive to think otherwise.

ISAK: And we haven’t been able to stop them in all that time, so clearly they’re not incompetent. They’re not a nothing adversary.

THOMAS: It is moral to take them over. But if we’re going to make a claim like that, we have to be prepared to send troops. You won’t win by blowing up this and that. You go in and change the regime completely, and that’s nation-building. And there’s no point in doing it unless you’re going to make it a Christian nation. Otherwise you do what we did in Afghanistan: “We took Bagram. We overthrew the Taliban. Now we’re tired of this. This is the longest war we’ve ever had, and we’re out of here.”

ISAK: Then you get out, like you were saying about Vietnam, and the people you sided with, the allies you fought alongside, are left defenseless and get destroyed, because there are no more American lives to spend, and the other side cleans up.

THOMAS: Absolutely. Those are among the most immoral things we’ve done as a country. And we pretended the problem was anything but what it was. “We’re culturally diverse. We honor diversity.” Why were they acting that way? Because of Islam. Not because they were Buddhists or Baha’is. There’s an element of Islam that’s toxic, and its teaching carries the seeds that let that toxic strain grow. Now we have the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Sharia law. To pretend we have to honor that as diversity is nonsense. Would you put a black widow spider in your bed? That’s a stupid thing to do. You’ll get hurt.

ISAK: It’s like the scene in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. A meteor is coming, and everybody’s going to die in a few days. Steve Carell is brushing his teeth, sees a spider in the sink, and is about to kill it. Then he thinks, “The world’s ending. I’ll let it live.” Next scene, he’s driving to work with a big spider bite on his face.

What I said, and what I hold

I said something that morning that I need to correct. I told Isak it would be moral to take Iran over: to send in the troops, change the regime, rebuild the country, and make it a Christian nation. I said it in the heat of a conversation about a real threat, and I have thought about it since. I no longer hold it, and I want to say why, because a leader who cannot be corrected, even by himself, has no business asking a nation to follow him.

Here is what I believe about when a nation may go to war.

First, in its own defense. A nation may defend its people, its territory, and its allies against attack. That is the purpose of an armed force, and the name Congress gave its department in 1949 said so: the Department of Defense. As I write, Congress is considering changing it back to the Department of War. I think the old name was right. A name states a purpose. A nation that calls its military the Department of War has told itself what its army is for.

Second, against aggression by one nation against another. When a strong nation invades a weaker one to take its land, its people, or its government, other nations may rightly help the victim, as a man may rightly stop another man from beating his neighbor.

Third, against a government committing genocide against its own people. A government that sets out to exterminate a people has forfeited any claim to be left alone. The nations that stood by at Auschwitz, in Cambodia, and in Rwanda carry that on their consciences.

Those are the occasions when intervention may be just. They are not a list of wars that must be fought. Christ said that a king going to war should first sit down and count whether he can win, and if he can’t, send an embassy and ask for terms of peace. A just cause does not make a war wise, and a war that cannot be won, or whose cost would destroy the innocent it is meant to save, should not be started.

Outside those occasions, we do not send armies into other nations to change their governments or their religions, even governments and religions I believe are gravely wrong. That includes Iran. I still believe its rulers are dangerous, and that a nuclear weapon in their hands would be a threat to the world. If they attacked us or our allies, or set out to exterminate a people, we would have every right to act. But changing their regime is not our right, and making Iran a Christian nation is not the army’s work. No soldier can convert anyone. A church planted by conquest is not a church. It is an occupation with a steeple.

The weapons of the kingdom

What, then, does a Christian nation do about the nations it believes are wrong? It uses the weapons of the kingdom. “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.”

It sends missionaries, teachers, doctors, and builders. It educates. It builds bridges between peoples. It cares for the widow and the orphan, which James calls “pure religion and undefiled before God.” It shows other peoples that whatever is true and good in their own moral and religious traditions comes from the One God who made all things, since “without him was not any thing made that was made.” Every people has some portion of the truth about God, some fragment of His law written on its heart. We go to them not to erase what they have, but to show them the whole of which they hold a part, and to invite them to the One who is its source. I take this up again in Chapter 15.

That is slower than an invasion, and less satisfying to the part of us that wants the problem solved by next year. But it is the only thing that has ever actually transformed a nation. The Roman Empire was not converted by an army. It was converted by people who cared for the sick during the plagues when everyone else fled, who took in abandoned babies, and who died for their faith without killing anyone. That is what overcoming evil with good looks like at the scale of nations.

Turning the test on ourselves

Isak’s question at the start of our conversation was not really about Iran or Ukraine. It was about us. He said America seemed to have been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: going out to get oil and other resources, snuffing out political cultures it didn’t like, and funding regimes that crushed their own people’s movements. And he asked, “At what cost that I don’t know about? Are the good guys really the good guys?”

If I am going to tell him to look for the moral side in Russia and Ukraine, I have to be willing to look for it in America. So here it is.

What the record shows

Some of what Isak suspects is true, and I won’t pretend otherwise.

In 1953, after Iran’s elected prime minister nationalized the country’s oil industry, the CIA and British intelligence helped organize the coup that removed him and strengthened the Shah. The CIA has since acknowledged its role. The next year, the United States backed the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president after his land reform threatened the holdings of an American fruit company. In Chile in the early 1970s, the United States worked to destabilize an elected Marxist government. During the Cold War we supported more than one regime that tortured its own citizens, because those regimes opposed communism. And in 2003 we invaded Iraq on the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction, and the weapons were not there.

That is the playground-bully part of the record, and a Christian cannot look away from it.

But it isn’t the whole record, and if you see only that part, you will see something false. After the Second World War, the United States held more power than any nation in history. It did not annex Germany or Japan. It rebuilt them, and within a generation they were free, prosperous, and our friends. The Marshall Plan fed and rebuilt Western Europe, including our former enemies. The Berlin airlift flew food and coal into a blockaded city for more than a year rather than fight for it. And for most of the past eighty years, the American navy has kept the world’s sea lanes open to every nation’s ships, not only our own. Empires have not usually behaved that way. Rome did not rebuild Carthage. It destroyed it.

So the honest answer to “Are the good guys really the good guys?” is that America has done both. It has done great good and real wrong. The wrongs follow a pattern, and the pattern is worth seeing clearly.

The sin has a name

Every one of those wrongs has the same root: the tenth commandment. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house… nor any thing that is thy neighbour’s.” James tells us where wars come from: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain.”

Remember Naboth’s vineyard from Chapter 2. King Ahab wanted it. Naboth wouldn’t sell, so the queen arranged Naboth’s death and the king took the vineyard. God sent Elijah to ask him, “Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?” Nations are held to the same law. When a powerful nation overthrows a smaller nation’s government because that government decided its own oil or its own land belonged to its own people, that is Naboth’s vineyard. It doesn’t matter that the smaller nation’s decision was foolish, or that the foreign owners had a contract, or that the new government would be friendlier. A nation that takes by force, by an arranged coup, or through a puppet it installed what it could not obtain by fair trade has done what Ahab did. Paul says God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The borders of nations are not ours to rearrange for our convenience.

It is also the cancer picture from Chapter 3. A tumor makes the body build blood vessels to feed it; it captures the common supply for itself. An empire of plunder does the same beyond its borders: it arranges for other nations’ resources to flow to it on its terms, not theirs. And like a tumor, it doesn’t stay in one place. It spreads.

Trade is not tribute

Here is the distinction that answers Isak’s worry about capitalism.

Capitalism doesn’t need conquest. It needs trade. Trade is two owners each saying yes. You have oil and want tractors; I have tractors and want oil. We agree on a price, and both of us are better off. That is the free market working exactly as it should, across a border just as across a street. It is the good-roads principle applied to the whole world. Everybody wants the sea lanes open, and a nation that keeps them open for everyone is doing something like building good roads.

Tribute is different. Tribute is when the stronger party sets the terms by force, or arranges for the other side’s “yes” to be spoken by someone it installed. That isn’t capitalism. It is the captain of industry buying up the mousetrap company, done with gunboats instead of contracts. It is the same centralizing perversion we saw in Chapter 3, at the scale of nations.

So Isak’s worry is aimed at the right thing but blames the wrong cause. The problem isn’t that a growing economy needs resources. The problem is a nation that stops trading for what it needs and starts taking it.

And the premise has changed. For a generation, the argument was that America had to secure foreign oil because it didn’t have enough of its own. That is no longer true. The United States is now the world’s largest producer of oil and a net exporter of petroleum. And we have domestic energy we have barely begun to use: nuclear power, whose so-called waste is mostly unused fuel that could be recycled. A nation that produces its own energy has no excuse for resource wars. If we ever go to war again, we will not be able to pretend it is for survival. We will have to state the real reason, and that is exactly as it should be.

The ends did not justify the means

Isak also raised the Cold War: funding regimes that crushed socialist or communist movements in their own countries. That one is harder, and I want to be fair to both sides of it.

Communism was not a harmless difference of opinion. It killed tens of millions of people in the twentieth century, through famine, purges, and prison camps. Resisting it was right. Keeping it from spreading was right. The people of Eastern Europe said so as soon as they were free to speak.

But Paul warns against saying “Let us do evil, that good may come,” and says the condemnation of those who reason that way is just. A good end does not sanctify an evil means. When America armed men who tortured prisoners, made dissidents disappear, and massacred villages because those men were anti-communist, it was doing evil so that good might come. And it planted exactly the resentment that anti-American movements have fed on ever since. The Shah we helped restore in 1953 fell in 1979 to the Islamic revolution, and we have been dealing with that regime for nearly half a century. Evil means don’t just stain a good end. They tend to destroy it.

The purchase of policy

Why does a nation that has done so much good keep doing these things? I think the deepest reason is the one in the Pleasantville story of Chapter 5: we pay the government to rob for us, and then the robbers get paid by others too.

Weapons makers profit from war. Intelligence agencies grow when there is an enemy. Politicians need campaign money, and some of it comes from people whose business depends on conflict, and some from the friends and lobbies of foreign governments. When a legislator trades his vote on war for campaign money, he is selling what must never be sold. America’s foreign policy may be advised by friends, but it must be purchased by no one. An alliance is a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney.

So the reforms I propose are concrete. No sustained military campaign without a congressional declaration or authorization that states its objective in one sentence, the conditions under which it ends, and a date on which it expires; if the objective can’t be written in a sentence, nobody knows what winning is. War-industry profits audited and capped while hostilities last, so that no company’s earnings depend on a war continuing. The revolving door between the Pentagon, the agencies, and the contractors closed. And foreign-influence laws enforced equally against every nation’s lobby, friend and adversary alike.

But I will say what I believe most deeply about it. A bought government is the symptom. A people who can be bought is the disease. The lobbyist’s check only has power over a man who has a price.

The test for American power

So what should America do with its power? What I would tell any strong man to do with his strength.

Use it to protect, not to take. Defend your own. Stand with the weak when they are invaded, and with a people when its own government sets out to destroy it. Keep the sea lanes open for everyone. Keep your word, to allies and enemies alike, because a nation’s word is a moral act: the righteous man “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” Count the cost of every war before you start it. Trade, don’t take. Send teachers, doctors, and missionaries where you once sent coups. And when you have done wrong, say so.

Apply to every act abroad the same test I apply at home: would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize this as love? Not flattery, and not always pleasant, because correction isn’t always pleasant, and neither is defending a nation against an aggressor. But love: the Iranian student, the Guatemalan farmer, the Russian conscript, and the Ukrainian mother, each treated as a child of God whose good is being sought. The 1953 coup fails that test. The Marshall Plan passes it.

America doesn’t need to take other nations’ lunch money to be great. It needs to be good. A good nation does not covet its neighbor’s vineyard, and it does not feed young men into a meat grinder for someone else’s profit.

So, are the good guys the good guys? Sometimes. Our job is to make that true more often, beginning by telling the truth about the times it wasn’t. That is what repentance is for a nation. It is the same thing it is for a man.

Notes

In 2014 Crimea held a referendum on joining Russia that most of the world did not recognize, and Russia annexed it. Separatist forces in the Donbas declared independence, and the war there from 2014 to 2022 killed about 14,000 people on all sides, including more than 3,000 civilians, according to United Nations estimates. The role of the United States in Ukraine’s 2014 change of government is disputed.

“Last night” refers to statements about Iran on the evening of September 22, 2026, summarized as Thomas described them. Iran’s population is roughly 90 million.

The War Department was reorganized under the National Security Act of 1947, and the Department of Defense received its name by act of Congress in 1949. A September 2025 executive order authorized “Department of War” as a secondary title, and in June 2026 the House and Senate Armed Services Committees advanced a formal renaming in the fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

Luke 14:31–32; Romans 12:21; James 1:27; John 1:3; Exodus 20:17; James 4:1–2; 1 Kings 21:19; Acts 17:26; Romans 3:8; Psalm 15:4.

Iran, 1953: the CIA acknowledged its role in documents released in 2013. Guatemala, 1954 (President Jacobo Árbenz and the United Fruit Company). Chile, 1970–1973: documented in the 1975 reports of the Senate’s Church Committee.

U.S. petroleum: the Energy Information Administration reports the United States as the world’s largest crude oil producer and a net total petroleum exporter since 2020.

The reforms and the phrases “advised by friends, but purchased by no one” and “a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney” are from Thomas’s “The Ambassage of Peace” (August 2026).

Chapter 14 — The Room and the Sofa: Islam and the Limits of Free Exercise

When Isak and I talked about safeguards, he mentioned Sharia law almost in passing. It was his example of the authoritarian version of religion: “You will obey by command, and if not, you’re done.” Then he said something honest: “I don’t know what that looks like in reality. I haven’t been there. I only know what I’m told, and I’m trying to be critical of it, even though it may be true.”

That is the right posture, and it is more than most Americans bring to the subject. It also tells me that I owe him, and every reader like him, a careful account. When I told Isak in the last chapter that there is an element of Islam that is toxic, I made a strong claim. A strong claim needs reasons, and it needs limits. This chapter gives both.

I also want to say why this belongs in a book about transforming America. Every movement to restore a nation has front lines, the places where the real resistance gathers and where a stand has to be taken. In our time there are two. One is sexuality and the family, which I have been discussing, and whose sharpest point, abortion, I take up in Chapter 18. The other is the place where freedom of religion meets a movement that uses that freedom as cover for a political program. That is this chapter.

Why the subject closed

For most of my adult life, I did not say publicly what I am about to say. I don’t think I was unusual. Two prices closed the subject in the West, and neither required anyone to win an argument. The first was lethal: the novelist with a price on his head, the filmmaker murdered in the street, the cartoonists shot at their desks. The second was social: the word Islamophobe, which ends a career or a friendship as surely as a threat ends a conversation. Between the two, the subject was simply dropped. People stopped examining it, not because they had been persuaded, but because they had been frightened.

That is not a healthy state for a free people. A question that cannot be asked is a question that has already been answered by whoever made it dangerous to ask.

The room is not the sofa

The key to the whole subject came to me from a man who knows it from the inside. Danny Burmawi was born in Jordan, raised a Muslim, studied Islam deeply, and became a Christian. He cannot go home. When an interviewer raised the obvious objection, that America has freedom of religion and the government doesn’t critique theologies, Burmawi answered with a short sentence: Islam has a religion.

A room has a sofa, but the room is not the sofa. A house has a kitchen, but the house is not a kitchen. Islam contains prayer, fasting, almsgiving, pilgrimage, and a creed. That is a religion. But it contains them inside a legal, political, military, and civilizational program whose stated goal is the rule of Allah’s law over all mankind. Call the whole thing a religion, and you have used the word to smuggle the program past the Constitution’s gate on the sofa’s ticket.

The word “religion” names a relation between the soul and God, and the practices that express it. The First Amendment protects the free exercise of that. It does not protect a program to replace the Constitution, because a program to replace the Constitution is not a relation between a soul and God. It is a relation between a party and a state. If a Communist Party declared Marx a prophet and the Communist Manifesto holy writ, no serious person would grant it religious protection for seizing power. The label would not change what it was doing.

This is the same line I drew in Chapter 7. Conduct between man and man, and between man and the state, falls under the state’s jurisdiction, whatever its religious motive. The relation between a man and God does not.

So here is what free exercise means. The state may not forbid a man to pray, to fast, to teach his children his creed, to build a mosque with his own money, to wear what his faith prescribes, to change his religion, or to try peacefully to persuade others to change theirs.

It does not mean that a legal system in which those who leave the faith lose their children is a protected religious practice. It does not mean that an organized effort to substitute the law of a god for the law of the land is a protected religious practice. It does not mean that a demand to punish criticism of a prophet is a protected religious practice. And it does not mean that the state must pretend not to know what a movement’s own texts say its goals are.

Muslims are not the enemy

Now the other half, which matters just as much.

The word Islamophobia was built to attach the ideology to the persons, so that criticism of the one becomes hatred of the other. We have to separate them again, and say which we mean. Contempt for Muslims as persons is sin. It violates the second great commandment, and I will say so as strongly as any imam. Criticism of Islam as a system of ideas is the ordinary use of the mind God gave us, and in this country it is protected speech.

I have had Muslim patients whom I thoroughly enjoyed, and I have shared Thanksgiving tables with Muslim families. They are wonderful people. They are children of God, and I am commanded to love them. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, thousands of young Iranians held candlelight vigils in the streets of Tehran for the American dead, at real risk to themselves. The people paying the highest price today for opposing the Islamist program are Muslims and former Muslims. The line does not run between Muslims and everyone else. It runs through the middle of the Muslim world, and many of the bravest people on the right side of it were raised in the faith.

Ezekiel says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. Collective guilt is pagan. No American Muslim who did not fly a plane is guilty of what the hijackers did. But Ezekiel is speaking of guilt, not diagnosis. Ideas have consequences. The neighbor is innocent of the bomb, and the book that inspired it is not thereby cleared.

The standard and the execution

Why do I say there is something in Islam itself, and not merely in some of its followers, that produces the toxic strain? Because of the difference between a faith’s standard and its execution: between what it teaches and what its followers have done.

Christianity’s standard is Christ, who conquered nothing, killed no one, and told Peter to put away his sword, “for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Christianity’s execution includes the Crusades, the Inquisition, the burning of Servetus, and the wars of religion. But every one of those can be condemned by Christians from inside Christianity, by the standard, without abandoning a single verse. That is what I did in Chapters 6 and 12, and it is what Christians have done for centuries.

In Islam, the standard is Muhammad, “the perfect man,” the pattern for all conduct. So the caravan raids, the killings of his critics, the massacre of a Jewish tribe, and his marriage to a child cannot simply be called wrong. They must be justified, or explained away, or blamed on later forgers. In that structural sense, Islam’s standard is its execution. There is no higher court to appeal to. And every Muslim who is a good man, and many are, is good by a standard his own tradition did not give him: the law written on the heart that Paul says every people has by nature.

That is also why the phrase “moderate Islam” has to be handled carefully. The Muslim who reads the hard verses as bound to their seventh-century setting is welcome, and he is not the problem. But if he uses his reading as a shield, forbidding anyone to examine the texts that produce the extremist, he is protecting the source, whatever his intentions. My request to him is fair: if you read it that way, you are not the problem, so step aside and let us deal with the reading that is.

What the state should not do

Burmawi wants the State Department to run a program to combat Islamic theology. I don’t. A government competent to judge theology will, on some later Tuesday, judge mine. The truth about Islam is the church’s to teach, not the government’s. When I argue from the pulpit that Allah is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as Christ revealed Him, that argument belongs in the pulpit. It must never be brought to the immigration counter.

And the state must not impose a religious test. A law barring anyone who calls himself a Muslim from citizenship or office would be a religious test, and I oppose it. It would punish the man for his relation to God rather than for his conduct or his politics. It would also bar the very Muslims who are our allies, the ones who reject the program at personal cost.

What the state should do

The state’s proper work is narrower, and it rests on law already on the books. The question it asks is not what a man believes about God, but whether he is loyal to the Constitution. The state may not test his religion. It may, and must, test his allegiance.

At the gate. A nation has the right to decide whom it admits and whom it makes a citizen. The Supreme Court has recognized that power as nearly complete where admission is concerned. Our naturalization law already requires an applicant to be “attached to the principles of the Constitution,” and it already bars those who advocate establishing a totalitarian dictatorship here. So I would ask every applicant for citizenship, whatever his religion, a direct question: Will you affirm that no religious law, Sharia included, should ever replace the Constitution as the law of this land? That is a renunciation of a political program, not a religion. A Muslim who answers yes is welcome, and I mean it. A man who answers no has told us, without our asking a single question about his God, that he does not accept the Constitution he is asking to live under. This test applies at the gate, not inside the house. It governs whom we admit and naturalize, not how we treat citizens.

In government service. Federal law already provides that no one may hold a federal position who advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government, and every federal employee swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. The courts have rightly held that mere membership in an organization cannot disqualify a man, because membership sweeps in the passive, the unaware, and even the member who opposes the group’s goals. Guilt by association is a sin against the ninth commandment before it is a constitutional problem. But what a man himself advocates is his own. So I would refuse federal employment to anyone who will not renounce the program of replacing the Constitution with religious law. And where this matters most, in the granting of security clearances, the government already has broad discretion, and its guidelines already make “allegiance to the United States” the first question. The lesson is to screen at entry and at the clearance, because removing a man afterward is slow and nearly impossible.

For the apostate. The state should protect those who leave Islam from the families and communities that would punish them, and should grant asylum to apostates as a named class of religious persecution. A religion whose members cannot leave it is not being practiced freely.

Against blasphemy law. The state should refuse every law, in every form, that makes criticism of a religion a crime. That includes laws against “Islamophobia” that define criticism of Islam’s teachings as hatred. A faith that cannot bear examination has confessed something about itself.

What the law cannot reach, and must not

Here I have to be honest about the limit of all this. A determined movement can pursue its goals by lawful means: by having large families, by persuading converts, and eventually by voting, even for an amendment to the Constitution. No statute can reach those means, and none should. They are the same freedoms that protected the abolitionists, the early Christians under Rome, and every minority that has ever changed a nation by conviction. If I would not want the government to stop Christians from having children, winning converts, and voting their consciences, I cannot ask it to stop anyone else.

So the laws I have described are door locks. They are worth having. But a lock does nothing for a house nobody is living in. The real defense is not legal.

The real program: tell the truth, and ask one question

The main work belongs to the press, the pulpit, public opinion, and the neighbor. It is exposure: saying plainly, and without fear, what the program is.

It begins with a prepared answer to the charge of Islamophobia, because the charge works mainly on people who have no answer ready. Here is mine, and I recommend saying it exactly this plainly:

I am not afraid of Islam, and I do not hate Muslims. I am opposed to a political project. Your movement has a religion, and it also has a program to replace the Constitution with Sharia. I have no quarrel with the religion. Pray five times a day, build your mosque, raise your children in your faith, and I will defend your right to all of it. I am opposed to the program. Call me an Islamophobe as often as you like. It will not stop me from describing the program accurately, and it will not make the program go away.

And then there is one question, which anyone can ask at any dinner table, with no law required. Ask a Muslim neighbor, respectfully and directly:

“Will you say that Sharia should never replace the Constitution as the law of this land? And will you say so to your friends?”

If the answer is yes, then he is not part of the problem, and I mean that without reservation. He is a fellow citizen, and I will stand beside him against anyone who troubles him for his prayers. The second half of the question matters most, because a man who will say it to his own community is doing work no government program could ever do.

If the answer is no, then he has told me where he stands, without my asking him one thing about his beliefs about God. I did not test his religion. He volunteered his politics. And the door stays open. When he changes his mind, he is welcome.

Notice what that question is. It is answerable. It is not a religious test; no government asks it, and nothing attaches to the answer but the truth. It is polite. A fourteen-year-old can ask it. It requires no knowledge of the Qur’an. And it produces more real information than a thousand op-eds.

The church’s work

Beneath all this lies the work that only the church can do.

Christians should read what Islam says about itself: the Qur’an, the traditional biography of Muhammad, and the major collections of his sayings. Not to become scholars, but as the Bereans read, searching “whether those things were so.” A Christian who has never read what Islam teaches is defenseless against both the imam who misrepresents it and the commentator who misrepresents it the other way.

Christians should practice hospitality. The man at the mosque down the road is not an ideology. He is a neighbor who may have been told all his life that Christians secretly know Islam is true and reject it out of rebellion. He has probably never met a Christian who loves him and can also tell him, gently, what the cross means. Be that one. Relationship first, questions before arguments, and Jesus before any discussion of Muhammad.

And Christians should offer the thing that answers the whole problem at its root. The fury behind blasphemy laws is the fury of people whose worth rests entirely on their adherence to a system, so that every criticism of the system feels like an attack on the self. The Christian’s identity is not his ideology. It is Christ: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” Because his standing rests on a Person and not a program, he can hear his church’s history criticized and lose nothing. The way out for our Muslim neighbors is not to demand that they grow thicker skin. It is to offer them the ground we stand on: adoption as sons of a Father who paid what we owed. “Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.”

The real defense

I will not read the ledger of any nation’s calamities and announce which one was God’s judgment for what. When people asked Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices, He refused to say they were worse sinners than others. He said, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

That is the last word on national security, too. A nation that has emptied itself of the faith that held its liberties in place doesn’t need a special act of wrath to lose them. It only needs to keep going the way it is going. The laws I have proposed are door locks. Repentance, and the return of a people to the God who made them free, is the house itself.

Joshua compelled no one. He laid out what was on offer and declared where his own household stood: “Choose you this day whom ye will serve… but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” That is the model for a Christian nation facing Islam: no coercion, no religious tests, no hatred of persons, and no pretending. Tell the truth about the program, protect the Constitution at its gates, love the neighbor, and make plain whom we serve.

Notes

The interview is Jeremy Boreing’s PragerU conversation with Danny Burmawi of the Ideological Defense Institute, engaged at length in Thomas’s essay “The Room and the Sofa” (September 12, 2026). The legal program follows “The Trench” (September 17, 2026).

Candlelight vigils for the victims of the September 11 attacks were held in Tehran in the days following the attacks.

Ezekiel 18:20; Matthew 26:52; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:11; Galatians 2:20; Romans 8:15; Luke 13:1–5; Joshua 24:15.

U.S. Constitution, Article VI, clause 3 (no religious test for office). Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753 (1972). 8 U.S.C. § 1427(a) (“attached to the principles of the Constitution”); 8 U.S.C. § 1424(a) (bars to naturalization, including advocacy of a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States); Schneiderman v. United States, 320 U.S. 118 (1943).

5 U.S.C. § 3331 (federal oath of office); 5 U.S.C. § 7311 (bar on federal employment for one who advocates the overthrow of our constitutional form of government); Elfbrandt v. Russell, 384 U.S. 11 (1966), and Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967) (membership alone insufficient); Cole v. Richardson, 405 U.S. 676 (1972) (affirmative oath upheld); Department of the Navy v. Egan, 484 U.S. 518 (1988) (security clearances). Adjudicative Guideline A concerns allegiance to the United States.

Chapter 15 — Believing We Are Right: The Gentle Yoke and the Unreached

We had covered a great deal of ground: economics, government, sexuality, war. I wanted Isak to understand what all of it requires of the people who would carry it.

THOMAS: The point of all this is that we have a lot of work to do, and we have to actually believe in what we’re doing. We have to believe we’re on the side of right. Otherwise we’ll be double-minded, and a double-minded man receives nothing. We have to be willing to impose this on the world, and it’s imposed by saying, “This is a really good thing. Won’t you do it?” It’s a very gentle kind of imposition. “Good is good. Listen to this argument. Take this yoke on yourself. It’s easy. Its burden is light. You’re going to have to serve somebody. Take this one. It’s a good one to serve.”

ISAK: Those are very reasonable standards, and strong ones. Not strong like a heavy yoke, but strong as in having strength, something that could make individuals, families, and countries stronger.

There’s so much growing for people to do, and for me to do. But I feel like I’m growing. I’m learning and developing my worldview and where I draw my lines. I’m paying more attention to what I think God wants to feel and experience, and being sensitive to that. Hopefully that spreads to other people, the way you’re doing with your group: spreading these ideas and trying to live them out, and seeing where they go. I think we could change the world.

THOMAS: It’s the only hope I see. I don’t see anybody else doing it, so I figure I’d better do it myself. And I can’t do it alone, so I have to bring other people along. Bringing other people along is changing the world. That’s what changing the world is. Everybody has to bring everybody else along. You bring people along, and then you teach them to bring people along, and they teach others. It only takes a spark to get a fire going.

[Thomas recited the words of Kurt Kaiser’s 1969 song “Pass It On”: a single spark starts a fire that warms everyone around it; God’s love, once experienced, is as fresh as spring and has to be shared; the singer wishes his friend the same happiness and wants to proclaim from the mountaintop that the Lord of love has come to him.]

ISAK: It’s a really good song. Well, let’s go pass it on.

Passing it on raises the question behind every mission, and Isak had asked it at the start of our conversation. I say that the moral law is real and can be discovered, and that Christ in the heart is what brings a person into alignment with it. But most human beings who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman I had told Isak about, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to meet Christianity in order to change. What about the billions who never did?

That question is not new to me. It is the question that first sent me searching through the religions of the world. I want to say where I have come to rest, and where I have deliberately stopped.

Two truths that careless people collapse into one

The first truth is that there is only one way. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I hear that verse first as a statement about how reality is built, before it is a statement about religion. It says there is one and only one way the thing works: one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. There is no second door, no Buddhist door and Muslim door and Christian door leading into the same room. The Son is the only way in.

The second truth is that the Son’s light has been going out since the beginning. John calls Him “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, not every man who has heard a sermon. Paul says that Gentiles who never had the law of Moses still “do by nature the things contained in the law,” because its work is “written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” The early Christian teacher Justin Martyr spoke of the “seeds of the Word” scattered among every people, and said that Socrates, reasoning his way toward the good, was responding to Christ without knowing His name. And when Paul stood in Athens before an altar inscribed “To the Unknown God,” he didn’t tell the Athenians their worship was nothing. He said, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”

This is what I meant in Chapter 13 when I said that every people has some portion of the truth about God. Nothing was made that was not made by Him, and whatever is true and good in any tradition came from Him. When a sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. His moral knowledge is real. His conscience is real. That is why the moral law can be discovered: the One who wrote it has been speaking into every heart all along.

Consider Cornelius in the book of Acts. He was a Roman army officer, not a Jew, and he had never heard the gospel. But he feared God, he gave generously, and he prayed. God did not tell him, “You’re fine as you are.” God sent an angel to tell him to send for Peter, and at the same time gave Peter a vision to prepare him to go. That is the pattern. The seeker who responds to the light he has is not left where he is. God arranges for him to hear the name. The woman I told Isak about is the same. The fervor was always in her. She gave it to communism because communism was what she had been shown. When she met Christ, the same hunger found its true object.

Why the name still matters

Here I have to correct something, including a conclusion I once reached myself. It would be easy to say: if the seeker can come through the Son without knowing His name, then the name doesn’t really matter, the missionaries can stay home, and everything will work out. That doesn’t follow, and two hard facts forbid it.

The first is that entering is a relationship. The sharpest words Jesus ever spoke were not aimed at pagans. They were aimed at people whose works were impressive, who prophesied in His name and cast out devils and did many wonderful works. To them He said, “I never knew you.” Good works, whatever else they show, are not by themselves the one thing He is seeking, which is a soul He knows. And a relationship is entered with open eyes.

The second is that the light can be misread. The seeker who perceives the good without knowing its source can bend it, add to it, and build a religion around the bent version. The seeds of the Word are real, but seeds grow into whatever the soil allows. That is why Paul did not leave the Athenians at their altar. He preached the resurrection to them.

So the honest position is narrower than the comfortable one, and truer. The light is universal. It is genuine wherever it is received. The way in is the Son, named or not. And none of that is a reason to stop preaching His name. The Great Commission is two things at once. It is map-making: we carry the fullest map of country that many people are already stumbling across. And it is rescue: some of them are walking toward the edge of a cliff, and we are sent to pull them back.

What we are not appointed to do

What about those who never heard in time? Here I stop, and I stop on purpose.

I am certain of one thing: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” God will not condemn a man for failing a test he was never given. The Judge is exactly fair. But what He does with each soul is His to decide, not mine to announce. There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition has usually allowed: that God “will have all men to be saved,” that in Christ He is reconciling all things to Himself. I hold those threads, and I hold them as hope. I will not preach them as a promise. A man who is told he will certainly arrive has been given a reason never to set out. I think God left those passages as hints rather than headlines for exactly that reason.

The physics doesn’t settle it either. When I first explored these questions through Conscious Point Physics, I reasoned toward a confident universalism, as though good would spread through all of creation automatically, the way ice crystals spread through supercooled water until none of the liquid is left. That was an error. The order of the universe is conservative: disorder does not heal itself. It persists until a remedy is applied, and the remedy is applied only where it is willingly received. So the physics tells us something about how the remedy works. It tells us nothing about how many will receive it. That silence is honest, and I intend to leave it there.

We are not appointed to rule on the hard cases. We are appointed to go.

The unreached among us

This matters for this book, and not only for missions overseas.

It matters first for how a Christian nation treats those of its citizens who are not Christians. Recall what I said about good roads, and about the atheist and the priest agreeing that you shouldn’t take my things or hurt me. Why do they agree? Because the law is written on every heart. The atheist knows theft is wrong, not because he has read Exodus, but because the Light that lights every man has lit him too. That is why a nation can hold the moral law in common without requiring every citizen to be a believer, and why the civil law of a Christian nation can be just to the Muslim, the Hindu, and the unbeliever. It asks of them only what their own consciences already know. They are our neighbors and fellow citizens, and they are owed love, not coercion. They are not the enemies of a Christian nation. They are its mission field.

And America has its own unreached, and they are not in the jungle. They are the millions who have heard the name of Jesus all their lives, as a curse word, a cliché, a political party’s brand, or the religion of their grandmother’s church, and have never once heard the gospel. In some ways they are harder to reach than a man who has never heard the name at all, because they think they already know what it means. They have been inoculated with a weak dose of the thing, and the weak dose protects them from the real one.

That is the field for Transforming America. We are not trying to reach America by taking over its government. We are trying to reach the unreached who live on our own streets, with the real thing instead of the caricature.

Why it can’t wait

Isak gave my Fellowship something important when we discussed this last summer, and it belongs here. He pointed out that the urgency of the Great Commission isn’t only about the life to come. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” is present tense. A soul that is out of alignment is suffering now, in this life, from the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces. Isak knows that from his own experience, the fish chasing the hook, and so do I. And the way back to harmony is open now.

So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat. It combines a physician’s urgency with a shepherd’s. “You are suffering, and you need not be.” And also: “You are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall.” Both are true. They are the same love, looking at the same person, across two horizons.

That is why it only takes a spark. The seeker is already there, with the light he has, looking for its source. Our part is to be the Peter who goes when Cornelius sends for him, and to go even before we are sent for. We bring people along, and we teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. And it is the only answer I can give Isak about the billions: God is fair to every one of them, and He has told us to go.

Notes

James 1:6–8; Matthew 11:29–30. “You’re going to have to serve somebody” echoes Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” (1979). Kurt Kaiser, “Pass It On” (1969).

John 14:6; John 1:3, 9; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:22–31; Acts 10 (Cornelius); Matthew 7:21–23; Genesis 18:25; 1 Timothy 2:4; Colossians 1:20; Matthew 4:17; Matthew 28:19–20.

Justin Martyr, Second Apology 8 and 10, and First Apology 46 (the “seeds of the Word” and Socrates).

The correction of the earlier universalist conclusion, the “map-making and rescue” framing, and Isak’s point about present-life urgency are from Thomas’s Christos Fellowship essay “The Architecture of Mercy” (July 10, 2026).

Chapter 16 — The Worldview Without a Center

Isak thanked me for going down the road with him. He had come into the conversation troubled, and I could hear that some of the trouble had lifted.

ISAK: Thanks for going down that road with me. In the political climate we’re in, and I feel like I keep saying “climate,” there’s a lot of confusion and chaos, and centuries and decades to learn from about where we are and how we got here. As a young person, I feel like I’m getting my bearings, getting my sea legs: what’s happening, what came before, what’s likely to come after. Unfortunately, I’m pretty ignorant about past generations. I’ve read enough history to have an overall view, but the details get filled in as you get older. I guess that’s how it happens.

THOMAS: I’ve always thought what was missing for you was the right framework. I think you’ve been taught the woke worldview: diversity, oppressor, colonizer, imperialist. “What about the pygmies? What about other people’s viewpoints? Who’s to say what’s right?”

That worldview isn’t new. It’s eternal. It’s the satanic worldview, the worldview of the rebel against God. It dresses itself in the clothing of caring about other people, about fairness, about doing right and letting people be. “Who’s to say what’s right?” It’s a worldview without a center. Everybody has his own world, and who’s to say whose world is right? If everybody has his own world, and everybody feels he’s doing the right thing, who are we to tell him what the right thing is?

It’s a libertarian kind of perspective, and it’s really common. I actually think the libertarian philosophy is the most dangerous ideology, because it seems so right. “I’m not hurting anybody.” Non-aggression, contract, consent. Add a market economy where everybody produces what he wants, and you’re not imposing anything on anybody. That openness to everything is very attractive. It seems intuitively obvious: “I’m not hurting anybody, and if I think this is right, who are you to stop me? Who are you to tell me what’s right or wrong?” It’s very hard to argue against, because it’s so close to being right.

About the only thing that needs to be added is this: “By the way, there is a God, and some things actually are right. Most of what you want to do is right. Most of what you feel is good. But there are a few things that aren’t, even though you probably enjoy them.” You want to smoke a joint; you’re not really hurting anybody. Shooting up is harder, and you’ll probably die, but who am I to tell you not to enjoy yourself on the way out? Who you sleep with, which sex, for how long: if people agree, who am I to tell them what to do? At some point we have to ask: If there is a God, does God care about these things?

Has your dad ever told you his story about the eternal happy family?

ISAK: Remind me. I’m not sure I know it.

THOMAS: I wish I could tell it as well as he does. It’s one of the most profound stories I’ve ever heard. He was at BYU, studying child development. He’d been immersed in it, and he came out and sat down on a bench, and something came over him. I think he heard a voice. It was as if all the wisdom of the universe opened up to him. He went into one room, and either it was spoken to him or he realized it: family. And behind it was this unfathomable wisdom and beauty and eternity. Then he went into another room, and it was the room of eternal family. Then he went into another room, even grander, and the depth and magnitude of it was eternal happy family.

ISAK: That’s the goal.

THOMAS: That’s the goal.

ISAK: It’s a good goal. It isn’t a power-hungry goal. It isn’t self-serving. It’s literally loving others the way God loves us. It’s a beautiful story.

THOMAS: That vision really is the top. It’s the kingdom of heaven on earth. Have him tell you the story again. I didn’t tell it nearly as well as he does.

ISAK: Firsthand beats secondhand.

I called the worldview Isak had absorbed satanic, the worldview of the rebel against God. That is a strong statement, and I want to explain it, because I don’t mean that the people who hold it are wicked. Most of them are sincere, and many are more compassionate than the people who argue with them. What I mean concerns the shape of the idea, not the character of the people who hold it.

The oldest idea in the world

The first temptation in the Bible was not to steal or to kill. The serpent told the woman, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The offer was not a particular pleasure. It was the authority to decide for oneself what is good and what is evil, without reference to the One who made us. That is the root of every other rebellion, and it is the root of the worldview without a center.

The book of Judges ends with a sentence that describes a whole society living that way: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Notice that it does not say every man did what he knew was wrong. It says every man did what was right in his own eyes. Each one had his own center, and so the nation had none. The chapters just before that verse describe what followed: kidnapping, rape, murder, and civil war. A people with no shared center does not become tolerant. It becomes a collection of private worlds, and when the private worlds collide, there is nothing above them to settle the conflict except force.

That is why I say this worldview is not new. It is the oldest idea in the world, and it always arrives dressed as freedom and kindness. “Who am I to judge?” sounds humble. But it quietly assumes that there is no one above any of us who can judge, and that is not humility. It is the removal of the King.

Why the libertarian version is the most dangerous

I told Isak I consider libertarianism the most dangerous form of this idea, and I should say why, because I agree with much of it. I believe in free markets, as Chapter 2 made clear. I believe in limited government, as every chapter since has made clear. I believe no one should be forced to believe anything.

The danger is precisely that it is so nearly right. A system that is obviously wrong, like communism, eventually discredits itself in its failures. A system that is ninety percent right can carry its missing ten percent a long way before anyone notices. The libertarian principle, “Do what you like as long as you don’t hurt anyone,” gets most of life right. But it quietly defines “hurt” to include only the harms that are immediate and visible: the broken window, the stolen wallet, the punch in the face. It cannot see the harm of the broken heart, the abandoned child, the hardened conscience, or the slow erosion of a people’s ability to love and be faithful. Those are the harms this book has been about. By the time they are visible, they are everywhere.

And the principle has no way to answer “Who’s to say?” because it has already agreed that no one is. That is why the one thing it needs added is so simple and so decisive: there is a God, and He has said. Add that, and most of what the libertarian loves survives: free markets, limited government, and freedom of conscience. But now it survives inside a world with a center.

The center

What is the center? Not a program, not a party, and not a nation. It is a Person. Paul says of Christ that “by him all things consist,” or hold together. That is not only a spiritual statement. I believe it is a physical one. Everything that exists is held in being by the One who made it, and everything finds its meaning in relation to Him. A worldview with a center is one that begins there.

That does not make everything simple. It does not mean every question has an obvious answer, or that the people who hold the center always hold it well. We have seen in this book how badly Christians have sometimes held it. But it means the questions have answers. “Who’s to say?” has a reply. And the reply is not “I say,” or “the majority says,” or “the state says.” It is “He says, and we are all under Him, including me.”

The eternal happy family

And when the center is in place, what is it all for? Isak’s father saw it on a bench at BYU, in three rooms, each larger than the last: family, eternal family, eternal happy family.

That is the answer to what the worldview without a center can never supply. The libertarian can tell you what you may do. He cannot tell you what life is for. The progressive can tell you whom to be angry at. He cannot tell you where the anger is supposed to lead. The vision Charlie Gutierrez saw tells you both. Life is for love that lasts: love between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and neighbors, and God and His children, and love that is not only lasting but joyful.

Paul bowed his knees “unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.” The family is not an arrangement human beings invented for convenience. It is named after God’s own household, and our families are meant to be small pictures of it. Everything in this book serves that purpose. Property is for the family’s stewardship. The republic is built up from families. The Department of Morality exists to help families stay together. The economy of enough is an economy of households. Even war, rightly limited, is the defense of homes.

So when I say I want to transform America, this is what I mean. Not a nation where the right party wins, or where the right laws are passed, though some laws matter. A nation that has recovered its center, and that understands what the center is for: an eternal, happy family, beginning now, in ten thousand kitchens and on ten thousand porches, and never ending.

Notes

Genesis 3:5; Judges 17:6, 21:25 (and chapters 19–21); Colossians 1:17; Ephesians 3:14–15.

Charlie Gutierrez is Isak’s father and Thomas’s friend and business partner.

Chapter 17 — The Sacrifice a Nation Must Make

Isak had said that the vision of an eternal happy family was a good goal, not a power-hungry one. I agreed. But I wanted him to see that the goal has a price, and to know what it is.

THOMAS: That’s what we’re moving toward. This isn’t about a Christian-Nazi, Handmaid’s Tale, Scarlet Letter world. It isn’t an Inquisition. It isn’t a revival meeting. It’s living life, living it in holiness, enjoying life, and having a life that’s really good.

But we do have to sacrifice something. We have to sacrifice sexual diversity. It won’t happen without that. We’re going to have to be pleasing to God in our sexuality. We’re going to have to take a stand as a nation. We’re going to have to take a stand for Christ. We’re going to have to say, “No, we are not a nation of every religion and every morality.” We aren’t establishing a national church. But we pray at everything. We use the Bible, and we quote it.

John Adams said this nation was founded on the general principles of Christianity, and that’s what we teach. The general principles of Christianity come from the Bible. We speak its language and use its metaphors. When we talk about Romans 1, we talk about the fact that there are sexual acts God does not allow, that God actually hates.

The other thing we’ll have to do is recognize, fully and completely, that God exists, and that God rewards and punishes nations. We have to apologize for our national wrong, for our worship of the Pride movement. It was really a shame movement. It should be called the Shame movement.

ISAK: I’m examining my own inclusivity: “all are welcome,” toward people and toward ideas. I’m having to do a lot of inner work, stopping at any reluctance or pushback I feel against an idea and inspecting it. “Why is that? Where did I learn this?” There’s a lot of work to do, and that’s why I’m quiet. I’m thinking. It’s really interesting to break things down and see where they came from. And if you can’t tell where they came from, you ask what fruit they bear.

THOMAS: The theory is all wonderful, blue skies and roses, until you say, “And by the way, you have to say no to certain sexual behaviors.” Then it’s no longer fun and games. Now it’s personal. “Sorry, that isn’t welcome here.” “I believed in all that other stuff; it was great. But you want me to live sexually in one particular way, the way the Bible authorizes, within marriage between a husband and a wife? No, I’m sorry. We’d rather live in hell. We want our sexuality the way we want it, and we’ll sacrifice everything for it.”

That’s essentially the bargain America has made. We held the line pretty well, at least on the surface. People never actually behaved well, but on the surface we had blue laws. Adultery was a punishable offense. And in the church, divorce was the one unforgivable sin. You’re probably not old enough to remember that, but it’s a phrase people actually used.

ISAK: Divorce as the unforgivable sin. I’ve heard that. I’m not the wisest person in the world, but it never quite made sense to me, because of the circumstances of divorce and the reasons for it. I think people should be allowed out of an agreement in some cases. But culturally, divorce was the “D word.” You didn’t say it. You didn’t hear about it. “Where are his parents?” “We don’t talk about that.” It was very taboo, very scary, and reasonably so. If you’re going through it, somebody did something wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean the person leaving did wrong, or the person staying. But it was, “That family fell apart. We don’t know what will happen to them. It’s just the baby and the mama now,” or the dad and the baby.

THOMAS: The context for “the only unforgivable sin is divorce” was the church. It was a Christian idea. “You were a homosexual? A drug addict? A murderer, a robber, a liar, a thief? We can forgive you. Welcome in, dear brother. You’re divorced? No, we don’t accept people like that.” That’s the taboo I mean. These were people who could forgive sin, who knew sin was sin, and they couldn’t forgive divorce. That was the era I grew up in.

But my point was about sexuality at the national level, after the fall we’ve taken. We could have turned it around forty years ago. Homosexual acts were illegal in many states, and some of those laws may still be on the books. Adultery was illegal. Pedophilia is still illegal; we’re still willing to do that much. Now we’d be saying that fornication, adultery, homosexual practice, the whole list, are recognized by us as a nation as sins against God and a threat to the social order.

And the Department of Morality would counsel people and help them: help them overcome confusion about their sex, about their attractions, about fidelity, about using their sexuality too early. It would help people with the thing at the center of life, because sexuality was made for a purpose. Now you get to use it as God intends, because God is our center. He’s our source. More than our source, He’s our being. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” I don’t know how to make it any clearer. You can’t separate God from who you are, or from who anyone else is.

ISAK: You can’t hide.

THOMAS: You can’t hide.

That last exchange ended the way I began Chapter 7: “Separation of state and truth.” I won’t repeat that argument here. But I do owe the reader a clear statement of what I mean by the sacrifice, because it is the part of this book most likely to be misunderstood, and the part where honesty matters most.

What the nation gives up

The sacrifice is not a person. It is a permission.

For sixty years, American law and culture have increasingly treated sexuality as a private matter with no public meaning: any arrangement between consenting adults is as good as any other, and the nation has nothing to say about it. I am asking the nation to give up that permission. Not to give up any of its people. The people stay. What goes is the pretense that how we use our sexuality doesn’t matter to anyone but ourselves. Chapters 8 through 10 argued that it matters to everyone: to children, to spouses, to the hearts that harden, and to the whole people’s capacity for faithfulness and joy.

In our conversation I spoke of the laws that once made homosexual acts and adultery crimes, and I said we could have turned things around forty years ago. I want to be precise about what I now propose, because it is not a return to those laws. The nation would name these acts, officially and publicly, as falling short of the moral standard it aspires to. Not as private preferences, and not as identities to be celebrated, but as sins against God and harms to the social order. That is the stand. But the nation would not prosecute consenting adults for them. There would be no stocks, no scarlet letters, and no police at the bedroom door. The work of turning people toward a better life belongs to families, churches, counselors, and communities, supported by the kind of Department I described in Chapter 10. The one exception is the act in which a third person’s life is taken, and I turn to it in the next chapter.

Some readers will think that is too little. They will say that naming a sin without punishing it is toothless. I don’t think so. Most of the moral change in any society happens not through prosecution but through what a people honors and what it is ashamed of. The Surgeon General jailed no smokers. What changed was what the nation said out loud. I am asking America to say out loud, again, what it once believed about marriage and faithfulness, and to mean it.

Other readers will think it is far too much. They will say that any public judgment on sexual conduct is hatred. To them I say what I said in Chapter 9: I am not describing enemies. I am describing a lesser happiness, which every one of us settles for in some part of our lives. A nation that cannot say what it believes about the good life cannot help anyone find it.

Pride and shame

I called the Pride movement a shame movement, and I meant it as a diagnosis, not an insult. Pride is the oldest sin. It is the refusal to be corrected: “I am what I am, and no one may tell me otherwise.” When a nation sets aside a month to celebrate that refusal, flies its flag on public buildings, and teaches its children to honor it, the nation has done something it will one day need to repent of.

Nations can repent. When Jonah preached in Nineveh, the king himself put on sackcloth, and God relented. God told Solomon, “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” I believe God rewards and punishes nations, not by a formula I can read off the evening news, but in the long arc of their histories. And I believe a nation’s repentance begins where a man’s does: by calling its sin by its right name.

The church’s own sin

But honesty requires me to turn to my own house first. The story Isak and I told about divorce shows what went wrong in the church before it went wrong in the nation.

A church that could forgive the murderer and the thief but not the divorced was not holding a high standard. It was holding a selective one. It was severe where severity was socially easy and lenient where leniency was convenient. And it made the sin that ended marriages unspeakable rather than dealing with it, so that when the culture changed, the church had nothing to say but silence or condemnation. The families that were falling apart needed neither. They needed help.

So the church has two opposite sins to repent of. The first is laxity: blessing what God does not bless, and saying nothing about the permission our culture has taken. The second is selective harshness: making some sinners unwelcome while overlooking others, and treating shame as a substitute for help. The way forward is to hold the standard high for everyone, including ourselves, and to forgive and restore everyone who turns back, including the divorced. That is not a compromise between the two errors. It is the gospel.

What it looks like in practice

What would the nation actually do? Several things, all of them consistent with what I have said so far.

It would speak. Its laws, its schools, and its leaders would describe marriage between a man and a woman, lifelong and faithful, as the standard the nation honors, and would describe what falls short of it truthfully and without contempt.

It would strengthen marriage in law. When California adopted the first no-fault divorce law in 1969, it made marriage the easiest contract in America to break. States could restore the option of covenant marriage, which Louisiana, Arizona, and Arkansas already offer: a marriage entered into with premarital counseling and a commitment not to seek divorce without counseling first and without serious cause. And the counseling I described in Chapter 10 would be free and close to home for any couple who wanted it.

It would stop teaching children the opposite. Schools that receive public money would not teach young children that every sexual arrangement is equally good, or that their sex is something to be chosen.

It would help. Every person struggling with attractions he does not want, or with confusion about his sex, or with faithfulness, or with the damage done by sexuality used too early without commitment would find counsel without contempt, and a community ready to welcome him.

And it would not humiliate anyone.

What the sacrifice buys

Isak said he had started examining where his own reluctance came from, and that when he couldn’t tell, he asked what fruit an idea bears. That is the right test, and I invite every reader to apply it to the last sixty years. Look at the fruit of the permission: the marriages, the children raised without fathers, the loneliness, the hearts made hard. Then look at what faithfulness produces where it is actually lived.

The sacrifice is real. It asks every one of us, not only some of us, to give up the idea that our appetites are nobody’s business. But what it buys is the eternal happy family of the last chapter, beginning here. And that is worth far more than what it costs.

“In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” We cannot separate God from who we are. A nation that stops trying to will find it has not lost its freedom. It has found its center.

Notes

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, June 28, 1813 (“the general Principles of Christianity”). In the recording, Thomas attributed the phrase to Washington.

Romans 1:24–27; Jonah 3:5–10; 2 Chronicles 7:14; Acts 17:28; Matthew 7:16–20.

State laws against consensual homosexual acts were held unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). California’s Family Law Act of 1969 was the first no-fault divorce statute. Covenant marriage is available in Louisiana (1997), Arizona (1998), and Arkansas (2001).

Chapter 18 — The Front Line: Abortion

Isak and I did not talk about abortion that morning. I did not bring it up, and neither did he. That is not unusual. Abortion is the third rail of American politics: touch it, and your political life ends. Candidates learn to speak of it in the vaguest possible terms, or not at all.

But I promised in Chapter 6 that I would make the argument in full, and a book about transforming America that avoided it would not be honest. Every movement to restore a nation has front lines, the places where resistance gathers and where a stand has to be taken. I named two in Chapter 14. This is the other one. It is where the question of sexuality, which I have said is the heart of our disagreement, reaches its sharpest point.

What changed

Consider what the sexual revolution actually changed. For all of human history, a sexual act between a man and a woman carried a possible consequence that fell very unequally. The man could walk away. The woman could not. She might carry a child for nine months and then raise it, often alone, and society held her more accountable than it held him. That inequality was unjust in many ways. But it also meant that women, and the families and communities around them, had every reason to guard sexuality closely, and to insist that a man who fathered a child marry its mother.

Two technologies changed that. The birth-control pill, approved in 1960, made pregnancy far less likely. Legal abortion, imposed nationwide by the Supreme Court in 1973, made pregnancy something that could be undone. Together they lowered the stakes of uncommitted sexuality for women to nearly what they had always been for men. The economist George Akerlof, later a Nobel laureate, and his colleague Janet Yellen, later chair of the Federal Reserve, showed in 1996 that this change helped end the expectation that a man who got a woman pregnant would marry her. The result was not fewer children born outside marriage, but far more, raised by mothers who had been left to do it alone.

So abortion is not an isolated issue. It is the backstop of the sexual revolution, the guarantee that sexuality can be separated from its consequences. That is why the fight over it is so fierce. For many people, giving up abortion means giving up the promise that sex need never cost them anything. The real issue is not abortion so much as the ungodly sexuality it protects.

What abortion is

I said in Chapter 6 that the state’s sword is for the sins that make victims, and that I count the child in the womb among the victims. Here is why.

From conception, the child is a distinct, living human organism, with his own genetic identity, different from his mother’s and his father’s. That is not a religious claim. It is what any embryology textbook says. He is at an early stage of development, as a newborn is at an early stage of development compared to a teenager. But he is not a part of his mother’s body, as her kidney is. He is a separate human being living inside her.

Scripture says the same thing in its own language. “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb… my substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret.” God told Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.” When Mary, carrying Jesus, came to her cousin Elizabeth, the unborn John “leaped in her womb.”

If that is true, then abortion is not a private choice between consenting adults. There is a third person in the room, and his life is taken. It is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being. The law has a name for that, and the name is murder.

The hardening of hearts

A nation that permits this does not stay where it started. It hardens.

At first, abortion was defended as a tragic necessity: “safe, legal, and rare.” Then it became a right. Then it became something to celebrate. Some people now say they are proud of their abortions. Meanwhile the boundary has moved outward. A Philadelphia abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, was convicted in 2013 of murdering infants who had been born alive in his clinic. In 2019, a sitting governor described on the radio a case in which an infant born alive after a failed late-term abortion would be kept comfortable while the mother and her doctors discussed what to do. Most abortions happen early, and I don’t claim these cases are typical. But they show the direction of travel. When a people decides that a child’s life depends on whether he is wanted, it will not stop at any particular week.

The effect is a cheapening of life. And I think it goes deeper than policy. In ancient Canaan, parents offered their children to Molech, and God called it an abomination. I believe something like that has happened among us. Abortion has become a kind of sacrament to the god of personal satisfaction without consequence, the rite by which our culture covers the sins it has decided not to give up. That is why it is defended with a fervor that looks religious. It is religious. It shows how far we have fallen, and how fully we have come to worship gods other than the One God.

A better way: family, prosperity, and adoption

The answer to abortion is not only to forbid it. It is to build a nation where it is unthinkable, because there is a better way for every child.

A child conceived in fornication or adultery is still a living being, still a child of God. He did not choose the circumstances of his conception, and he should not pay for them with his life. And there are, at this moment, many married couples who long for children and cannot have them. Far more couples hope to adopt an infant than there are infants placed for adoption in this country each year. The appropriate thing, when a mother cannot or will not raise her child, is to give that child to a family who will.

So the nation’s program must be positive as well as prohibitive. It means making adoption easier, faster, and less expensive. It means supporting the thousands of pregnancy centers that already care for mothers in crisis. It means an economy in which a young couple can afford to marry and have children, which is part of what Chapter 8’s economy of enough was about. And it means churches and communities that surround a frightened young mother with help, rather than shame. A nation that says to her, “Your child is a life, and we will help you carry him, and if you cannot raise him, a family is waiting,” has earned the right to say that abortion is wrong.

The law

I believe the law should define abortion as the taking of a human life and prosecute it as such. A law that says “this is murder” and then attaches no consequence to it is not a law. It is a sermon.

Who is prosecuted? The doctor and the mother. The doctor is the one who does the killing, and he is the principal. The mother who seeks it out and consents to it is an accessory to the killing of her own child. I know that nearly every abortion law now on the books in America exempts the mother from prosecution, and that most pro-life organizations support that exemption. I understand why. They want to treat her as a second victim, and they fear, rightly, that prosecuting mothers will be the hardest thing in this whole program to win. I disagree with them anyway, and I want to give my reasons plainly.

Either the killing of an unborn child is wrong or it is not. If it is, then the one who arranges it cannot be simply innocent. We would never say that of anyone who hired another person to kill a born child. Consequences are how people learn. People move in the direction of least pain, and pain is one of the main reasons anyone changes. As things stand, abortion continues because people want to sin without paying for it. They cover one sin that has consequences, an unwanted pregnancy, with a second sin that has far greater ones, the death of a child. If the law names the act for what it is and holds everyone who chose it accountable, the behavior will change. If it doesn’t, it won’t.

That does not mean the law should be cruel, or that it should humiliate anyone. Everything I said in Chapter 6 still holds. In weighing a mother’s guilt, a court should consider what our law considers in every case of accessory to homicide: coercion, fear, deception, and the man who pressured her and then disappeared. He, too, should answer for what he did. The jury still stands between the statute and the sentence. And the purpose of the whole law, here as everywhere in this book, is not vengeance. It is repentance: a change of heart and mind in the people who did this, and in the nation that permitted it, so that the nation can be sanctified, brought back to holiness, and blessed by God again.

No exception for rape

The first question every reader will ask is about rape. My answer is that there is no exception, and I want to explain why, because I know how hard that answer sounds.

Rape is a grave crime, and the woman who suffers it is a real victim. Her attacker should be punished severely, and she should be surrounded with every kind of help: medical, spiritual, financial, and practical. If she cannot raise the child, a family is waiting for him.

But the child did not commit the crime. He did not cause his own conception, and he cannot be the cause of his own death. He was conceived as a result of the crime, not as a participant in it. He is not a criminal, that he should be killed because a crime took place. Killing him does not undo the rape. It adds a second crime to the first. Killing a person because he was present when a crime was committed against someone else is a reassignment of the punishment from the guilty to the innocent, and there is no justice in it.

The child conceived in rape is formed as much in the image of God as the most wanted and cherished child who ever lived. I believe the reason so many people cannot see this is that we have lost our understanding of the holiness of life. The Christian answer to a terrible wrong is not to commit another so that we need not be reminded of the first. It is to forgive, which is the hardest thing God asks of anyone, and to let the innocent live. Preventing a larger crime is itself an act of compassion, toward the child and, in the long run, toward the mother who would otherwise carry that second wound. And a law that holds this line, even here, will teach the nation how much a human life is worth. Perhaps someday the depth of that will be understood.

Where the mother’s life is truly at stake, as in an ectopic pregnancy, a treatment whose aim is to save her life is not an abortion, and the law should say so clearly.

Where the war is fought

I will not pretend this program is politically easy. Holding mothers accountable, and refusing an exception for rape, will be the two positions most bitterly opposed, even by many who agree that abortion is wrong. It is the kind of stand that could sink everything else in this book. Any legislation will be opposed with a ferocity no other issue produces. Many people have grown so attached to what abortion protects that the attempt to take it away will feel to them like an assault on their very selves.

And the most troubling part is not passing a law. It is enforcing one. America learned during Prohibition that a law too far ahead of the people’s hearts is either ignored or repealed. If a law against abortion were passed tomorrow in a nation that still believed in the sexual revolution, it would not hold. That is where the real war will be fought: not mainly in legislatures, but in the hearts of the people, in their willingness to see the child, to take responsibility for their sexuality, and to accept the consequences of their choices.

So the order matters. Persuasion first, and always alongside the law. Show the child, through ultrasound and truth-telling and the testimony of those who were nearly aborted. Build the alternatives: adoption, support, and strong families. Change the culture of sexuality that makes abortion seem necessary. And as hearts change, let the law follow, and then hold.

But a stand must be taken somewhere. Every battle has a front line, and this is one of them. I would rather lose this fight honestly than win the rest of the argument by pretending it doesn’t matter.

Moses set two ways before Israel: “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.” That is the choice before America. It is not only a choice about law. It is a choice about what kind of people we will be, and whether our children, all of them, will live.

Notes

The oral contraceptive Enovid was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), was overruled by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), which returned the regulation of abortion to the states.

George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, no. 2 (1996).

Psalm 139:13–16; Jeremiah 1:5; Luke 1:41; Leviticus 20:2–5; Genesis 1:27; Ezekiel 18:20; Deuteronomy 30:19.

State abortion laws enacted since Dobbs almost uniformly exempt the pregnant woman from criminal liability, and major pro-life organizations, including National Right to Life, have opposed prosecuting women.

Kermit Gosnell was convicted in May 2013 of three counts of first-degree murder for killing infants born alive. The 2019 radio remarks were made by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in January 2019. The Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002 defines an infant born alive at any stage of development as a person under federal law. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that about one percent of reported abortions occur at or after 21 weeks of gestation.

Chapter 19 — Why I Run:

The Righteous Society

We were near the end of the morning. Isak had been quiet for a while, thinking, and then he began to sum up.

ISAK: This has been really intriguing. I’m going to learn more about political science and the nature of the universe and how they overlap. Not which ideology is right, but where the truth is and what we do with it now. What is good, and what do we do with it? I don’t think picking through all the world’s ideologies and asking which brand of capitalism or socialism is most like Jesus is the way. That will come as a byproduct of people and their hearts. It won’t come from “I have this whole plan, and I’m going to change everything right now.” The Bible says a man makes his plans, but the Lord directs his steps. We can have all the plans we want, but really we’ll watch it happen by taking part in it, by being part of the play, so that we can hear applause at the end.

THOMAS: As you can see, this is the vision I’ve carried for forty years. It’s why I’m running for president. It isn’t that I want to be president. I want the world to be better, and I don’t hear anybody else carrying the message I have.

ISAK: If somebody else were saying it, you’d say, “Great, let’s do that.”

THOMAS: You do that.

ISAK: But nobody’s doing it. There isn’t a vote I can cast and say, “This is a vote for this way of life.” It’s a vote for the same thing we’ve always had.

THOMAS: It’s a vote for the righteous. I used to call it the Righteous Society. That was one of my first names for it. It was the Christian nation. I’m just trying to get people to get with the program. It’s an important thing to do.

ISAK: Thanks for answering my questions and going on that journey. These are goals with merit. It isn’t a self-serving goal. You see a need in the country and what could fix it, and it’s something God saw a long time ago. What can we do to inspire people and help them change their lives?

THOMAS: That’s what we’re doing: showing people how to change their lives, how to live in a godly way. It’s simple, really.

ISAK: I don’t know what all the chaos is about. I don’t know what the problem is.

THOMAS: As far as I can tell, the whole fight is about being able to do what you want sexually without anybody interfering. In America we opened the floodgates and said everybody can do whatever he wants. Now we’re saying, “That thing where everybody does what he wants? We’re taking it back.” And people say, “No. We’ve seen what it’s like, and we don’t want to leave it. It was too good. Our bodies, ourselves. We’re not going back.” At this point we’re dealing with rebels, hardened rebels, and some of them are willing to kill the people who stand against their sexual freedom.

I think the Charlie Kirk assassination was exactly that. There’s a big conspiracy theory about Israel and all that, but I don’t think that’s it. I think we had a young man who didn’t like being told what he couldn’t do, and who believed Kirk was attacking his tribe, and so he killed him. And we’re not saying that loudly enough. We have people who, when their sexuality is threatened, go out and kill. The fruit of this sexual anarchy is death.

ISAK: Anarchy.

THOMAS: What makes this bearable is that you love the sinner and hate the sin. If you can just get that across: “No, we don’t hate you. You’re a child of God just as much as I am. You just haven’t learned to control one of your appetites. Maybe I don’t control my appetite for ice cream as well as you do, and you don’t control your sexual appetite as well as I do. We both have our problems. We’re both imperfect. We both need to master our appetites.” That’s really what this is: appetite control.

It’s a heavy burden for people who live with same-sex attraction. Or for people who have given in to their appetites long enough that they’ve become addictions. Addiction doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s fed, by people who didn’t control themselves well enough, until the appetite was out of control. I’m sorry, but abstinence is the start. You start with nothing. You just stop. You say no. You don’t do it a little; you just say no. If you fall, you say, “I’m sorry. That was wrong. I shouldn’t do it anymore. I’ll try again.” And you do it one day at a time, and on the hard days, one minute at a time.

ISAK: Self-control.

THOMAS: Self-control over desire. Desire is the issue, and controlling desire is most of what maturity is. Get your desires under control and you won’t sin. You know what sin is. You know your desire to sin. You simply say no. Then we don’t have to worry about a diversity of sins. We don’t take pride in our sins. We don’t honor them. We just don’t sin. We say no, and that’s what matters. You have these desires? Learn to control them. You have them, I have them, everybody has them. Mine are different from yours, but we all have them, we all have to work on them, and we all have to control them. That’s your job.

And there’s a reward for it. There’s a payoff. We won’t live in this body forever, and living for Christ brings gain. “Are you doing it for the reward?” As a matter of fact, I am. No need to apologize for that. If there were no reward, why would I be doing it?

ISAK: You only work the job because you’re getting paid.

THOMAS: Right.

ISAK: How embarrassing, to have to have a job. “What do you mean, you need money?”

THOMAS: “What do you mean, you sell your time for money?”

ISAK: “Your valuable life, for money!”

We laughed, and the conversation ended there, and we went back to the business we had set aside two hours earlier. But I want to finish what Isak and I started, because he asked a question at the beginning of that morning that this whole book has been trying to answer. He asked: What does God do with groups of people?

What God does with a people

Here is my answer, as plainly as I can give it.

God makes a people the way He makes everything else: from the bottom up, not the top down. He does not govern the universe by moving every particle directly. He gives each part its law and lets it move itself, and order rises out of countless faithful local motions. He governs a people the same way. He writes His law on their hearts. He sets them in families. He gives them neighbors who can say “enough,” and communities small enough for everyone to know each other. And He asks them to choose freely whether to live by His law, because a love that cannot refuse is not love.

When a people chooses to live that way, it becomes something like the eternal happy family Charlie saw on that bench. It is not perfect; no people ever is. But it has a center. Its laws protect the innocent and name what falls short. Its government is small, because its people mostly govern themselves. Its economy is honest, because its people know what is enough. Its families hold together, because its people have learned to serve and to ask for service, to confront and to forgive. And it can face the rest of the world, including its enemies, without covetousness and without fear.

When a people chooses otherwise, God does not usually strike it down. He lets it have what it chose. Its families come apart. Its government swells to manage the damage. Its hearts harden. Its people grow lonely in the middle of plenty. And eventually it learns, at great cost, what it would not learn by persuasion.

America is standing at that choice now. That is why I wrote this book.

Why I run

I am not running for president because I expect to win. I am not on the ballot, I accept no donations, and I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win, and otherwise to vote for the best man on the ballot. I call it a witness candidacy. It is a way of putting a vision in front of the nation that no one else is putting there: the Righteous Society, the Christian nation as I have described it in these pages.

I held that vision for forty years before I said much about it publicly. I wish someone else were carrying it. As Isak said, if someone else were, I would say, “Great, let’s do that,” and go back to my other work. But no one is, and I cannot find a ballot line that means “this way of life.” So I am doing what I can, which is to describe it, give my reasons, and hold every position open to a better argument. I cannot compel anyone, and I would not if I could. I can only invite.

The hardest part

The hardest part of this vision, as I have said throughout the book, is sexuality, and I will not pretend otherwise at the end. The deepest resistance to what I am proposing comes from people who have tasted a freedom they do not want to give up. Some of that resistance has turned violent.

I do not know what was in the heart of the young man accused of killing Charlie Kirk, and a court will judge the facts, as it should. But I believe that the rage directed at people who speak for traditional sexual morality is real, and that it grows from the same root as everything else I have described: a people told that its appetites are its identity, and that anyone who questions them is attacking the self. When your appetites are your identity, correction feels like violence, and some people answer it with violence.

That is exactly why the answer has to be love. Not a soft love that says nothing, but the love that says, “You are a child of God, just as I am. You have an appetite you have not mastered. So do I. Let us both learn.” We love the sinner, and we hate the sin, beginning with our own. If there is one sentence I would want every reader to carry away from this book, it is that. It is the only posture from which a Christian nation can be built without becoming the thing its critics fear.

Enough, and the reward

The whole program of this book comes down, in the end, to one small word that every person has to learn to say for himself: enough. Enough food. Enough money. Enough power. Enough of whatever appetite is pulling at you. The rich man said “just a little more,” and was never satisfied. The man who learns to say “enough,” and to say “no” one minute at a time when he must, finds that he has been given everything.

And there is a reward. I don’t apologize for saying so. “He that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Paul said, “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” We are not doing this for nothing. We are doing it for the life that is actually life, now and forever: the life God wants to live in every one of us, and the eternal happy family He is gathering.

What you can do

So what can one reader do?

Start at home. Govern your own appetites. Love your wife or your husband, and serve and be served, cheerfully. Raise your children to know God. Forgive, seventy times seven.

Then go one step out. Know your neighbors. Be the brother who can say “You’re getting out of line,” and the one who can hear it. Find or build a group small enough that everyone knows everyone, and meet together, and argue honestly, and pray.

Then speak. Tell the truth about what is good, in the plainest words you can, without contempt for anyone. Vote your conscience. Serve on juries and judge the law as well as the facts. Ask your representatives the hard questions, and ask your neighbors the one question from Chapter 14.

And bring people along, and teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. It only takes a spark.

Isak said at the end of that morning that he didn’t know what all the chaos was about. I think he does now. The chaos is what a people looks like when it has lost its center. The answer is to find it again, one heart, one home, and one neighborhood at a time, until a nation remembers whose it is.

That is what I mean by transforming America.

Notes

Proverbs 16:9; Hebrews 11:6; Philippians 1:21; Matthew 18:22.

Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. On September 2, 2026, a Utah judge ordered the accused, Tyler Robinson, to stand trial on a capital murder charge. He has not been convicted. Thomas’s account of the motive is his own reading of the case.

On the witness candidacy, see Thomas’s essay “Why I Run When Winning Is Unlikely” (August 2026) at drthomasforpresident.com.

Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute

Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38

260920 – Recap – Evaluating Islam Honestly

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 23, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Islam, the West, and the Purpose of Life

Fellowship Discussion Essay | 20 September 20, 2026

The meeting took up Thomas’s essay on the interview between Danny Bermawi, a former Muslim who became a Christian, and Jeremy Boreing, published by PragerU. Thomas explained that his working method is to take a video or article that interests him, have an AI draft an essay on it, and then revise; this one grew from 9,000 to 23,000 words over a week of revision, so a summary and outline were circulated with it. A guest, Mickey (introduced as Michelle), joined for the first time; she is a practicing Latter-day Saint, related to Susan by marriage, and described herself as more interested in religion than politics. Charlie had described the topic to her as whether Islam is a religion of peace or of conquest, and a friend or an enemy of the West and of Christ. The discussion ran in three movements: Thomas’s thesis and the questions it drew; a long turn on the nature of God, agency, and the purpose of life prompted by Mickey’s response; and a return to the problem of divinely commanded violence in the Old Testament and what it means for the Christian critique of Islam.

Notes marked Additional note were added in preparing this essay to supply references or corrections the discussion did not have at hand.

1. The thesis, as Thomas presented it

Thomas said that in a conversation with Charlie during the week he had been able to extract the essence of the long essay, and he gave it in the following order.

The problem. Islam is advancing in the West, and the West appears powerless to resist. The powerlessness is self-imposed. Because Islam is classified as a religion, and because the First Amendment protects free expression, the prevailing view is that Islam may say anything it likes and may not be criticized. Thomas said he had assumed the obstacle was the Establishment Clause, the idea that criticizing Islam would amount to establishing Christianity as a state religion, but had concluded in preparing the essay that the operative argument is a free-expression argument, and that both need reframing.

The witness. Bermawi was raised Muslim and set out to become a fanatic, to master his religion so as to defend it against every alternative. The deeper he went, the more he concluded that it was not a good religion, and he left it for Christ. His thesis, as Thomas summarized it, is that Islam has a political arm that cannot be separated from the religion, that the agenda of Islam is to bring the world under Islamic rule, and that the West should therefore be able to discriminate between Muslims who hold a revolutionary political program and those who do not. Thomas added the caveat that not every sect holds this program, but that enough do, and that the texts support it: the doctrine of Dar al-Islam holds that the golden age comes when Islam rules everything. He named the Twelvers, who await the twelfth Imam, as especially committed to it. He recalled the celebrations in some quarters after 9/11 as evidence that part of Islam supported it, while acknowledging that other Muslims were horrified.

Additional note. Dar al-Islam (“the abode of Islam”), paired with Dar al-Harb (“the abode of war”), is a term of classical Islamic jurisprudence rather than a phrase found in the Quran. The Quranic texts most often cited for a standing program of conquest are Surah 9:5 (the “verse of the sword”) and 9:29 (fighting the People of the Book until they pay the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims living under Muslim rule, which is what Thomas referred to later as taxing and subjugating those who worship the Book). Muslim scholars are divided on whether these verses are historically bounded to Muhammad’s campaigns or standing commands; the critics’ reading and the apologists’ reading both exist within Islam. “Twelvers” are the majority of Shia Muslims, including most of Iran, so the expectation of the twelfth Imam is mainstream Shia belief rather than a fringe; the militant, expansionist reading of it belongs to a subset.

Three action items. First, bar naturalization to anyone who holds a revolutionary political program against the Constitution. The naturalization oath already requires the applicant to support and defend the Constitution. Second, bar federal employment on the same ground; the federal oath of office requires the same. A Muslim who will not specifically renounce the political and revolutionary elements of his religion should be denied both. Third, and most important, change America’s heart and mind: stop fearing the label “Islamophobic,” and say plainly that the project of replacing the Constitution with Sharia is not welcome. Those who wish to live under Sharia should do so elsewhere. Those who wish to swear allegiance to a constitutional republic are welcome.

Additional note. The oath provisions Thomas referred to are 8 U.S.C. §1448 (the naturalization oath) and 5 U.S.C. §3331 (the federal oath of office). There is a closer precedent for his proposal than the oath itself: 8 U.S.C. §1424 already bars naturalization to members of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, and to anyone advocating the overthrow of the government by force. That statute distinguishes political ideology from religion, which is the distinction Thomas’s proposal depends on. The constitutional tension he did not name is Article VI, which forbids any religious test for federal office; a bar framed as applying to a religion would meet that clause, while one framed as applying to a political program that some adherents hold would not.

All law is legislated morality. Thomas said the slogan “you cannot legislate morality” is the most foolish thing a person can say, because every law legislates some morality; the only question is which. American law rests on a Judeo-Christian moral framework, not exclusively but predominantly, and what is now called liberal democracy is consistent with that framework. America needs to get over its embarrassment about this and embrace it. Thomas said plainly that he is a Christian nationalist: America is a Christian nation and should embrace the Lord behind it.

What a Christian nation is. Thomas tied this to Susan’s testimony from two weeks earlier. Being a Christian is not holding a belief system; it is taking the person of Christ inside oneself. A Christian nation is a nation of people who have done that and who treat one another accordingly. The Great Commandment, to love God with all one’s heart, mind, and soul and one’s neighbor as oneself, contains all the law and the prophets, and loving God is the code name for living by God’s standard, which is God’s own way of being.

The theology underneath. For Mickey’s benefit Thomas gave the short version of his own theology. In 1987 he had what he called a Buddha experience: the realization that there is nothing which is not God. He has spent forty years trying to articulate why that is so. Every thought, emotion, object, and event is God experiencing himself; “in him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). God began as a point of awareness and, through a long story, produced this manifestation, in which creatures with free will have the privilege of being God in a microscopic aspect and giving God an experience he chose not to force. Loving God is giving God the experience of life lived the way he would live it perfectly, and the Bible is the instruction manual, in stories, proverbs, commandments, and parables, for what God enjoys being and experiencing.

Islam in that frame. Islam, Thomas said, is a satanic imitation meant to pull people from the true God to another. Allah and Jehovah are two different gods with two different sets of commanded behaviors. Islam is essentially Old Testament religion plus additional material, mainly on enforcement: a performance religion without grace. Christianity is a grace religion that is also a performance religion, in that one commits to God’s way, but justification does not come by performing perfectly; it comes by taking God’s person within and living by that Spirit.

The posture toward Muslims. Thomas said that he has had Muslim patients whom he thoroughly enjoyed, shared Thanksgiving with, and counts as wonderful people. Muslims are children of God deceived by another god, and are to be loved. The ideology is to be opposed at every step. Anyone pursuing the project of replacing the Constitution is an enemy of the state, but should not be prosecuted absent a crime; such groups should be monitored so that unlawful acts become known. When terrorism occurs, the names and motives of the perpetrators should be spoken publicly without worrying about backlash against innocent Muslims because, as Christians, we look at people as Children of God, and love them, but we do not love an anti-God/anti-constitutional ideology. Americans should be open about their Christianity, open about the Islamic project, and evangelical about the message of Christ, preparing the nation as the bride of Christ without spot or blemish.

Separation of church and state. Thomas closed by noting that the phrase is not in the Constitution. It comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, assuring them that the government would not interfere with them, and the Supreme Court elevated it to a quasi-constitutional principle in Everson v. Board of Education (1947). Criticism of Islam as a political program is therefore constitutionally available and needs no apology.

Additional note. Everson was a 1947 Supreme Court decision. The two clauses are the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) and the Free Exercise Clause (“or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”); the free speech clause follows them in the same amendment. Michael later quoted the first two accurately.

2. Questions and responses on the thesis

Charlie Hebdo. Charlie asked how the Charlie Hebdo story would have played out if the magazine had been in America rather than France, and what the difference between America and Europe is now. He explained for the group that the satirical magazine had published a cartoon of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and that Islamist gunmen entered its offices and killed as many as they could. Thomas answered that America’s Muslim population is still small enough that its militants do not feel emboldened to act openly and expect to escape justice through political weight. Charlie objected that 9/11 was bold; Thomas replied that 9/11 was a covert strike, not an open project. Thomas said that in America such perpetrators would be prosecuted regardless of religious banner, because enough Judeo-Christian morality remains; if France had reached the point of tolerating such killing as cultural, it would already have been overtaken. He described the stages by which he believes a growing Islamic minority moves: from “why can’t we all get along,” to “we are a persecuted minority,” to legislating, to incorporating Sharia into the legal system. Charlie then read what he found: the three principal attackers of January 2015 were killed by French police within days and never tried; a later trial convicted fourteen people of providing support, with sentences from four to thirty years; seventeen people were killed in all, twelve at the magazine, a police officer, and four shoppers at a kosher supermarket.

Additional note. The turban-bomb cartoon Charlie described was drawn by Kurt Westergaard and published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005; Charlie Hebdo republished the Danish cartoons in 2006 and ran its own Muhammad covers afterward, which made it a target. The two brothers who attacked the magazine and the gunman at the supermarket were killed by police on 9 January 2015, as Charlie reported.

Terror as a chill on speech. Thomas said he does not place terrorism in the category of acts most Muslims would support. Its function, as he sees it, is intimidation: to neuter any opposition vocal enough to mobilize public support. He confessed that he himself is afraid to say publicly what he was saying in the meeting, and that he does not believe his fear is unusual; if each person imagined going public against Islam’s program of conquest and Sharia, few would feel free. He cited Salman Rushdie, who wrote a novel about Islam, had a fatwa issued against him, went into hiding for years, and was later attacked. Charlie named this as terrorism working exactly as intended, and supplied the legal term from First Amendment cases: a chilling effect on speech. Thomas agreed: there is a group within Islam that understands the power of terror, and the terror is aimed not at the nation but at the opposition.

Additional note. The fatwa against Rushdie was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 over The Satanic Verses; Rushdie lived under protection for roughly a decade and was stabbed on stage at Chautauqua, New York, in August 2022, losing the sight of one eye. The attack on fellow soldiers Thomas mentioned was at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, by Major Nidal Hasan.

The 9/11 disagreement. Leonard said that 9/11 was a lie, that there were not nineteen Islamist hijackers, and that Islam has long been used as a tool by others, including the Nazis and the Communists. Michael countered that the Nazis killed Muslims along with Jews and others, and that after 9/11 Muslim congregations uniformly condemned the attacks and President Bush stood with imams to say it was not about Islam; Leonard replied that it is strange to say the attacks had nothing to do with Islam while Islamists were used as the instrument in the propaganda. Susan called time. Thomas later gave his position: the conspiracy view is a minority position and, in his judgment, a disinformation campaign of the Soviet type, whose carriers are sincere but which was deliberately seeded; more to the point, whether or not one accepts 9/11 as the example, terrorism exists, and denying the Islamic connection to 9/11 throws away the clearest evidence that some part of Islam will use terror. He listed other examples: the shooting of fellow soldiers on a military base, suicide bombings in nightclubs, vehicles driven into pedestrians. Leonard’s summary of the opposing sentiment, “can’t we all just get along,” was left as the closing line of that exchange.

Additional note. On the Nazi question, both claims contain something. Muslims were not a target group of the Nazi genocide, so Michael’s statement that the Nazis wiped out Muslims is not accurate; but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, collaborated with Hitler and helped recruit Bosnian Muslim units for the SS, which is the kind of use Leonard was describing. Michael’s remark that the Pope was “for the Nazis” refers to the contested record of Pius XII, on which historians disagree.

Mickey’s response. Mickey thanked Thomas for expressing views he had clearly spent much time forming, and said her own focus is religious rather than political, though she acknowledged she had introduced the politically charged subject by mentioning the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11. She offered three responses. On theology, she said that what Thomas describes as God she would describe as the Spirit: God is his own self, and she is her own self, and the beauty is in bringing the two together through the Spirit. She does not believe we experience our lives as God or for God; God wants us to experience life as ourselves, as his children, with him as a part of it through his Spirit, but we are not him. On politics, she said Christ was born into an intensely political situation, and people looked to him for an answer he had not come to give, and she resists applying his teaching to questions of who should be kept out of a country. Geography has changed; we are intermixed by technology; she asked whether we should fear a person crossing a border while the same discourse flows freely online. On fear, she said she has never been afraid to express her religious views, while acknowledging a sheltered life. Charlie noted that Thomas does not require anyone to share his view of God, and Mickey said she had not felt that he did.

Michael on exclusion. Michael, before leaving, said that what he valued in Mickey’s remarks was inclusion and acceptance, which he regards as the best of what religions offer, and that horrifying things follow when a religion excludes another. His examples: Rome’s treatment of Jesus and his followers as a threatening foreign religion; the persecution of the early Mormons by Christians, which he offered to Leonard, whose ancestor was driven out of Nauvoo; the Puritan witch ordeals; the seven centuries of war between Catholic and Orthodox Christendom; the Spanish Inquisition. One could say from this that all Christians are like that, but one need not, and the same restraint applies to Muslims. He quoted the First Amendment’s religion clauses and said that the thesis, as he heard it, begins by discarding them. Leonard answered that the early Mormons’ persecutors were simply prejudiced, and that the point about Islam is more nuanced than Michael allowed; Charlie added that Thomas had not condemned all Muslims. After Michael left, Thomas observed that Michael’s characteristic move is to take one instance and extend it to the whole, and that even when a qualifier is stated, the qualifier is minimized.

3. God, agency, and the purpose of life

Thomas returned to Mickey’s statement that God is separate from us and that each has his own experience, bridged by the Holy Ghost. He said that this is the orthodox view, the view nearly everyone holds, and that he himself finds it hard to escape; even he asks whether he is really part of God, giving God an experience. His view is a hypothesis, not a demand, and he believes it is a fundamental truth that God has deliberately hidden. He holds it because it resolves every problem he has applied it to, in physics and in religion alike: positions that seem mutually exclusive become intelligible within a holism in which the unity of life is seen. Mickey called that a beautiful thought.

Leonard on agency. Leonard said that in his scripture the work and glory of God is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man, and that God, who enjoys immortality and eternal life, in a sense enjoys our lives whether we obey or not, because that is his work and his joy. He is part of us and we of him. What separates us is our own use of his gift of agency: we have sinned, and God looks on sin with the least degree of allowance, so he cannot interact with what is not cohesive with him except to help and influence. Agency is the core structure. Mickey agreed that the separation came through agency and that agency was thereby provided to all of us.

Additional note. Leonard’s two citations are Moses 1:39 (“this is my work and my glory, to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man”) and Doctrine and Covenants 1:31 (“the Lord cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance”), both from the LDS canon.

Mickey on the plan. When Thomas asked whether God intended agency or whether it arose by accident, Mickey said her creation story is less defined than her tradition’s, but she strongly holds to a pre-mortal existence and a purpose for this one. She loves the title Heavenly Father because it uses the family, which mortals can understand, to convey an eternal relationship. God has a plan; we accepted it, and it includes coming to earth, illness, caring for the sick, love, conflict, and coming to understanding. He wants us to learn who we are, but he will not lay it all out on the table. Asked why, she said the purpose is educative: as with children, whom Charlie and Susan homeschooled rather than confining to a system that defines what is important, God wants us to question, imagine, explore, and hypothesize, as Thomas has; he loves that, and he provides prophets and people sensitive to his communication so that we are not left aimless, but he gives us a great deal of space.

The purpose of learning. Thomas said “life is for learning” is a common enough sentiment to be a song lyric, and he saw it young; the question is, learning for what end? Mickey said the purpose is multifaceted: the brain is multi-interested, we must learn to provide for ourselves, and civilization has learned everything from smelting iron onward. Susan then read 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, in which Christ delivers up the kingdom to the Father when he has put all enemies under his feet, the last enemy being death, and the Son himself becomes subject to the Father “that God may be all in all.” The purpose of earth life, she said, is to be back in God’s presence, which requires that we accept and embrace God’s ways: love and doing right to one another. There may be other reasons along the way, but that is the end. Thomas asked her to state it again and then said that was the answer he had been missing: we are learning God’s ways. That gives learning urgency, substance, and focus. Learning to look both ways before crossing, or to assemble a part, becomes learning that God has order in his world and that one must find it to assemble things his way.

Charlie added a saying Armond had quoted in the past year: the purpose of knowledge is not knowledge but action. Thomas placed that under Susan’s point: the only purpose of any action is to please God, which in his theology means giving God a good experience. Mickey took the next step: what actions please God, and what does living like Christ look like when one wakes in a physical world with no God standing there to demonstrate? That is her life’s quest. She named serving, helping, creativity (God wants us to feel the pleasure of creating), sharing, and putting two things together in the brain, which she believes is formative and preparatory for a life with God we cannot yet see. Thomas said all of this fits inside his envelope of God experiencing everything through us.

Additional note. The saying Charlie quoted is often attributed to Aristotle but does not appear in his works in that form; the nearest source is Nicomachean Ethics II.2, where Aristotle says the inquiry is undertaken not to know what virtue is but to become good.

Christ with us, or in us. Mickey said that when she reads of the atonement, she does not so much picture Christ experiencing all her pain in twelve hours in the garden as she experiences the garden’s effect in the way Christ is with her day by day, in challenge, exuberance, discovery, and creativity. He is with her rather than in her, by a miracle she cannot explain, and that is how she experiences being one with him.

Leonard flips the picture. Leonard said he would turn Thomas’s thesis on its head: it is not that God experiences us but that we are here to experience God. God is so far beyond us that our purpose is to get a glimpse of where he is, so that we want to be like him and with him. Moses on Sinai and Christ in the garden show that it can be done. Christ’s whole life was submission to the Father’s will, and that is what we must do, not the reverse. The commandments are like laws that protect a society; God, far ahead on an eternal path, calls his children to come. He recalled Lehi’s vision of the tree whose fruit is the love of God. The purpose of life is to know God as intimately as Christ did, to be at one with him, which is what atonement means; we should take truth wherever we find it, in Muhammad’s writings, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddha, or Christ, with discernment, since lies are abundant too. Immortality, he added, is a mysterious word; some men in scripture, Elijah and John, chose it.

Charlie on the boy and the ball. Charlie told a story that circulates among Latter-day Saints: a boy asks his father to play catch, the father says he has no time but loves him, and the boy says, “I don’t want you to love me; I want you to play catch.” God knows how slightly out of reach our understanding is of what he lives. Charlie agreed with Mickey that God is with us in our stuff; he would like to spend every day on a mountaintop communing with God, but he must pay the rent and the insurance. God does not spoon-feed; he makes us scratch and dig for every advance in knowledge, invention, art, and good behavior, and that makes them precious.

Susan’s grafting allegory. Susan set out the picture she has assembled from Scripture. Since Adam and Eve, mankind is cut off from God by sin, on a path to death. When Christ died for our sins, the Father accepted his death in place of ours. When a person believes deeply in Christ and takes him as Lord, which is not a small thing, since it means continuing to follow him, Christ grafts him back into the tree like a severed limb, and the life source runs through him again, with the fruit of the Spirit. Many who believe in Christ are not yet connected because of an unforgiven grudge, since God cannot forgive us if we do not forgive others. One who accepts Christ and then goes on living as before, without repenting, will lose the connection. Whether Christ is in us may be gradual: she is not keeping all the commandments and yet feels the connection, and suspects it will be greater as she keeps more. The connection is priceless, and one wants to share it; it is contagious, and people who see peace and love in someone will say they want it. We can stumble and repent. The new heart wants to please God, whereas the cut-off heart desires the things of this world, which are opposite to God’s ways. Mickey said she loved the image: wind and heat loosen the graft, and if worldly influences are not countered, it breaks. Susan agreed: the relationship must be nurtured by prayer and Bible study. Mickey added that without a taste for it one will not seek it, and that it is part of mortality to offer the sweet fruit and have it rejected or laughed at.

Additional note. The grafting image is Paul’s in Romans 11:17-24, where Gentile believers are wild branches grafted into the olive tree of Israel and warned that they too can be cut off. Susan’s phrase “life source” matches John 15:1-6, the vine and the branches. Her point on forgiveness is Matthew 6:14-15.

Leonard: this life is nothing. Leonard said we put too much emphasis on how we feel and what we do here; Christ’s message was that this is nothing and one must look beyond the mortal prison, which nonetheless gives the opportunity to draw closer to God by choice. God does not force, unless someone begins destroying others’ agency, and even then he usually lets things ride and the consequences come after this life, which is more a beginning than an end; he noted the word “replenish” in Genesis 1:28 as suggestive of reconstitution.

Susan: the choice changes everything. Susan said there is a wildly different experience once one has chosen to obey the Lord. Before that choice, one may pray and ask what to do and still flounder. Once one has said “I want your way, I want Christ as Lord,” and inclined the heart to it, the life source running through one changes outlook and desire, and affects every decision every minute, even when God does not speak directly. One still has to lean on God in situations one does not understand. She pictured Christ on the mountain before choosing the apostles (Luke 6:12), a sinless man still struggling with the Father over whom to choose, and imagined Judas being the hard case. Leonard said the hard part was choosing which one would betray him, since the betrayal was necessary for the final work. Susan said her picture has been that Christ’s understanding grew through his life and that the Father led him step by step, so he may not have gone up the mountain with that knowledge; Mickey said that whether he knew or not, the purpose was there. Charlie said it seems unfair to Judas, who like all of us as a child wanted to do something great; none of the Bible’s characters knew they were Bible characters. Leonard said Christ knew their hearts; Judas held the Old Testament expectation of a Messiah who would save the people politically, and betrayed Christ to force him to stand up as that Messiah, not seeing the whole picture; none of the apostles really understood, having been taught by their rabbis as we are all taught by ours.

James 1:5-7 again. Susan reread James 1:5-7 in the New Living Translation, as she had the week before: ask God for wisdom, but be sure your faith is in God alone, for a person of divided loyalty is a wave tossed by the wind and should expect nothing. The King James can leave the impression that one only needs enough faith that the prayer will be granted; this rendering asks whether one wants God’s way no matter what, or only when it is convenient. She then tied it back to Islam: what needs to happen is that people turn to God with their whole hearts, in prayer, fasting, and reading, and as more people become truly about the Lord, that is where the answer to Islam and everything else will be. Leonard added James 4:8, “draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you,” and observed that “upbraideth not” in James 1:5 means God does not hold back: ask him and watch out. Susan and Charlie agreed; Charlie said he stopped praying for strength long ago because the answer was always a disaster.

4. Domination, sacrifice, and the violence of the Old Testament

Where does domination come from? Mickey asked the question that shaped the last hour. Every religion, Islam, Christianity, even Confucianism, begins with an experience of heaven and a desire to share it, and then slides: others must agree, and if they do not, they are wrong, and then they are to be conquered. She cited the children of Israel destroying everyone in the land as an example she cannot wrap her mind around.

Sacrifice. Leonard said the common thread through all the prophets, apostles, and Christ is sacrifice, up to the sacrifice of their lives, and he tied it to Matthew 25, in which what is done for the least is done for Christ; he asked what those men and women experienced that made them willing. Mickey said some of it comes from commandments from heaven, as with Adam’s sacrifice, which he offered without knowing why. She said she believes in evolution, including the evolution of the capacity to understand God: when Christ came in the meridian of time, the law of sacrifice was fulfilled, animal sacrifice, which had become offensive when offered without love, gave way to the sacrifice of a broken heart and contrite spirit, and she doubts we will ever fully understand why animal sacrifice was required.

Susan answered that God implemented it because he was dealing with hard-hearted people, and that from the start it foreshadowed Christ’s death for our sins, a ritual to be understood later. The sheer volume of ritual reoriented them to attend to what God told them; it was so time-consuming that one either obeyed or did not, with no fence to sit on. Leonard said many sat on the fence and just wanted to be fed; Susan said the fence was itself disobedience. Mickey added that sacrifice from a herd that sustained life was a physical lesson in giving up resources to God. Leonard said men typically corrupt an ordinance over time and build a business on it, which is what Christ found in the temple; he suggested Christ deliberately stirred them to the point of wanting to kill him, because he had to die, and that everything in the Gospels should be read as planned by the Father, with the fig tree and the “destroy this temple” saying as hints no one understood. Susan objected that she does not think Christ’s perspective was to provoke his own killing; he was obeying the Father, and the death followed, and to say otherwise sounds like manipulation and would be off-putting to many. Leonard asked whether it would change anything if it were so, then accepted Susan’s framing: the Father led him in everything needed for the outcome. He added that Christ condescended from God’s presence, risked it all as we do, and was perfect because he chose wisely every time. Susan said: he obeyed. Leonard said: obeying is a choice.

The conquest problem. Susan returned to Mickey’s difficulty and made it a task for the group. When Christians object to Muslim violence, non-Christians answer that the Israelites did the same, and so did the Crusaders. She said this is a real stumbling block, that she does not yet have a good answer, and that the group ought to develop one alongside its critique of Islam.

Leonard answered first: God knows hearts. When he commanded Joshua, he knew the hearts of the people of the land, who had become so wicked that he ended it before they went further and did more damage; he trusts that foresight. Mickey said idolatry was a large part of it, and that the gods of the nations arose from trying to understand and manipulate the environment. Leonard added the flood and Sodom as precedents, and said Lot would have been consumed had he stayed; we should learn by precept as quickly as possible rather than by sad experience.

Thomas gave his answer from his unified view. God wanted the experience of his word proliferating in the land, and a people utterly committed to evil cannot cohabit with what is committed to their destruction. Mickey said it still hurts her heart; Thomas and Leonard said it hurts God’s heart too. Thomas continued: this is the passage that everyone who wants to discredit Christianity reaches for, “what kind of God commands genocide,” and the word does the work of condemning the whole program. He offered these points. God wanted to restore the garden, a people who long for his rule; he had done the same at the flood, finding one man of his own heart. God cannot be in relationship with what is irrevocably committed to evil, any more than a body tolerates a disease. The sympathy that recoils at killing anything is understandable, since we all have hearts; he had drowned a glue-trapped mouse the day before to end its suffering and found it awful. But God hates evil, and in commanding Israel to execute the judgment rather than doing it himself, he was having his people execute his own heart toward evil. This is a good God who hates evil, and we need not apologize for him. He cited Paul’s potter: who are you to answer back to God, when the potter has power over the clay (Romans 9:20-21)?

Susan added that the peoples of the land were not innocent: every man is born with the light of Christ (John 1:9), so even without Moses they had something from God that they were disobeying. Thomas took this further. People are born with the light and then trained in a colony that has found a way to perpetuate evil without destroying itself, a sustainable culture of evil, and that is the problem with Islam: a sustainable culture of evil fourteen hundred years old, the mirror image of the Jews, who have sustained a good culture for four thousand. This connects to Susan’s thesis of the two sons: Isaac and Ishmael, good and evil, both established by God as a polarity, something to push against, without which there is nothing to learn and no direction to grow. God evidently has a plan for Ishmael, since he has not been destroyed. Thomas said he had recently listened to a long, sympathetic history of Islam that presented it as Old Testament religion, people trying to worship God in their own way, and that it whitewashed the additions: the subjugation and taxation of the People of the Book, the killing of pagans in Surah 9:5, the claim to rule all. A few small twists make it a religion incompatible with worship of the true God, a false god almost identical to the true one, just off enough. All of it, he said, is God’s plan, and life is for learning is embedded in the play.

Additional note. On Isaac and Ishmael, Genesis 17:20 has God promising to bless Ishmael, make him fruitful, and make of him a great nation, and Genesis 21:17-20 says God was with the boy. The “two sons” pattern in Genesis (Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob) is a pattern of election, the covenant line versus the non-covenant line, rather than a declaration that the non-chosen son is evil; the group may want to keep that distinction in view when the pattern is applied to Islam. Susan’s questions about the conquest may also benefit from the following lines of response, which the discussion touched but did not draw together: the conquest commands were addressed to one people, for one land, at one time, and no standing command to repeat them exists in either Testament; the New Testament explicitly removes the sword from the kingdom’s means (John 18:36, 2 Corinthians 10:4, Matthew 26:52); Christians who committed atrocities are condemned by Christians on Christian grounds, whereas the critics’ reading of Surah 9 treats conquest as fulfilling the founder’s command; and the “light of Christ” argument Susan offered establishes that the nations of Canaan were accountable rather than innocent. These are lines the group could develop, not settled answers.

Pruning. Mickey said she had never felt challenged by the cleansing stories until she became a mother, since a mother’s heart wants the best for everyone and finds the idea of a child becoming evil hard. What helped her was the thread Susan had introduced: we are God’s olive grove, which is why scripture is so full of groves, trees, and planting. The Lord prunes, weeds, cuts, and regrafts, arranging and forming his planting, and if one can move beyond “all life is sacred” to God protecting and building his kingdom and the children who love him, the stories become more palatable.

Who would you trust? Charlie asked who on earth today any of them would trust to know the mind and will of God well enough that, if he said “kill that city, every one of them,” they would believe and do it. He said he would not. Susan said that is not how it works in the new covenant; Charlie said he did not think so either, but the question stands. Mickey asked how God accomplishes the weeding now. Susan answered that he does it through people who have come into relationship with him, which spreads by contagion: the tares convert into wheat now that the Spirit is available to everyone who seeks, which was not the case in the old covenant. Mickey suggested that when Paul was sent to the Gentiles, the house of Israel had become strong enough that God could branch out and grow the family; Susan replied that it was rather that Israel was refusing its God, so the invitation went out to the highways, as in the parable of the wedding feast, and the prophecy is that the Gentiles come in first and then help the Jews see that Christ is the Son of God, the last first and the first last. The two agreed that God had prepared Gentile hearts to receive him, however that came about.

Back to 9/11. Charlie closed the loop: the hijackers were following their prophet; Muslims who do such things are like the ancient Israelites in that they believe in someone who has the mind and will of God and think they are doing God’s will. Susan added that they are also promised a large reward, which Mickey called as twisted as it sounds; Susan said it is aimed at those who will not act for the love of God, and Mickey said it is worldly bait for those the Spirit cannot reach.

5. Closing

Susan closed in prayer, thanking God for his goodness, righteousness, truth, mercy, and grace, and for the fellowship, and asking that everyone learn, understand, and grow through the week and return able to edify one another. Mickey said she would rarely be able to attend, since her own church meets at the same hour.

260923 – Transforming America – Book

by Thomas Abshier | Sep 23, 2026 | Sermon/Meeting/Discussion Transcripts

Transforming America

First Overview Draft — edited from a conversation between Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez, September 23, 2026

Editor’s Note on This Draft

This manuscript is the backbone of the book, taken from a morning conversation between Thomas and Isak. At the end of the conversation Thomas said, “This one’s a book… just elaborate it. This is the backbone of the book. Transforming America. That’s the name of the book.”

The transcript has been edited for coherence: false starts, repetitions, and self-corrections have been removed, and sentences have been completed. No new argument has been added. The conversation has been kept in its original order and divided into chapters at its natural turning points.

Chapter 1 — A Young Man’s Questions

ISAK: I’ve been working on something on my own, for my own understanding. I’ve been trying to understand the forces at work in this country’s politics: socialism and capitalism, empires and rebellions. It’s been really interesting. It’s like trying to see how the world actually functions.

Then I started running it through Conscious Point Physics. I thought, if I run a list of ideals and ideologies through it, how does Conscious Point Physics respond? I don’t know that it’s fully ready, but I’ve been developing it as an article, or really a thought experiment, with Claude. How does the universe respond to cultural movement? How does consciousness, or group consciousness, respond to different cultural ideologies?

It isn’t done, and I don’t have all the answers. It compares different arrangements, like top-down government. We were looking at socialism: gathering power and resources for the people, then rationing them out so everybody is equal. That’s the ideology, the idealistic side of it.

I’m trying to do this in an unbiased way, bringing in everything I’ve learned over the years about capitalism and socialism, and everything I’ve had to unlearn about each. I was working with the actual political climate we’re in, the far right and the far left, and trying to break it down into a rational description. If I’m honest, I think the right and the left are both in chaos, and neither one is carrying out its agenda of service. They’re all part of the system. I tend to be really cynical about that. I think both parties need reform. There isn’t an obvious party where you can say, “This is going to be right for the country.” That’s where we find ourselves.

So I’ve been asking, What would God do with a group of people? What does God do with groups of people?

Here are the questions the framework raised:

Idealistically, if the universe self-organizes, why does it need a constitution at all? Conscious points don’t have a constitution; they have intrinsic rules. If humans are made of the same stuff, why can’t human society self-organize the same way? Why does it need an external document?

The answer might be that humans have something conscious points don’t: the ability to override their intrinsic rules. Particles can’t choose to ignore electromagnetism. Humans can choose to ignore their conscience.

The Constitution is the political version of the freezing mechanism: it selectively preserves good configurations against the thermal noise of human selfishness. That raises the next question: Who decides what gets frozen? God decides which molecular configurations to preserve. Who decides which social configurations to preserve? Thomas? The voters? The Supreme Court? The freezing mechanism in CPP is benevolent because God is good. The political version of it, the state deciding what to preserve and what to let thermal noise destroy, is the entire history of political abuse. Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good.

This is the question Isak asked on the call that didn’t get answered: What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law, and who decides what “Christianity done right” is?

This came out of our earlier conversation. It probably stems from my hesitation to see Christian nationalism as a positive. I’ve seen your point and the way you bring it up. I think it’s the wording. I’m so used to hearing “Christian nationalist this, Christian nationalist that” in such a negative context that I’m unlearning and relearning. So bear with me. I’m forming opinions and trying to form understanding most of all. I don’t want an opinion without knowing what I’m thinking. It isn’t really an opinion if it’s just something I read or something I was told. But I trust that if something is true, it will come up.

The next questions:

What does CPP say about property? Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. CPP has something to say here that nobody has explored. Conscious points occupy a specific position within the lattice. They have location. They have boundaries. The geometry constrains what interacts with what. Is there a physics-level argument for property, that having a defined place in the structure is intrinsic to existence? Or does CPP’s “it’s all God’s substance” point the other way, that ownership is an illusion because everything belongs to the Creator? Thomas’s theology would probably land on stewardship, that you manage what God owns, but the physics argument hasn’t been made.

I don’t know that the physics argument has to be made there. It’s trying to put physics on a lot of things where really we want a metaphor. It’s trying to explain each one, but it’s really interesting.

What about the failure modes of self-organization? CPP says order emerges without central command, but self-organizing systems also produce cancer: cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent. The critique of capitalism is essentially that self-organization produces tumors. What is CPP’s answer to that? Is cancer a violation of the intrinsic rules, or is it the intrinsic rules operating without moral alignment? If the latter, it maps directly onto capitalism without conscience.

What about people who never hear the message? CPP says moral law is real and discoverable. Thomas says Jesus in your heart is the alignment mechanism. But most humans who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The Muslim woman Thomas described, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to encounter Christianity to align. What about the billions who didn’t?

We’ve covered a lot of this.

Is democracy derivable from CPP, or is it just compatible? The essay draft would argue that a constitutional republic is the political form closest to CPP’s structure, but is that a derivation or a preference? A monarchy with a good king might also match the freezing mechanism: one wise sovereign preserving good configurations. Thomas’s own framework has God as a monarch, not a democratically elected president. Why should the political analog be democratic? The argument would need to come from something like this: because no human has God’s knowledge, distributed decision-making approximates omniscience better than centralized command.

I get that. Distributed decision-making approximates omniscience better than centralized command. But that’s an argument from human limitation, not from CPP directly.

What does CPP do with systemic injustice?

I think a lot of these are answered by “Jesus in your heart,” by the idea that if we’re hearing from the same God, from the same high command, so to speak, we can all move in organization and in harmony. But this was putting the CPP framework over the question. It was also a test: Can we scan an article through our GitHub repository and pull out answers, or is it still abstract? Is it still just questions? That’s what I was doing. I got a little stuck on the Walker, so I started working on this. It was after our conversation the other morning.

It just won’t leave me alone. What’s right and what’s wrong, Thomas? Every point you’ve made about God and the nature of the universe is well taken. I just find this troubling. I’m not sure about capitalism, and I feel like I sound like one of those woke idiots. But capitalism needs to move outward. It needs resources, and it seems to need to keep growing. A growing economy needs oil. We need to go and get resources. So it seems we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out opposing political cultures, or funding regimes on our side that squash their own country’s communism or socialism.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe I’m missing a lot, and I know there’s a lot of nuance to it: how much death happens under socialist regimes and communist governments, and how much “eat the rich” becomes part of the culture when the tide turns. Because there is so much nuance, I’m seeing all these different sides and trying to understand them. I want to have an opinion on all of this. Maybe I do, and that’s why I bring it up this way. If I were with somebody on the opposite side, I might argue more. But here I’m trying to understand, and I feel like you understand things well.

There seems to be so much nuance. How can things be black and white? Maybe I feel a responsibility to see the black and white of everything, but I only see gray. There are lighter and darker shades of it. I don’t see God as gray. But I see the world and humanity as an extension of God, and in that case, gray.

I don’t buy fully into the idea that we have the right to do anything we want in another country. I’m not saying that’s what we’re doing. I’m just more cynical about the country’s history and its motivations. Yes, we get to live with gasoline and no wars at home, and that’s a really beautiful thing. But at what cost that I’m ignorant of? Are the good guys really the good guys? Are the bad guys really the bad guys? Or is it a bunch of civilians paying the price for a few bad guys at the top? That’s where my fever-ridden brain has been, trying to figure out socialism and capitalism and empires.

Chapter 2 — Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism and Communism

THOMAS: It’s a really good topic. Let me riff on the ideas you brought up. You raised a broad spectrum of issues, and they all need to be addressed in a holistic way.

Capitalism is important to look at first. All of these systems (capitalism, communism, monarchy) are each the equivalent of a single Conscious Point Physics rule. They have no nuance to them. Capitalism in its unnuanced form is this: whatever makes the most money, you invest in, and when it stops making money, you redeploy your resources to do something else that makes money. It is goal-driven. It has no particular concern for the environment unless you price in the cost of fixing the environment. When you do that, it actually becomes a moral system, and a quantifiable one. How much does it cost to care for the environment? This is how much we have to spend on cleanup, replanting, and so on.

The communist system has a different goal. In its pure form, everybody does everything he possibly can to produce, but there is no real means of distributing or pricing what is produced. So everybody has to use his own judgment, decide what is needed, and put a price on it, without any real idea what the price should be or how much he should make. There is no incentive to take risks and do all the optimization required to get the maximum production from the minimum work and cost. People are supposed to be altruistic saints who just do things for others and work their hardest, with no more reward than the man who stays home and eats bonbons.

So communism suffers greatly from the pricing problem, from the lack of any mechanism for determining need, and from a motivation problem. People don’t work, because there is no payoff for working or for excelling. It all pays the same. Everybody becomes a government worker, punching a clock and getting away with doing as little as he can, because nobody is supervising. It’s just “the people.”

And when you say, “But somebody will start poking you if you’re not working hard enough,” you have begun to incorporate elements of capitalism and fair play, and those are Christian values. So you have had to incorporate Christianity to overcome the deficits of communism. You have had to incorporate capitalism to make up for them.

Socialism is a stepping point toward the pole of communism. It still has some remnant of pricing in it, some element of management, some element of accountability.

At the other end, it’s every man for himself. We get individual rewards and payoffs. We have management. Everybody specializes. The market determines the price, how much we produce of something, how much people will pay for it, and whether a business survives at all, because there isn’t enough demand or its costs are too high. There is an element of automatic adjustment. There’s an internal governor inside capitalism. But the problem you mentioned was monopolies, cartels, and one other thing—

ISAK: Cults. It was talking about cancer: self-organizing systems also produce cancer cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Monopolies, cartels, and cults are the social equivalent.

Addendum to Chapter 2 — Property: Owner, Steward, and the One Who Owns It All

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 2, “Systems Without Nuance: Capitalism and Communism,” after Thomas’s description of capitalism’s internal governor and before the turn to monopolies, cartels, and cults.]

THOMAS: Before we go on to the perversions of capitalism, I want to go back to one of the questions in your list, because it sits underneath everything I just said about pricing and motivation. Communism abolishes private property. Capitalism is built on it. Your draft asked whether Conscious Point Physics has anything to say about that, and you said you weren’t sure the physics argument needed to be made at all. I think you were partly right, and I want to show you which part.

What the physics says, and what it doesn’t

Your draft posed the question as a choice between two pictures. In one, every conscious point has a definite place in the lattice, with boundaries, so perhaps having a place of one’s own is built into existence itself. In the other, everything is God’s substance, so perhaps ownership is an illusion because it all belongs to the Creator.

When I look at the actual picture, both are half right, and the two halves fit together.

Here is the picture. Each conscious point perceives what is within its own perceptual sphere. It computes, from what it perceives, where it should go. Then it displaces itself. Perceive, compute, displace. It acts on the grid point it occupies, and on nothing else directly. It does not perceive the whole universe, and it does not move anything but itself. So each point is a real, bounded locus of perception and action. It has its own viewpoint and its own move to make, and nobody makes that move for it. That much of your first picture is true: individuality is not an illusion. It is built into the lowest level of what exists.

But the conscious point does not own the grid point it sits on. The lattice is common. Points pass through the same locations, and even two can land on the same place for a moment before it resolves. And the point itself is not self-made. It is a point of God’s own consciousness. It exists because He is, and it acts by the rules He gave it. So your second picture is true too: in the ultimate sense, everything belongs to the Creator, the points included.

Put those together and you get neither absolute private ownership nor the abolition of the individual. You get stewardship. A real, bounded domain of agency, with real responsibility for one’s own move, inside a whole that belongs to Someone else.

[Editor’s note: This is a picture, not a derivation. CPP has no concept of “property,” and the argument for property below rests on Scripture and experience, not on the physics. The physics shows that the stewardship picture is consistent with the structure of reality as CPP describes it; it does not prove it. That was Isak’s instinct, and it is correct.]

So the physics does not settle the political question. What it does is dissolve a false choice. The communist says that because everything is common, nothing is yours. The libertarian says that because it’s yours, you answer to no one. The picture at the bottom of reality says both are wrong. You have a place and a move that are truly yours, and you answer for them to the One whose substance you are.

What Scripture says

Scripture says exactly the same thing, and it says it more plainly than the physics does.

On one side: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” God says of the land of Israel, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” The silver is His and the gold is His. Nothing we hold is ours in the final sense.

On the other side, the same Bible guards private property fiercely. “Thou shalt not steal” makes no sense unless some things are rightly yours and not your neighbor’s. “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark,” the boundary stone of his field. The prophets’ picture of peace is “every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid,” not every man under the collective’s vine. And when King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard and Naboth would not sell his father’s inheritance, the king’s wife had Naboth killed and the king took the land. God sent Elijah to pronounce judgment on the king for it. The most powerful man in the nation could not rightly take a small farmer’s field.

And notice what happened in the early church, which people love to cite as Christian communism. In Jerusalem the believers sold their possessions and shared everything. But when Ananias sold his land and lied about the price, Peter said to him, “While it remained, was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?” The sharing was voluntary. Ananias’s sin was not keeping part of the money. It was lying to God about it. The church held all things in common because hearts were given, not because property was abolished. That is the whole difference between the Kingdom and communism. The Kingdom produces generosity by changing hearts. Communism tries to produce it by taking the property, and it cannot, because you cannot confiscate a heart.

The parables complete the picture. In the parable of the talents, the master gives his servants real money and real authority over it, and then leaves. They are free to trade, invest, or bury it. When he returns, he holds each of them accountable for what he did with what was entrusted to him. That is stewardship: real property, real freedom, real accountability to the true owner.

Why a steward needs property

This isn’t only theology. It is how things work in practice, and it connects to what I said about communism’s pricing and motivation problems.

A steward needs a domain he answers for. If everything belongs to everyone, then nothing is anyone’s responsibility. The common pasture is overgrazed because every herdsman gains by adding one more cow and no herdsman bears the cost alone. The public restroom is dirtier than the one in your house. Nobody washes a rented car.

We have run this experiment many times, and it always comes out the same way. The Plymouth colonists began with a common store: everyone worked the common land and drew from the common supply. By Governor Bradford’s own account, it bred confusion and discontent, and the young men resented working for other men’s wives and children without recompense. In 1623 they assigned each family its own parcel, and the harvest improved so much that women who had pleaded weakness went willingly into the fields with their children. In the Soviet Union, the small private plots that collective farmers were allowed to keep made up a tiny share of the farmland and produced a disproportionately large share of the food.

This is also why property is inseparable from pricing. A price is what happens when owners say yes or no. When I own something, I decide what I’ll accept for it, and you decide what you’ll pay, and that exchange tells everyone what things are worth. Abolish the owners and you abolish the yes and the no, and then the planner has to guess. That is why the Soviet planner never knew how many shoelaces to make.

The limits on property

But property is not absolute either, and here I part company with the libertarian. God’s law placed duties on the owner.

The farmer was not to reap the corners of his field, or gather the gleanings, or strip his vineyard bare. Those were left for the poor and the stranger, who came and gathered them with their own hands. Notice the design. The owner was not taxed and the proceeds handed out by an official. He was required to leave room for the poor to work for their own bread on his land. The land rested every seventh year. And in the Jubilee, land returned to the families it had originally been given to, so that no family could be permanently dispossessed and no man could accumulate field after field forever. “Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!”

So the steward’s property is bounded by two duties. The first is charity: “If any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith,” and what we do for the least of these, we do for Christ. The second is the duty not to use one’s property to destroy other men’s stewardship. That second duty connects directly to what I am about to say about monopolies and captains of industry. The man who buys up every mousetrap company so that no one else can build a better mousetrap is not exercising his property right. He is using it to abolish everyone else’s.

So the question to ask of any arrangement of property is this: Does it enable faithful stewardship, or does it concentrate control in ways that prevent stewardship by others? The communist arrangement fails that test by concentrating everything in the state. The monopoly fails it by concentrating everything in a company. The Jubilee passes it. So does the small farm, the family business, and the home a man owns outright.

Taxation, and the quieter kinds of theft

Where does taxation fit? Christ said, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” The government has a legitimate claim to pay for the things it is actually for: the common defense, the courts, the good roads everybody wants. A just tax for the group good is not theft.

But when the government takes from one man in order to give to another, not because the second man is helpless but because he votes, that is the Pleasantville robbery done by proxy. The citizen hires the government to do the robbing he would be ashamed to do himself. The Bible’s corrective to greed is not confiscation. It is voluntary generosity, family obligation, and the gleaning principle.

There is a quieter theft as well. The Bible condemns “divers weights and divers measures,” the merchant with one weight for buying and another for selling. When a government expands the money supply faster than the goods it measures, every dollar a man has saved buys less. His property has been taken without a law being passed or a tax being levied. It is the ancient practice of clipping coins, done by a printing press. A steward cannot plan to be faithful if the measure itself is dishonest.

The answer to your question

So, is ownership an illusion because everything belongs to God? No. It is real, but it is delegated. The illusion is not that the field is yours. The illusion is that it is only yours, that you answer to no one for it, and that there is no poor man with a right to glean its corners.

And is property built into the structure of existence? In the sense that matters, yes. Each of us has a place and a move that are truly his, and no one can perceive, choose, and act for him. That is why the collective cannot replace the individual, and why a system that tries to abolish the individual’s domain ends in the planner’s guess, the empty shelf, and the gun. But the place is on loan, and so is the one who holds it.

Stewardship holds both halves together: the dignity of ownership and the humility of accountability. It is the same pattern we will keep finding. Every system without nuance takes one true thing and makes it the only thing. The communist takes “it all belongs to God” and gives it to the state. The libertarian takes “this is mine” and forgets Whose it is. Christ’s way keeps both.

References for the rewrite: Psalm 24:1; Leviticus 25:23; Haggai 2:8; Exodus 20:15; Deuteronomy 19:14; Micah 4:4; 1 Kings 21 (Naboth); Acts 2:44–45, 4:32–5:4 (Ananias); Matthew 25:14–30 (talents), 25:31–46; Leviticus 19:9–10, 25 (gleaning, sabbath year, Jubilee); Isaiah 5:8; 1 Timothy 5:8; Matthew 22:21; Deuteronomy 25:13–15, Proverbs 20:10 (divers weights). William Bradford, “Of Plymouth Plantation,” entry for 1623. On Soviet private plots: estimates vary by year and crop; the rewrite should cite a specific source and figure before giving a number.

Chapter 3 — The Perversion of Centralization: Cartels, Monopolies, Captains of Industry, Government, and Cults

THOMAS: Cults. I have a particular definition of a cult. I don’t know whether it’s the correct one, because it’s the definition we used when I was in a cult. We said we weren’t a cult because we didn’t have a guru over us; we were a religion. But we did have a man over us, and we were doing exactly what he wanted. In a sense it was a perversion of the religion as it was practiced in India, although in another sense it was more pure. We were actually doing the religion that the people who claimed to practice it were supposed to be doing. We weren’t reformed. We were unreformed purists. There was a battle cry: someone would call out “Bole So Nihal,” and everyone would reply “Sat Sri Akal.” I don’t even know what it meant, but we were gung-ho. We did everything perfectly. We were fanatic religionists, unreformed. The Indians had been doing it for three, four, five centuries, and their attitude was, “That didn’t do us much good. We’ll do it, sort of.”

[Editor’s note: The call-and-response is the Sikh jaikara, “Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal.”]

The cult was what Claude named as a pathology that develops out of capitalism. The essence of a cult, for me, is a single-minded idea of how things should be. In a healthy group, direction is homogenized because there are so many people. In a cult, there is a singularity of “do it this way.”

Because the metaphor switched, I would put the list a different way. A cartel is a group of companies all going in the same direction. A monopoly is one company making everybody go in one direction. And instead of “cult,” the third item should have been the captain of industry: the Carnegies, Mellons, Morgans, and Rockefellers. That was the equivalent. I had to figure out what the essence behind “cult” was, and “captain of industry” captures it better: a singularity of direction pushing people.

We should add one more pole to that list, and that is government. So we have government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry. Those are the four poles that people can be pulled toward. Communism is the pole where government takes over. Government directs how many shoelaces to make, how many ballpoint pens, how many computers, because it is in control.

The characteristic perversion in each of them is centralization. All of the poles you identified are centralization poles, and they are the opposite of capitalism. In each case—government, cartel, monopoly, and captain of industry—competition has in some way been suppressed. In the captain-of-industry case, you lowball, or you use force of personality, or contracts, or intimidation, or alliances. In some way you pervert the competitive market that would have let somebody else build a better mousetrap. You say, “I’ll just buy up your mousetrap company. Then I’ll keep jacking up the price of my mousetrap, because now I own yours, and I won’t sell yours. Or I’ll make yours and charge high prices for it.” So it is usually some perversion of the free market, carried out by a group or by one man.

There is another place for the cult as well: the eco-fascist cult. We will run all the water from the Sierra Nevada into the Pacific Ocean because the delta smelt might not have enough habitat to live in, and so there is no farming in the San Joaquin Valley because the water went out past Sacramento to keep the fish alive. The Northwest equivalent is the spotted owl. No logging. No forest maintenance. We will let everything grow wild, and the result is so much overgrowth that when there is a fire we lose millions of acres. We can’t stop it anywhere. There are no clear-cut firebreaks.

[Editor’s note: The fish at the center of the California water dispute is the delta smelt. The snail darter, which Thomas named, was the subject of the Tellico Dam dispute in Tennessee (TVA v. Hill, 1978).]

Eco-fascism is a cult, and it is completely unreformed. It has not incorporated the other aspects of reality: there is a time for growing and a time for harvesting, a time for clearing undergrowth, and places for leaving natural, full-spectrum growth. There should be islands of it, rather than an entire world of it.

All of these (captains of industry, monopolies, cartels, governments, and eco-cults or special-interest cults) pervert the market and do not allow competition. All of them say, “My way is the right way.” That is the realm of the religious cult, where acting one particular way is the only right way: an ideological cult.

The interesting thing is that there is a particular way to think that is right. I think it was Coolidge who said everybody wants good roads. That’s just a fact. Nobody wants a road with chasms in it, or boulders that fell across it from the cliff.

ISAK: Or a tree across it.

[Editor’s note: The attribution of “everybody wants good roads” to Coolidge has not been verified; the phrase was also the slogan of the Good Roads Movement of the 1880s–1910s.]

Addendum to Chapter 3 — The Cancer Question: Broken Rules, or Rules Without Alignment?

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 3, “The Perversion of Centralization,” after the “good roads” exchange and its editor’s note.]

THOMAS: I want to go back to the cancer metaphor in your list, because I answered it by changing the list, and I didn’t answer the question underneath it. Your draft asked this: self-organizing systems produce order without central command, but they also produce cancer, cells that follow their own rules at the expense of the organism. Is cancer a violation of the intrinsic rules, or is it the intrinsic rules operating without moral alignment? And if it’s the second, doesn’t that map directly onto capitalism without conscience?

It’s a good question. The answer is that it is both, at two different levels, and seeing the two levels answers the question about capitalism too.

Two levels of law

Start at the bottom. A conscious point cannot break its rules. It perceives, it computes, it displaces, every moment, exactly as it was made to. A particle cannot decide to ignore electromagnetism. At that level there is no such thing as a violation. Everything that happens, happens lawfully.

Now go up to the cell. A cancer cell doesn’t break chemistry either. Every reaction inside it obeys the same laws as the reactions inside a healthy cell. Nothing in a tumor violates physics. So at the lowest level, the answer to your question is the second one: cancer is the rules operating without alignment.

But the body has a second kind of law, the law of the whole. A healthy cell lives inside a web of signals from its neighbors and from the body. They tell it when to divide and when to stop, when to specialize, and when it is damaged beyond repair and should die for the body’s sake. A healthy cell is constantly listening to the whole and adjusting itself to it. That law is real. The body’s life depends on it. And a cancer cell breaks it. So at the level of the organism, the answer is the first one: cancer is a violation.

That is exactly the situation of a man in a society. The laws of economics work in him the way chemistry works in a cell. Supply and demand, incentive, scarcity: a monopolist obeys them perfectly. The captain of industry who buys up his competitors breaks no law of economics. But there is a second law over him, the moral law, the law of the whole: love your neighbor as yourself. That law he breaks.

So when your draft says “capitalism without conscience,” it has put its finger on the right thing. Capitalism is a set of rules like chemistry. It is lawful and powerful, and by itself it has no idea what the organism is for. It does not produce tumors because its rules are broken. It produces them because the men operating it have stopped listening to the law of the whole.

What a cancer cell actually does

Look at how cancer works, because the parallel is closer than a figure of speech. Cancer researchers describe a set of things a cell must do to become a tumor. I’ll give you the ones that matter here, with their social equivalents, and you will recognize every one of them from what we just discussed.

A healthy cell stops dividing when it touches its neighbors. This is called contact inhibition. The neighbor’s presence says “enough,” and the cell listens. A cancer cell ignores its neighbors and piles up on top of them. That is the man who hears his brother say “You’re getting out of line” and keeps going. It is “just a little more.”

A healthy cell that is badly damaged destroys itself for the sake of the body. A cancer cell refuses to die. In an economy, a business that fails is supposed to fail, and its people and capital go somewhere they are more useful. When a failing giant arranges to be kept alive at everyone else’s expense because it is too big to fail, it has done what the tumor does.

A tumor can’t grow beyond a small size on its own. To grow, it has to send out signals that make the body build new blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply and redirects it to itself. That is the cartel or the monopoly that lobbies for subsidies and favorable regulation, and the special interest that gets the water or the timber or the tax money routed to its cause.

The body has an immune system that patrols constantly and destroys aberrant cells, most of them long before anyone would ever know they existed. A successful tumor learns to hide from it. It displays the signals that say “I am self; leave me alone.” That is the cartel dressed up as free enterprise, and the zealot dressed up as the church. The disguise is always the same: the perversion wears the clothes of the healthy thing it is destroying.

And finally, a tumor spreads. It leaves its place and sets up colonies in other organs. That is the concentration that starts in one market and moves into the next, and into the press, and into the government.

Now notice what all of these have in common. Every one of them is centralization. The healthy body is made of trillions of cells, each in its place, each limited by its neighbors, and none of them in charge. A tumor is one line of cells that has decided to become the whole. That is what I was describing when I said the perversion in every case (government, cartel, monopoly, captain of industry) is centralization, the suppression of competition. Cancer is what a monopoly looks like in flesh.

The perception failure

There is one more connection to the physics, and I think it is the deepest one.

A conscious point computes its move from what it perceives. What it can perceive determines what it can take into account. Now think about what the cancer cell has lost. It has not lost its ability to act; it acts with enormous energy. It has lost its ability to perceive the whole. The signals from its neighbors are still arriving, but it no longer responds to them. It computes its move as if it were alone.

Greed is the same failure in a man. It is not mainly a failure of will. It is a narrowing of perception. The greedy man computes his next move from a sphere that has shrunk down to himself. His neighbor is still there, still sending signals: “I need to eat,” “You’re hurting me,” “That was mine.” He no longer takes them into account.

That is why the remedy cannot be only a set of external constraints. You can wall the tumor in, and cut it out, and poison it, and you should when you must. But health is a body whose cells are all listening to the whole. And that is what “love your neighbor as yourself” is. It is a command to widen the sphere of perception until your neighbor’s good is part of what you compute when you decide your move. The conscience is not a regulator bolted onto the economy from outside. It is the cell’s receptor for the signals of the body.

[Editor’s note: The link between the perceive–compute–displace cycle and moral perception is an analogy drawn from CPP, not a derivation within it.]

Where the analogy breaks, and why that matters

The analogy breaks at one point, and the break is important.

A cancer cell does not choose. It becomes cancerous through damage to its genes, by accident or by toxic exposure, not by a decision. A person with cancer has done nothing wrong by having it, and nothing I am saying suggests otherwise.

A man does choose. That is the one thing humans have that conscious points and cells do not: the ability to override the law of the whole, to ignore conscience. So the social tumor is worse than the biological one. The monopolist is not a victim of mutation. He knows his neighbor is there. He has decided not to count him. That is why we speak of greed as a sin and not as a disease, and why the remedy includes repentance and not only treatment.

It is also the answer to your constitutional question from the start of our conversation: why does a self-organizing universe need a written constitution when conscious points don’t? Because conscious points cannot defect, and cells defect only by damage. Men can defect on purpose. A people that can choose to stop listening to the whole needs the whole written down, and needs neighbors, juries, and courts that will say “enough” when the conscience fails.

How a body stays healthy

So how does a body keep cancer from taking over? Not mainly by chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is a necessary and sometimes lifesaving tool, but it is a blunt one. It attacks every rapidly dividing cell, healthy and sick alike, and the patient suffers for it. The main defense is the one that never stops: the immune system, distributed everywhere, recognizing the aberrant cell early, while it is small, and removing it before it becomes a tumor. The more modern cancer treatments increasingly work by stripping away the tumor’s disguise so that the body’s own immune system can see it and do its job.

Society works the same way. When the tumors are already large, the big central remedies have their place: antitrust law, breaking up the monopoly, prosecuting the fraud. But those remedies are chemotherapy. They are blunt, they harm the healthy along with the sick, and a government big enough to use them is itself at risk of becoming the largest tumor of all. That is what happened with the G-men.

The real health of a society is distributed. It is a market with many competitors, where no one gets large enough to capture the blood supply. It is neighbors who say “enough” early, while the problem is small. It is juries who can see through a disguise. It is churches and families that form men whose perception includes their neighbor. And it is a public that can recognize the tumor when it is wearing the clothes of healthy tissue, and name it.

“Growth for its own sake”

Last, your worry that capitalism has to keep growing, has to keep going out and getting more. The writer Edward Abbey said that growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. He was right, but notice what he did not say. He did not say growth is cancerous. A child grows. A healthy body grows to its proper size, and then it keeps renewing itself: cells die and are replaced every day, and the body stays alive by constant, orderly production.

An economy is supposed to be like that: growth that serves real needs, and then steady, faithful production that maintains a good life. What makes growth cancerous is the same thing that makes a cell cancerous: when it no longer serves the whole and serves only itself. When “how much is enough?” gets the answer “just a little more.” That is not the free market. That is the free market with its conscience cut out.

So the answer to your question is this. Self-organization does not fail because its rules are bad. It fails when the beings operating within it stop perceiving the whole. For conscious points that can never happen. For cells it happens by accident. For men it happens by choice, and so for men there is a remedy that cells don’t have: they can repent, widen their sight, and choose again.

References for the rewrite: Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg, “The Hallmarks of Cancer” (Cell, 2000) and “Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation” (Cell, 2011), the source for contact inhibition, evasion of cell death, angiogenesis, immune evasion, and metastasis as the capabilities a tumor acquires. Edward Abbey’s line appears in One Life at a Time, Please (1988). The comparison of antitrust enforcement to chemotherapy and of distributed competition to immune surveillance is offered as an analogy, not as a medical claim.

Chapter 4 — Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and Order

THOMAS: Everybody wants good roads, and that phrase is the equivalent of absolute morality. Nobody wants bad roads. The only people who want bad roads are highway robbers. When the stagecoach comes up to the washed-out road, they say, “All right, everybody, hands up. Where’s the strongbox?”

ISAK: So his point was that it’s a moral good, a moral truth, an absolute morality, that the government should pay for roads. Is that a socialist concept you’re talking about, taxing groups for a common good? I’m sorry, I missed the point.

THOMAS: I didn’t address that, and it’s a really good point. What we’re talking about there is the communist element. We’re saying that in this particular area there is a group good, and that’s why we have government: to take care of the group good. The libertarians, and a group called the anarcho-capitalists, say that if you just put a price on everything, somebody will take care of it. No government whatsoever; the market will take care of everything. That one has its flaws too, but that’s a whole discussion.

It turns out there is a good argument for each of these systems. There is a place for anarchy. It lies in letting people experience their own lives and the things that go on in them. There is a level of anarchy that is absolutely irreducible. That’s thermal noise. At its smallest level nature is in a state of anarchy. But that anarchy is tempered by the environment. It only goes to a certain level, and then it suddenly passes into a realm where it is ordered. It gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and it turns into the sun. The sun is extremely chaotic, and yet it is a very ordered object. It holds itself together at a particular size boundary. So the question is: What is the size boundary at which anarchy passes into order?

ISAK: Interesting. Keep going.

THOMAS: Take the anarchy of an individual life. “I want to be free.” What do you want to be free to do? “I want to go to work when I want to go. I want to go play. I want to have a family. I want recreation. I want good roads and nice places to go on them.” Well, it sounds like you want a very ordered life.

ISAK: Yeah.

THOMAS: “Actually, I do. I want to be able to do all these things, but I want them in a very ordered way.” So an ordered life has many different parts, each with degrees of freedom inside it. When I get tired of one, I go to another place with its own degrees of freedom, and then to another. I’ve used five or ten of them. Well, how about if we just roll over it with a tornado? That’s a lot of randomness. You’d have a lot of freedom there. “No, I don’t want that. I want my good roads, my place for recreation, and my family.” After a while—

ISAK: Anarchy gets old.

THOMAS: Anarchy gets old really quickly if you get too much of it.

Addendum to Chapter 4 — The King and the Republic: Is Self-Government Derived or Merely Chosen?

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 4, “Good Roads: Absolute Morality, Anarchy, and Order,” after “Anarchy gets old really quickly if you get too much of it.” This section also answers the question Thomas raised in that chapter: “What is the size boundary at which anarchy passes into order?”]

THOMAS: I said a minute ago that the question is where anarchy passes into order, where the size boundary is. That connects to another of your questions, and it’s a sharp one, so I want to take it on directly.

Your draft said that if I argue a constitutional republic is the political form closest to the structure of reality, I have to say whether that’s a derivation or a preference. It pointed out that a monarchy with a good king might also fit the pattern: one wise sovereign preserving the good. And it pointed out that in my own framework God is a monarch, not an elected president. So why should the political version be democratic? The only answer it could find was that no human has God’s knowledge, so spreading decisions out approximates omniscience better than central command. Then you noticed that’s an argument from human limitation, not from the physics.

Here is my answer. It is not a derivation, and I won’t pretend it is. But I think the argument from limitation and the argument from the physics turn out to be the same argument. Let me show you why.

God is King, and the throne is taken

Start with the part your draft got exactly right. God is a monarch. The universe is not a democracy. The rules the conscious points follow were not voted on. The Kingdom of God is a kingdom, and its King is not up for re-election.

So I am not a democrat in the sense that I think the majority is the source of what is right. It isn’t. The majority chose Barabbas. A crowd that shouted “Hosanna” on Sunday shouted “Crucify him” on Friday. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, and a system that treats it as the final authority is just another system without nuance, like the ones we talked about. Pure democracy is anarchy with a vote count. Fifty-one percent can rob forty-nine, and when they do it by ballot instead of by six-gun, it is still Pleasantville.

But notice what follows from God being King. If the throne belongs to Him, then no man can rightly sit on it. That is what the Christos Voting Network means when it says “No King but King Jesus.” It is not a slogan against monarchy as a form. It says the office of absolute sovereign is already filled. Every man who claims absolute power over other men is claiming a seat that is not vacant.

That is the Bible’s own verdict. When Israel asked Samuel for a king “like all the nations,” God told Samuel, “They have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Then He had Samuel warn them what a king would do: take their sons for his chariots, their daughters for his kitchens, their fields for his servants, and a tenth of everything, until they cried out because of the king they had chosen. It is the most accurate description of centralized government ever written, and it was written three thousand years ago.

So, why not a monarchy with a good king? Because the question isn’t whether a good king would govern well. Some did. David was a man after God’s own heart. Hezekiah and Josiah led the nation back to God. The problem is what came after them. Hezekiah was followed by his son Manasseh, one of the most wicked kings Judah ever had. Solomon was followed by Rehoboam, who split the kingdom in two by promising to be harsher than his father. A monarchy is only as good as the next heir, and heirs are not chosen for their character. Even the good king has no one who can correct him when he goes wrong, except a prophet like Nathan, willing to risk his life to say “Thou art the man.” Monarchy puts the entire weight of the nation on one man’s heart, and no man’s heart can carry that.

What the physics actually shows

Now the physics. I don’t claim that CPP derives a constitutional republic. It doesn’t. There is no ballot box in the lattice. But look at how God actually governs the universe He made, because I think it tells us how He intends men to be governed.

God does not move each conscious point by direct command. He gave the points their rules, and each point perceives what is within its own sphere, computes its move from what it perceives, and moves itself. No point commands another point. No point perceives the whole universe. Every one of them sees only its neighborhood. And out of that, out of countless local perceptions and local moves all obeying the same law, comes everything: atoms, stars, living bodies. The order is not imposed from a central office. It emerges from local agents faithfully following a law that is above all of them.

So the structure of creation is not a monarchy of creatures and not a democracy of creatures. It is a Kingdom whose King wrote the law, and whose subjects govern their own moves, locally, under that law. Absolute sovereignty at the top belongs to God alone. Below it there is distributed, local agency, and no creature rules another by fiat.

[Editor’s note: This is an argument from pattern, not a derivation. CPP describes how conscious points behave; it does not contain a theory of government. The claim is that the constitutional-republic form is consistent with the way CPP describes God governing creation, and more consistent with it than a human monarchy is. The stronger claim, that CPP derives a republic, would be the more convenient one for the book, and it is not being made.]

And here is where your two arguments meet. Why is spreading decisions out better than central command? Because no human has God’s knowledge. But why doesn’t any human have God’s knowledge? Because every created thing perceives only within its own sphere. That limitation is not a defect of human nature that the physics knows nothing about. It is built into the structure of every created point. Only God perceives the whole. So the argument from human limitation is the argument from the physics. Every creature is finite in perception, and that is exactly why no creature may be trusted with the whole.

James Madison put it plainly: if men were angels, no government would be necessary, and if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary. We are not angels, and we are not governed by angels. So the government has to control the governed, and then it has to be made to control itself.

Where anarchy passes into order

That brings me back to the size boundary.

I said earlier that anarchy is irreducible at the smallest scale, and that at some size it passes into order. In human life, the smallest scale is the individual and the family. There, government is mostly self-government: a man ruling his own appetites, a father and mother ordering their home. No state should reach into that more than it must.

The next boundary is about a hundred and fifty people. That’s roughly the number of people a man can actually know: know their names, their faces, their families, and how they live. Below that size, a community can govern itself largely by relationship. Everyone knows who is trustworthy. Accountability is personal. A brother can say “You’re getting out of line,” and it means something because he knows you. That is why I proposed the hundred-and-fifty-person cell as the building block of the Voting Network. At that size, it feels like a family.

Above that size, you can no longer know everyone, and something else is needed: representation. You choose someone you do know, whose character you have seen, to stand for you among people you don’t know. And that is exactly the structure Moses was given. When the work of judging the whole nation was crushing him, his father-in-law Jethro told him to choose able men who feared God, men of truth who hated covetousness, and make them rulers over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. The small matters were judged at the smallest level. Only the great matters came up to Moses. And in Deuteronomy, Moses tells the people, “Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and I will make them rulers over you.” The people chose men known among them, and those men were set over them under God’s law.

That is a republic. It was in the Bible three thousand years before Philadelphia: a people choosing leaders they know, organized in nested levels from the smallest to the largest, every level bound by a law none of them wrote, with the King above them all. It is the same shape as the physics: local knowledge, local decisions, one law above everyone, and no creature on the throne.

The republic depends on the King

One more thing, and it is the most important. The republic works only if the law above it is real and the people submit to it.

John Adams said the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and that it is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. He was right, and the physics shows why. Distributed agency produces order only when every agent follows the same law. Conscious points can’t help following theirs. Men can refuse. A republic of men who have rejected the law above them is not a republic. It is a crowd with a constitution, and a crowd will eventually vote itself whatever it wants, including a king. That is how republics have always died. Rome didn’t fall to a foreign conqueror first. It handed itself to Caesar.

So when someone asks whether I believe in democracy, my answer is this. I believe in the Kingdom of God, and I believe the best form of human government under that Kingdom is a constitutional republic: nested levels of self-government, beginning with the man who governs himself and the family that governs its home, rising through communities small enough to know each other, bound at every level by a moral law no majority can repeal, with every office held as a stewardship under God. That form is not derived from the physics. It is the form most in harmony with how God actually governs what He has made. It keeps the throne vacant for the only One who can fill it.

And it only works as long as the people keep the King. When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, someone asked what kind of government they had made. He said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” We keep it the same way a conscious point keeps its place in the order of things: by following the law we were given, in the place we were given, one move at a time.

References for the rewrite: 1 Samuel 8:5–18; Judges 21:25; Deuteronomy 17:14–20 (limits on the king); Exodus 18:13–26 (Jethro); Deuteronomy 1:13–15; Matthew 20:25–28; 2 Samuel 12:7 (Nathan); 2 Kings 21 (Manasseh after Hezekiah); 1 Kings 12 (Rehoboam); Matthew 27:15–23 (Barabbas). James Madison, Federalist No. 51 (1788). John Adams, letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, October 11, 1798. Franklin’s reply is recorded in the notes of James McHenry, a Maryland delegate. The 150 figure is Robin Dunbar’s estimate of the number of stable relationships a person can maintain, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point*; the cell model is from the Christos Voting Network materials.*

Chapter 5 — From Pleasantville to the G-Men: How Every Remedy Is Corrupted

THOMAS: It works the same way in the other direction. I’ve got my little bit of order here, and the government comes in and tells me what to do, and I don’t like it. “Fine, we’ll just let everybody do what he wants.” Nobody is watching anybody. Everybody has his own little area.

Then we have some people over here who don’t want to work that hard, and they say, “It’s a lot easier to take their stuff and make it my stuff.” So I ride into Pleasantville with my six-gun, line the people up against the wall, load my sack, ride out of town, and enjoy the stuff on my own until I need a refill, and then I go back to Pleasantville.

So the government comes in and says, “Al, the way you come in and take other people’s stuff, we’re going to send the G-men after you, and we won’t let you do it anymore.” Everybody says, “This is great. The disorder is under control.” Now there are G-men everywhere, and the G-men don’t have anything to do, and they need to get paid. So they say, “We’ll go into surveillance. We’ll watch everybody. Maybe we need a war, so we’ll have something to do. We’re bored.” So they monitor everybody and make up all the rules. And if people don’t like the rules, the G-men can be lenient by taking a little money on the side so they can keep doing business. There is corruption there.

So then we have a court to judge the G-men. The courts are good, but they get corrupted too. So we need a government that passes laws, and special agencies to watch the agencies.

Everybody has a little laziness in him. He doesn’t want to work that hard. Everybody has a little Al Capone in him, a little Dillinger. Everybody wants to take somebody else’s stuff. “I want the government to rob for me. I have this ailment, and I want to go to the doctor. So rob that guy, so you can pay my doctor bill.” So we vote for people who will bring home the goods. We vote for the robbers we like, so that we don’t have to do the dirty work of riding over to Pleasantville ourselves.

ISAK: So we don’t have to rob anyone ourselves.

THOMAS: We say, “Government, we want you to rob them for us, so we can get what we need without working that hard.” Every place ends up with a point of corruption in it. The problem is that we don’t know where the point is. We say we want a government, but we don’t want it too big. We want police, but we don’t want them getting bored and corrupt and making us pay for things they should be doing anyway.

Then the government says, “If we’re going to regulate you, you’re going to have to pay for our campaigns, so people can vote for us. Or we won’t regulate your business if you send us campaign contributions.” So we end up overlooking business because it gave us payoff money not to regulate it, and we call it campaign contributions. Government gets corrupted by democracy, by campaigns. We try to pass laws, but we make big loopholes: “Everybody has to report everything, except the people with lots of money. They can have super PACs and give huge contributions. Anybody small will be monitored to the max.” So you have to pay your politician, buy your politician, in order to have your needs met.

Everybody needs to survive. Either you take stuff or you work for stuff. Everybody is in the business of having somebody else take stuff for him, or having his own stuff taken, or working for it. And everybody is trying to regulate the perverted part, because it’s really bad. So we pass more laws, and corruption grows up to bypass those laws, and we pass more laws about the corruption, and none of it ever gets solved. At some point everybody wants free stuff. He wants the other guy to pay for it, and he doesn’t want to work for it. Or he wants to work, but he doesn’t want anybody to take his job, so he has to get rid of other people’s jobs so that he gets all the money himself.

So the problem is sloth and greed. Rather than saying, “I’m going to work hard for my money and get what I need,” people try to have everything, and do anything they possibly can to get their stuff and have more. When Rockefeller was asked how much is enough, he said—

ISAK: Just a little more.

THOMAS: Just a little more. There is no end. Proverbs talks about things that are never satisfied, the fire that is never quenched. Greed is one of them. It is never satisfied. There is no top to it. You can’t have enough power. You can’t have enough money. If you’re into destruction, there’s no end to that either. If you’re into the Jim Morrison life, the next whiskey bar, the next little girl, there’s never enough. There’s never an end. Morrison sang that if he didn’t find the next whiskey bar, he would have to die.

ISAK: That’s how it feels sometimes. If I don’t find it, I might as well be roadkill on the side of the road.

[Editor’s note: The “how much is enough” answer is usually attributed to John D. Rockefeller. The passage in Proverbs is 30:15–16, the things that “are never satisfied,” including the fire that never says “Enough.” The whiskey-bar song is “Alabama Song,” written by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1927) and recorded by The Doors.]

Chapter 6 — The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You

THOMAS: It isn’t how much we want it. It’s that there is no end to those hungers. That’s what this whole question of ideology comes down to: having a rule set for how to live right. If you don’t have a rule set for living right, and if everybody isn’t upholding that rule set with everybody else, then somebody will say, “Nobody’s watching. This is my chance to take a little more than I earned.”

So everybody has to be everybody else’s brother. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” As a matter of fact, you are. That is one of the rules. You watch out for yourself, and you watch out for your brother. If your brother comes along and says, “You’re getting out of line here,” you say, “Really? Am I? I’ll have to look at that.” And then, “Yes, you’re right,” and you throttle yourself. It’s like Archie Bunker telling Edith, “Stifle yourself.” At some point you have to say no. That’s the Nancy Reagan mantra: Just say no. Say no to greed. Say no to theft. Theft and greed are the two things. And you say yes to working hard, to serving your fellow man, to loving your country, to loving your fellow man, to loving God.

So the rule set that is the equivalent of CPP is this: Love God. Love your neighbor as yourself. And “a new commandment I give to you: love one another as I have loved you.” So: love God, love your neighbor, love self. How do you love as He has loved you? That gives us a calibration on love. We know what the love looks like, because “love as I have loved you” is really “What would Jesus do?” We are always asking what Jesus would do. That was really the only thing we needed to know in all of this. People considered it hackneyed or trite, but it was the truth. That was all that needed to be done. We take “What would Jesus do?” to every single part of life, and we live it. And that is the way it should be done in government. It should be done that way in industry, in religion, in relationships, in work, in child-rearing, and in children honoring their parents.

Your question yesterday was, “Can you have too much Christian nationalism?” The answer is no. The reason is that Christian nationalism has a definition. If you’re doing the Dillinger–Capone method of living, or the Carnegie–Rockefeller–Mellon method, you’re not doing Christian nationalism. You’re doing captain-of-industry-ism. You’re doing monopolism, cartelism, communism. You’re doing religious zealotry, a Handmaid’s Tale sort of thing, a Spanish Inquisition. That has to be one of the most horrible perversions of Christianity you can imagine: killing people for not being orthodox enough. Where did they get that idea?

[Editor’s note: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is Genesis 4:9. The new commandment is John 13:34.]

ISAK: I think that’s the worry behind the Christian-nationalist rhetoric: the Handmaid’s Tale scenario. I know people who are concerned about that. What if rights are taken away from women? Any number of horrible outcomes could come from a group gaining power and deciding, “This is the way things are.”

Ideally, I think the same as you: acting as Christ wants you to act, “What would Jesus do?”, is the ultimate way to actually meet people, to know who they are, and to know your role in your community. The cartels and the captains of industry aren’t better than that pure connection between humans. But I think there probably are a lot of people who hold the Handmaid’s Tale ideal of an authoritarian group. I know that story is a caricature. But how would it play out? What does it look like when it’s done out of love, not out of control?

What we’re talking about is people changing: not forced change, but being shown the truth and living it. The forced route, the Inquisition and the rest, is actually the opposite of what God did when He gave us free choice and said, “You will love Me or not, but it’s up to you.” The other version says, “We as a group are all going to love God so that we succeed in our mission, and all of you will love God and serve God and do what we ask you to do.” That’s the authoritarian side that people are worried about. It’s also the authoritarian version we’re told about in other countries, like Sharia law: “You will obey by command, and if not, you’re done.” I don’t know what that looks like in reality. I haven’t been there. I only hear what I’m told, and I’m trying to be critical of what I hear, even though it may be true.

It’s the same evil behind each one. The man who claims to be in God’s army and leads it to kill a village has the same evil as the man in Islam who says, “Sacrifice your life for this cause and you’ll have seventy-two virgins.” The concern that always comes up for me is how we do this. I think it comes back to each individual and his level of influence: “This is how you live. This is what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to control anybody or force anybody into submission. We’re trying to show you that this is the way to live, that it is right and good, and that it will do good for you in many ways.” I think you’ve clarified that.

I don’t think Christian nationalism, at least the way you think of it, is wrong. But regularly evaluating the climate of Christian nationalism is valuable, because there are Christian nationalists who really want all the black and brown people out of the country. Those are real people. It isn’t just fake videos. There are people who believe in purity of race and purity of everything.

In a way, a country does require a purity of group and of mindset. Under the Constitution we’re all supposed to have an agreement, a shared belief. That’s what makes a country a country: a group of people with faith in something, a collective mission. We probably don’t have much national pride right now, because there is no collective mission. Everybody has his own mission, and we’re being destroyed by too many perspectives. Or maybe we’re not being destroyed by too many—

Addendum to Chapter 6 — Safeguards: Who Decides What “Christianity Done Right” Is?

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 6, “The Rule Set: Love as I Have Loved You,” after Isak’s words about purity of group and collective mission.]

THOMAS: You asked two questions at the start of our conversation that I haven’t answered yet, and they deserve an answer, because they are the first questions any honest person asks about what I’m proposing. What safeguards keep a Christian-majority government from overriding the rule of law? And who decides what “Christianity done right” is?

I’ll begin by granting the full force of the fear, because if I don’t, nothing I say afterward is worth hearing.

The fear is justified by history

Every tyrant claims to be preserving the good. Your framework put it well: in the physics, God decides which configurations to freeze, and His freezing is benevolent because He is good. In politics, men decide, and the history of men deciding what to preserve and what to destroy is largely the history of political abuse.

It is worse than that, and I want to say the worst part myself. The juries in the South that acquitted lynchers for the better part of a century were not made up of atheists. Nearly every man on them was a professing, church-going Christian. Many of them believed they were defending a Christian social order. If I had stood at the courthouse door with a test that asked, “Do you hold the Bible as your moral standard?”, every one of them would have said yes, and every one of them would have been seated.

So the problem in those courtrooms was not the absence of the Bible. It was a people who held the Bible and read it in a way that permitted contempt for their neighbor. Profession is not discernment. Christ said so Himself: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven,” and “By their fruits ye shall know them.” A test can examine what a man professes. It cannot examine his fruit, and only God examines his heart.

That means there is no safeguard that works by checking labels. Any answer to your question that amounts to “put Christians in charge and trust them” is not an answer. It is exactly what the Inquisition’s defenders said.

So here is what I actually propose. There are safeguards at four levels: in the definition of the faith itself, in the limits on what the state may use its sword for, in the structure of the government, and in the character of the people who lead it. None of them is sufficient alone. All of them together can still fail. I’ll come to that at the end.

The first safeguard: the faith defines itself by its fruit, and its fruit cannot be coerced

Who decides what Christianity done right is? The first answer is that Christ already decided it, and He did not leave it vague. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you.” That is the calibration. We know what the love looks like because we have seen how He loved. He did not conscript anyone. He healed, He taught, He rebuked, He invited, and when the rich young ruler walked away, He let him go. He told Peter to put away his sword.

So the test of whether something done in Christ’s name is Christian is not whether the people doing it say so. The test is whether it looks like what He did. And the simplest form of that test, for anything done in the public square, is this: Would a neighbor on the receiving end of this act feel loved by it? Not flattered, not indulged, and not necessarily pleased, because correction is not always pleasant. But loved: treated as a child of God whose good is being sought.

A lynching fails that test instantly. So does the Inquisition. So does forced conversion, forced baptism, and the burning of heretics. None of them can be called Christian nationalism done badly. They were not Christian at all. They were the captain-of-industry spirit, the cartel spirit, the will to dominate, wearing the church’s clothes.

Coercion is ruled out for a deeper reason, built into the faith rather than bolted on from outside. God gave man free choice. He did not have to. He could have made beings that obeyed Him automatically, the way a conscious point obeys its rules. He made us able to refuse Him, because love that cannot refuse is not love. A forced conversion is no conversion. A man who bows because a gun is at his back has not repented; he has only been frightened. So a government that tries to compel faith is not merely cruel. It is working against the very thing it claims to want. The Christian standard carries its own brake.

That is not true of every creed. A creed whose founding texts command conquest has no brake of that kind; its zealots are being faithful to it. A creed whose founding text tells its followers to overcome evil with good, to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, and to forgive seventy times seven has a brake written into its first principles. When its followers become persecutors, they have to disobey their own book to do it. That is why the right response to Christian cruelty is not less Christianity. It is more of the real thing, and the first people who should stand up and say “That is not Christ” are Christians.

The second safeguard: the sword has a limited job

The second answer to your question is about what the state may do at all, whatever its majority believes.

I have never argued that the government should prosecute every sin. Thomas Aquinas argued centuries ago that human law should not try to prohibit every vice, because the attempt produces worse evils than it prevents. He was right. Most sin is the business of the sinner, his family, his church, his friends, and his God. It is not the business of the man with the badge.

Here is where I draw the line for the sword, and I’ll state it as precisely as I can.

First, the state punishes the sins that make victims: murder, rape, the abuse of children, theft, fraud, violence. The things that took my stuff or hurt my person. On these, as I said, the atheist and the priest agree.

Second, the state never compels a man to participate in what he believes is sin. A baker should not be forced to make the cake; a photographer should not be forced to photograph the wedding. When the state punishes a man for declining, it is enforcing a creed by law. That is wrong when the creed is secular, and it would be equally wrong if the creed were mine.

Third, the state judges men by their actions, never by their doctrine. A man’s view of baptism, of the end times, of which day is the Sabbath, whether he is Catholic or Baptist or neither, none of it should ever carry the force of law. The intra-Christian imposition of doctrine is as much a sign of immaturity as anything the secularists do. It is also what made the Founders nervous in the first place. The American founding’s reticence about religion was not mainly unbelievers against believers. It was Christians afraid of one another. Baptists and Quakers had been jailed by Christian magistrates, and they were among those who fought hardest for the separation of church and state.

Fourth, speech is free, and the state may regulate it only where it becomes action in embryo: a threat, an incitement, a fraud. A man advocating a way of life I think is wrong is not threatening me. Under my rule he is left alone.

So the answer to “Who decides what Christianity done right is?” has a second part: where Christians disagree, on doctrine, the state is silent. Where they agree, on the moral law, the commandments and the two great commandments on which they hang, the nation has a conscience. That is what John Adams meant when he told Jefferson that independence had been won on “the general principles of Christianity.” A Baptist and a Catholic can both stand under that. They cannot both stand under each other’s catechism, and the state should never ask them to.

The third safeguard: power is broken into pieces and handed to neighbors

The third answer is structural, and here the American founding did something remarkable. It did not trust anyone with all the power. Not the king, not the legislature, not the courts, not the majority.

Think back to your physics question. In the Conscious Point Physics, one Being freezes the configurations, and it works because that Being is omniscient and good. No man is either. So in politics, many hands have to do the freezing, and none can do it alone. The Constitution divides power among three branches that check each other. It divides it again between the nation and the states. It reserves a list of rights that no majority can vote away without an enormous effort. And it makes the Constitution itself very hard to change: two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. That high barrier is itself a safeguard. You do not freeze a configuration into the nation’s foundation unless nearly everyone agrees. It means the amendment I have argued for, declaring the nation’s allegiance to the God of the Bible, will almost certainly not pass in my lifetime. I know that. The same barrier that keeps my amendment out keeps out the amendments of people who would do far worse.

[Editor’s note: The freezing-mechanism language is used here as an analogy to CPP, not as a physical derivation.]

Federalism is the second structural safeguard, and it is underrated. When power sits mostly in the states and the counties, a failure in one place does not become a failure everywhere. A man who cannot live under one state’s laws can move to another. And when a community proves unfit to govern itself in some matter, the discipline can be scaled to the failure. The county’s judgment can pass up to the state, or the state’s to the nation, for as long as the failure lasts. I agree with that kind of discipline. When the Southern juries would not convict lynchers, the nation was right to take those cases into federal court. That was a wider community’s conscience overruling a narrower one. My objection is only that the discipline was made permanent and universal. A father who takes the car keys from the son who drove drunk is right. A father who never gives the keys back, to any of his children, is no longer disciplining. He has decided his children are serfs.

The jury is the third structural safeguard, and I consider it the cornerstone. Every other check on the government runs through the government. Courts review legislatures, legislatures fund courts, the executive appoints judges. The jury is the one place where a neighbor sits in judgment on the law as applied to his neighbor, and where his acquittal cannot be appealed. If a Christian-majority legislature passed an unjust law, and some day one will, twelve citizens could still look at the man in the dock and say, “This law, applied to this man, is wrong, and we will not be the instrument of it.” John Adams said it was not only the juror’s right but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, even in direct opposition to the direction of the court.

That power still exists. No juror can be punished for an acquittal. What was taken away is the jury’s knowledge of it. Since Sparf v. United States in 1895, judges have not been required to tell juries they hold it, and a prospective juror who says honestly that he would use it is struck from the panel. I have friends who told the truth in jury selection and were sent home for it. So we are teaching our citizens that they may judge the law only if they hide that they would. I would restore the instruction and stop punishing candor. And I would do it knowing that the power can be abused, as it was in the South, because the alternative is a people with no hand on the law at all.

The last structural safeguard is the vote, and not only at elections. What I have called the Christos Voting Network is simply this: every citizen informed, every citizen voting, every citizen putting his argument into the public conversation with his name attached. Opinion begets consensus. A government that knows exactly what its people think, and why, is harder to capture than one that hears from them every two years.

The fourth safeguard: leaders who can be corrected

The fourth answer is about the men who lead. A leader who cannot be wrong cannot be corrected. So the manner in which a Christian holds public power is itself a safeguard, or its absence is a danger.

I have tried to practice what I am describing. I take positions, and I give my reasons, and I hold each position open to a better argument. I have said I cannot claim to speak for the Lord in every position; I can say I am trying to. That admission is not modesty for its own sake. It is structural. The man who claims to be God’s mouthpiece has put himself beyond correction, and the history of religious tyranny is largely the history of such men.

It is also why I describe my candidacy as a witness candidacy. I am not seeking power. I accept no donations, and I have told voters to write me in only if they are certain I would win; otherwise, to vote for the best man on the ballot. That is not false humility. It is the only honest posture for a man whose platform is converting the nation’s heart, because that is not something an officeholder can do. If I cannot persuade, I have no business compelling. The yoke I am offering is imposed the way Christ imposed His: “Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” It is an argument and an invitation, not a decree.

And when all the safeguards fail

Now the hardest part. All of these safeguards can fail. They failed in the lynching South. The courts were there, the Constitution was there, the jury was there, the churches were there, and still innocent men died, and their killers walked free. Structure did not save them, because structure is only as good as the people who operate it.

So the final answer to your question is not an institution. It is the heart of the people. The jury box, the courthouse, the legislature, the amendment are all downstream of what the nation actually loves. A people whose hearts are right will operate even a poor structure justly, and a people whose hearts are wrong will corrupt the best structure ever devised. That is why the work I am calling for is not mainly political. It is the formation of men, by fathers, churches, teachers, and neighbors, one heart at a time. The government cannot do that work. It can only get out of its way, or stand in its way.

And when a nation will not listen to its prophets, God corrects it through its history. Every nation that walked the road of cruelty in His name eventually learned, at great cost, what it would not learn by persuasion. Spain learned it. The South learned it. That is not a comfort, but it is a safeguard of the last resort, and I believe it is real.

So, who decides what Christianity done right is? Christ decided it and showed us. The Bible states it, and every citizen must read it and judge for himself, with the humility to be corrected by his neighbors and by the facts. The state enforces only the small part of it on which all Christians agree and which protects victims. The rest is carried by persuasion and example. And the people who most need to say “That is not Christ” when Christians do evil are Christians, first and loudest.

That is the only Christian nationalism I have ever meant. If it turns into anything else, it has stopped being what I am describing, and I will be among the first to say so.

[Editor’s note for the chapter rewrite — decision needed]

This section states Thomas’s position as he set it out in the September 2026 dialogue “Whose Law?” The state punishes the sins that make victims, never compels participation in sin, and leaves most vice to family, church, and conscience. Chapter 15 contains a passage that points the other way. There, Thomas says the nation “could have made homosexuality illegal,” and speaks of fornication, adultery, and homosexuality being recognized “as sins against God and a threat to the state.” In the same passage, however, the Department of Morality’s role is to counsel and help.

Thomas: The intent is to declare sin by name officially. Sin is the polarity of the standards of moral excellence the nation aspires to. And yes, you have chosen my polarity and intention correctly. 

The two can be reconciled in either of two ways, and the rewrite should choose one:

(a) The nation declares these acts to be wrong, in its laws’ preambles, its teaching, and its public speech, and offers help through counsel, but does not prosecute consensual adult conduct. This fits the safeguards above and “Whose Law?” as written.

(b) The nation criminalizes some consensual sexual conduct, as many states did before Lawrence v. Texas (2003). If this is the position, the safeguards section needs a paragraph explaining why these acts fall on the “victim” side of the line (for example, harm to children, to spouses, or to the social fabric as argued in Chapters 7–9), because otherwise a reader will see a contradiction and conclude that the limits on the sword are only rhetorical.

As drafted, the section follows (a). This is the more convenient reading for the drafter, because it matches the published dialogue, so it is flagged here rather than assumed.

Chapter 7 — Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality and the State

THOMAS: The place where all of this becomes really controversial is one area: sexuality. It really does come down to that. There isn’t much disagreement anywhere else.

We have the state, which makes laws about things that harm other people. You took my stuff; you hurt me. Property and person. As far as enforcement goes, that’s all the state is there for. Then comes the question: Should the state regulate who I copulate with, and how? That’s where people say, “You’re incorporating religion. You’re pushing religion on us.” The answer is, yes, there are religious concepts here, but there are also social concepts. If sexuality is violent, we say clearly that it is not allowed. But then there is consensual sexuality. Should it, in any of its forms, be a matter for the state or not?

That is exactly where you can determine whether a society is committed to living the law of God. Before that point, everybody agrees, from the atheist to the most devout priest. We don’t want people taking our stuff, and we don’t want people hurting us. Until we introduce sexuality, there is no disagreement. When we get to sexuality, people say, “My rights, my body. We agreed.” And those are principles one could make a case for: laissez-faire, the boundary the state doesn’t cross.

Or we could say no. The family is the foundation of the state. If families don’t stay together because of all the varieties of sexuality that are not procreative, or that disrupt stable, procreative family life, then we are looking at the foundation of society, and at whether the state should be concerned with it, because the group welfare falls apart if we don’t have family.

If babies come out at the end of a long tube, as in Brave New World, and we have no bonding, we’re all just feral cats. We’re all just Alphas, Betas, Deltas, and Epsilons, and we all fit in. The texture of life becomes a caricature. We end up in a world that isn’t as warm, isn’t as meaningful. It’s just industrial, just functional, just convenience. Nothing means that much, and nothing costs that much. Sexuality intersects with meaning so deeply that if the state stays out and says everybody can do whatever he wants—don’t ask, don’t tell, laissez-faire sexuality—then it’s really just “whatever.”

ISAK: Anything’s good.

THOMAS: It’s all good. Was it Cream or Blind Faith that sang “Do What You Like”?

ISAK: Blind Faith. Ginger Baker.

THOMAS: That song is basically Aleister Crowley put to music: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” If sexuality had nothing to do with family, if it were simply a matter of getting off wherever you like and then going on to something else, it would have no significance. It would be like having an ice cream cone. You get a real thrill from the ice cream cone. And heroin is the ultimate ice cream cone. It’s an ice cream cone with a bad hangover, and you want another one really badly when you haven’t had one for a while.

ISAK: And eventually you can only eat ice cream, or you get sick.

THOMAS: That’s why drugs are regulated. People don’t control themselves well, and when they don’t, they don’t eat, they don’t work, and they take your stuff because they don’t have any. All of these things come down to this: you have to act right. Otherwise somebody is going to come along and put his thumb on you, because you’re not putting your thumb on yourself. You’re not stifling yourself. You’re just doing what you like. People don’t like that, because it interferes with their doing what they like in moderation.

There’s a lyric I’ve always wondered about, from “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by The Band. The singer didn’t mind chopping wood, and didn’t mind that the money was no good, but they never should have taken the very best.

The problem is that people have to choose to regulate themselves to act right. You can do what you like, but only to a certain level. You can’t take it too far. You have to say, “This is enough.” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line was “Stay hungry.” But the issue is greed: doing more than you need. There’s a Foreigner song with a line about never doing more than you really need. That was the key. But the song wasn’t really saying that. It was a double message, not properly calibrated. It was basically saying, “Do more than you need, because that’s where the real mojo is.”

ISAK: Do more than you need: drink too much, eat too much, have too much sex.

THOMAS: Too much. Shoot it, snort it, smoke it.

ISAK: So in this case it’s about personal temperance: the individual sustaining himself without ridiculous consumption. If we had a culture where people weren’t overconsuming, it would change the economy, but it would also feel less cancerous than using things we don’t need, spending money we don’t need to spend, wearing clothes we don’t need, and eating too much food. Just overindulgence. What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich? Would we be spending money on things that actually matter? How much is overindulgence part of the society we’re trying to protect, in ways other than sex and drugs? That leads to a lot of other questions, but your point is taken.

It’s really interesting to think about. “Don’t steal, don’t kill”—but then sexuality. I’ve heard people argue, I think on an episode of Subway Takes, that everything people do is for sex. It was a controversial take, and I had to think about it. You get a job so you can make money and support yourself, or you get a cool car so you can take the ladies out. We are driven. As you said, meaning and sexuality are intertwined, because we’re driven to keep the gene going, to let whatever consciousness is in us continue past our death. That biological urge to reproduce isn’t in everybody, but if it’s inherent in how people are supposed to be—be fruitful and multiply—then it makes sense that we have the urges and desires we have.

But is that the only meaning? Is that really the only thing we do anything for? I don’t think so. You can find so much gratitude, so much ability to appreciate everything in life, that it doesn’t come down to reproduction or sexual activity alone. But a lot of people do live that way. That’s what they live for, and they don’t realize there’s something beyond it. And the drugs just heighten the feeling. It’s a dopamine dependency, a dopamine craving. I think it’s the lazy side of us: you can’t commit to something, so you have the fling and never see the person again, and you go on to the next one. You never learn to do the work of connection and family, of embracing your responsibilities. You don’t grow, because you don’t have to. There’s a perfectly consenting person over there, so you break a couple of hearts and keep going.

There can be selfishness in every good thing. You can pervert everything. So, going back to what you said, do the country’s problems boil down to sexual immorality, aside from the stealing and the killing? Or is it greed?

THOMAS: No, that isn’t the place where it all breaks down, and everything isn’t about the rush of a sexual experience. But there isn’t anything that isn’t related to sex, because if there were no sex, there would be nothing to relate to.

ISAK: True.

THOMAS: What comes out of sex is all the bondedness: the shared experience of overcoming hard times, celebrating good times, nurturing growth in the right way, helping you when you went the wrong way and getting you back on track, and getting everybody else to do the same, so that it’s good for all of us because we’re all doing the right thing together.

Addendum to Chapter 7 — The Economics of Enough: What Would Happen If America Stopped Overindulging?

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 7, “Where the Controversy Lies: Sexuality and the State,” after Thomas’s words about bondedness (“…because we’re all doing the right thing together.”). This answers the question Isak asked in that chapter: “What would it look like economically if overindulgence went away? Would we be rich?”]

THOMAS: You asked a question a while ago that I passed over, and it deserves an answer, because it’s the question an economist would throw at everything we’ve been saying. You asked what would happen economically if overindulgence went away. If people stopped eating too much, drinking too much, buying clothes they don’t need, spending money they don’t have, would we be rich? Or would the whole thing fall apart?

Let me take the objection first, because it’s a serious one.

The objection: won’t the economy collapse?

Consumer spending is roughly two-thirds of the American economy. So the argument goes: if Americans stopped overconsuming, businesses would sell less, lay off workers, those workers would spend less, and the whole economy would spiral down. Economists even have a name for it: the paradox of thrift. What’s prudent for one family, saving instead of spending, becomes harmful when everyone does it at once, because one man’s spending is another man’s income.

There’s a real point in that. If every American suddenly stopped buying anything but necessities tomorrow morning, there would be a shock. Stores would close and people would lose jobs. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But the argument has three weaknesses, and they’re fatal to it.

The first is that money not spent doesn’t disappear. It gets saved, and savings are what investment is built from. The dollar you don’t spend on a fourth pair of shoes goes into a bank, a business, a home, or a child’s education. It becomes a machine, a workshop, a house, a skilled worker. Consumption uses things up. Investment builds the capacity to make more things. The nations that rebuilt fastest after the Second World War, like Germany and Japan, and later South Korea, did it with very high rates of saving. Their people deferred consumption, and their savings built the factories.

The second is that the change we’re talking about isn’t sudden. It’s a change of culture, one heart and one household at a time, over a generation. An economy adjusts to that the way it adjusts to every other change in what people want. When people stopped buying typewriters, the economy didn’t collapse. It moved.

And the third, which Adam Smith put better than I can: what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom. If it’s wise for your household to live within its means, avoid debt, save for the future, and not waste, it can’t be foolish for the nation of which your household is a part. A nation is only its households added together.

What temperance doesn’t take away, it moves

Temperance doesn’t mean people stop spending. It means they spend differently. The ice cream becomes vegetables. The money doesn’t vanish from the economy; it changes what it’s spent on.

Think about what a temperate household spends its money on. It buys fewer things, but better ones: the tool that lasts thirty years instead of the one that breaks in three, which means more craftsmen and fewer landfills. It owns its home and fixes it instead of leasing everything. It gives more, because people who aren’t drowning in their own appetites have something left over for others. It invests in education and skills. And most of all, it has children and raises them. Family is the largest “consumer” of a temperate life: food, clothing, housing, schooling, time. A nation of intact, fruitful families does not lack for demand. It is building the next generation of workers, taxpayers, and parents, which is the one thing a nation cannot import or borrow.

And notice what happens to debt. American households owe more than a trillion dollars on credit cards alone. “The borrower is servant to the lender.” A nation of temperate households is a nation out of servitude. Every dollar not spent on interest is a dollar that can be spent on something real or saved for something that matters.

The ledger of intemperance

Now look at the other side of the ledger, which the objection never counts: what intemperance already costs us.

These are rough figures from government and research sources, and they come from different years. They should be checked before this goes to print. But the order of magnitude is what matters:

Excessive drinking has been estimated to cost the United States around 250 billion dollars a year in health care, lost productivity, crime, and car crashes. Smoking, more than 600 billion a year once lost productivity is included. Medical care for obesity-related illness, around 170 billion a year. Diabetes, most of it the type that is largely preventable through diet and activity, more than 400 billion a year in medical costs and lost work. The opioid epidemic has been estimated at well over a trillion dollars in a single year when lives lost are counted. New sexually transmitted infections cost billions in lifetime medical care every year. Family breakdown, meaning divorce and childbearing outside marriage, has been estimated to cost taxpayers more than 100 billion dollars a year through welfare, courts, and the other programs that step in when fathers leave. And something like a third of all the food produced in this country is wasted.

Add it up. Even allowing for overlap between those numbers, you are looking at well over a trillion dollars a year, every year, spent cleaning up the consequences of appetite that wasn’t controlled.

I’ve practiced as a naturopathic physician for many years, and I can tell you what those numbers look like from the inside. Most of the chronic disease I’ve treated came from how people ate, drank, smoked, slept, and moved. Much of it was preventable, and much of it was reversible when the patient was willing. The American health care system is mostly a system for managing the consequences of intemperance, and it is the largest single sector of the economy.

That’s the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, and we pay for it whether or not we ever need it ourselves, in premiums, in taxes, and in the lost work of people who should have been healthy.

The broken window

This is where the objection turns inside out.

A French economist named Frédéric Bastiat told a story about a boy who breaks a shop window. The townspeople console the shopkeeper: at least the glazier will get work. The glazier spends his money, and so on, and the broken window looks like it has stimulated the economy. But Bastiat pointed out what isn’t seen: the shopkeeper was going to spend that money on a new pair of shoes. Now he has a window he already had, and no shoes. The town is poorer by one pair of shoes.

Intemperance is a nation breaking its own windows. The rehab clinic, the divorce lawyer, the prison, the dialysis unit, and the bariatric surgeon all show up in the national accounts as production. They count toward the economy’s size exactly the way the glazier’s work did. But they aren’t wealth. They are repairs. A nation that spent a trillion dollars less a year cleaning up after itself might even show a smaller economy on paper for a while, and be far richer in fact: more money in savings, more in real goods, more in children, more years of healthy working life, and more time on the porch.

It’s the same distinction we drew with cancer. A tumor grows fast. Growth is not the same thing as health. A temperate economy grows the way a healthy body does: to meet real needs, and then it maintains itself by steady, faithful production. It doesn’t need to keep swelling to stay alive.

Who would lose

If temperance spread, some businesses would shrink, and I think we should name them honestly. The businesses that depend on people not controlling themselves: the gambling apps designed to be addictive, the predatory lenders, the pornography industry, the makers of food engineered to be impossible to stop eating, and the marketers whose whole trade is making people feel they need what they don’t. A great deal of their profit comes from a small number of people who have lost control.

When those businesses shrink, that is the tumor shrinking. The people who work in them would need other work, and a healthy economy would have it for them, because the money their former customers are no longer losing would be spent and invested somewhere else. There would be real hardship in the transition, and a Christian nation should help people through it. But no one should mourn an industry whose profits depended on other people’s ruin.

What “rich” means

So would we be rich? Yes, but I want to be careful about what that word means.

We would be richer in money. The trillion dollars a year we spend cleaning up after ourselves would be saved, invested, given, or spent on things that last. Families would carry less debt and own more of what they use. Government would be smaller, because there would be fewer messes to clean up. That is the opposite of the G-men: a government that shrinks because there’s less wrongdoing.

But we would also be rich in the way that matters more. “Godliness with contentment is great gain.” Temperance is one of the fruits of the Spirit, listed with love, joy, and peace, and I don’t think that’s an accident. The man who can say “this is enough” is the only man who can ever be satisfied. The man who always needs “just a little more” is poor no matter what he owns.

God taught Israel this in the wilderness with the manna. Every family gathered what it needed for the day. “He that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack.” The ones who tried to hoard it found it rotten in the morning. And on the sixth day He gave them twice as much, so they could rest on the seventh. That was the first lesson in the economics of enough: gather what you need, trust God for tomorrow, and rest.

“There is treasure to be desired and oil in the dwelling of the wise; but a foolish man spendeth it up.” That is the whole answer to your question. The temperate nation isn’t the one that has stopped enjoying life. It is the one that has something left over: money in the bank, oil in the lamp, time for its children, strength in its old age, and the peace to sit on the porch and say, “This is good. This is enough.”

References for the rewrite: Proverbs 21:20; Proverbs 22:7; 1 Timothy 6:6; Galatians 5:22–23; Exodus 16:16–30; 2 Corinthians 8:15. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book IV, ch. 2. Frédéric Bastiat, “That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen” (1850). Cost estimates to verify before publication: CDC, excessive alcohol use (about $249 billion, 2010); CDC, smoking (more than $600 billion, 2018); CDC, obesity medical costs (about $173 billion, 2019); American Diabetes Association (about $413 billion, 2022); Joint Economic Committee, opioid epidemic (about $1.5 trillion, 2020, including value of lives lost); CDC, sexually transmitted infections (about $16 billion lifetime medical costs of 2018 infections); Institute for American Values, “The Taxpayer Costs of Divorce and Unwed Childbearing” (about $112 billion a year, 2008); Federal Reserve Bank of New York, credit card balances (above $1 trillion since 2023); USDA, food waste (30–40 percent of the food supply). Overlap among these figures means they should not be summed exactly; the text says “well over a trillion dollars” for that reason.

Chapter 8 — Where Does God Get the Most Joy?

THOMAS: We’re trying to make life good. I brought up sexuality because we were talking about regulating the world so that everybody acts right: we punish people who do bad things, and we leave alone people who do good things. Doing good is its own reward, or we give each other pats on the back. We don’t have a government Department of Congratulation.

ISAK: They have that in schools: the little participation ribbon.

THOMAS: We don’t need a government Department of Applause. We have government controlling various things. Whether we need administrative bureaucracies to control energy, education, homeland security, commerce, agriculture, labor, and so on is another topic.

The issue of sexuality comes up because when a society is sexually unregulated, people aren’t faithful. They aren’t monogamous. They aren’t choosing the proper age lane, the proper gender lane, or the proper consent lane. If all of that is “do what you like,” you end up with a hugely heterogeneous population behaving in ways that are not part of the optimum way of relating. People in any of the alternate sexual experiences don’t create family. Or if they do, it’s a family bent in a certain way by the experiences of that orientation. So it changes society. It is a society-modifier, a society-biaser.

Then the question is: If it biases society, should we want a rainbow of biases? The answer is that all of them are sub-happiness. The people choosing them are eating ice cream all day. They aren’t eating their vegetables and fiber. They aren’t living a full-spectrum life. They’re living a life that is either immature or pathological.

I consider homosexuality a growth arrest. Of course, growing up, you’re attracted to boys. Of course you’re attracted to girls. That makes total sense. Now let’s grow up. People have their own particular way of needing to grow up, or a particular desire. You’ve got that; now let’s work on developing a taste for a different experience. That different experience includes children. It includes fidelity, hard work, long-term devotion, relationship, old age, sickness and health, better or worse, richer or poorer, all the things that make up life. Without fidelity, those things are missed.

If a society allows those alternate expressions, it has large colonies of people who have made that choice, and when there are large colonies of an alternate lifestyle, the society changes. The LGBT argument is that it’s a rainbow, and it’s all good. The fact is that having a group of people living in immaturity or pathology, unable to commit, unable to be faithful—breaking a few hearts, as you put it—changes the dynamic of society, and it ends up a less happy, less joyful society.

I put all of this under one question: Where does God get the most joy living in every single person? If there is one person who is not fully enjoying his life in the way that makes God happy, then there is one less experience of God being fully satisfied in this world. It shows up in people who are unsatisfied with their lives, and who go out and do things that are heinous, or irritating, or impoverishing in some way. There is a cost to not living the way God wants us to live. That is the bottom line. It diminishes life a little for all of us if any of us lives outside that perfection.

We are all pulled toward the animal expression of our sexuality, toward overconsumption of money, of control, of sensory satisfaction. All of those things are good in themselves. Control is very important. Sexuality is very important. Sensual experience is very important, and so is working for things and having the highs and the lows. But the drug experience makes it so clear: the high is higher than you would ever go without it, and the low is lower than you would ever go without it, and the in-between is a ho-hum place where you would normally live. So life is never satisfying with drugs, because you never get to live in “This is all right. This is good.” Like your experience on the porch the other day: “This is just good.”

ISAK: I was thinking about that while you were talking: the highs and the lows, and the thing I used to chase without consciously knowing it. “I need to feel good.” You’re like a fish chasing a hook. It’s over there; it’s going to be so good. You’re swimming against the current and you don’t know where it is, but you saw it in this water before. It becomes a chaotic service in and of itself, not to you, but an offering to the night. “I’ll give my time to the evening and let it take me.”

What I have now is the ability to sit back and say, “I’m bored. This is nice. I don’t have anything on my mind. I’m emptying out my mind. I’m interacting with the universe right now, and this is enough. This is peace.” It’s a momentary peace, and I know what to do with it. I can just sit here and be here. You don’t get that in a low or in a high.

In a high you may say, “I dedicate my life to this,” but it doesn’t stay unless it’s real. You quickly lose it. I do think spiritual things can happen in altered states, so I’m not talking about your experience. I mean that you think you know something, you feel amazing, you think this is the best, and then you come to and realize the toll it takes on you.

Sex is great until you find out it’s meaningless. The whole reason you go into it is “I don’t have to see this person ever again. It’s going to be fun.” Then you move on, and it isn’t an experience you wanted or feel joyful or good about. Obviously, if you don’t care, you can brag about it and add to your body count. But it won’t take you anywhere. If anything, you can get sick from it. It isn’t sustainable. It isn’t “the more sex, the better,” any more than “the more food, the better.” After a while you’ll be—

THOMAS: Fat or impotent.

ISAK: Fat from pleasure, or impotent. Exactly.

Chapter 9 — A Department of Morality: The State as a Church That Pulls for You

THOMAS: One of the things we’re missing as a society, in terms of government, is something we might call a Department of Morality, since we’re into having departments. Not something that goes around with a flashlight shining it into the backs of cars. It’s almost like church. We are encouraging people not to do these various things. The state is on your side if you’re trying to be good. If you’re not, we’re here to try to help you, even though you don’t want to be helped, and even though you don’t realize you need help. We’re not going to throw you in the pokey, but we are going to come by and talk, see how you’re doing, see if we can help, see where you are in your journey, and let you know we’re pulling for you.

What I’ve just described is what church is supposed to be, but it isn’t. Church isn’t that, but it should be. And the government has, in a way, allied itself with “do what you like.” “Do what you like” is not conducive to a stable social order.

If the purpose of the state is its own continued existence, and the purpose of its continued existence is to maximize the health and the general welfare of the people, then the state is not supporting the program of the general welfare. It is not promoting the common good. The Constitution speaks of providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare. Punishment should really be in support of the social order, which is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which should have been property. So: life, liberty, happiness, and property.

[Editor’s note: The Preamble to the Constitution reads “provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare.” “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is from the Declaration of Independence; Locke’s earlier formula was “life, liberty, and estate.”]

We should be happy. If you’re having alternate sex, unfaithful sex, and so on, you are in some way not contributing to the group’s happiness. If nothing else, you broke a heart. If nothing else, you helped make another heart callous and hard. Do you want hard-hearted, callous people as part of an optimally growing society? We are trying to grow a nation with the optimal experience of life. Do you want people who don’t really connect with other people? “Whatever. I can use them or take them.” That is not the society that provides the most happiness. If everybody wants to be like that, it is not an optimally happy society. You could let people do that because it’s what they like. But those of us on the other side want people who actually care, rather than people who don’t.

ISAK: It’s like thinking about the country the way you think about your family. What do you want for the people in it? A hard-hearted person who shies away from the world won’t benefit anybody. You can’t send your son out to buy groceries if he’s too afraid of the world. Maybe that’s a bad example.

Think of it this way: everybody in the world you can treat well—treating him well is treating your own child well. It’s treating God well. They’re all interchangeable. Only the way you treat them differs. So how do you build a country where people are soft-hearted? It’s a country where people treat each other well and don’t expect to be stabbed in the back, or screwed over, or abandoned with a child. Those have become the expectations. Sometimes people take the risk and commit to somebody, and sometimes it works. Or they don’t think about it at all, and they’re left not knowing who the father is.

All of these things lend themselves to a decaying society, not by any one person’s choice, but by a way of life: “It’s okay to leave. Nobody’s shaming me for it. Or if they are, they’re in a different state, and I’ll get out of paying child support.” That’s the generational decay: of support, of confidence, of the ability to be open-hearted with each other. We really wrecked the family unit, didn’t we? It has to be restored. Is anybody really ignorant of how good it is to have a family together?

Of course there are complexities. The dad beats the mom and she has to leave, or he cheats, or she cheats. But in a Christian world, I always think of the story in the Bible about a man whose wife went off and prostituted herself. I don’t remember whether he was a king.

THOMAS: That was Hosea and Gomer.

[Editor’s note: In the recording Thomas said “Ezra”; the prophet is Hosea (Hosea 1–3).]

ISAK: He asks, “What do I do?” And God says, in effect, “Let her bathe and clean herself and wait a while, and then you must take her back, because I have done the same for you. I have done the same for this nation.” In my mind, that’s everybody. It’s just the nature of things: we act against what the high command would want, or what your wife would want.

That story always stood out to me because it bothered me as a child. I thought, “I would never take anybody back.” It’s the rational thing the world teaches: “This is a sin. Don’t take them back. They’re defiled now.” I think it really affected how I understood forgiveness. Being stabbed in the back by the person closest to you may be the worst pain. But that pain is not new. God has felt it in billions of iterations, and it’s okay. The only way forward is through forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance.

Keeping the family together, not mistreating people—I wonder whether we could change hearts in a generation or two. “This is how we should be treated. This is how we should treat other people. This is how we forgive, and how we ask for forgiveness.” How many times do you forgive somebody? Seventy times seven. It’s really about the heart. Seventy times seven is a ridiculous number on purpose. It means don’t stop.

[Editor’s note: Hosea 3:1–3 describes Hosea buying Gomer back and asking her to wait “many days”; the “bathe” detail is Isak’s paraphrase. Seventy times seven is Matthew 18:22.]

Addendum to Chapter 9 — The Department of Morality: How It Would Work, and What It Must Never Become

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 9, “A Department of Morality,” after Isak’s words on forgiveness (“Seventy times seven… It means don’t stop.”). The counseling method follows Thomas’s “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (RM, February 26, 2026). The design assumes option (a) in the decision note to Point 1: the nation declares and counsels; it does not prosecute consensual adult conduct.]

THOMAS: I threw out the phrase “Department of Morality,” and I said it isn’t a man with a flashlight shining into the backs of cars. But a phrase like that frightens people, and it should, until they see what it means. Orwell’s Ministry of Love was a torture chamber. The Soviet Union put dissidents in psychiatric hospitals and called their disagreement a mental illness. China today runs camps it calls re-education and vocational training. Every one of those regimes said it was helping people become better. So if I’m going to propose anything like this, I owe you a clear account of how it would work, and an even clearer account of what it could never be allowed to do.

What it is for

Start with the purpose. I said the state is supposed to promote the general welfare, and that “do what you like” is not conducive to a stable social order. I said hard hearts are a public cost: every broken marriage, every abandoned child, every addiction, every heart made callous by being used and discarded is paid for by all of us, in prisons, in welfare, in children who grow up without fathers and pass the wound on. The government spends enormous sums treating the results of moral collapse, and nothing at all encouraging the character that prevents it. It is the most expensive way possible to run a country: pay nothing for the fence at the top of the cliff and everything for the ambulance at the bottom.

So the purpose of the Department of Morality is simple. It is the nation saying, out loud and with its resources, “We are on your side if you’re trying to be good. And if you’re not, we’re still pulling for you, and there is help.”

We already have a model for this, and it works. The Surgeon General has no police. He can’t arrest a smoker or fine a restaurant that serves bacon. What he has is a voice, and the standing to use it. When the Surgeon General reported in 1964 that smoking causes cancer, and put a warning on every pack, nobody was jailed. But over the following decades the share of American adults who smoked fell by more than half. That happened by persuasion, by a nation telling the truth with one voice and making help available to anyone who wanted to quit. The Department of Morality is that, applied to the heart.

Its five functions

Here is what I think it would actually do.

First, it would declare. The nation would state, in plain words, the moral law it holds in common: the commandments on which all Christians agree, and the two great commandments on which they hang. Not doctrine, not the teaching of any church about baptism or the end times, but the moral floor. Do not murder. Do not steal. Do not bear false witness. Honor your father and mother. Keep your vows. Love your neighbor as yourself. The Department would be the nation’s conscience speaking in public, the way the Surgeon General is the nation’s physician speaking in public.

That voice would speak to the government as well as the people. The Bible’s prophets were not chaplains to the king; they were the ones who told the king what God thought of his laws. So the Department would publish, for any major bill, a plain moral assessment: whom does this help, whom does it harm, and would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize it as love? It would have no veto. Its only power would be the power Nathan had with David, the power to say “Thou art the man” and let the conscience do the rest.

Second, it would teach. It would produce materials for families, for schools that choose to use them, for churches, and for anyone else: on marriage, on raising children, on handling money, on controlling appetite, on forgiveness. “Just say no” was ridiculed, but it put a simple truth in front of a generation of children. The Department would do that across the whole of life, in the way we’ve been talking: not “because we said so,” but “here is why, and here is what happens when you don’t.”

Third, it would train counselors, and this is the heart of it. Most people who are going wrong don’t need a lecture. They need somebody who can see what is actually happening in their soul, and tell them the truth in a way they can hear. I’ve practiced that for years, and I believe it can be taught. The method is rapport, confrontation, and change. Rapport first: a man has to trust you before he’ll hear you. Then confrontation, but the precise kind, a rifle shot rather than a shotgun: “When you do this, here is what it does to you and to the people you love.” And then an invitation to change. The diagnosis opens the door; he has to walk through it. The Department would train ordinary people in that skill: pastors, teachers, coaches, older men and women in every community. It would certify them, and then get out of their way.

Fourth, it would offer help to anyone who asks. A couple on the edge of divorce. A young man who can’t stop drinking. A father who wants to be a better father and doesn’t know how, because his own father left. A woman who was used and discarded and has hardened her heart so it can’t happen again. The help would be free and available close to home, provided mostly through churches and community counselors in the small groups where people actually know each other, the hundred-and-fifty-person cells I’ve talked about. And it would be voluntary. You could walk in, and you could walk out.

Fifth, it would help rehabilitate the convicted. For a man who has actually committed a crime, stolen or assaulted or defrauded, the court could offer or require counsel as part of his sentence, alongside restitution to his victim. That is the rehabilitation I talked about in Chapter 11: sitting in the corner, but for the purpose of coming back softened, not for the purpose of being put away. A prison that releases a man harder than it received him has failed at the one thing that would actually protect the next victim.

What it must never do

Now the other side, and this matters more than everything I just said, because the history of this idea is written in blood.

It must never watch. No surveillance, no files on anyone’s private life, no informants, no reports from neighbors about what goes on in a man’s bedroom or his home. The flashlight shining in on the backseat of the car is exactly what it is not. The moment it keeps a list, it has become the Stasi.

It must never compel. No one can be required to receive its counsel unless a court has convicted him of a real crime against a real victim. No one can be penalized for refusing its help, disagreeing with its teaching, or telling it to go away. A forced conversion is no conversion, and forced counseling of a free man is just a softer prison.

It must never enforce. It has no police, no power to arrest, no power to fine, and no power to deny anyone a job, a license, or a benefit. The sword belongs to the courts and is limited to the crimes that make victims. The Department holds a voice and an open door, and nothing else.

It must never inform. What a man tells a counselor stays with the counselor, protected the way what a man tells his priest or his lawyer is protected. If a person seeking help fears his confession will reach a prosecutor, he will never come, and the whole purpose fails. The only exceptions would be the ones the law already recognizes: a child in danger, or a clear threat to someone’s life.

It must never impose doctrine. It speaks the moral law on which Christians agree and leaves everything else to the churches. When a man is ready to go further, it sends him to his own church, or to one of his choosing. It never tells a Baptist what to believe about baptism or a Catholic what to believe about the Mass.

And it must never grow beyond its purpose. Remember the G-men. We created them to stop the robbers, and once the robbers were caught, they needed something to do, so they started watching everybody. Every agency wants to grow. This one would have to be built small and kept small. A small federal office to state the standard and certify training; delivery by states and counties, mostly through volunteers, churches, and community organizations; and a requirement to show its fruit. Are fewer marriages breaking up? Are fewer children growing up without fathers? Are fewer men returning to prison? If after a fixed number of years it can’t show that fruit, it expires. A Department of Morality that couldn’t prove it was making people better would be the most hypocritical agency ever created, and it should not be allowed to outlive its failure.

Why a department, and not just the church?

You might ask: if what I’m describing is what the church is supposed to do, why not just let the church do it? Why involve the government at all?

The honest answer is that the church should do it, and mostly isn’t. I said that plainly. And the state isn’t neutral now. It has allied itself with “do what you like.” Through its schools, it teaches our children that there is no moral center. It pays for the consequences of the collapse and says nothing about the causes. So the choice is not between the state teaching morality and the state being neutral. The state is already teaching. The only question is what it teaches.

But the order of responsibility matters. The family is first. The church is second. The community is third. The state is last, and its job is to strengthen the first three, not to replace them. The best measure of the Department of Morality would be how much of its work it could hand off: to fathers who have learned to be fathers, to churches that have learned to counsel, to communities that have learned to say “enough” to their own members early and in love. If it succeeded completely, it would work itself nearly out of a job. That is the opposite of the G-men, and the opposite of every Ministry of Love that ever existed. They needed more wrongdoers to justify themselves. This would need fewer.

What it looks like when it works

Let me make it concrete. A young husband goes to a counselor in his own town, somebody trained through the Department, maybe a deacon in his church, maybe a retired teacher. He says his marriage is falling apart and he’s thinking of leaving. The counselor builds rapport and listens. Then he tells him the truth: “You’re not getting your needs met, and neither is she, and neither of you has ever asked the other for what you need in a way the other could hear.” They work on it, as I describe in the next chapter: asking for what you need without demanding, serving by requiring service. Maybe the marriage survives. Maybe it doesn’t. But no one watched him, no one reported him, no one forced him to come, and no one punished him for leaving. The nation simply made it easy for him to find help, and made it plain what it hoped he’d choose.

Multiply that by a million homes, and you have a different country.

That is what I mean. The state pulling for you. The nation telling the truth with one voice, and then holding the door open. It’s what Hosea did for Gomer, and what God has done for every one of us: not throwing us away, but coming after us, over and over, seventy times seven, without ever forcing us to come home.

References for the rewrite: 2 Samuel 12:1–7 (Nathan); Hosea 3; Matthew 18:22. U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee report “Smoking and Health” (1964); adult smoking prevalence fell from about 42 percent in 1965 to under 12 percent by the early 2020s according to CDC data (verify current figure before publication). The rapport–confrontation–change method and the “rifle shot” delivery are from “Effective Counsel — Christos Diagnostician” (RM, CDI, 2026-02-26). Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949); Soviet punitive psychiatry is documented in Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, Psychiatric Terror (1977).

[Drafter’s note: The moral-assessment function for legislation (the “Nathan” function under “Declare”), the fruit-based sunset, and the confidentiality rule are proposals added in drafting. They follow from Thomas’s stated principles (prophets not chaplains; the G-men problem; rapport before confrontation) but were not stated by him, so he should confirm or strike them.]

Chapter 10 — Everything Is God: The Ministry’s Purpose, Marriage, and the Two-Way Street of Service

THOMAS: These things are the end goal of what we are trying to do. This is a ministry about creating that for the nation.

Why do you believe in God? Because look at the physics of it. At the bottom of it, you can see that everything is God. Now that you’ve got that, how does it fit your life? If everything is God, then I am a part of God. Certainly not the whole thing; I can see I’m just a tiny speck of it. But I have a viewpoint, and my point of view is a point of view God has, because I have it and God is everything. If I have a God point of view, you have a God point of view too. You have your particular desires, what makes you feel good, and I have mine. If you like good things, and I can give them to you without destroying my own life—if it’s in the domain of what is actually possible to do for another person, something that doesn’t destroy me but does help him—then I should take those options.

A marriage has difficulties within it.1 Corinthians 7:28, 7:33, but we must not be discouraged by the duties or hardships of married life. We need to realize, going into it, that there is great reward, but marriage also has things that are not pleasant. A level of maturity is required. It requires the same character that must be developed to successfully cope with life stresses. Marriage will be another one of the challenges that must be overcome; develop that maturity before marriage. Having reached that milestone, the difficulty of marriage can be more realistically assesed and the choice made with full understanding that there will be difficulties, and decide consciously to choose marry. But having chosen marriage, don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. Don’t be resentful. Do what marriage requires, and do it with a good spirit. The Lord loves a cheerful giver. Do it as unto the Lord, with a giving heart.

[Editor’s note: The marriage passage Thomas paraphrased has not been identified. “God loves a cheerful giver” is 2 Corinthians 9:7; “as unto the Lord” is Colossians 3:23. Note: I recently read this verse in the Amplified version and have not yet been able to identify it. I’ll put it in later.

If everybody did that all the time in their marriages, people wouldn’t get divorced. People get divorced because their needs aren’t being met. If you give to meet her needs and she gives to meet yours, even if they are very different needs, both people feel that this is all right. If that doesn’t satisfy you, and you want something else because it’s more exciting, faster, smoother, cooler, longer, quieter—the latest model—then you’re living on ice cream. You just want sugar. You want heroin, another dopamine hit. You have a maturity problem. So learn to be at peace. Learn to sit on the porch and be at rest. Learn to appreciate what is. It comes down to a regulated heart.

If everybody has that, everybody is being served by everybody else. “He who is greatest in the kingdom is the servant of all.” That’s because he made so many people happy. But you’re also supposed to love yourself, and loving yourself means that you need to be served as well. The person who only serves others is not obeying the Great Commandment. You love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t have a body and not have needs. It’s a given. So: What is it that you need? How can I help you? And what do I need in order to be served? Maybe all I need is a cup of water and a crust of bread. That’s very minimal, but I do need it.

[Editor’s note: Matthew 23:11; Mark 9:35.]

Most people need a great deal more than that. But if we all give and receive, and focus on the joy of giving to people who perhaps can’t give—all they can do right now is take, and they need that—then we give them that. When they’ve had enough, we say, “Now it’s time for you to learn to give. I’m going to serve you by letting you serve me, by asking you to serve.” That is serving him, because he is learning how to serve. So correction is a very important part of teaching. Training other people to give is an important part of giving. It’s another kind of service: we serve them by requiring them to serve.

So it isn’t self or other. It’s self and other, and it can’t be any other way. If it’s self or other, its imalanced. If you think, “I just serve.” you haven’t got like in a proper balance. You need some education. You need to let other people help you, and if they don’t then you have to teacch them how to serve. If you’re surrounded by takers, you need to train them to be givers, and that is giving to them and serving them.

ISAK: Yes. You can serve them and serve yourself at the same time, and ideally, in a harmonious society, that’s how it goes. But not everybody knows how to do each part.

THOMAS: That comes down to being able to ask for what you want. It’s rapport, confrontation, and change. “When you do this, it makes me feel bad. I’d like it if you did it this way. Wipe up the countertop, take out the trash, get up and take care of the kids.” Whatever it is. “Rather than my doing it all the time, I need to be served too. It makes me feel bad when I have to do it all the time. Would you do this for me?”

When you ask to be served, you are speaking the truth, and you speak the truth in love. It isn’t demanding its own way. It isn’t proud, arrogant, boastful, or angry. It’s patient. It asks for what it wants, but in a way that pleases. If that isn’t responded to, then you may need to be angry, but you don’t sin, and you don’t carry the anger with you. You keep faith and you forgive. You’re angry because you were sinned against. You were hurt. You were trespassed against. There was a debt, and you’re asking for it to be balanced. So it is necessary to use anger when sugar doesn’t work. You try the stick. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but occasionally you need a fly swatter.

ISAK: Good point. It doesn’t work for everything.

THOMAS: Sugar works really well most of the time, but you need the fly swatter too.

[Editor’s note: “Speaking the truth in love” is Ephesians 4:15; love “does not insist on its own way” is 1 Corinthians 13:5; “Be angry, and sin not” is Ephesians 4:26.]

Chapter 11 — A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State: Overcoming Evil with Good

THOMAS: So the Christian-nationalism question sounds as though it’s about a nanny state, but it isn’t. It’s about a church. It’s about a kingdom. It’s about creating the kingdom of heaven on earth. It isn’t about going out to raise hell, or going out tonight to get some sinners and string them up. It’s about actually loving other people. Be angry and sin not. You overcome evil with good. Lynching is not overcoming evil with good. It is participating in evil, being evil yourself. That isn’t how you overcome evil. All the things that have been done in the name of Christianity that aren’t Christian need to be called what they are. That isn’t it. You can call it Christian nationalism all you want, but it isn’t Christian. It might be national, but it isn’t the kind of nation I’d want to live in, so it isn’t even a good nation.

[Editor’s note: “Overcome evil with good” is Romans 12:21.]

ISAK: Ultimately, we’re trying to create a nice place for nice people.

THOMAS: And if you’re not a nice person, you need to rehabilitate yourself. That’s really important. We’re not into punishment alone; we’re into rehabilitation. If you need to sit in the corner, or be away from people for a while to soften your heart and get some perspective, we’ll do that. But this is about rehabilitating yourself, and that’s why we forgive people. We give another chance. How many times do you forgive? It’s turning the other cheek: “Let’s try again. The way you did that wasn’t good. Let’s try again.” It doesn’t mean, “You slapped me here; now slap the other side.” It means, “I’m not going to retaliate and repay evil for evil. I’m going to repay this with goodness.”

To me it all seems so simple. It isn’t some big, complicated routine. But if you try to explain how it applies to every part of life, it becomes quite a tome. If you try to address every inequity, it becomes very lengthy, because the number of ways you can put a watch together wrong is enormous. There is one way to put it together right. Any other way is just another wrong way, and there is no end to them.

ISAK: And we’re seeing it compound from one evil decision: the lynching, the eye-for-an-eye, and it continues and compounds. So it isn’t as if there’s one righteous side. When I see a war—this may be controversial—I don’t see a right side. I see that both sides have their issues, historically and now. It seems we’re so far gone that it isn’t about being right anymore. It’s about who can forgive. How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?

Addendum to Chapter 11 — Systemic Injustice: Inherited Wounds, Personal Guilt, and the Only Remedy That Breaks the Chain

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 11, “A Kingdom, Not a Nanny State,” after Isak’s question: “How do we stop, forgive, and move forward?” The frame follows Thomas’s February 2026 Fellowship response to Charles Eisenstein (“The Malware and the Patch”), which accepted that evil is both personal and systemic.]

THOMAS: You just said you see evil compounding from one decision: the lynching, then the eye-for-an-eye, then the next one. That is the last question on your list that I haven’t touched, and it’s the right place for it. Your draft asked, “What does CPP do with systemic injustice?” and then stopped. I want to give it a real answer, because it is a phrase that means two very different things, and one of them is true.

Two meanings of one phrase

The first meaning is simply this: sin doesn’t stay where it’s committed. It gets built into laws, customs, institutions, and families, and it goes on doing damage long after the people who committed it are dead. That is true. The Bible taught it long before any sociologist did.

The second meaning is the one you’ve been taught to hear in the phrase. It says that every difference in outcome between groups is proof of oppression, that people are guilty or innocent according to the group they were born into, and that the world divides into oppressors and oppressed, colonizers and colonized. That meaning is not true. It is the worldview without a center I described to you, dressed up as justice.

I want to affirm the first as strongly as I reject the second. Christians who deny the first because they don’t like the second have made a serious mistake, and they have handed the whole subject to people who will use it badly.

What the Bible says about inherited sin

God said in the Ten Commandments that He visits “the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” I read that first as a description of how sin actually works, not as an arbitrary punishment. Abuse creates abusers. A father who abandons his children raises sons who don’t know how to stay. A community that was robbed stays poor, and poverty has its own consequences. The wound is passed on.

The Bible also recognizes sin written into law. “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people.” That is systemic injustice in the most literal sense: injustice made into the system. The prophet Amos condemned Israel for selling the righteous for silver and turning aside the poor in the gate, where the courts sat. The Bible calls the whole of it “the world,” the system of human society organized apart from God, and says the whole world lies in wickedness.

But the same Bible draws a line that the modern ideology erases. Ezekiel says, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Consequences are inherited. Guilt is not. The child of a thief may inherit poverty because his father’s stolen goods were confiscated, or wealth because they weren’t. But the child is not a thief. You cannot put a man in the dock for what his great-grandfather did, or for what people who looked like him did.

That one distinction settles most of the argument. The consequences of injustice are real and they travel down the generations. The guilt belongs to the man who committed it, and to no one else.

America’s own record

You told me you’re cynical about this country’s history, and I want to be honest with you, because you deserve honesty and not a flag-waving answer.

America has written injustice into its law. Slavery was protected by the Constitution itself, through the fugitive slave clause and the three-fifths clause. After slavery ended, the Southern states wrote Jim Crow into their statute books. As I’ve said, lynchers were acquitted by juries of professing Christians for the better part of a century. In the 1930s the federal government’s own mortgage programs marked black neighborhoods as bad risks and refused to insure loans there, so a generation of families couldn’t build wealth through their homes the way their white neighbors did. Treaty after treaty with the Indian nations was signed and broken. Those were not the private sins of bad individuals. They were the law. They were the system.

But here is the other half, which the ideology leaves out. The people who ended those systems were overwhelmingly Christians, acting on the Bible. The abolitionists were evangelicals quoting Scripture. The civil rights movement was led by preachers out of black churches. Martin Luther King Jr. did not quote Marx. He quoted Amos: “Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” The remedy for America’s systemic sin came out of the same book that people now blame for it.

That is the pattern. When Christians do evil, they have to disobey their own book to do it, and the book is what convicts them. There is no other civilization that produced its own abolition movement out of its own scriptures in quite that way. So I don’t answer your cynicism by denying the sins. I answer it by pointing to where the repentance came from.

Why injustice outlives the unjust

Your draft asked what CPP has to say. Here is the one thing I think it adds.

The order of the universe is conservative. Disorder does not heal itself with time. It persists until a remedy is actually applied to it. This isn’t only physics. It’s the principle behind everything I’ve said about the cross: nothing is simply forgotten. A debt doesn’t disappear because the creditor died. A wound doesn’t close because the man who inflicted it is gone.

[Editor’s note: The “conservative order” is used here as it is in “The Architecture of Mercy,” as a principle of Thomas’s framework applied by analogy, not as a derived result about societies.]

That is why systemic injustice outlives the unjust. The slaveholders are dead, the Jim Crow legislators are dead, the lynch mobs are dead. But the disorder they introduced didn’t die with them. It is still moving through families, neighborhoods, and the ways people look at each other. Waiting won’t fix it. Something has to be done.

And it’s why, as Eisenstein saw, political fixes alone keep failing. When the roles are available, someone steps in to fill them. You can abolish one unjust arrangement, and if hearts are unchanged, another grows in its place, the way the tumor grows back when the cancer is still in the body.

The remedies that make it worse

There are two wrong remedies, and they are mirror images of each other.

The first is denial. “That was a long time ago. It has nothing to do with me.” It is true that it isn’t your guilt. But it isn’t true that it has nothing to do with you. You inherited a country, and a country is responsible for its own laws. Pretending the consequences aren’t there is not righteousness. It’s the priest and the Levite crossing to the other side of the road.

The second wrong remedy is the one you described: the eye-for-an-eye. It punishes the children for the sins of the fathers. It assigns guilt by race, which is exactly the thing it claims to oppose. It turns grievance into an identity, a permanent anger that no longer seeks to fix anything because the anger has become the self. It redistributes by group, which is the Pleasantville robbery in a new form. And it produces a new generation of wounded people who feel, correctly, that they were punished for something they didn’t do. So the chain continues. Every injustice done to remedy an old injustice is simply the next link.

This is what you meant when you said you don’t see a right side in so many conflicts. Once both sides have committed injustice in the name of redressing injustice, each side has a true grievance. Each can point to the other’s latest link. Arguing about who struck first stops being useful. The only question left is who will stop.

The remedies that work

So what does a Christian nation actually do about systemic injustice? I see six things.

First, it repeals unjust law and applies the law equally. This is the part that truly belongs to the state, because the state is responsible for its own laws. “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.” One law for all, the same at the courthouse door for every man, whatever his color or his bank account. That is the systemic remedy for systemic injustice, and it is the government’s job.

Second, it makes restitution where the victim and the wrongdoer can actually be identified. When Zacchaeus met Christ, he didn’t say “I’ll be a better man going forward.” He said, “If I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.” Where a particular institution defrauded particular people, and the record shows it, justice requires repayment. What justice does not require is charging people who did nothing for debts owed by people they never knew.

Third, it confesses its national sins. Nehemiah and Daniel both prayed on behalf of the nation: “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity… we and our fathers.” They didn’t claim personal guilt for what their fathers did. They confessed that the nation had sinned, and asked God to restore it. I’ve said America must repent for its national sins, and this is part of what I mean. A nation that confesses the sin of slavery, of broken treaties, and of the lynching tree is not humiliating itself. It is doing what Nehemiah did.

Fourth, it rejects every form of racial nationalism, which answers the worry you raised about the people who want the black and brown people out. God “hath made of one blood all nations of men.” In Christ “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free.” He “hath broken down the middle wall of partition.” A nationalism built on race is not Christian nationalism. It is the same idolatry of the tribe that the gospel came to destroy. The Christian nation is defined by allegiance to Christ and to His law, not by blood.

Fifth, it transforms the relationships inside the system from within. Paul didn’t lead a slave revolt. He sent Onesimus, a runaway slave, back to his master Philemon with a letter saying to receive him “not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved.” Within a few generations, a church that treated slaves as brothers had undermined the whole idea of one man owning another. When master and slave kneel at the same table, the institution cannot survive the meal.

Sixth, and underneath all the others, it forgives. And forgiveness is not the same as forgetting or excusing. It is the decision to absorb the blow instead of passing it on.

Who will stop

That brings us back to your question: how do we stop, forgive, and move forward?

Somebody has to take the blow and not return it. That is the only thing that ends a chain of retaliation. It is what Joseph did when his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, came to him in Egypt, and he had all the power in the world to repay them. He said, “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good.” The chain stopped with him.

And that is what Christ did on a scale no one else could. He took the whole weight of human injustice, the systemic and the personal, the fathers’ and the sons’, into Himself on the cross, and He did not pass it on. “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” That is the remedy from outside the system. It is the patch the system cannot write for itself, because the system only knows how to pass things along.

So the Christian answer to systemic injustice is not to deny it and not to repay it. It is to repeal the unjust law, restore what can be restored, confess what the nation did, refuse every idol of blood, change the relationships from within, and then let the chain end with us, because it ended with Him first.

References for the rewrite: Exodus 20:5; Ezekiel 18:20; Isaiah 10:1–2; Amos 2:6–7, 5:12, 5:24; 1 John 5:19; Leviticus 19:15; Deuteronomy 1:17; Luke 19:8 (Zacchaeus); Exodus 22:1; Nehemiah 9:2, 33–34; Daniel 9:5–8; Acts 17:26; Galatians 3:28; Ephesians 2:14; Philemon 16; Genesis 50:20; Luke 23:34; Luke 10:31–32. U.S. Constitution, Art. I §2 cl. 3 and Art. IV §2 cl. 3 (pre-Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments). Federal mortgage redlining: Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps (1935–1940) and Federal Housing Administration underwriting manuals of the 1930s. Charles Eisenstein, “From Depravity to Redemption,” as engaged in the RM Fellowship transcript of February 24, 2026. “Grievance as identity” follows Thomas’s “Eight Strongholds” essay (April 30, 2026).

Chapter 12 — War and the Moral Side: Ukraine, Iran, and the Price of Victory

THOMAS: Usually one side doesn’t want to stop and forgive. It wants to dominate, and to dominate for evil. So you really do have to look at the moral sides. Who is the moral one here?

Look at Russia and Ukraine. On the surface, somebody was just sitting there being himself, and somebody came along and tried to take him over because he had always wanted it. That isn’t the right way to do things. But the way it actually happened was that we installed a government in Ukraine, and the people in the Donbas, or perhaps Crimea, voted to have their own government aligned with Russia. And the Ukrainians shelled them. The people weren’t doing anything; they had said they wanted to belong to Russia, and they got an artillery barrage. Thousands of people were killed.

Then Russia comes along and says, “Now we want to take the rest of it.” And you say, “No, you don’t have the right to come in and take us over just because you decide you want to.” So one group harasses the people who chose to leave, and the other group says, “We’ve had enough. We’re coming over to stop you from harassing the people who wanted to be with us.” But they didn’t stop there and say, “We’ve got our part; now we’re going home.” They said, “Since we’re here, we’ll take the rest of it.” So both sides escalated, and both lost the moral high ground.

[Editor’s note: In 2014 Crimea held a referendum on joining Russia that most of the world did not recognize, and Russia annexed it; separatist forces in the Donbas region declared independence, and the war there from 2014 to 2022 killed about 14,000 people on all sides, including over 3,000 civilians, according to UN estimates. The role of the United States in Ukraine’s 2014 change of government is disputed.]

This is the kind of situation in which people ultimately have to say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong.” If nobody is willing to say that, then the only thing possible is to say, “If you won’t stop, I’ll have to defeat you.” When a group is doing wrong and won’t surrender, unconditional surrender—complete defeat—is the only thing possible.

That’s basically what Trump did last night, and it’s why the market went down today. He basically said, “If you don’t completely stop and disarm, and get rid of your nukes, we are going to annihilate you.” That was a correct statement. The problem is that the cost of annihilating Iran without annihilating the world is a price too great for America to pay. America doesn’t have the will to go in with, I would guess, five or ten million men to destroy the regime over a population of some ninety million people. Iran is huge, and it’s mountainous terrain. And the use of atomic weapons would wipe out so many innocent people that it is completely unacceptable. There are people there who are friendly to us, and we would be wiping them out to get rid of the cancer in their midst. Can we use nuclear weapons against a society like that? No, you can’t. Even to consider it is completely immoral.

So if you rattle your saber and say you’re going to annihilate them, that means either nukes or ten million men. They know you won’t send ten million men, and they know you won’t use nukes. So they’ll sit there and thumb their noses at you, because you won’t do it. “You’re just bluster. You’re just jawboning. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing. We’ll keep blocking the Strait and annoying you, because you don’t have the will to come in and defeat us.”

[Editor’s note: “Last night” refers to the evening before this conversation (September 22, 2026); the statement is summarized as Thomas described it. Iran’s population is roughly 90 million.]

ISAK: They’re calling the bluff.

THOMAS: They’re going to call our bluff, and it is a bluff. That’s all it is. And if it isn’t a bluff, that’s even worse.

ISAK: God forbid.

THOMAS: God forbid. The ten-million-men option isn’t workable, and the nukes aren’t workable.

ISAK: And dropping ten million people into a country isn’t good for your own economy, unless you’re ripping the other country to shreds and taking all its resources. Even then we’re still in that moral fight: even if we kill all the right people—

THOMAS: No, that part is moral. You have stood up and said, “By your character, you desire the reign of the Mahdi. You don’t mind bringing destruction on the world. The way you treat your people is completely unacceptable. And you have nuclear weapons, either in development or in a stockpile.” They probably have a stockpile. Imagine that they couldn’t develop nuclear weapons in the thirty years since we first went after them. Either they are the most incompetent nuclear scientists in the world, or they have nukes. It would be naive to think otherwise.

ISAK: And we haven’t been able to take them over or stop them in all that time, so clearly they aren’t completely incompetent. They’re not a nothing adversary.

THOMAS: It is moral for us to take them over. But if we’re going to make a claim like that, we have to be prepared to send troops. That’s all you can do. You won’t win by blowing up this and that. You go in and do complete regime change, and that is nation-building. And there’s no point in doing it unless you’re going to make it a Christian nation. If you are going to make it a Christian nation and eliminate the cancer of Islam in that country, it’s worth doing. If not, you just go in and say, “We took Bagram. Great, we have a big air base. We overthrew the Taliban once. Now we’re tired of this. This is the longest war we’ve ever had, and we’ve had enough. We’re out of here.”

ISAK: Yes. Then you get out, like you were saying about Vietnam, and the people you sided with, half the country, the allies you fought alongside, are left defenseless and get demolished, because there are no more American lives to spend. They were all destroyed, and the other side cleaned up shop.

THOMAS: Absolutely. Those are the most immoral things. There are probably others we’ve done too, but those are the top-of-the-shelf immoral things we’ve done as a country. It’s unbelievable not to go in, take out the leadership completely, and do missionary work afterward. Instead it was, “We’re culturally diverse. We’re honoring diversity.” What was the problem? Why were they acting that way? It was because of Islam. It wasn’t because they were Buddhists or Baha’is. It was because they were Islamists, and there is an element of Islam that is toxic. Islam carries within its ideology the seeds that allow that toxic strain to grow, and it grew in that place. Now we have the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Sharia, the Twelvers. It is a toxic religion, and to pretend we need to be diverse and honor that culture is nonsense. Would you put a black widow spider in your bed? That’s a stupid thing to do. You’ll get hurt.

ISAK: It’s like the scene in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. A meteor is heading toward Earth, and everybody is going to die in a few days. Steve Carell is brushing his teeth, and he looks down and is about to kill a spider in the sink. He thinks, “The world’s going to end. I’ll spare it.” The next scene, he’s driving to work with a big spider bite on his face.

Addendum to Chapter 12 — The Biggest Kid on the Playground: Empire, Resources, and Naboth’s Vineyard

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 12, “War and the Moral Side,” after the spider scene. The positions follow Thomas’s “The Ambassage of Peace” (drthomasforpresident.com, August 29, 2026) and his September 2026 energy-policy paper. See the editor’s note at the end on one tension with the Iran passage earlier in this chapter.]

THOMAS: I’ve told you how I look for the moral side in a war. Now I want to turn that same test around and point it at us, because that was the real question you asked me at the start, and I haven’t answered it yet.

You said capitalism seems to need to keep growing, a growing economy needs oil, and so America goes out and gets resources. You said we’ve been the biggest kid on the playground, stealing lunch money: snuffing out political cultures we didn’t like, funding regimes that crushed their own people’s movements, and letting civilians pay the price for a few bad men at the top. And you asked: at what cost that I’m ignorant of? Are the good guys really the good guys?

If I’m going to say “look for the moral side” about Russia and Ukraine, I have to be willing to say it about America. So here it is.

What the record actually shows

Some of what you suspect is true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

In 1953, after Iran’s elected prime minister nationalized the country’s oil industry, the CIA and British intelligence helped organize the coup that removed him and strengthened the Shah. The CIA has since acknowledged its role. The following year, the United States backed the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president after his land reform threatened the holdings of an American fruit company. In Chile in the early 1970s, the United States worked to destabilize an elected Marxist government. During the Cold War we supported more than one regime that tortured its own citizens, because those regimes were against communism. And in 2003 we invaded Iraq on the claim that it had weapons of mass destruction, and the weapons were not there.

That is the playground bully part of the record, and a Christian cannot look away from it.

But it isn’t the whole record, and if you only see that part, you’ll see something false. After the Second World War, the United States held more power than any nation in history. It did not annex Germany or Japan. It rebuilt them, and within a generation they were free, prosperous, and our friends. The Marshall Plan fed and rebuilt Western Europe, including our former enemies. The Berlin airlift flew food and coal into a blockaded city for more than a year rather than fight for it. And for most of the last eighty years, the American navy has kept the world’s sea lanes open to everyone’s ships, not only our own. Empires in history have not usually behaved like that. The Romans didn’t rebuild Carthage. They salted it.

So the honest answer to “Are the good guys really the good guys?” is this: America has done both. It has done great good, and it has done real wrong. The wrongs follow a pattern, and the pattern is worth seeing clearly.

The sin has a name: covetousness

Every one of those wrongs has the same root. It’s the tenth commandment: thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, nor his field, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s. James tells us where wars come from: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain.”

Remember what I said about property. King Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard. Naboth wouldn’t sell, so the king’s wife arranged Naboth’s death, and the king took the vineyard. God sent Elijah to him: “Hast thou killed, and also taken possession?” The most powerful man in the nation had no right to a small farmer’s field.

Nations are held to the same law. When a powerful nation overthrows a smaller nation’s government because that government decided its own oil or its own land belonged to its own people, that is Naboth’s vineyard. It doesn’t matter that the smaller nation’s decision was foolish, or that the owners had a contract, or that the new government might be friendlier. A nation that takes by force, or by a coup it arranged, or by a puppet it installed, what it could not obtain by fair trade, has done what Ahab did. Paul says God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” The borders of nations are not ours to rearrange for our convenience.

That is also the cancer picture. A tumor sends out signals that make the body build blood vessels to feed it. It captures the common supply for itself. An empire of plunder does the same thing beyond its own borders: it arranges for other nations’ resources to flow to it on its terms, not theirs. And like a tumor, it doesn’t stay put. It spreads.

Trade is not tribute

Here is the distinction I want you to hold onto, because it answers your worry about capitalism.

Capitalism doesn’t need conquest. It needs trade. Trade is two owners each saying yes. You have oil and want tractors; I have tractors and want oil; we agree on a price, and both of us are better off. That is the free market working exactly as it should, across a border just as across a street. It’s the good roads principle applied to the whole world. Everybody wants the sea lanes open, and a nation that keeps them open for everyone is doing something like building good roads.

Tribute is different. Tribute is when the stronger party sets the terms by force, or arranges for the other side’s yes to be spoken by someone it installed. That isn’t capitalism. It’s the captain of industry’s method, buying up the mousetrap company, done with gunboats instead of contracts. It’s the same centralizing perversion we talked about, at the scale of nations.

So your worry is aimed at the right thing but assigns it to the wrong cause. The problem isn’t that a growing economy needs resources. The problem is a nation that stops trading for what it needs and starts taking it.

And it’s worth noticing that the premise has changed. For a generation, the argument was that America had to secure foreign oil because it didn’t have enough of its own. That is no longer true. The United States is now the largest oil producer in the world and has become a net exporter of petroleum. And we have domestic energy we’ve barely begun to use: nuclear power, whose so-called waste is mostly unused fuel that could be recycled. A nation that produces its own energy has no excuse for resource wars. If we ever go to war again, we can’t pretend it’s for survival. We’ll have to state the real reason, and that’s exactly what should happen.

When fighting communism, the ends did not justify the means

You also raised the Cold War: funding regimes that squashed socialism or communism in their own countries. That one is harder, and I want to be fair to both sides of it.

Communism was not a harmless difference of opinion. It killed tens of millions of people in the twentieth century, through famine, purges, and camps. Resisting it was right. Keeping it from spreading was right. The people of Eastern Europe, when they were finally free to speak, said so.

But Paul warns against saying “Let us do evil, that good may come.” He says the condemnation of people who reason that way is just. A good end does not sanctify an evil means. When America armed men who tortured prisoners, disappeared dissidents, and massacred villages because those men were anti-communist, it was doing evil so that good might come. And it planted exactly the resentment that anti-American movements have fed on ever since. The shah we restored in 1953 fell in 1979 to the Islamic revolution, and we have been dealing with that regime for nearly half a century. Evil means don’t just stain the good end; they tend to destroy it.

The purchase of policy

Why does a nation that has done so much good keep doing these things? I think the deepest reason is the one I gave in the Pleasantville story: we pay the government to rob for us, and then the robbers get paid by others too.

Weapons makers profit when there’s war. Intelligence agencies grow when there’s an enemy. Politicians need campaign money, and some of that money comes from people whose business depends on conflict, and some of it comes from foreign governments’ friends and lobbies. When a legislator trades his vote on war for campaign money, that is prostitution, the sale of what must never be sold. America’s foreign policy may be advised by friends, but it must be purchased by no one. An alliance is a friendship between sovereigns, not a power of attorney.

So the reforms I’ve proposed are concrete. No sustained military campaign without a congressional declaration or authorization that states its objective in one sentence, its conditions for ending, and a date on which it expires. If the objective can’t be written in a sentence, nobody knows what winning is. War-industry profits audited and capped while hostilities last, so that no company’s quarterly earnings ever again depend on a war continuing. The revolving door between the Pentagon, the agencies, and the contractors closed. And foreign-influence laws enforced equally against every nation’s lobby, friend and adversary alike.

But I have to tell you what I believe most deeply about it. A bought government is the symptom. A buyable people is the disease. The lobbyist’s check only has power over a man who has a price.

The test for American power

So what should America do with its power? The same thing I’d tell any strong man to do with his strength.

Use it to protect, not to take. Keep the sea lanes open for everyone. Defend the weak when they’re attacked. Keep your word to your allies and to your enemies, because a nation’s word is a moral act: the righteous man “sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” Count the cost of every war before you start it, as Christ said a king must, and if you can’t win it, send an embassy and ask for terms of peace. Trade, don’t take. And when you’ve done wrong, say so.

And apply the same test to every act abroad that I apply at home: would the neighbor on the receiving end recognize this as love? Not flattery, and not always pleasant. Correction isn’t always pleasant, and neither is defending a nation against an aggressor. But love: the Iranian student, the Guatemalan farmer, the Russian conscript, and the Ukrainian mother, treated as children of God whose good is being sought. The coup in 1953 fails that test. The Marshall Plan passes it.

Tocqueville is supposed to have said that America is great because America is good, and that if America ever ceases to be good, it will cease to be great. Whoever said it first, it’s true. America doesn’t need to take other nations’ lunch money to be great. It needs to be good. A good nation does not covet its neighbor’s vineyard, and it does not feed meat grinders.

So, are the good guys the good guys? Sometimes. Our job is to make it true more often, starting by telling the truth about the times it wasn’t. That’s what repentance is for a nation. It’s the same thing it is for a man.

[Editor’s note for the chapter rewrite — decision needed]

Earlier in this chapter Thomas says it is moral for the United States to take over Iran, with full regime change and nation-building, provided it is prepared to send troops and to “make it a Christian nation.” In “The Ambassage of Peace” (August 29, 2026), the solutions essay on drthomasforpresident.com states the opposite: regime change “is not an American objective — because it is not an American right,” and the policy is “transformation over containment,” reaching the Iranian people with truth, commerce, and the gospel rather than invasion.

This addendum follows the “Ambassage” position (no conquest for another nation’s resources or government; Acts 17:26), which is the more convenient reading because it is already published. It avoids restating either position on Iran specifically. The rewrite of Chapter 12 should reconcile the two, either by revising the conversation passage or by explaining under what conditions (for example, an imminent nuclear threat that cannot be deterred) conquest and nation-building would become right despite the general rule.

References for the rewrite: Exodus 20:17; James 4:1–2; 1 Kings 21:19 (Naboth); Acts 17:26; Romans 3:8; Psalm 15:4; Luke 14:31–32; Proverbs 14:34. Iran 1953: the CIA publicly acknowledged its role in 2013 in released internal history documents. Guatemala 1954 (Árbenz, United Fruit Company); Chile 1970–1973 (documented in the 1975 Church Committee reports). U.S. petroleum: the Energy Information Administration reports the United States as the world’s largest crude oil producer and a net total petroleum exporter since 2020; verify current figures before publication. The Tocqueville line is widely attributed but not found in his writings, which is why the text says “is supposed to have said.”

Chapter 13 — Believing We Are Right: The Gentle Imposition of a Good Yoke

THOMAS: The point of all this is that we have a lot of work to do, and we have to actually believe in what we’re doing. We have to believe that we are on the side of right. Otherwise we’ll be double-minded, and a double-minded man receives nothing. We have to be willing to impose this on the world, and it is imposed by saying, “This is a really good thing. Won’t you do this?” It’s a very gentle form of imposition. “Good is good. Listen to this argument. Put this yoke on yourself. It’s easy. Its burden is light. You’re going to have to serve somebody. Put this one on. It’s a good one to serve.”

[Editor’s note: James 1:6–8; Matthew 11:30. “You’re gonna have to serve somebody” echoes Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody.”]

ISAK: Those are very reasonable, strong standards. Not strong as in a heavy yoke, but strong as in something with strength, something that could make individuals, families, and countries stronger.

There is so much growing for individuals to do, and for me to do. But I feel that I’m growing, learning, and developing my worldview and the lines I draw. I don’t know about “boundaries.” I’m paying more attention to what I think God wants to feel and experience, and being sensitive to that. Hopefully that spreads to other people, the way you’re doing it with your group: spreading these ideas and trying to live them out, and we’ll see where they go. I think we could change the world.

THOMAS: It’s the only hope I see. I don’t see anybody else doing it, so I figure I’d better do it myself. And I can’t do it alone, so I have to bring other people along. Bringing other people along is changing the world, because that’s what changing the world involves. Everybody has to bring everybody along. You bring people along, and then you teach them to bring people along, and teach them to bring people along. It only takes a spark to get a fire going.

[Thomas recites the words of Kurt Kaiser’s 1969 song “Pass It On”: a single spark starts a fire that warms everyone around it; God’s love, once experienced, is as fresh as spring and must be shared; the singer wishes his friend the same happiness and wants to proclaim from the mountaintop that the Lord of love has come to him.]

ISAK: It’s a really good song. Well, let’s go pass it on.

Addendum to Chapter 13 — The Unreached: Those Who Never Heard, and Those Who Heard Only the Noise

[New material — drafted for Thomas’s review. Append to the end of Chapter 13, “Believing We Are Right,” after “Well, let’s go pass it on.” The theology below follows Thomas’s positions in “The Architecture of Mercy” (Christos Fellowship essay, July 10, 2026), including the corrections he made there to the July 8 exploration.]

THOMAS: Since we’re talking about passing it on, I want to answer one more question from your list, because it is the question behind every mission. Your draft put it this way: CPP says the moral law is real and discoverable, and I say Jesus in your heart is the alignment mechanism. But most humans who have ever lived never heard of Jesus. The woman I told you about, who is as fervent a Christian now as she was a communist before, had to encounter Christianity to come into alignment. What about the billions who never did?

That question isn’t new to me. It is the question that first sent me searching through the religions of the world. I’ll tell you where I have come to rest, and where I have deliberately stopped.

Two truths the careless collapse into one

The first truth is that there is only one way. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” I hear that verse first as a statement about architecture, before it is a statement about religion. It says there is one and only one way the thing can work: one mediating reality through which the Father’s life reaches a creature. There is no second door, no Buddhist door and Muslim door and Christian door leading to the same room. The Son is the interface.

The second truth is that the signal of the Son has been going out since the beginning. John calls Him “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Every man, not every man who has heard a sermon. Paul says the Gentiles who never had the law of Moses still “do by nature the things contained in the law,” because the work of the law is “written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” The early church father Justin Martyr spoke of the seeds of the Word scattered in every people, and said that Socrates, when he reasoned his way toward the good, was responding to the Logos without knowing its name. And when Paul stood in Athens before an altar inscribed “To the Unknown God,” he did not tell the Athenians their worship was nothing. He said, “Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.”

So when a sincere seeker in any land perceives something true and good and turns toward it, he is responding to the real thing, whether or not he can name it. His moral knowledge is real. His conscience is real. That is why your framework was right that the moral law is discoverable. It is discoverable because the One who wrote it has been speaking into every heart all along.

Look at Cornelius in the book of Acts. He was a Roman centurion, not a Jew, who had never heard the gospel. But he feared God, he gave generously, and he prayed. And God did not tell him, “You’re fine as you are.” God sent an angel to tell him to send for Peter, and at the same time gave Peter a vision to prepare him to go. That is the pattern. The seeker who responds to the light he has is not left where he is. God arranges for him to hear the name. The woman I told you about is the same. The fervor was always in her. She gave it to communism because communism was what she had been shown. When she met Christ, the same hunger found its true object.

Why the name still matters

Here is where I have to correct something, including something our own earlier exploration concluded. It would be easy to say: if the seeker can pass through the Son without knowing His name, then the name doesn’t really matter, the missionaries can stay home, and it will all work out. That doesn’t follow, and two hard facts forbid it.

The first is that entrance is a relationship. The sharpest word Jesus ever spoke was not aimed at pagans. It was aimed at people whose works were impeccable, who prophesied in His name, cast out devils, and did many wonderful works. To them He said, “I never knew you.” Whatever good works diagnose, they do not by themselves constitute the one thing He is seeking, which is a soul He knows. And a relationship is entered with open eyes.

The second is that the signal can be misread. The seeker who perceives the good without knowing its source can bend it, add to it, and build a religion around the bent version. The seeds of the Word are real, but seeds grow into whatever the soil allows. That is why Paul did not leave the Athenians at the altar. He preached the resurrection to them.

So the honest position is narrower than the comfortable one, and truer. The signal is universal. It is genuine wherever it is received. The interface is the Son, named or not. And none of that is a warrant to stop preaching the Name. The Great Commission is two things at once. It is cartography: we carry the fullest map of a terrain that many people are already stumbling across. And it is rescue: some of them are walking toward the edge of a cliff, and we are sent to pull them back.

What we are not appointed to do

What about the ones who never heard in time? Here I stop, and I stop on purpose.

I am certain of one thing: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” God will not condemn a man for failing a test he was never given. The Judge is exactly fair. But what He does with each soul is His to decide and not mine to publish. There are threads in Scripture that lean toward a wider hope than the tradition usually allows, that God desires all men to be saved, that in Christ He is reconciling all things to Himself. I hold those threads, and I hold them as hope. I will not preach them as a promise. A man who is told he will certainly arrive has been given a reason never to set out. I think God left those passages as hints rather than headlines for that very reason.

And I have to be honest that the physics does not settle this either. Your framework asked the question in CPP terms, and I want to be clear about what CPP can and cannot say. In our first exploration of these questions we reasoned from the physics to a confident universalism, as though the good would spread through the whole lattice automatically, the way a crystal grows through a supercooled liquid until none of the old phase is left. That was an error. The order of the universe is conservative: disorder does not heal itself. It persists until a remedy is applied to it, and the remedy is applied only where it is willingly received. So the physics tells us something about how the remedy works. It tells us nothing about how many will receive it. That silence is honest, and I intend to leave it there.

We are not appointed to adjudicate the edge cases. We are appointed to go.

The unreached in our own country

Now let me bring this home, because it matters for the book, and not only for missions overseas.

It matters first for how a Christian nation treats those among its citizens who are not Christians. Remember what I said about good roads, and about the atheist and the priest agreeing that you shouldn’t take my stuff or hurt my person. Why do they agree? Because the law is written on every heart. The atheist knows theft is wrong, not because he has read Exodus, but because the Light that lights every man has lit him too. That is why a nation can hold the moral law in common without requiring every citizen to be a believer, and why the civil law of a Christian nation can be just to the Muslim, the Hindu, and the unbeliever. It asks of them only what their own conscience already knows. They are our neighbors and our fellow citizens, and they are owed love, not coercion. They are not enemies of the Christian nation. They are its mission field.

And second, America has its own unreached, and they are not in the jungle. They are the millions who have heard the name of Jesus all their lives, as a curse word, as a cliché, as the brand of a political party, or as the religion of their grandmother’s church, and have never once heard the gospel. They are in some ways harder to reach than the man who never heard the name at all, because they think they already know what it means. They have been inoculated with a weak dose of the thing, and the weak dose protects them from the real one.

That is the field for Transforming America. We are not trying to reach America by taking over its government. We are trying to reach the unreached who live on our own streets, with the real thing instead of the caricature.

Why it can’t wait

You gave the Fellowship something important when we discussed this in the summer, and I want to put it here where it belongs. You pointed out that the urgency of the Commission isn’t only about the life to come. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” is present tense. A soul that is out of alignment is suffering now, in this life, in the stress and self-destruction that misalignment produces. You know that from your own experience, the fish chasing the hook, and so do I. And the way back to harmony is open now.

So evangelism is not fire insurance sold by threat. It is a physician’s urgency joined to a shepherd’s. “You are suffering, and you need not be.” And also: “You are near the edge, and I love you too much to watch you fall.” Both are true. They are the same love looking at the same person over two horizons.

That is why it only takes a spark. The seeker is already there, with the light he has, looking for its source. Our part is to be the Peter who goes when the Cornelius sends for him, and to go even before we’re sent for. We bring people along, and we teach them to bring people along. That is what changing the world is. And that is the only answer I can give you about the billions: God is fair to every one of them, and He has told us to go.

References for the rewrite: John 14:6; John 1:9; Romans 2:14–15; Acts 17:22–31; Acts 10 (Cornelius); Matthew 7:21–23; Genesis 18:25; 1 Timothy 2:4; Colossians 1:20; Matthew 4:17; Matthew 28:19–20. Justin Martyr, Second Apology 8, 10, and First Apology 46 (the “seeds of the Word”; Socrates). The universalism correction and the “cartography and rescue” framing follow “The Architecture of Mercy” (RM, CFE, 2026-07-10), Part IV. Isak’s present-life-urgency contribution is credited there as well.

Chapter 14 — The Worldview Without a Center

ISAK: Thanks for going down that road with me. In the political climate we’re in—I feel like I keep saying “climate”—there is a lot of confusion and chaos, and centuries and decades to learn from about where we are and why we’re here. As a young person, I feel like I’m getting my bearings, getting my sea legs: what’s happening, what came before, what we anticipate will come after. Unfortunately, I’m very ignorant of past generations. I’ve read history and studied enough to have an overall view, but the details get filled in as you get older. That’s how it happens, I guess.

THOMAS: I’ve always thought what was missing for you was a correct framing. I think you’ve been indoctrinated by the woke worldview: diversity, oppressor, colonizer, imperialist. “What about the pygmies? What about other people’s consensual viewpoints? Who’s to say what’s right?”

That worldview is not new. It is eternal. It is the satanic worldview, the rebel against God. It dresses itself in the clothing of caring about other people, about fairness, about doing right and letting people be. “Who’s to say what’s right?” It is a worldview without a center. Everybody has his own world, and who’s to say whose world is right? If everybody has his own world and everybody feels he is doing the right thing, who are we to tell him what the right thing is?

It’s a libertarian kind of perspective, and it’s really common. I think the libertarian philosophy is actually the most dangerous ideology, because it seems so right. “I’m not hurting anybody.” Non-aggression, contract, willing consent. Add in a market economy where everybody produces what he wants, and you’re not imposing anything on anybody. That openness to anything is very attractive. It’s intuitively obvious: “I’m not hurting anybody, and if I think this is right, who are you to stop me? Who are you to tell me what’s right or wrong?” It’s a very difficult worldview to combat because it’s so close to being right.

About the only thing that needs to be added is this: “By the way, there is a God, and there are things that actually are right. Most of what you want to do actually is right. Most of what you’re feeling is good. But there are a few things that aren’t, though you probably enjoy them.” You want to smoke a joint; you’re not really hurting anybody. Shooting up is a little harder, and you’ll probably die, but who am I to tell you not to enjoy yourself on the way out? Who you want to sleep with, which gender, for how long—if people agree, who am I to tell them what to do? At some point we have to ask: If there is a God, does God care about these things?

Your dad’s story about the eternal happy family—has he told you that story?

ISAK: Remind me. I’m not sure I’m familiar with it.

THOMAS: I wish I could tell it as well as he does. It’s one of the most profound stories I’ve ever heard. He was at BYU, and he had been studying child development. He had been immersed in that study, for a day or for days. He came out and sat down on a bench, and something came over him. I think he heard a voice. It was as though all the wisdom of the universe opened up to him. He went into one room, and either it was spoken to him or he realized it: family. Behind it was this unfathomable wisdom, beauty, and eternity. Then he went into another room, and it was the room of eternal family. Then he went into another room, even grander, and the depth and magnitude of it was eternal happy family.

ISAK: That’s the goal.

THOMAS: That’s the goal.

ISAK: It’s a good goal. It isn’t a power-craving goal. It isn’t exclusively self-serving. It’s literally loving others, as God loves us. It’s a beautiful story.

THOMAS: That vision really is the top. It’s the kingdom of heaven on earth. Have him tell you the story again. I didn’t tell it nearly as well as he does. It’s an amazing story.

ISAK: Firsthand beats secondhand.

Chapter 15 — The Sacrifice a Nation Must Make

THOMAS: That is what we’re moving toward. This is not about a Christian-Nazi, Handmaid’s Tale, Scarlet Letter world. It isn’t an Inquisition. It isn’t a revival meeting. It is living life, living holy, enjoying life, and having a life that is really good.

But we do have to sacrifice something. We have to sacrifice sexual diversity. It won’t happen without that. We are going to have to be pleasing to God in our sexuality. We are going to have to take a stand as a nation. We are going to have to take a stand for Christ. We are going to have to say, “No, we are not multi-ethnic, multi-everything, multi-religion.” We are not establishing a national religion. But we pray at everything. We use the Bible and quote it at everything.

George Washington said this nation was founded on the general principles of Christianity, and that is what we teach. The general principles of Christianity are the Bible. We talk it, and we use its metaphors. When we talk about Romans 1, we talk about the fact that there are sexual acts God does not allow, that God actually hates.

The other thing we will have to do is make an absolute, complete recognition that God exists, and that God rewards and punishes nations. We have to apologize for our national wrong, for our worship of the Pride movement. It was actually a shame movement. It should be called the Shame movement.

[Editor’s note: The phrase “the general Principles of Christianity” is from John Adams’s letter to Thomas Jefferson of June 28, 1813, not from Washington.]

ISAK: I’m evaluating my own inclusivity: “all are welcome,” toward people and toward ideas. I’m evaluating that kind of thought. I’m having to do a lot of inner work, stopping at any reluctance or pushback I feel against an idea and inspecting it. “Why is that? Where did I learn this?” There’s a lot of work to do, and that’s why I’m quiet. I’m thinking. It’s very interesting to break things down and see where they came from. And if you can’t tell where they came from, you ask what fruit they bear.

THOMAS: The theory is all wonderful, blue skies and roses, until you say, “And by the way, you actually have to discriminate against certain sexual behaviors.” Then it’s no longer fun and games. Now it’s personal. “Sorry, you’re not welcome there. I believed in all that other stuff; it was great. But you want me to behave sexually in one particular way, the way the Bible says is the authorized way?” Essentially the missionary position. “No, I’m sorry. We’d rather live in hell. We want our sexuality the way we want it, and we’ll sacrifice everything for it.”

That is essentially the bargain we have made in America. We held the line against it pretty well, at least on the surface. People never actually behaved well, but on the surface we had government that had blue laws. Adultery was a punishable offense. And in the church, divorce was the only unforgivable sin. You probably weren’t old enough to know that, but it’s a phrase people actually used.

ISAK: Divorce being the unforgivable sin. I’ve heard that sentiment. I’m not the wisest person in the world, but it never quite made sense to me, because of the circumstances of divorce, the reasons for it. I think people should be allowed out of an agreement in some cases. But culturally, divorce was the “D word.” You didn’t say it. You didn’t hear about it. “Where are his parents?” “We don’t talk about that.” It was very taboo, very scary, and reasonably so. If you’re going through it, somebody did something wrong. That doesn’t necessarily mean the person leaving did wrong, or the person staying. But it was, “That family fell apart. We don’t know what will happen to them. It’s just the baby and the mama now,” or the dad and the baby.

THOMAS: The context for “the only unforgivable sin is divorce” was the church. It was a Christian concept. “You were a homosexual? A drug addict? A murderer, a robber, a liar, a thief? We can forgive you. Welcome in, dear brother. You’re divorced? No, we don’t accept people like that.” That’s the taboo I was referring to. These were people who could forgive sin, who thought sin was sin, and they couldn’t forgive divorce. That was the era I grew up in. It was a very real Christian cultural concept.

But the point I was making concerns sexuality at the national level, after having fallen. We could have done this forty years ago. We could have said we’re turning it around and making homosexuality illegal, and it was illegal in many states. Maybe it still is on the books. Adultery was illegal. Pedophilia is illegal. We’re still willing to do that much. Now we would be saying that fornication, adultery, homosexuality, the whole list, are recognized by us as a nation as sins against God and a threat to the state.

And it may be that this Department of Morality counsels people and helps them: helps them overcome gender dysphoria, orientation problems, fidelity problems, the problem of using sexuality too early. It helps people overcome the thing that is at the center of life, because sexuality was made for a purpose. Now you get to use it as God intends, because God is our center. He is our source. More than our source, He is our being. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that. You can’t separate God from who you are, or from who somebody else is. You can’t do it.

[Editor’s note: Acts 17:28.]

ISAK: You can’t hide.

THOMAS: You can’t hide. “God doesn’t like this.” “How do you know?” “It says so in the Bible.” “You’re mixing church and state.” “No, I’m not saying you have to have a religion. I’m saying what’s true.”

ISAK: If you separate the state from truth, what do you have?

THOMAS: Separation of state and truth. Yes.

ISAK: Separation of state and truth. That’s what we’ve been heading toward. It seems so simple when it’s laid out that way. There is a way of life, and there is something that protects it, so that citizens can go on living that way of life. Then it gets twisted, so that way of life can no longer be carried out in government. It’s no longer “In God we trust.” It’s “God, we’ll put You over there,” and in Hoover we trust over here. In God we piggy-bank.

THOMAS: Oh my.

Chapter 16 — Why I Run: The Righteous Society

ISAK: This has been really intriguing. I’m going to learn more about political science and the nature of the universe and how they overlap—not which ideology is right, but where the truth is and what we do with it now. What is good, and what do we do with it? I don’t think picking through all the world’s ideologies and asking which brand of capitalism or socialism is most like Jesus is the way. That will come as a byproduct of people and their hearts. It won’t come from “I have this whole plan, and I’m going to change everything right now.” The Bible says a man makes his plans, but the Lord directs his steps. We can have all the plans we want, but really we’ll watch it happen by participating, by being part of the play, so that we can hear applause at the end.

[Editor’s note: Proverbs 16:9.]

THOMAS: As you can see, this is the vision I’ve carried for forty years. It’s why I’m running for president. It isn’t that I want to be president. I want the world to be better, and I don’t hear anybody else carrying the message I have.

ISAK: If somebody else were saying it, you’d say, “Great, let’s do that.”

THOMAS: You do that.

ISAK: But nobody’s doing it. There isn’t a vote I can cast and say, “This is a vote for this way of life.” It’s a vote for the same thing we’ve always had.

THOMAS: It’s a vote for the righteous. I called it the Righteous Society. That was one of my first names for it. It was the Christian nation. I’m just trying to get people to get with the program. It’s an important thing to do.

ISAK: Thanks for answering my questions and going on that journey. These are goals with merit. It isn’t a self-serving goal. You see a need in the country and what could fix it, and it’s something God saw a long time ago. What can we do to inspire people and direct them to change their lives?

THOMAS: That’s what we’re doing: showing people how to change their lives, how to live in a godly way. It’s simple, really.

ISAK: I don’t know what all the chaos is about. I don’t know what the problem is.

THOMAS: As far as I can tell, the whole deal is about being able to do what you want sexually without anybody interfering with you. In America we opened the floodgates and said everybody can do whatever he wants. Now we’re saying, “That thing where everybody does what he wants? We’re taking it back.” And people say, “No. We’ve seen what it’s like, and we don’t want to leave it. It was too great. Our bodies, ourselves. Women unite. We’re not going back.” At this point we’re dealing with rebels, hardened rebels, people willing to kill those who stand against their sexual freedom.

The Charlie Kirk assassination was exactly that. There’s a big conspiracy theory about Israel and all that, but that isn’t it. We had a man who didn’t like being told what he couldn’t do. In his eyes Kirk wasn’t honoring his tribe; Kirk was dissing it. So he went and killed him. And we’re not saying that loudly enough. This is a time for a national cry: this is what is going on. We have people who, because their sexuality is threatened, go out and kill people. The fruit of this sexual anarchy is death.

[Editor’s note: Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. The account of the shooter’s motive given here is Thomas’s reading of the case.]

ISAK: Anarchy.

THOMAS: I think what makes this palatable is that you love the sinner and hate the sin. If you can just get it across: “No, we don’t hate you. You’re a child of God just as much as I am. You just haven’t learned how to control one of your appetites. Maybe I don’t control my appetite for ice cream as well as you do, and you don’t control your sexual expression as well as I do. We both have our problems. We’re both imperfect. We both need to master our appetites.” That’s really what this is: appetite control.

It is very sad for people who have been afflicted with same-sex attraction disorder. It’s a terrible burden. Or for people who have given license to their appetites long enough that they became addictions. Addiction doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s nurtured, by people who didn’t control themselves well enough, until the appetite was out of control. I’m sorry, but abstinence is the start. You start with nothing. You just stop. You say no. You don’t do it a little; you just say no. If you fall, you say, “I’m sorry. That was wrong. I shouldn’t do it anymore. I’ll try again another day.” Today you do it one minute at a time.

ISAK: Self-control.

THOMAS: Self-control over desire. Desire is the issue, and control of desire is the largest part of maturity. Get your desires under control, and you won’t sin. You know what sin is. You know your desire to sin. You simply say no. Then we don’t have to worry about sin diversity. We don’t take pride in our sin. We don’t have diverse sins. We don’t honor diverse sins. We just don’t sin. We say no, and that’s the important thing. You have these desires? Learn to control them. You’ve got them, I’ve got them, everybody’s got them. Mine are different from yours, but we all have them, we all have to work on them, and we all have to control them. That’s your job.

And there’s a reward for it. There is a payoff. We won’t live in this body forever, and by living for Christ there is gain. “Are you doing it for the reward?” As a matter of fact, I am. No need to apologize for that. If there were no reward, why would I be doing it?

ISAK: You only work that job because you’re getting paid.

THOMAS: Right.

ISAK: How embarrassing, to have to have a job. “What do you mean, you need money?”

THOMAS: “What do you mean, selling your time for money?”

ISAK: “Your valuable life, for money.”

End of the conversation’s book material. Thomas’s closing words: “I think what we actually have here is a book… This is the backbone of the book. Transforming America.”