In my last Substack, Think Like Pilgrims, Revisited, I argued that the America many of us remember is not coming back and that Christians need to recover the imagination of pilgrims. That naturally raises the next question:

Okay. What should we pilgrims actually do?

I think I’ve been watching part of the answer unfold right in front of me.

I live near a little town in rural Oklahoma with about 1,200 people. Recently, an attempt was made to fire a popular police officer and the chief of police. When people discovered what was happening through the agenda for a Board of Trustees meeting, something remarkable happened.

They showed up.

A huge portion of this little town packed the meeting and stopped it.

Since then, something even more interesting has been happening. A local barbershop and a small community blog have become organizing centers. People are talking to one another. They’re paying attention to local government. A Fall Festival is coming together. I suspect Christmas will bring another community effort. Our little house church intends to participate. Meanwhile, the Board of Trustees suddenly finds itself accountable to people who previously weren’t paying much attention, and there is now an organized effort challenging the city manager with some moving to remove him.

Think about what happened.

• Nobody captured Congress.

• Nobody raised $100 million.

• Nobody persuaded CNN, Fox News or some national conservative organization to care.

• People who lived near one another discovered one another.

• And suddenly they had power.

This is where I think pilgrims should begin. Sure it’s not fancy, but with AI upon us now, local communities will soon become VERY important. Like, within the next two-years.

Jesus told His disciples that they would be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the end of the earth (Acts 1:8). We understandably emphasize the outward movement of that commission. But perhaps American Christians should notice something else about it.

It started in Jerusalem.

Your Jerusalem is probably sitting outside your front door - not in Washington D.C. Having worked there as a Senior Legislative Assistant for a “conservative” Congressman, let me assure you of this - you have NO power there unless you are a big campaign donor.

Sadly, many of us spend enormous amounts of intellectual and emotional energy worrying about Washington, Hollywood, universities, multinational corporations, immigration, elections and institutions worth trillions of dollars over which we possess almost no meaningful influence.

• Meanwhile, we may not know the widow three houses down.

• We don’t know who sits on the town council.

• We don’t know the young father whose electricity is about to be disconnected.

• We don’t know which marriage is collapsing.

• We don’t know the local businessman who might help organize fifty neighbors.

• We don’t know the family whose air conditioner just failed in an Oklahoma summer and who doesn’t have $4,000 to replace it.

• We stare at Rome while walking past Jerusalem.

Perhaps the first task of pilgrims is much smaller, much harder and ultimately much more consequential:

Build Jerusalem.

Our little experiment

There is another experiment happening where I live, and this one is much closer to home. We gather as a house church. I once was the guy on the stage, so I understand the institutional model from the inside, and I am not suggesting moving Christians into a living room somehow solves the problem of fallen human beings. It doesn’t. There can still be a unbiblical clergy/laity distinction in the home, and don’t think a comfortable chair cannot become a stage and pulpit.

But I increasingly believe the house church may represent an important part of the Christian frontier because it forces us to reconsider assumptions about church that have accumulated over many centuries.

A first-century Christian reading Paul’s letters would not have imagined what a modern Western Christian usually pictures when hearing the word pastor: a professionally trained and usually salaried man standing behind a pulpit before hundreds of relatively passive listeners in a building owned by the church. In Ephesians 4:11, poimēn means shepherd. Translating it “pastor” isn’t necessarily wrong, provided we remember that pastor originally meant shepherd. The problem arises when we pour the entire modern institutional package back into Paul’s word and then begin assuming that shepherding is principally the work of a professional religious class and/or it is an “office” within the body.

This is why we sometimes describe the expectation in our gathering provocatively as “every man an elder.” I don’t mean that every Christian husband occupies the ecclesial function of elder or overseer. I mean that every Christian husband should aspire to become the kind of man from whom elders naturally arise. Read Paul’s description in 1 Timothy 3: sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, gentle rather than violent, not quarrelsome or greedy, spiritually mature, respected by outsiders and managing his household well. Which of those characteristics should an ordinary Christian husband not desire?

Paul himself connects the two spheres when he asks, “If someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God’s church?” (1 Timothy 3:5). Household leadership is therefore not unrelated to shepherding the larger household of God. It is part of the proving ground for it.

The ecclesial responsibility may be particular, but the character is paradigmatic. Our goal, therefore, is not to convince every man that he possesses a church office. It is to destroy the idea that Christian men are supposed to spend thirty years sitting in pews while outsourcing biblical knowledge, teaching, discipleship, hospitality and spiritual leadership to the man on the stage.

Our gathering gives men somewhere to exercise those muscles. Every man participates and is expected to grow in his ability to lead, teach, serve and shepherd. The same principle applies to the women. One of our older women, for example, is working diligently to recover the Titus 2 pattern of older women helping younger wives and mothers. None of this makes our gathering remarkable. It simply means ordinary Christians are being given meaningful Christian responsibilities rather than primarily being asked to attend something.

When the church becomes a social safety net again

The part of this experiment that may excite me most, however, is what happens outside our gathering. Our community is poor, and there are widows and families who regularly reach the end of the month without enough money. Electricity gets disconnected. Food runs low. Air conditioners fail during Oklahoma summers. Plumbing breaks. Cars quit running. When we learn about these needs, we try to help. Sometimes God has provided money; sometimes He has provided men who know how to fix things; sometimes somebody simply needs groceries or a bill paid.

This experience has given Proverbs 18:16 a very tangible meaning for me: “A man’s gift makes room for him and brings him before the great.” The proverb itself is not an evangelism manual. Its immediate picture is of a gift opening access and bringing a man before people he otherwise might not reach. But the social reality behind the proverb is wonderfully human. Gifts make room.

In the honor-shame world of Scripture, a gift could acknowledge another person’s dignity, establish goodwill and create relational space where none previously existed. We see something similar when someone’s electricity has been disconnected and Christians help turn it back on, or when a widow faces a problem she cannot solve and men arrive to solve it, or when a struggling family discovers groceries they could not afford have been provided. We aren’t buying anyone, trading assistance for a profession of faith, or attaching a Gospel presentation as a condition of receiving help.

We help because these people bear God’s image and because loving our neighbor is itself obedience to God.

But kindness changes relationships. People who might never enter a church building may invite you into their lives. Someone who has little reason to listen to a stranger talk about Jesus may be remarkably willing to listen to the man who sat beside him when his electricity was about to be shut off. The gift cannot regenerate anyone, and it cannot do the work of the Word or the Holy Spirit. It simply makes room. Once God gives us that room, however, we bring the Gospel into it.

I suspect several people we are serving today may become Christians before the year ends. If they do, it won’t be because we discovered a clever evangelistic technique. It will be because God gave us resources, placed people with needs near us, allowed us to love them in tangible ways and then opened relationships through which we could speak about Christ.

There is a practical reason our little gathering can function this way. We have no mortgage, church building, staff salaries, stage, lighting system or administrative structure requiring continual financial support. The hard truth is, money used to maintain an institution cannot simultaneously pay a widow’s electric bill, and hours spent maintaining infrastructure cannot simultaneously be spent helping a struggling family. Because our overhead is almost nonexistent, all of what God gives us can flow outward.

And the community notices, mostly because people talk. A widow knows another widow. A struggling mother knows another struggling mother. The man whose plumbing you repaired knows someone whose car just died. Relationships begin forming that no church marketing campaign could manufacture. I increasingly wonder whether this ordinary web of generosity, hospitality, discipleship and shared life looks considerably more like the social witness of the early church than much of what we have built around the modern Sunday service.

What I know for certain is this - no month goes by where one of our locals finds us and a text comes. We meet, discuss and always address the need. God has bless us with this opportunity - who are we to calculate whether it is worthy or not.

Start where you actually have agency

This brings me back to the Pilgrim question. I write about enormous subjects: government, culture, abortion, constitutionalism, immigration, artificial intelligence, secession and the future of Western civilization. Christians should think seriously about all of them.

But there is a danger in spending most of our intellectual and emotional energy at a scale where we possess almost no meaningful agency. I cannot control Washington, the Supreme Court, Harvard, Hollywood or a multi-trillion-dollar federal government. Neither can most people reading this.

What I can do is know my neighbor, help a widow, disciple my family, strengthen our gathering, participate in my little town, attend a Board of Trustees meeting, help with the Fall Festival, put food in somebody’s refrigerator and tell people about Christ. None of that is retreat from the larger struggle. It is the exercise of actual agency rather than imagined influence. Perhaps we have spent so much time raging about institutions beyond our reach that we have neglected the people and institutions God has placed directly within it.

This matters even if we eventually reach the much larger political questions I have been raising. I have written about secession and expect to continue doing so because I increasingly wonder whether peaceful political separation may eventually become necessary in a country whose populations no longer share enough moral assumptions to sustain a common political project. But political separation by itself cannot create the civilization we hope might follow it.

You cannot secede into a civilization you haven’t built.

Drawing a new border around thirty-one states accomplishes very little if the people within those borders remain atomized, their families weak, their churches passive, their neighbors strangers, their men spectators and their communities dependent upon distant institutions to perform responsibilities they once performed themselves. Geography does not manufacture civilization. Civilization grows from families, churches, neighborhoods, habits, obligations, shared beliefs and people who have learned to govern themselves together.

That may be the lesson my little Oklahoma town is teaching me. People who thought they possessed very little political influence discovered that several hundred neighbors standing together in the same room possessed quite a bit of it. Christians who might assume meaningful ministry requires a building, staff and programs are discovering that a living room, mature men and women, open wallets, willing hands and the Gospel can accomplish quite a bit too. Neither experiment is perfect and neither ever will be, but both are real, and both are happening within a few miles of my house.

So perhaps the answer to “What should we pilgrims do?” begins much closer to home than our national political imagination normally permits. Before trying to save America, learn the names of the people around you. Strengthen your household. Know the widow. Help the struggling family. Develop Christian men who can shepherd rather than merely consume sermons. Restore older women to the Titus 2 work younger women desperately need. Know the local businessman, the barber and the town trustee. Participate in the life of your community. Give generously enough that your gifts actually make room in people’s lives, and when God opens that room, carry the Gospel through the door.

Jesus told His disciples that they would be His witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and eventually to the end of the earth. There was an outward movement to that commission, but it began somewhere.

Perhaps American Christians should do the same.

Find your Jerusalem. Build there.

Then perhaps we’ll be ready to think seriously about Judea.

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So we’re back from our two-week family vacation in Nags Head, North Carolina, and we had a wonderful time. So I’m back in the saddle and will get back to writing - time is short.

Last night, as we flew into DFW and made our way through the airport, I had a considerable amount of time simply to observe the country around me.

And something struck me with unusual force.

The America I grew up in during the 1960s is gone.

I don’t mean merely that America has changed. Of course it has. Every country changes. I mean that the cultural continuity connecting the country of my childhood to the civilization founded here roughly 250 years ago has been substantially broken. The assumptions about God, family, morality, sex, community, nation, duty and even what it means to be an American that once provided a broadly recognizable cultural framework are no longer shared.

We have become something else.

That does not mean everyone around me at DFW was bad, threatening or somehow responsible for what has happened. That would badly miss my point. Airports are simply unusual places because you can sit still while thousands of people pass before you. Looking around that terminal, I realized how completely the country has changed during my own lifetime.

And then I remembered something I wrote more than two years ago.

We are in a Pilgrim moment.

Sadly, there seem to be very few pilgrims - for now anway.

When the old assumptions disappear

The Pilgrims did not wake up one morning, decide England was imperfect and impulsively board the Mayflower.

They reached their conclusion over time.

The world around them had become incompatible with convictions they considered more important than comfort, familiarity and security. Eventually they had to confront a difficult question: What if the place we have always called home can no longer provide the conditions necessary for the life we believe we ought to live, more importantly, a life God expected them to live?

My 10th great-grandfather was on that Mayflower and the more I learn about him, the more I want the dedicate my remaining years as devoted to freedom to practice Christianity as he did.

So the question of the life God expects us to live is a profoundly different question from the one most American Christians continue asking.

We keep asking how to get the old America back.

Elect the right president. Capture Congress. Appoint better judges. Win the next election. Reform the schools. Defeat the Left. Restore constitutional government. Rebuild the Republican Party.

But what if the civilization capable of sustaining the America we remember no longer exists?

That possibility changes the question.

The question becomes not, How do we get 1980 back?

It becomes, How do Christians faithfully live in 2026?

Those are not remotely the same project.

Pilgrims understood something we have forgotten

The people who crossed the Atlantic four centuries ago possessed remarkably little compared with us. They left familiar communities, livelihoods and physical security. They crossed an ocean without knowing whether the experiment would even work.

Yet they possessed something modern Americans increasingly lack: the ability to imagine a life outside the political and cultural arrangements they had inherited.

That is what I mean by thinking like pilgrims.

I am not suggesting that everyone sell their house tomorrow, find a ship and search for an undiscovered continent. There isn’t one.

Our frontier may therefore have to look very different from theirs.

It may mean:

• stronger extended families.

• Multi-generational households.

• House churches.

• Christian schools and homeschooling.

• Local economies.

• Land ownership.

• Geographic concentration.

• Mutual aid.

• Communities capable of caring for their own.

• Greater independence from institutions increasingly hostile to Christian convictions.

• Perhaps political secession eventually becomes part of that conversation as well.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what it looks like. But I do know that the desire for such a frontier is already visible. Thirty-one states voted for Trump in 2024, and Trump - whether as caricature, symbol or repository into which people poured their hope of restoration - reflected a cultural ethos that remains recognizably Christian and conservative: traditional marriage, masculinity, an anti-woke and pro-family orientation, entrepreneurship, self-government and a desire to preserve the moral assumptions that made American freedom possible.

That vote was not simply a referendum on one man. It was evidence that a substantial portion of the country still wants to live within a different cultural order from the one being imposed by the institutions that increasingly govern American life.

Which is why secession will likely be the most viable way to imagine sailing off to a new frontier.

The Pilgrims did not merely seek better representation within the world they were leaving. They sought a place where their community could order its life according to convictions the old world no longer protected. In our circumstances, that means imagining political secession, not as an act of hatred toward our fellow citizens, but as a peaceful recognition that the country has become too culturally divided to sustain one common political project.

A new frontier may not require discovering new land. It may require recovering the possibility of self-government among people who still share enough convictions to govern themselves together.

But that uncertainty is precisely why imagination matters.

Pilgrims do not begin with a complete blueprint. They begin by recognizing that the old arrangement is no longer adequate and then asking what must be built in its place.

I am here at this place.

Are you?

The hardest thing may be admitting what has happened

This is where I think Christians and conservatives struggle.

We have enormous emotional investment in America.

I understand it. I once felt it myself.

I remember the America of my childhood. I remember its neighborhoods, churches, schools, families, expectations and assumptions. It certainly wasn’t perfect. No fallen society ever has been. But it possessed a cultural coherence that is increasingly difficult even to explain to younger Americans because they never experienced it.

And it was beautiful, peaceful, simple.

And I think many of us are still waiting for that country to come home.

It isn’t coming home.

The demographic, religious, technological, economic, sexual and political transformations of the last sixty years are too profound. Even a spectacular electoral victory cannot reverse them because elections are downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from what people believe about God, man and reality itself.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can begin thinking clearly.

There is an important difference between despair and recognition.

Despair says nothing can be done.

Recognition says something different must be done.

Christians should be unusually capable of this

This should not terrify Christians.

Our faith was never supposed to depend upon the permanence of the United States.

• The Kingdom of God does not rise and fall with Washington.

• The Gospel does not require the Constitution.

• Christian families do not require permission from the Supreme Court to become faithful Christian families.

• The Church survived Rome, persecution, collapsing empires, invading armies and civilizations far more hostile than ours.

Right?

Perhaps our great disadvantage is that American Christians became so comfortable inside one particular civilization that we began confusing its preservation with Christian faithfulness.

Pilgrims cannot afford that confusion.

They have to distinguish what is eternal from what is temporal, what must be preserved from what can be surrendered, and what God actually commands from what we merely inherited.

That requires loving God with our minds.

It requires looking at the world as it actually exists rather than continually demanding that reality conform itself to our memories. Or even our favorite political ideology.

So where are the pilgrims?

That is the question I find myself asking after returning home.

Not, Where are the Republicans?

Not, Where are the constitutional conservatives?

Not even, Where are the angry Christians?

• Where are the men and women willing to acknowledge that an age has ended and begin seriously thinking about what should come next?

• Where are the families willing to organize their lives around generations rather than election cycles?

• Where are the Christians willing to build institutions instead of merely complaining about the institutions they lost?

• Where are the communities willing to experiment with new ways of living together, educating children, caring for the elderly, worshiping, producing, protecting and providing?

• Where are the people willing to sacrifice comfort now so their grandchildren might inherit something better later?

Four centuries ago, only a tiny number of people climbed aboard those ships. My 19th Great Grandfather was one of them.

That may be the part of the Pilgrim story we most need to remember.

It never required a majority.

It required pilgrims.

Coming Next: What Should We Pilgrims Do?

If we really are living in a Pilgrim moment, then recognizing it isn’t enough. Pilgrims eventually have to build something.

And perhaps we have the order backward. Before we talk seriously about secession, national politics or rebuilding a civilization, we should ask whether we have learned to build anything where God has already placed us.

Jesus began with Jerusalem (Acts 1:8).

In my little corner of rural Oklahoma, I’m watching two fascinating experiments unfold: a small town rediscovering the power of local community, and a house church discovering what can happen when Christians redirect their attention and resources toward discipleship, widows, struggling families and their neighbors.

Maybe the new frontier doesn’t begin in Washington.

Maybe it begins right outside your front door.

Next: What Should We Pilgrims Do?

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Last year I wrote an essay called The 4% Who Rule You. I was trying to understand something that had bothered me for years: why do people who desire extraordinary power over other human beings so often seem different from the ordinary people over whom they exercise it?

But if I am going to ask that question honestly, I cannot ask it only about them. I spent part of my own younger life on Capitol Hill, eventually serving as a Legislative Correspondent and then Senior Legislative Assistant to two Members of Congress. I wanted to be there. I wanted proximity to political power and influence. Why? What attracted me to that world? Was it simply public service and an interest in government, or was there something about influence, status, access, and being close to the machinery of power that appealed to my own fallen nature? I would be intellectually dishonest to scrutinize the motives of today’s elected officials without turning the same scrutiny upon myself.

That does not mean everyone who seeks political office or influence is a narcissist. It means the desire for power itself deserves examination, including when I find that desire in myself.

I still believe the question I asked last year was important. But in that Substack, I think I framed the answer too crudely.

The deeper problem is not whether some fixed percentage of politicians can be labeled sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, or anything else. Nor am I interested in remotely diagnosing elected officials with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

There is a much more interesting question available to us, and Christians in particular should be willing to ask it.

George Orwell famously gave us the corrupted commandment of Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

I want to borrow the structure while making a very different point:

All men are fallen. But some men are more fallen.

That sentence sounds theologically dangerous.

Good.

It should make us think.

Because understood ontologically, it is false. Understood functionally, I believe it describes something Christians desperately need to recover, perhaps even discover for the first time.

Ontology and Function

Ontology is simply concerned with what something is. Function concerns how something operates, behaves, or manifests itself.

Christians already make this distinction, even if we do not regularly use the philosophical terminology.

Consider men and women.

Ontologically, men and women are the same kind of creature before God. Both are human. Both are created in God’s image. “Male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27). Neither possesses more human dignity than the other. Both are fallen in Adam, both stand under judgment apart from Christ, and both require the same Savior.

Yet ontological equality does not require functional sameness.

Scripture assigns distinctions between men and women in marriage and the church, including passages such as Ephesians 5:22-33 and 1 Timothy 2:12-14. Christians disagree vigorously about how broadly those distinctions should be applied, but the conceptual point remains. Things can be equal ontologically without being identical functionally.

Now apply the same reasoning to the Fall.

Ontologically, all men are fallen.

Paul could hardly be clearer: “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Through Adam, sin entered the world and death through sin (Romans 5:12). There is no secret class of morally unfallen human beings walking among us.

The kindly grandmother is fallen. The missionary is fallen. The mechanic is fallen. The politician is fallen. The thief is fallen. The murderer is fallen.

But does the Bible therefore teach that fallen nature manifests itself identically in every human being?

Clearly not.

Functionally, human fallenness varies enormously.

Some people possess tender consciences. Other consciences become “seared” (1 Timothy 4:2). Some people sin and are crushed when confronted. Others harden themselves. Some are foolish. Others deliberately devise wickedness. Proverbs describes those whose “feet run rapidly to evil” and whose hearts “devise wicked plans” (Proverbs 6:16-19). Still others reach the extraordinary condition described in Proverbs 2:14, actually rejoicing in doing evil.

Romans 1 describes something more disturbing still. Human beings suppress truth, persist in rebellion, and eventually God “gives them over” to increasingly corrupted desires and thinking. The passage describes movement. Development. Hardening.

The Bible therefore does not present humanity as eight billion interchangeable units of depravity.

• Peter is fallen.

• Judas is fallen.

• David is fallen.

• Herod is fallen.

• Paul before conversion is fallen.

• Diotrephes, who “likes to put himself first,” is fallen (3 John 9).

But these men are not functionally interchangeable.

So when I say all men are fallen, but some men are more fallen, I am not arguing that some human beings possess more original sin, less human dignity, or less of the image of God.

I mean that the Fall does not manifest itself identically in every person. Character develops. Consciences can become hardened. Habits become entrenched. Appetites become dominant. Restraints weaken. Some people become extraordinarily deceptive, manipulative, cruel, predatory, or hungry for domination.

And Scripture expects us to recognize the difference.

Your Daughter Already Proves You Understand This

Suppose your daughter came to you frightened.

A man has become obsessed with her. He lies to her. He follows her. He refuses to respect boundaries. He manipulates her emotionally. Perhaps he has begun threatening her.

Imagine responding: “Well, sweetheart, we’re all sinners.”

Everything about that statement is theologically correct. Everything about using it in that situation is insane. You would immediately begin making distinctions.

• Has he threatened you?

• Does he habitually lie?

• Has he done this to other women?

• Does he respect boundaries?

• Does he demonstrate empathy?

• Does he enjoy frightening you?

• Is his behavior escalating?

• Does he have access to your home?

You would never say, “I cannot judge his behavior because I’m fallen too.”

You would judge his behavior precisely because someone you love may be in danger. You would perform a functional analysis of another fallen human being. And you would do it because you love your daughter.

Now put that same man behind a podium.

• Give him a $3,000 suit.

• Give him television cameras.

• Give him consultants who teach him how to smile.

• Give him speechwriters.

• Give him polling data.

• Give him a political party.

• Give him several million dollars.

And then give him governmental authority over millions of human beings.

Why does our theology suddenly become less discerning?

Jesus Believed in Wolves

One of the strangest habits among Christians is treating discernment about character as somehow unchristian. Jesus apparently did not share our concern.

When sending his disciples into the world, he told them:

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.”
Matthew 10:16

Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say everyone is basically a sheep struggling with different sins.

He identifies wolves.

That is a functional distinction between human beings.

Jesus simultaneously commands innocence and wisdom. Apparently innocence is not synonymous with naïveté. The Christian is not permitted to become wolfish, but neither is he permitted to pretend wolves do not exist.

The rest of Scripture is filled with similar distinctions: fools, oppressors, hypocrites, deceivers, wicked rulers, false shepherds, violent men, the hard-hearted, the double-minded, the seared in conscience, and men who love preeminence.

God apparently believes these distinctions matter.

Why wouldn’t we?

Put 1,000 People in a Room

Imagine putting 1,000 randomly selected adults into an enormous room. Most are ordinary people.

They want to raise their families. They want meaningful friendships. They want enough money to live comfortably. They want their children to do well. They enjoy vacations, hobbies, grandchildren, football games, church dinners, gardening, hunting, music, or whatever else gives ordinary life its texture.

They’re fallen.

They get angry. They envy. They rationalize selfishness. They occasionally lie. They can be cowardly. They can behave terribly.

But suppose a small number among the thousand possess unusually strong combinations of grandiosity, entitlement, hunger for admiration, manipulativeness, low empathy, willingness to exploit others, and desire for dominance.

Now place an enormous lever in the center of the room.

Whoever controls that lever gains extraordinary authority over the other 999 people.

• He can regulate their businesses.

• Tax their income.

• Control enormous amounts of money.

• Command bureaucracies.

• Determine which behavior is punished.

• Influence war and peace.

• Put his face on television every evening.

• Have thousands of people stand when he enters a room.

• Now announce that anyone may compete for control of the lever.

Here is the question:

Are the people who most desperately want that lever likely to constitute a psychologically random sample of the thousand people in the room?

Why would we assume they are?

What Psychology Has Discovered

We do not need to speculate entirely.

Psychologists have been studying narcissistic traits and leadership for years. Again, I am speaking here about personality traits measured on a continuum, not diagnosing individual politicians with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

The findings should interest anyone thinking seriously about political power.

In three studies, researchers found an association between narcissism and leader emergence.1 People higher in narcissistic traits were more likely to emerge as leaders, including when experts evaluated leadership emergence among executives.

Other research suggests something even more interesting. Grandiose narcissists may possess characteristics that make them particularly effective at navigating political environments. One 2021 series of studies found that people higher in grandiose narcissism were more likely to perceive organizations politically, more willing to engage in organizational politics, and more skilled at doing so.2 The researchers describe traits including grandiosity, self-confidence, entitlement, and willingness to exploit others for self-interest.

Another study found greater willingness among people higher in narcissism to employ tougher and more aggressive political tactics, particularly when guilt-proneness was lower.3

Think carefully about what this means.

The personality most attracted to power may sometimes be unusually equipped to acquire it.

And this does not mean narcissistic people are incompetent.

That would make the problem easier.

Research involving U.S. presidents suggests grandiose narcissism can be a double-edged sword. It has been associated with qualities we often reward politically, including public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and electoral success. But it was also associated with negative outcomes including unethical behavior and congressional impeachment resolutions.

Other research suggests that the initial appeal of narcissistic leaders can deteriorate as people become better acquainted with them. In one longitudinal study, narcissism predicted positive peer ratings of leadership during initial group formation, but that advantage disappeared later. Among groups whose members already knew one another, narcissism eventually correlated negatively with peer-rated leadership.4

This is much more interesting than saying narcissistic people are simply bad leaders.

Some of the characteristics that should concern us may be precisely the characteristics that initially impress us.

• Confidence attracts followers.

• Grandiosity can look like vision.

• An appetite for admiration can produce extraordinary public performance.

• Manipulation can look like political skill.

• Shamelessness can be mistaken for courage.

An extraordinary desire for status can create an extraordinarily hardworking candidate.

The dysfunction may help produce the résumé.

Politics Is Not a Random Sample of Humanity

This is the part I think Christians have not thought deeply enough about.

We routinely speak of government as though elected officials are ordinary people randomly selected from the population.

• They aren’t.

• They self-select.

Before someone becomes president, senator, governor, congressman, cabinet secretary, party chairman, or perhaps even mayor of a city, he generally has to want something most people do not want badly enough to pursue.

He must endure campaigns, fundraising, scrutiny, attacks, endless public appearances, institutional maneuvering, networking, competition, and frequently years of positioning himself for advancement.

That doesn’t make him a narcissist.

Many honorable people enter politics from a genuine sense of duty.

But the selection mechanism matters.

If certain personality traits simultaneously increase a person’s desire for status, his willingness to manipulate others, his comfort with organizational politics, and his ability to project confidence, then political institutions may not merely suffer from narcissistic personalities after they arrive.

They may help select for them.

That possibility should profoundly affect how Christians think about political institutions.

The question is no longer merely:

How do we design government knowing that men are fallen?

The more sophisticated question is:

How do we design government knowing that the people most aggressively seeking governmental power may represent particular manifestations of fallenness that make the possession of enormous power especially dangerous?

That is a very different problem.

“But We’re All Sinners”

Yes. We are.

But this is where an ontological truth can become an excuse for functional stupidity.5

“We’re all sinners” establishes our common condition before God. It does not tell us that every sinner should receive identical levels of trust, authority, responsibility, or access to other human beings.

We understand this everywhere except politics.

• You would not hire an embezzler as your accountant because “we’re all sinners.”

• You would not hire a convicted child abuser to supervise the church nursery because “we’re all sinners.”

• You would not give the man stalking your daughter a key to her apartment because “we’re all sinners.”

Yet somehow, when contemplating men seeking control of governments capable of surveillance, taxation, imprisonment, warfare, regulation, property seizure, and enormous economic redistribution, our anthropology becomes astonishingly shallow.

Everyone is fallen.

Therefore everyone is basically the same.

No. Emphatically NO!

• Scripture doesn’t teach that.

• Experience doesn’t teach that.

• Psychology doesn’t teach that.

• And Jesus certainly didn’t teach that.

There are wolves.

Loving God Requires the Mind

This brings me back to the command that has increasingly shaped how I try to understand the world:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”
Matthew 22:37

We usually read that command devotionally. I think we should also read it intellectually, and more importantly, we should read it as what it actually is: a command from the God of the universe to be obeyed. Loving God with our minds is not an interesting suggestion for Christians who happen to enjoy thinking. It is part of what Jesus says obedience to God requires.

And that means we should be willing to use the uncomfortable biblical word when we refuse to do it: sin.

If God commands me to love Him with my mind, then intellectual laziness, especially when I have the ability and opportunity to think carefully, cannot simply be excused as temperament or disinterest. If I refuse to examine assumptions because they are comfortable, repeat inherited slogans because investigation is difficult, or deliberately avoid evidence because I fear where it might lead, I should at least be willing to ask whether I am failing to obey something Christ explicitly commanded.

God gave us minds with which to discern reality. Christianity does not require us to close our eyes to human behavior in order to demonstrate grace. Quite the opposite. Scripture repeatedly tells us to watch, discern, test, judge rightly, recognize fruit, distinguish wisdom from foolishness, and identify wolves.

• If God tells me wolves exist, loving Him with my mind requires me to learn something about wolves.

• If observable human beings differ dramatically in conscience, empathy, aggression, deceitfulness, narcissism, appetite for domination, and capacity for remorse, I should account for those differences.

• If empirical research suggests that certain personality characteristics can make people unusually interested in power and unusually effective at obtaining leadership positions, I should want to know that too.

And if I am helping design, defend, or perpetuate political institutions that concentrate enormous amounts of coercive power in the hands of whoever wins the competition to obtain it, I had better think very carefully about who that competition attracts and rewards.

That isn’t cynicism.

It is discernment.

Perhaps We Asked the Wrong Question

For generations, conservative Christians have correctly observed that government must account for fallen human nature.

Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

True enough.

But perhaps that observation doesn’t go far enough.

The problem isn’t simply that the people governing us aren’t angels.

The problem may be that the political process itself disproportionately rewards certain characteristics among fallen men.

Put another way, perhaps we have spent too much time designing government around the proposition that all men are fallen, without adequately considering what happens when some manifestations of fallenness are particularly attracted to governing other men.

That is where Orwell’s formulation becomes useful again.

All men are fallen.

But some men are more fallen.

Ontologically?

No.

Every one of us stands desperately in need of Christ.

Functionally?

Of course.

Some men possess tender consciences and others seared ones. Some repent when confronted and others retaliate. Some reluctantly accept responsibility while others crave authority. Some use influence to serve. Others discover that influence satisfies something deep within themselves and spend their lives accumulating more of it.

A Christian political anthropology that refuses to recognize those differences isn’t more biblical because it constantly repeats that everyone is a sinner.

It is less biblical because Scripture recognizes those differences everywhere.

And that leaves us with a question much larger than narcissism and much larger than any particular politician:

What kind of political system would Christians design if we actually believed Jesus when He warned us about wolves?

Perhaps we would spend considerably less time asking whether the men seeking the lever agree with us.

Perhaps we would spend considerably more time asking why anyone should possess such an enormous lever in the first place.

And more importantly, why do we keep defending the Constitution as sacred when our eyes tell us something very different. We see evil from this government created by the Constitution and yet refuse to call evil, evil.

Loving God with our minds requires us to questions why we recoil.

And perhaps loving God with all our minds requires us, finally, to ask all these questions.

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I am a born-again Christian who has been commanded by Jesus to love God with my mind (Matthew 22:37). I am commanded to think critically, even about the Constitution. I cannot embrace a mythology, I must only embrace truth and historic facts.

There appears to be one proposition that cannot be entertained in polite constitutional-conservative society:

Maybe the Constitution is part of the problem.

You may criticize Congress. You may condemn the Supreme Court. You may rage against presidents, bureaucrats, Democrats, Republicans, progressives, Marxists, universities, voters, judges, administrative agencies and, when every other explanation has been exhausted, that wonderfully convenient abstraction called the people.

But the Constitution itself?

Careful.

For many constitutional conservatives, the investigation ends before it begins. The Constitution must be innocent because the Constitution has already been declared innocent. Whatever happened under it must therefore have happened contrary to it. Whatever government became cannot tell us anything important about the governmental system that produced it.

And if history becomes inconvenient, apparently history must move aside.

That is why I have become increasingly critical of constitutional conservative leaders who continually tell Christians and conservatives that America’s great political task is to “return to the Constitution.” Before following them back there, I would like to know something rather elementary:

Back to which year?

1789?

1798?

1803?

Because if we actually return to the beginning instead of the mythology surrounding the beginning, we discover something very different from the story many of us were taught.

And unlike most constitutional conservative leaders, I will cite the FACTS. Not a story, but a fact and link to them.

Start With the Assignment

The Constitutional Convention was not summoned with a blank sheet of paper and instructions to invent whatever government the delegates considered best.

Congress’s February 21, 1787 resolution authorized a convention for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”1 The resulting alterations were to be reported to Congress and the state legislatures and become effective when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states. The words “sole” and “express” were not casual phrasing but terms of legal limitation: sole meant the Convention had no other authorized object or jurisdiction beyond revision, and express meant that this was the explicitly stated, narrowly defined mandate under which the delegates were commissioned. The delegates were well aware that these words functioned as binding constraints in their commissions, signaling that any action beyond revision would exceed the formal legal authority under which they had been appointed.

New York’s commission was equally explicit. Robert Yates, John Lansing Jr. and Alexander Hamilton were appointed for the “sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”2

Delaware imposed an additional restriction. Its delegates were prohibited from agreeing to any alteration that eliminated the principle that each state possessed one vote under Article V of the Confederation.3

These are not theories invented by modern Constitution critics. These are documents.

And the delegates knew the problem.

On May 30, Charles Pinckney observed that declaring the existing federal system incapable of accomplishing its purposes might effectively terminate the Convention’s authority because its powers were to revise and amend the Confederation.4 When proportional representation was considered, Delaware objected specifically because its delegates’ credentials prohibited it.

That sounds considerably less like a gathering of men who unanimously understood themselves to possess authority to create an entirely new government.

Eventually they did exactly that.

Congress’s own constitutional history acknowledges the difficulty: the Convention had been called to revise the Articles but instead proposed an entirely new Constitution, along with a ratification procedure under which nine states could establish the new government even though Article XIII of the Articles required unanimous state approval for alterations.

Even the Continental Congress recognized what had happened. Nathan Dane’s September 26 motion described the proposed Constitution as “an entire system in itself” (Journals of the Continental Congress, 33:535–36 (Sept. 28, 1787)) rather than an alteration of the Articles and acknowledged that Congress itself was constitutionally confined to alterations of the existing Confederation.

That does not automatically prove the Constitution illegitimate, though it sure gets close, right? One can make a serious revolutionary, popular-sovereignty or necessity argument defending what the Convention did. Madison essentially confronted the charge in Federalist No. 40.

Fine.

But then make that argument.

Do not tell me there was no problem. And for God’s sake, don’t insist that the solution is “we just have to get back to the original Constitution.”

And Then They Closed the Doors

Once enough states finally arrived, the Convention adopted a secrecy rule.

Madison recorded it plainly:

“That nothing spoken in the House be printed, or otherwise published or communicated without leave.”5

Delegates could not copy entries from the journal without permission, and only members could inspect it.

If you’re going to violate the limitations of the Commissioning Documents, then there were understandable reasons for confidentiality. Madison himself defended secrecy because it allowed freedom of discussion and prevented premature reports from inflaming the public. Jefferson thought otherwise, condemning the precedent of “tying up the tongues” of the delegates.6

My point is not that secrecy proves conspiracy.

My point is that secrecy is part of the history and allows for discussion as to why the secrecy. Maybe you disagree with Madison’s defense of secrecy, especially in this era where transparency is the new buzzword for conservatives. Thus, shouldn’t there have been transparency in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787?

Same with the the conflicts in the Convention - and there were many.

Same with the departures. It’s intellectually honest to wonder why at least four delegates to the convention left in protest.

New York delegates Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr. eventually left Philadelphia because they observed that the Convention had exceeded its mandate and moving toward a powerful national government.7 Their departure effectively neutralized New York’s vote because Hamilton was left without the required second delegate.

Why?

Because each state delegation had one vote, but the Convention's rules required that a state have at least two delegates present to be represented for voting purposes. Once Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr. left Philadelphia in July 1787, Hamilton was New York's only remaining delegate. He could participate in debate, but he could not cast New York's vote. Shouldn’t this matter to you as a Constitutional conservative? He shouldn’t have been allowed to cast a vote? 89

At the end, George Mason, Edmund Randolph and Elbridge Gerry refused to sign the Constitution at all. Mason feared, among other things, that the proposed structure would threaten the states and lacked a bill of rights.

This was not fifty-five Christian statesmen holding hands around George Washington while waiting for divine inspiration.

It was politics. Cold, hard, dirty compromising politics.

Serious politics. Brilliant politics in places. Courageous politics in places. But politics nonetheless.

About That Famous Prayer Meeting...

Here we encounter one of my favorite pieces of constitutional mythology.

Benjamin Franklin really did make his famous June 28 appeal for prayer.10 The Convention had become badly divided, particularly over representation. Franklin reminded the delegates of their earlier dependence upon Providence and proposed that prayers be offered each morning before business began.

Roger Sherman seconded him.

And then something rather inconvenient happened.

They did not adopt it.

Hamilton and others objected. Hugh Williamson noted that the Convention lacked money for a chaplain. Edmund Randolph proposed instead that a sermon be preached on July 4.

The Convention finally adjourned without ever voting on Franklin’s prayer proposal.

That is the historical record.

Yet somewhere along the way this episode has been transformed into a Christian founding legend in which Franklin called the Convention to prayer, the delegates humbled themselves before God, attended church together, returned spiritually transformed, and a supernatural spirit of unity descended upon Philadelphia.

It is a wonderful story.

There is just one irritating problem.

It isn’t what happened.11

Some would call it a lie. At best its a Barton Fairytale.

The National Park Service itself notes that Franklin’s proposal has been particularly susceptible to later embellishment.12

If your defense of the Constitution requires turning an unsuccessful prayer motion into something resembling Pentecost in Philadelphia, perhaps we should reconsider what we are doing.

Christians, especially, should demand better. We are supposed to be people of integrity, right?

He who walks in integrity walks securely, But he who perverts his ways will be found out. Proverbs 10:9

Defending the Constitution at all costs in not practicing integrity.

Then Came Ratification

Perhaps everything became wonderfully democratic once the Constitution was sent to the states.

Pennsylvania should cure anyone of that romanticism.

When opponents in the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to attend and thereby denied the legislature the necessary two-thirds quorum for completing arrangements for a ratifying convention, officials were ordered to find the missing legislators.

With assistance from a mob, two absent members, James M’Calmont and Jacob Miley, were forcibly brought into the chamber. Their presence supplied the quorum. The Assembly proceeded to schedule the election and convention. The episode became sufficiently controversial that opponents publicly protested both the violence and the proceedings.13

Pennsylvania ultimately ratified 46-23.

Again, this does not by itself invalidate Pennsylvania’s ratification.

It does something more important for my argument.

It destroys the fairy tale.

Massachusetts presents another fascinating picture. Ratification there barely prevailed, 187-168, and Federalists themselves became sufficiently concerned about defeat that recommended amendments became important to securing ratification.

The geographical division was remarkable. Contemporary tabulations show strong Federalist support in coastal counties such as Suffolk and Essex while Worcester County voted overwhelmingly against ratification, 58-7. Western Hampshire and Berkshire counties also opposed it.14

Does that pattern sound remotely familiar?

Urban and commercial interests seeing government differently from rural populations?

Apparently the “red county/blue city” argument began considerably earlier than Fox News.

The important point is that the Constitution was not handed down to an adoring American population. Ratification was an extraordinarily bitter political struggle. Massachusetts was 187-168. Virginia was 89-79. New York was 30-27. Rhode Island eventually ratified 34-32.

Those numbers should forever end the story of some nearly unanimous American constitutional consensus.

Then the New Government Actually Started Governing

Here is where things become even more uncomfortable.

If today’s constitutional mythology were correct, we should expect the earliest Congresses, populated by men who actually participated in the founding generation, to provide our clearest example of limited constitutional government.

Instead, almost immediately, they began arguing about what the Constitution allowed.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 is a wonderful example.

Section 25 authorized Supreme Court review of certain decisions from the highest state courts involving federal constitutional, statutory and treaty questions. It was controversial precisely because critics regarded federal judicial review of state courts as an intrusion upon state authority.

Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania left us one of the rare private accounts of the First Senate, whose proceedings were then closed to the public. He despised the Judiciary Bill and accused Oliver Ellsworth, one of its principal architects, of departing from the Constitution.15

Stop and consider what that means.

• 1789.

• Not 1889.

• Not 1937.

• Not the Warren Court.

The government had barely opened for business and senators were already fighting about whether Congress was constructing federal power beyond what the Constitution permitted.

So much for the idea that everyone originally understood exactly what the document meant and government only wandered away generations later.

And Then Came 1798

Nine years.

That is approximately how long it took before a Federalist Congress enacted the Sedition Act.

The First Amendment said:

“Congress shall make no law...”

Yet Congress made one.

And this wasn’t because nobody had thought of the constitutional objection.

The Democratic-Republicans made it.

They argued that the Constitution delegated no power to Congress to regulate speech or the press and that the First Amendment specifically prohibited Congress from doing so. Federalists answered with a competing constitutional interpretation, including arguments based upon the Necessary and Proper Clause and common-law understandings of seditious libel.16

And then came the part constitutional mythology never adequately explains.

The Federalists had the votes.

• The constitutional argument did not magically descend from the parchment and arrest them.

• The enumerated-powers doctrine did not leap from Article I.

• The First Amendment did not physically prevent Congress from passing the statute.

• One side said the Constitution prohibited the legislation.

• The other side said it permitted it.

• Political power decided what happened.

That should cause us to ask a question much larger than whether the Federalists were wrong about the Sedition Act.

Who actually enforces the limitation when the people exercising governmental power interpret the limitation differently?

That question has haunted the Constitution from the beginning.

Then John Marshall Told Us Who Says What the Law Is

In 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote perhaps the most consequential sentence in American constitutional history:

“It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”17

If a statute and the Constitution conflicted, Marshall reasoned, courts necessarily had to determine which governed the case before them.

There is an irony here that constitutional conservatives should appreciate. Marshall’s opinion simultaneously defended the idea of a limited written Constitution. He explicitly argued that constitutional limitations would be meaningless if those intended to be restrained could simply pass beyond them.

Exactly.

But that merely relocates the problem.

Who determines whether the boundary has been crossed?

Marshall’s answer was the judiciary when deciding cases properly before it.

And as American constitutional government developed, judicial interpretations became extraordinarily powerful determinants of what government could actually do. Which brings us to the question constitutional conservatives rarely answer satisfactorily.

Suppose the Supreme Court says the Constitution permits something you believe the Constitution clearly prohibits.

• Now what?

• Tell me the mechanism.

• Not the theory.

• Not Federalist 51.

• Not “checks and balances.”

• Not “We the People.”

Show me the lever an ordinary American pulls that forces five Supreme Court justices to adopt his interpretation of the Constitution.

It does not exist.

You can elect presidents who appoint future judges. You can elect senators who confirm them. Congress can alter inferior federal courts and regulate portions of appellate jurisdiction within constitutional boundaries. You can amend the Constitution. You can pursue political resistance within the system.

In other words:

More politics.

The Constitution Cannot Interpret Itself

This is the point that gets buried underneath all the talk about originalism, enumerated powers and getting “back to the Constitution.”

I can place the Constitution on my desk tonight.

• It will not do anything.

• It cannot interpret itself.

• It cannot enforce itself.

• It cannot arrest a president.

• It cannot remove a congressman.

• It cannot reverse a Supreme Court decision.

• It cannot prevent an unconstitutional statute from being enacted.

• Human beings must do all of those things.

And human beings disagree about what the Constitution means.

• They disagreed in 1787.

• They disagreed in 1788.

• They disagreed in 1789.

• They disagreed in 1798.

• They disagreed in 1803.

Why, then, have we constructed a political theology in which disagreement about the Constitution is treated as something that happened after the founding?

It was there from the beginning.

Stop Selling Christians the Mythology

This is where I have increasingly lost patience with constitutional conservative leadership.

When Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, David Barton or anyone else tells you that America’s solution is simply to “return to the Constitution,” ask them to define the destination historically.

• I don’t mean rhetorically.

• I mean historically.

• Walk me through the delegates’ commissions.

• Explain Article XIII.

• Explain why Congress authorized revision of the Articles and received an entirely new government with an entirely different ratification mechanism.

• Explain the secrecy rule.

• Explain Yates and Lansing.

• Explain Mason, Randolph and Gerry.

• Explain what actually happened after Franklin’s prayer motion.

• Explain Pennsylvania.

• Explain Massachusetts.

• Explain Section 25.

• Explain Maclay.

• Explain the Sedition Act.

• Explain Marbury.

Then we can have a serious conversation about whether returning to the Constitution solves our problem.

But please stop giving Christians a devotional version of American history and calling it constitutional education.

I am asking something much simpler.

Tell the truth about them.

They disagreed profoundly about sovereignty, representation, democracy, federalism, executive power and the judiciary. They compromised. They had ambitions, some of them wicked. They were fallen men. They maneuvered. They argued. Some walked out. Some refused to sign. Their countrymen nearly rejected their work in several states.

And once the new government began operating, disagreements over constitutional meaning erupted almost immediately.

That is vastly more interesting than the mythology.

It is also vastly more useful.

And you won’t be vulnerable to the charge of misleading people. Just tell the truth.

Maybe the Constitution Isn’t Broken

There is one final possibility constitutional conservatives seem especially reluctant to consider.

What if the Constitution isn’t malfunctioning? (hint: it isn’t)

Perhaps the United States did not slowly abandon some universally understood constitutional government. The historical Americans have been arguing over the boundaries of federal power from the moment the ink dried.

What is more likely is that the enormous government sitting in Washington today is not simply the result of 239 years of inexplicable betrayal.

Perhaps it is also the accumulated result of institutions exercising powers, interpreting ambiguous language, establishing precedents, winning political contests and gradually expanding their jurisdiction while claiming constitutional authority for doing so.

Pretending this isn’t the case and defending a mythology is not a definition of adult maturity, but rather, it is evidence of anti-intellectualism.

And if your constitutional philosophy cannot survive that investigation, the problem isn’t the investigation.

The problem is the philosophy.

Christians, especially, should understand this. Loving God with our minds does not mean protecting inherited political conclusions from uncomfortable evidence. It means following truth wherever the evidence takes us, even when that truth threatens something we have spent our lives believing.

• So read Madison.

• Read Yates.

• Read Mason.

• Read the delegates’ commissions.

• Read the ratification debates.

• Read Maclay.

• Read the Sedition Act debates.

• Read Marshall.

• Then ask the forbidden question:

What if the Constitution we actually received is more accurately revealed by the government it produced than by the mythology constitutional conservatives have constructed around it?

Don’t be afraid. Don’t defend a mythology.

Let the Constitution survive the historical evidence.

Don’t protect it from the evidence and call that constitutional conservatism.

Because when a political philosophy requires us to ignore history, embellish stories, explain away contrary evidence and blame everyone except the system itself, we are no longer studying the Constitution.

We are defending it at all costs.

Maybe the Constitution just needs to be exposed and ended and new thinking about organizing society embraced.

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Footnotes

In 2022, I wrote an essay called The Cult of Constitutionalism. At the time, I was trying to shake constitutional conservatives out of what I had come to regard as an almost reflexive devotion to the Constitution. I still believe that critique was necessary, but four years later I would make the argument differently. My concern today is not simply that the federal government routinely exceeds what conservatives believe to be its constitutional authority. Constitutional conservatives have made that complaint for generations. The more difficult question is whether we have become so committed to defending the Constitution that we are unwilling to evaluate the political system it actually created.

That distinction matters because nearly every conservative criticism of the federal government eventually arrives at the same explanation.

• The Constitution is sound, but politicians, judges, bureaucrats, voters or some combination of them have failed to obey it.

• Federal power expands, and we say the expansion is unconstitutional.

• The administrative state grows, and we say it is unconstitutional.

• Presidents acquire enormous practical authority over war and foreign policy, federal agencies exercise powers unimaginable to most eighteenth-century Americans, and courts discover constitutional meanings previous generations would scarcely recognize.

Yet through all of this, the underlying system remains exempt from criticism because every undesirable outcome can be attributed to someone failing to follow the Constitution correctly.

Sure, there’s the occasional tepid, flaccid: “Well Mark, no document can be perfect!” And sadly, they think this is a profound, intellectual argument.

In the end, there is something intellectually unsatisfying about an argument that can never be falsified.

• If the system produces limited government, the Constitution receives the credit.

• If the system produces enormous government, the people receive the blame. If courts restrain governmental power, constitutionalism worked.

• If courts expand governmental power, the judges failed the Constitution.

• The possibility that the architecture itself might contain weaknesses is almost never seriously entertained.

After 237 years, I we have earned the right to entertain it. In fact, we’re foolish not to critique the underlying system.

The Constitution Is Not Scripture

This is particularly difficult for conservative Christians because many of us inherited an understanding of American history in which Christianity, the founding generation and the Constitution became intertwined.

In this version of the founding story, the Framers were extraordinarily wise, the Constitution was uniquely brilliant, and America’s prosperity and liberty were attributed in substantial measure to the governmental structure they created. Within that story, questioning the Constitution could feel vaguely like questioning the Founders, America or even the Christian heritage of the nation.

In fact, it might even be sinful!

I once thought largely within that framework myself (not the sinful part). I worked on Capitol Hill in the 1980s for two Republican Members of Congress. I considered myself a constitutional conservative, and for years I accepted the standard explanation that America’s political deterioration resulted primarily from abandoning its constitutional foundations.

For Christians especially, there should be nothing threatening about examining the Constitution critically. It is not Scripture. It is not revelation. It was written by fallible men dealing with political issues in the eighteenth century. Recognizing simply places their work in the proper category: human political engineering. Once we place it there, we are free to do what we would do with every other human institution, which is to compare its purposes with its results and ask whether its design accomplished what its advocates claimed it would accomplish.

If an engineer designs a bridge that repeatedly fails under conditions the bridge was expected to withstand, we do not protect the reputation of the engineer by insisting that the bridge would have worked perfectly if people had used it differently. No, we investigate the design. Political architecture should not be granted an exemption from the same kind of examination.

What Actually Restrains the Government?

This brings me to a question that I wish constitutional conservatives would spend considerably more time answering: what mechanisms actually prevent the federal government from expanding its own power?

The difficulty becomes apparent as soon as the question is stated plainly. The Constitution establishes institutions that are themselves responsible for interpreting many of the boundaries placed upon those institutions. Congress determines how broadly to exercise congressional authority. Presidents continually test the boundaries of executive authority. Executive agencies interpret and administer enormous bodies of federal law, while federal courts, ultimately the Supreme Court, determine whether many disputed exercises of governmental power survive constitutional challenge. The government is therefore, the final authority when interpreting the document that supposedly restrains the government.

Please make that make sense? You can’t, can you?

There are supposed checks among the branches, and we’re told elections, federalism, impeachment and judicial review are backstops. My argument is not that the Constitution appears to contain restraints. My question is whether those restraints have proven adequate to the task assigned to them. When government officials exceed constitutional limits, the ordinary consequence is not personal liability for violating the governing agreement even if people are killed by the policy. A policy may eventually be struck down, an agency may lose a lawsuit, a president’s action may be enjoined or legislation may be declared unconstitutional, sometimes after years of litigation. The officials responsible generally continue with their careers.

• No one is fired.

• No one sent to jail.

• No one executed.

• When that would be the appropriate response for average thieves and murderers.

This is where my thinking about contract law has changed the way I look at constitutional government. In virtually every other serious area of human affairs, we understand that words become meaningful restraints when they are connected to institutions, incentives, remedies and consequences. Contracts specify obligations and provide remedies for breach. Corporate officers have fiduciary duties. Employees can be terminated for violating agreements. Military personnel can face serious consequences for violating their duties. People entrusted with classified information can face severe penalties for violating their obligations.

Yet when we discuss constitutional government, conservatives often speak as though the words themselves constitute the restraint. If everyone would simply honor the Constitution, we are told, the system would work.

But that is precisely the problem political design is supposed to solve. Human beings cannot be assumed to restrain themselves merely because a document tells them where the boundaries are.

Imagine Writing the Agreement Today

Suppose you hired someone to manage your property and gave him a written agreement specifying exactly what he could and could not do. Now suppose the agreement also allowed him substantial influence over how its provisions were interpreted, gave his colleagues considerable authority to decide whether he had exceeded those provisions, and imposed few personal consequences when he crossed the boundaries. If the only meaningful remedy was expensive litigation followed by an order telling him not to do it again, you would probably conclude that the weakness was not merely that your manager was behaving badly. You would question whether you had written a sufficiently enforceable agreement.

This does not mean government can be reduced entirely to private contract law. Obviously it cannot. Government possesses powers and responsibilities fundamentally different from those of private parties. But contract law illustrates something important that constitutional rhetoric often obscures: limitations without meaningful enforcement mechanisms are weaker than they appear on paper. And voting and impeachment are NOT meaningful enforcement mechanism. Not even close.

This raises a question that I did not adequately explore when I wrote the original version of this essay. Knowing everything we now know about government, institutions and human behavior, what would we write if we were designing a governing agreement today?

The Men Who Warned Us

Even asking that question can sound radical because Americans have been taught to think of the Constitution as the settled achievement of an unusually gifted founding generation. I often hear: “it’s not perfect, but it’s better than anything else man has created.” And this reveals something, right? That’s a cultish statement intended to stop an argument and declare victory.

The actual history is considerably more interesting. The Constitutional Convention and ratification debates were fiercely contested. Patrick Henry refused to attend the Convention and later became one of Virginia’s most prominent opponents of ratification. Luther Martin strongly criticized the proposed system. Robert Yates and John Lansing Jr. left the Convention, while the Anti-Federalists subsequently produced an extensive body of argument warning that the new arrangement could consolidate power and diminish the political importance of the states.

Those men were not necessarily correct about everything, any more than Madison, Hamilton and the other Federalists were correct about everything. That is not the point. What interests me is that intelligent Americans who were present when the Constitution was written saw structural dangers in the proposed system, yet modern conservatives frequently treat serious criticism of that system as though it were somehow contrary to the American founding.

We also possess something neither side possessed in 1787: more than two centuries of evidence.

Imagine that we could bring the delegates at Philadelphia forward to 2026 and show them the federal government their Constitution eventually produced. We could show them the modern presidency, the enormous federal bureaucracy, the national debt, the intelligence establishment, the administrative state, the Internal Revenue Code, the Federal Register, America’s global military commitments, executive orders and the immense body of administrative rulemaking through which federal power now reaches into everyday life.

I do not know what Madison would say. Neither does anyone else. Historical figures should not be recruited as imaginary witnesses for positions they never had the opportunity to consider. But we can ask a legitimate historical question: does the federal government of 2026 resemble the limited central government Americans were told they were ratifying in 1787 and 1788?

That question deserves more than the familiar answer that people stopped following the Constitution.

Who Are “The People”?

This is where constitutional conservatives often place the final responsibility. The Constitution did not fail; the people failed. But the more I hear that argument, the more I wonder who these people are supposed to be.

The actual people I know get up in the morning, go to work, operate businesses, raise children, care for aging parents, pay mortgages, fix equipment, teach Sunday school and try to keep their families together. They are not reading the Federal Register before breakfast. They cannot possibly monitor thousands of federal employees, congressional committees, intelligence programs, administrative proceedings, federal prosecutions, appellate decisions and executive actions.

Nor should a political system require ordinary citizens to devote their lives to supervising professional government officials. The entire reason we create political structures, divide authority, establish procedures and impose restraints is because ordinary people cannot personally monitor every exercise of governmental power.

Christians should understand the deeper problem here better than anyone. Our theology does not begin with perfectible human beings. It begins with fallen ones. Any durable political system therefore has to anticipate ambition, selfishness, cowardice, corruption, tribalism and the desire for power. It must also anticipate an electorate that will sometimes be distracted, ignorant, frightened or willing to exchange long-term liberty for short-term advantage. If a constitutional arrangement works only when politicians remain unusually virtuous, judges unusually restrained and citizens unusually vigilant, then blaming human nature eventually becomes an indictment of the design. Human nature was one of the variables the design was supposed to account for.

What Have We Learned Since 1787?

This is where I think the conversation should now move. I not at all interested in proving that the Constitution failed, that is obvious, right? I am much, much more interested in asking what centuries of experience can teach us about designing something better.

We know things about institutional behavior that Americans in 1787 could not possibly have known. We have accumulated centuries of experience in constitutional law, economics, corporate governance, organizational theory and political science. We understand principal-agent problems, regulatory capture, bureaucratic incentives, institutional self-preservation, emergency powers and the tendency of temporary governmental measures to become permanent. We have watched concentrated political benefits overcome dispersed public costs. Most importantly, we have an enormous historical record demonstrating how governments adapt to, reinterpret and sometimes circumvent written limitations.

Why would we refuse to use that knowledge?

Suppose Americans were designing a governing agreement from the beginning. We would have to decide which powers were delegated and which were permanently withheld, but we should not stop there. We would also have to determine:

• who judges whether government has exceeded those powers, what remedies citizens possess when violations occur,

• whether officials can be removed or disqualified for specified breaches,

• how emergency authority expires,

• how political subdivisions protect themselves from consolidation, and

• whether the institutions exercising governmental power should have the final authority to determine the boundaries of their own power. (Hint, they should not).

Those questions do not presume a particular answer. The important thing is that we permit ourselves to conduct the inquiry.

The Constitution Is a Means, Not an End

I am asking constitutional conservatives and Christians to stop treating affection for the Constitution as a substitute for evaluating it.

Read Madison and Hamilton, certainly, but also read Patrick Henry, George Mason, Luther Martin, Robert Yates, John Lansing and the Anti-Federalists. Read the ratification debates and then read American history. Compare predictions with outcomes, not because one side must be declared prophetically correct and the other foolish, but because more than two centuries of experience allow us to examine questions that the founding generation could only debate theoretically.

Most importantly, we should stop answering every criticism of the constitutional system by saying that someone failed to follow the Constitution. Of course people failed to follow it. After all, it was not even designed to be “followed,” it was just a framework, being advertised as being limited. But the historic factual record tells us a different story.

But this should not surprise us, right? People fail contracts, violate laws, abuse authority, break promises and pursue their own interests. The purpose of institutional design is not to create a document suitable for people who always behave properly.

A governing system should therefore be judged not merely by the elegance of its language or the intentions of its designers, but by the incentives it creates, the restraints it actually imposes, the remedies it provides when those restraints are violated and the kind of government it predictably produces over time.

There is an irony here that constitutional conservatives should appreciate. The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were themselves willing to reconsider the political arrangement they had inherited. They did not regard the Articles of Confederation as sacred merely because Americans had already agreed to them. They actually decided to violate their Commissions and create a entirely new system without permission. Did you know that fact?

After 237 years of this failed experiment we call the Constitution, I think conservatives should be willing to ask a question that should never have become taboo: knowing everything we now know about government and human nature, what kind of governing agreement would we design if our actual objective were to keep government limited?

It certainly is not the U.S. Constitution as written.

That is no longer a question I am willing to dismiss because the men of 1787 already gave us their answer. This one is causing great evil.

Right? We have 63,000,000 dead babies to make that point clear, right?

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In September 2021, President Biden issued an executive order adding measles to the list of communicable diseases for which federal quarantine authority may be exercised under Title 42, U.S.C. § 264.

Most Americans had probably never heard of § 264. There is no particular reason they should have. People have businesses to run, jobs to perform, children to raise, churches to attend, bills to pay and lives to live. One of the reasons we elect representatives is precisely because ordinary citizens cannot possibly monitor every statute, regulation, administrative rule, judicial opinion and executive order produced by the federal government.

Yet buried within that enormous body of law is this remarkable grant of authority:

Apprehension, detention, or conditional release of individuals

Regulations prescribed under this section shall not provide for the apprehension, detention, or conditional release of individuals except for the purpose of preventing the introduction, transmission, or spread of such communicable diseases as may be specified from time to time in Executive orders of the President upon the recommendation of the Secretary...

Set aside for the moment whether you believe such authority is wise, necessary or dangerous. I want to use § 264 to ask a different question, one that has interested me far more in the years since I originally wrote this essay.

How exactly do “the people” get rid of it?

I do not mean theoretically. I mean mechanically.

Suppose tomorrow a substantial majority of Americans concluded that the federal government should not possess this particular power. Explain precisely what those Americans are supposed to do.

• “Vote.”

  • Fine. For whom?

• “Elect constitutional conservatives.”

  • Fine. How many?

Remember that legislation does not disappear because voters dislike it. Congress must act. A bill must survive the House and Senate. A president must sign it, unless Congress possesses sufficient votes to override a veto. Members who promised repeal must actually vote for repeal. Leadership must allow the legislation to advance. Procedural obstacles must be overcome. And even after all of that, litigation may follow over the meaning, application or constitutionality of whatever Congress has done.

None of this proves that § 264 is unconstitutional. That isn’t my point.

My question is about agency.

When conservatives tell me that the failures of the federal government are ultimately the fault of “the people,” I increasingly want to know what that sentence actually means.

Who Are These People?

At the risk of borrowing from Jerry Seinfeld, whenever I hear that all of this is ultimately the fault of the people, I find myself wanting to ask:

Who are these people?

Seriously. Who are they?

We invoke the people as though they are an identifiable political actor who gathers somewhere on Tuesday mornings to review the Federal Register. Apparently the people read the U.S. Code, monitor federal agencies, supervise Congress, follow appellate decisions, track executive orders, understand administrative rulemaking and, when something goes wrong, possess some great constitutional lever they can pull to make Washington stop.

I would very much like to meet these people.

Because the actual people I know are getting up at six in the morning, going to work, running businesses, raising children, caring for aging parents, paying mortgages, fixing tractors, teaching Sunday school and trying to figure out why their health insurance went up again.

They are not reading Title 42.

But there is an even deeper problem with blaming the people: there is no monolithic political creature called “the people.”

“We the People” sounds wonderfully unified on parchment. But Americans have never existed as a single mind possessing a single political will. Even in 1787, the people of the states differed enormously in religion, economics, regional interests and political philosophy. Rhode Island did not even send delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Nor did the Constitution require unanimous ratification. Under Article VII, it would become operative among the ratifying states once nine states agreed.

Whatever degree of cultural and political commonality existed then, consider what the phrase means today.

Who exactly are the people in 2026?

They are more than 340 million individual human beings scattered across fifty states. They come from different countries, cultures, religions, languages, histories and political traditions. They are Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, atheists and agnostics. Some believe government should be extraordinarily limited; others believe it should guarantee healthcare, housing and income. Some believe abortion is the killing of an innocent human being; others believe access to abortion is a fundamental liberty. Some want illegal immigrants deported; others want them given legal status. Some regard the Constitution with almost religious reverence; I don’t by the way.

These are “the people.”

• There is no Tuesday morning meeting.

• There is no collective brain.

• There is no unified political will.

• There is no giant constitutional lever sitting somewhere in Kansas marked PULL HERE TO STOP THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.

Yet when some obscure statutory authority enacted generations ago is eventually used in a way Americans find alarming, constitutional conservatives solemnly explain that the people are responsible.

There is something almost magical about this creature we have created called the people. It possesses responsibility without identifiable members, authority without an obvious mechanism for exercising it, and culpability for decisions made decades before millions of its current members were even born.

To be clear, “We the People” can describe a constitutional theory concerning the source of legitimate political authority. My objection is to quietly transforming that theory into the claim that hundreds of millions of actual Americans function as a single conscious political actor who can therefore be blamed for whatever their government does.

That distinction matters enormously.

A Christian mother homeschooling four children is one of the people. So is the progressive activist who wants dramatically more federal power. So is the immigrant who became a citizen last Tuesday. So is the businessman trying to keep twenty employees working. So is the socialist organizing for nationalized healthcare. So is the constitutional conservative demanding limited government. So is the twenty-year-old who has never voted.

What common political will do all these people possess?

And where, exactly, is it expressed?

Voting every two or four years does not answer the question. Elections aggregate millions of competing preferences through districts, states, parties and institutions. They do not transform those millions of people into a single political consciousness. Nor does electing one representative give an individual American control over the other 434 House members, 100 senators, the president, federal judiciary, administrative agencies and enormous accumulated body of federal law.

This is where the magic of abstraction becomes useful to defenders of the constitutional system.

If Congress creates something terrible, blame the people who elected Congress. If presidents accumulate power, blame the people who elected them. If federal judges interpret the Constitution in ways conservatives despise, blame the people who elected the presidents and senators responsible for putting those judges there. If the administrative state becomes enormous, blame the people for repeatedly electing politicians who permitted it.

The Constitution itself thereby becomes remarkably difficult to evaluate.

Whatever happens downstream can always be attributed upstream to the people.

So before we blame the people again, I want something more concrete than a civics-class abstraction.

Who are these people?

And, much more importantly, what actual power do these extraordinarily diverse, frequently antagonistic, hundreds of millions of individual human beings possess to stop the government supposedly operating in their collective name?

If we cannot answer that question without retreating into slogans about voting, civic virtue and “taking our country back,” perhaps the problem is not merely that the people have failed to operate the constitutional machinery properly.

Perhaps the system itself deserves examination. Perhaps the system is the problem (hint: it is!)

Test The Logic Of The Claim - Try Repealing It

But let’s follow the “people fault” theory a little and test the premise against logic and intelligence.

Imagine that millions of Americans decide tomorrow that § 264 must go.

They organize. They donate. They campaign. They persuade their neighbors. They recruit candidates. They survive primaries. They win congressional elections across hundreds of districts and numerous states. They somehow identify enough candidates who genuinely agree with them rather than merely saying what is necessary to obtain their votes.

• Then those representatives arrive in Washington.

• Now they must pass legislation through the House.

• Then through the Senate.

• Then obtain the president’s signature.

If the president vetoes the legislation, the people who supposedly control their government need two-thirds of both houses of Congress to override him.

Think about what that means to blame the people.

We casually tell an individual American, “If you don’t like the law, change it.”

But the constitutional mechanism for doing so may require him to participate in a nationwide political movement capable of influencing hundreds of congressional elections, overcoming party establishments, surviving legislative procedures, obtaining presidential agreement or assembling veto-proof supermajorities, and then defending the result through whatever litigation follows.

And we call this self-government.

Perhaps it is. But surely Christians who claim to love God with their minds ought to be willing to examine what the phrase means rather than merely repeating it.

The Constitution Cannot Fail. Only the People Can Fail.

This is where the argument becomes particularly interesting to me.

Among constitutional conservatives, there is an almost reflexive response whenever the federal government produces something terrible:

The Constitution didn’t fail. The people failed the Constitution.

Notice what this formulation accomplishes. It makes serious examination of the Constitution almost impossible.

• If government behaves properly, the Constitution receives credit.

• If government behaves badly, the people receive blame.

• If Congress accumulates extraordinary power, blame the people who elected Congress.

• If presidents expand executive power, blame the people who elected the presidents.

• If judges interpret constitutional provisions in ways conservatives find astonishing, blame the people who elected the senators who confirmed the judges appointed by presidents elected by the people.

The reasoning eventually becomes circular.

The constitutional system proves that the people control the government because the people elect the government. When the elected government does things the people cannot stop, this proves not that their control might be extraordinarily indirect or structurally weak, but that the people failed to exercise their control properly.

Under such reasoning, what evidence could ever demonstrate a structural defect in the Constitution?

I am no longer satisfied with an answer that makes the system unfalsifiable.

Compare the First American Constitution

This becomes even more interesting when we remember that the Constitution of 1787 was not America’s first constitutional arrangement.

Under the Articles of Confederation, Article II declared:

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

Read that carefully.

Power remained with the states unless it had been expressly delegated.

Article XIII went even further. The Articles were to be “inviolably observed by every state,” and alteration required agreement in Congress followed by confirmation by every state legislature.

To be sure, that arrangement had weaknesses, which were among the reasons its critics supposedly wanted it replaced. But those weaknesses should not prevent us from noticing something historically important: the constitutional settlement of 1787 created a substantially more powerful national government than the one it replaced.

That was not an accident.

The Constitution was designed, in significant part, because influential Americans believed the central government under the Articles was too weak.

We should therefore stop speaking as though centralized federal power mysteriously appeared two centuries later because Americans became lazy, stupid or insufficiently devoted to the Constitution. The expansion of national capacity began with the constitutional transformation itself. The legitimate historical question is how much of what followed represents corruption of the design and how much represents development made possible by the design.

Those are very different questions.

Stop Hiding Behind “The People”

This is why I have become increasingly impatient with the phrase “the people are responsible.”

Which people?

• The people born in 1990 who inherited statutes enacted in 1944?

• The people who voted for one representative out of 435?

• The people of Oklahoma attempting to change the votes of senators from California?

• The people who vote every two years but have no direct vote on federal statutes, administrative regulations, executive orders or judicial decisions?

There certainly are circumstances in which citizens bear responsibility. A people can become apathetic. They can reward corrupt politicians. They can prefer government benefits to liberty. They can refuse to learn what their government is doing. They can become cowardly, dependent or indifferent.

But those moral failures do not answer the structural question.

If we claim that the people rule, then we should be able to identify the mechanism through which they rule and evaluate whether that mechanism actually provides meaningful control over the institution exercising power over them. And not just silly voting, hoping and then coping.

That is not anti-American.

It is elementary political reasoning. This is logic. This in intellectual. To believe otherwise is the opposite.

The Question I Didn’t Ask in 2021

When I originally wrote about § 264 in 2021, my concern was the frightening power government could exercise during a declared public-health emergency.

Five years later, I think the deeper question is more important.

Suppose the government created under a constitution accumulates thousands upon thousands of statutes, regulations, precedents, agencies and executive authorities that an ordinary citizen could never possibly understand, much less personally consent to. Suppose reversing even one significant exercise of that authority requires an extraordinary national political effort.

At what point are we permitted to examine the architecture itself?

Christians especially should have no sacred political documents.

We have Scripture. Everything else produced by men is properly subject to examination.

That includes the Constitution.

So the question is much simpler:

Does the constitutional structure actually give the governed sufficient power to control the government created in their name?

If the answer is yes, show me how.

Take something concrete like Title 42, U.S.C. § 264. Put aside slogans about elections, freedom, democracy and “taking our country back.” Trace the mechanism by which an ordinary American can meaningfully withdraw a governmental power he never personally granted.

• How many elections?

• How many representatives?

• How many senators?

• How many years?

• How much money?

• How many court cases?

And what happens to the citizen while all of this is taking place?

Those are not cynical questions. They are precisely the questions people who believe in self-government should be willing to ask.

Because perhaps the greatest service performed by the phrase “We the People” has been convincing generations of Americans that because their name appears at the top of the document, they must hold all the power.

Maybe they do.

Look around. Does it look like the “people” have any power?

After more than two centuries, I think we have earned the right to ask those who like to blame the people to prove it.

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During a recent Facebook exchange I suggested that if the United States ever separated politically, those forming a new nation would have the chance to write an entirely different agreement between the people and the government they create. A friend gave the familiar conservative reply: it would work no better than the Constitution because in the end it would still be only words on paper.

I have heard some version of that my entire adult life.

• The Constitution is not the problem.

• People are the problem.

• No document can restrain government unless the people possess the will to enforce it.

In the mind of the average Christian, there simply cannot ever be a problem with the Constitution. Why not?

We Already Make Words on Paper Bind People

Constitutions, Confederation Covenants, Agreements can of course be better than the Constitution. Unless of course you believe the Constitution is the high-water mark of human civilization and nothing could ever be better.

Nevertheless, the reality is, we already live under an enormous body of law built on the opposite assumption. We call it contract law. Nobody looks at a mortgage and says those are just words on paper. We write the agreement down precisely because circumstances change and disagreements arise. The document defines the obligations beforehand, and institutions exist to adjudicate violations and impose consequences.

Written agreements can bind people. The real question is whether they have been designed to do so.

Perhaps the problem is what was written on the paper in 1787. After all, the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 went far beyond revising the Articles of Confederation. Right? It wasn’t supposed to write and entirely new constitution was it? So in 1787:

• The proceedings were secret.

• The delegates produced an entirely new structure.

• The Constitution did not descend from heaven.

• It was produced by fallible men pursuing political objectives amid fierce disagreement. These men were not Apostles like Paul, Peter James and John.

That should be especially obvious to Christians. But sadly, many American evangelicals inherited a providential mythology in which criticizing the Constitution feels almost irreverent. Down deep, don’t you want to react negatively to my critique thus far? Perhaps even think of me as a traitor for critiquing the parchment?

It is hard to understand this, but in a way, I do. Protestant evangelicals claim to believe in Sola Scriptura. The belief that Scripture alone possesses final authority in ALL matters of faith and practice. And yet somehow have come to believe there is a kind of Sola Constitutura. Yet:

• Philadelphia was not Sinai.

• James Madison was not Moses.

• The Constitution is entitled to examination by its assumptions, its design, and its results.

And We Have the Results

And we have nearly 240 years of evidence. Federal power expanded enormously. Taxation, spending, monetary power, war powers, and administrative authority grew far beyond anything most Americans in 1787 could have imagined. And 63,000,000 babies have been murdered under the auspices and protection of the U.S. Constitution. While emergencies repeatedly enlarged government, and the powers acquired rarely disappeared afterward.

So let me help you see my point about the need to critique the Constitution using an illustration. Imagine an engineer designing a bridge in 1787 and discovering structural weaknesses over two centuries. Would anyone argue the original plans must remain our model because the designers were brilliant men?

Of course not.

So why should political architecture be exempt?

One Structural Problem

Consider just one structural problem (and there are many, many others): the judiciary.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 gave the Supreme Court authority to review certain state court decisions involving federal law and constitutional questions. This simple Act established that the federal courts would became enormously important interpreters of the boundaries of federal authority.

Hmmm - the federal courts determining the extent of federal power. Notice the two terms are the same?

Now, think about that arrangement through the lens of contract law.

Would you willingly sign a contract in which the party whose power you are attempting to restrain exercises enormous influence over the institution ultimately interpreting the restraint? To use a simple illustration, imagine a mortgage in which the mortgage holder and the person responsible for determining whether the borrower has complied with the terms are brothers.

Having the federal government determine the extent of federal powers over us is exactly the same as the illustration above. So at minimum, that should make us willing to ask whether the architecture could have been better designed.

Someone Still Has to Enforce It

The obvious response is that none of these provisions would enforce themselves either. Of course not. Neither does a mortgage. Every legal order depends upon human beings willing to enforce it. That does not prove written agreements are meaningless. It means enforcement must be built into their design. And guess what wasn’t built into the Constitution?

This is where the familiar conservative argument becomes difficult to maintain. We are told the genius of the Constitution is its ability to restrain governmental power. Yet when confronted with the government that actually developed under it, we are told no constitution could have prevented this because constitutions are merely words on paper and the reasoning becomes circular. We cannot comfortably hold both propositions.

Yet conservatives and Christians try.

If written restraints cannot meaningfully constrain political power, we should stop celebrating them and insisting the Constitution created a limited government. Right?

A People-Empowering Agreement

I am no longer interested merely in rearranging federal powers like chairs on the Titanic, are you? I am interested in reconsidering the relationship between a people and the government. This constitutional system failed, and failed miserably - again, 63,000,000 innocent babies have been left in the wake of this massive failure. And now we are staring at a future that could include a President AOC and a Congress and Supreme Court dominated by Marxists and Muslims.

The people are told they delegate particular powers for particular purposes and that everything else remains outside that delegation. If that distinction is going to mean anything, violations need consequences, including prison time, perhaps even capital punishment.

After all, governments can and do harm people, including murdering them. Why should they be immune? Seriously, ask yourself why?

A genuinely people-empowering agreement might:

• Keep central authority narrow and difficult to expand.

• Prevent the institutions from controlling the interpretation of their own restraints. People in super-majorities must approve their interpretations.

• Impose stiff and severe personal consequences for violations of the contract.

• Preserve near complete autonomy below the central government

• And recognize that peaceful secession and or abolition of government is a fundamental right of the people.

This is a framework, and not a complete system by the way.

Clarity often requires exhaustive specification. What is dismissed as impractical verbosity by the political elite has now proven to be the necessary cost of precision. And with modern artificial intelligence (AI) I am certain a form of government could be designed that is not subject to the whims of the majority or the manipulation of the minority.

We Have Every Right And Duty To Think Again

More than 340 million Americans now live under one central government while disagreeing profoundly about God, marriage, sexuality, human life, property, education, and the purpose of government itself. We are in an extremely low-trust society. We must ask whether people who cannot agree about the nature of the good must forever remain under one central political authority.

Must we? Is the constitution and the government it created really the best we can do?

This is why I have grown weary of conservative and Christian slogans masquerading as political thought.

• “The Constitution is not the problem.”

• “It’s just words on paper.”

• “The Founders already figured this out.”

Each statement ends inquiry exactly where inquiry should begin.

To be sure, Christianity gives us no reason to believe we can construct a political system immune to corruption. I’m not suggesting it can. Fallen people will eventually corrupt every institution they inhabit. But human fallibility is an argument for better institutional design, not an argument against it not an argument for sticking with horror and keep voting, hoping an coping.

We have spent centuries learning how to write agreements that anticipate disagreement, define authority, identify breach, and impose consequences. Why should the most powerful institution in society operate under a weaker agreement than the agreements it enforces against everyone else?

The question is whether we have learned anything from the political order we inherited, and whether we still possess the courage to apply it.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The men in Philadelphia were allowed to think, and they did not do a great job when given the chance.

The men who opposed them ended up being correct in their assessment of the Constitution.

Will we just ignore the problems we face and continue to vote, hope and cope?

Or will we love God with our minds, learn from past experience, and propose something new?

Are you ready to face God with slogans, worn tired slogans?

Or with a new view of how human society can function under a very tightly written form of contract?

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eaders Note: Recently, I completed a six-part series titled The Sin of Roe, where I touched several times on the Christian conscience. This essay goes deeper because I have come to believe that one of Roe's most devastating consequences was not merely the slaughter of millions of unborn children, but what fifty years of living alongside that slaughter did to the conscience of the American ekklesia. We were never truly powerless. Even when constitutional structures prevented immediate rescue, we always possessed the ability to speak prophetically and unequivocally against the injustice, including through what I have called the Jefferson Option found in the Declaration of Independence. Instead, decades of accepting, managing and politically accommodating what we ourselves called murder trained us to live beside it. My concern in this essay is that such prolonged, sinful inaction did more than fail our unborn neighbors. It deadened our conscience.

There is something within you that speaks before you have formulated an argument.

You see cruelty and recoil. You tell a lie and feel the disturbance almost immediately. You betray someone who trusted you, and even if no one else knows, something within you knows. You encounter innocence being harmed and experience an impulse that precedes political calculation: This is wrong.

We call it the conscience.

Christians talk constantly about Scripture, doctrine, worldview, discernment and wisdom. We should. But Scripture also speaks repeatedly about the conscience, and what it says should frighten us more than it usually does.

Because the conscience can change.

• It can become stronger.

• It can become weaker.

• It can become defiled.

• It can become wounded.

• It can become corrupted.

• And, most frighteningly, it can become seared.

That means one of the most dangerous things that can happen to a Christian is not that he feels guilty.

It is that he stops feeling guilty about something for which he should feel guilty.

And if that is true of individuals, we should at least ask whether something analogous can happen within a Christian culture.

I believe it can.

And I fear we are watching it happen.

And being honest with you, it happened to me even though I never intended it to happen.

What Is the Conscience?

The conscience is not the voice of God. That distinction matters.

If conscience were simply God’s voice speaking directly within us, conscience could never be mistaken. Yet Paul plainly describes consciences that are weak, defiled and corrupted. People can feel guilty about things that are not sinful, and they can feel perfectly comfortable doing things that are.

Conscience, therefore, must be trained by truth.

The Greek word syneidēsis carries the idea of knowing with oneself, an inward awareness that evaluates our own conduct. Paul describes this remarkable faculty in Romans 2:

“They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them.”

Notice the courtroom language.

• The conscience bears witness.

• Our thoughts accuse.

• Our thoughts sometimes excuse.

Something resembling a courtroom operates within the human person. God has made us moral creatures capable not merely of acting, but of evaluating our own actions. That is an extraordinary gift.

It is also an extraordinary responsibility.

How Does God Use the Conscience?

Conscience is one means by which our moral condition is exposed to us.

When Peter preached at Pentecost, his hearers were “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37). When David numbered Israel contrary to God’s command, “David’s heart struck him” (2 Samuel 24:10). Paul could speak of serving God “with a clear conscience” (2 Timothy 1:3), while also warning that some had rejected a good conscience and “made shipwreck of their faith” (1 Timothy 1:19).

That last image deserves attention.

A good conscience is not some decorative feature of Christian maturity. Paul connects rejecting it with catastrophe.

Shipwreck.

The conscience does not save us. Christ saves us. Nor does conscience establish truth. God establishes truth.

But conscience is one of the faculties through which we recognize our relationship to what is true and good. That means the Christian should not merely ask:

“Can I defend this?”

He should ask:

“What is happening to me that I now need to defend this?”

Those are very different questions.

Human beings possess an almost limitless ability to construct intellectual arguments for things they already want to believe. Christians are not immune to this. Me included. In fact, biblical knowledge can make the problem worse if Scripture becomes ammunition for rationalization rather than light by which we allow ourselves to be examined.

We can learn how to defeat the prosecutor without ever asking whether the prosecutor is right.

The Conscience Must Be Maintained

Paul told Felix that he exercised himself “to have always a conscience void of offence toward God, and toward men” (Acts 24:16, KJV).

The ESV renders it, “I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.”

I love that phrase: I take pains.

Paul apparently did not imagine that a clear conscience simply maintained itself. There was effort involved.

The writer of Hebrews speaks similarly of people whose powers of discernment have been “trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Hebrews 5:14).

Moral discernment is cultivated. We become something through repeated obedience.

But the opposite must also be true. We become something through repeated disobedience.

Every time conscience warns us and we obey, we are reinforcing something within ourselves. Every time conscience warns us and we suppress it, explain it away, redefine the offense, blame someone else or hide behind an institution, we are also reinforcing something.

We are training ourselves.

The question is simply what kind of person we are training ourselves to become.

The Terrible Possibility of a Seared Conscience

Paul gives us one of Scripture’s most disturbing descriptions of moral degeneration in 1 Timothy 4:2:

“through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared”

The image appears to be cauterization. Something once sensitive has become insensitive.

That helps explain a phenomenon we have all observed. The first violation of conscience can be agonizing. The twentieth becomes easier. Eventually the person can do without apparent discomfort what once would have horrified him.

We sometimes interpret the disappearance of guilt as evidence that the behavior was never wrong. Scripture gives us another possibility. Perhaps the alarm stopped sounding because we kept disconnecting it.

There is an enormous difference between peace of conscience and silence of conscience.

One can come from faithfulness. The other can come from repeated suppression. And God knows the difference.

Roe v. Wade and the Training of the Christian Conscience

Now consider abortion.

I do not want to revisit here every argument I have made elsewhere about the failures of the pro-life movement. I want to examine something underneath those arguments.

What has fifty years of legalized abortion done to the Christian conscience? Imagine an ordinary Christian suddenly transported from another age into an abortion clinic.

• He knows nothing about American politics.

• He knows nothing about Roe v. Wade.

• He knows nothing about Casey, Dobbs, Republican platforms, Supreme Court appointments, incremental legislation, heartbeat bills, gestational limits, federalism, constitutional originalism or the pro-life movement.

• He simply sees what happens.

A living human being developing within his or her mother is intentionally murdered. What would conscience initially say?

Stop this.

Now introduce fifty years of political education.

• You cannot stop it yet.

• The courts won’t allow it.

• We need another justice.

• We have to win another election.

• This legislation saves some.

• We cannot demand too much.

• The Constitution limits what can be done.

• The states must decide.

• This is the best politically achievable outcome.

• Take the win.

• Be patient.

Eventually something remarkable can happen. The Christian can still sincerely believe abortion is murder while experiencing remarkably little moral urgency about the murder occurring tomorrow morning.

That should terrify us as Christians. Absolutely and horrifically terrify us.

I am not suggesting every political limitation is imaginary or that prudence is sinful. I am asking a much more personal question.

What happens to conscience when Christians repeatedly encounter something they call murder and then train themselves to accept its continuation?

• At first we grieve.

• Then we explain.

• Then we accommodate.

Then we develop sophisticated theological and political arguments explaining why accommodation is wisdom.

Eventually we can discuss the intentional killing of unborn children with approximately the same emotional register with which we discuss marginal tax rates.

Something has happened.

And blaming “the culture” does not resolve the problem, because I am not asking what happened to America.

I am asking what happened to us, evangelical community who should know better because we claim sola scriptura.

God Judges the Silencing of Conscience

This is where the matter becomes considerably more serious. We often imagine judgment primarily in terms of the sins we commit. Scripture also presents judgment as God giving human beings over to what they insist upon becoming.

Romans 1 describes people who “suppress the truth” and eventually are “given up” by God to the consequences of their rebellion.

• That progression matters.

• Truth is present.

• Truth is suppressed.

• Suppression continues.

• Darkening follows.

• Then God gives them over.

This suggests something frightening: moral blindness can itself become part of judgment. The inability to recognize what we have become is not necessarily evidence that everything is fine.

It may be evidence that we have been permitted to continue down the road we repeatedly chose. That is why the Christian response to an accusing conscience should not immediately be to make the accusation disappear.

• Sometimes guilt is false and must be corrected by truth.

• But sometimes guilt is mercy.

• Sometimes discomfort is God graciously preventing us from becoming comfortable with evil.

• We should be very careful about medicating the soul against a pain God intends us to feel.

Can a Damaged Conscience Be Recovered?

Thank God, yes. He helped me recover mine!

Otherwise there would be little reason to write this. The Christian faith is filled with people whose moral vision had become terribly distorted.

• David committed adultery and arranged a man’s death.

• Peter denied Christ.

• Paul participated in persecution and described himself as formerly “a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent.”

Yet none was beyond restoration. That is the absolute miracle from a God who loves us and is willing to forgive a “broken and contrite spirit.” But notice what restoration required.

• Not better rationalization.

• Not improved messaging.

• Not political repositioning.

• Repentance.

David’s restoration begins when the elaborate machinery of concealment finally collapses under Nathan’s words:

“You are the man!”

And David responds:

“I have sinned against the LORD.”

That is the moment conscience begins breathing again. Recovery therefore begins with truth. Not truth about somebody else.

Truth about ourselves.

• We stop asking how the Democrats did this.

• We stop asking how secularism did this.

• We stop asking how Planned Parenthood did this.

• We stop asking how the Supreme Court did this.

Those questions may have legitimate answers, but they can also become ways of avoiding Nathan’s finger.

You are the man.

• What have we tolerated?

• What have we justified?

• What have we learned to live beside?

• What language have we adopted that makes evil easier to tolerate?

• What institutions have we defended because admitting their failure would threaten identities we cherish?

• What have we stopped seeing?

A recovered conscience begins when we want the answer even if the answer condemns us.

How Do We Retrain It?

We bring conscience repeatedly under the authority of God’s revealed truth. We read Scripture not merely to prove what we already believe, but to discover where we are wrong.

• We confess sin specifically.

• We obey quickly when conviction comes.

• We stop calling cowardice prudence.

• We stop calling indifference patience.

• We stop calling compromise strategy merely because the compromise was politically useful.

• We expose ourselves to the suffering of people whom our abstractions have allowed us to ignore.

• We welcome brothers and sisters who challenge our moral assumptions.

And perhaps most importantly, we ask God to make us sensitive again.

David prayed:

“Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!”

That is a dangerous prayer.

It gives God permission to disturb things we have spent years making comfortable. But Christians who love God with their minds should want that disturbance. We should prefer painful truth to comfortable blindness.

Now Imagine the Conscience Disappears

Imagine another generation passes.

• Abortion continues.

• Perhaps euthanasia expands.

• Perhaps genetic selection becomes normal.

• Perhaps governments acquire technological powers of surveillance and coercion previous tyrants could scarcely have imagined.

• Perhaps Christians continue adapting.

Each accommodation comes with an explanation. Each surrender has a constitutional argument. Each silence has a strategic justification.

Each generation inherits the compromises of the previous generation without remembering that they were compromises.

Eventually Christian moral reasoning becomes almost entirely reactive.

We no longer ask:

What does God require?

We ask:

What can our political system accommodate?

We no longer ask:

Who is being harmed?

We ask:

What position can win an election?

We no longer ask:

What would obedience look like?

We ask:

What will the courts permit?

And because this happens gradually, Christians continue attending church, singing hymns, preaching sermons, electing Republicans, defending the Constitution, supporting ministries and assuring one another that they are standing for righteousness.

All while the alarm grows quieter.

That future frightens me considerably more than losing an election. Because a church surrounded by evil can still be faithful. A persecuted church can be faithful. A politically powerless church can be faithful. A church living under a wicked government can be magnificently faithful.

But what happens to a church that can no longer recognize evil because it has spent generations learning how to live comfortably beside it?

That church may retain its buildings.

• It may retain its institutions.

• It may retain its political organizations.

• It may retain its conferences, seminaries, podcasts, publishing houses and celebrity teachers.

• It may even retain impeccable doctrinal statements.

What it will have lost is something far more difficult to recover.

• The ability to blush.

• The ability to grieve.

• The ability to become angry at injustice.

• The ability to hear the cry of the innocent without first consulting political strategy.

• The ability to stand before God and say with Paul:

  “I always take pains to have a clear conscience toward both God and man.”

Perhaps that is where repentance in our generation must begin.

• Not with another political strategy.

• Not with another constitutional argument.

• Not with another explanation for why obedience must wait.

Perhaps it begins with a much more frightening prayer:

Lord, make my conscience alive again. Show me everything I have taught myself not to see.

And then, when He does, obey.

Because the most terrifying judgment upon a people who repeatedly silence conscience may eventually be receiving exactly what they demanded: silence from God. Perhaps even judgment from God.

Samuel once warned a people who had insisted upon their own political choice:

“And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day.”

1 Samuel 8:18

Is that what awaits the ekklesia in America? Especially when confronted with the reality that God knows we always had options?

I think this is a distinct possibility and we will not like His judgement against us.

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Say the word holocaust in America and almost immediately our minds travel to Nazi Germany. They should.

Six million Jews were systematically murdered because an evil government concluded that an entire category of human beings could be excluded from the protection ordinarily owed to human life. Men, women and children were identified, dehumanized, dispossessed, transported and killed. We built museums and memorials so subsequent generations would know what happened, see the faces, hear the names and understand where the logic of dehumanization can lead.

Good.

We should.

But the Nazi Holocaust does not own the word holocaust, nor does the horrific suffering of the Jewish people exhaust humanity’s experience with organized mass killing.

The Armenians experienced systematic deportation and mass killing in the Ottoman Empire. Stalin’s Soviet Union produced political terror, executions, deportations, the Gulag and catastrophic famine, including the Holodomor in Ukraine. Mao’s ideological campaigns in China resulted in persecution, executions, imprisonment and famine on an almost incomprehensible scale. Pol Pot attempted to remake Cambodian society and left behind killing fields containing the remains of his own people.

These were not identical events, and historical honesty requires us to say so. Their ideologies were different. Their victims were different. Their methods were different. Their governments were different. Even the intentions of the perpetrators differed.

But the bodies were human.

Millions upon millions of them.

And that is precisely why I refuse to surrender the word holocaust as though one people, one government or one period of history possesses exclusive claim to the category.

Indeed, the proper lesson of the Nazi Holocaust should lead us in exactly the opposite direction. Remembering Auschwitz should train civilization to recognize the recurring human capacity to identify a category of human beings whose lives are no longer considered worthy of the protection afforded everyone else.

That brings me to another holocaust.

Ours.

The American Abortion Holocaust

For nearly fifty years under Roe v. Wade, tens of millions of unborn human beings were legally murdered in the United States. Protected by the government created by the U.S. Constitution. That is just a fact.

They were not potential human beings waiting for government recognition to become human. They were human beings at an early stage of development, bearing the dignity their Creator gave them rather than whatever dignity the state was willing to recognize.

For Christians, this is not a political premise requiring an if.

Human government does not confer human dignity.

God does.

The unborn child’s smallness does not diminish that dignity. Dependency does not diminish it. Location inside his or her mother’s body does not diminish it. Inability to speak does not diminish it. Being unwanted does not diminish it. A difficult conception does not diminish it. Poverty does not diminish it. And a Supreme Court decision certainly cannot diminish it.

This is precisely why I use the word holocaust.

The Armenian was human when the Ottoman government treated him as disposable. The Ukrainian peasant was human when Stalin’s regime treated his life as expendable. The Chinese victim was human when Mao’s revolution consumed him. The Cambodian was human when Pol Pot’s ideology marked him for destruction. The Jew was human when Nazi law excluded him from the community deserving protection.

And the unborn child was human when American law permitted his or her life to be intentionally murdered. The entire U.S. government since 1973 should be charged with murder.

Because there is no expendable class of image-bearers. Government does not protect the murder of a clump of cells, our government protected the murder of an innocent little baby and stands indicted because of that.

That conviction is not ours to negotiate. It was not created by the Republican Party, the pro-life movement, the Supreme Court or the Constitution. It comes from our understanding of God, man, creation and human dignity.

And once Christians confess that truth, we inherit an uncomfortable obligation.

We must reckon honestly with what happened here. We must own our own complicity.

Why We Build Museums

Why did America build the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Why did we preserve Auschwitz?

Why does Oklahoma City have a memorial where 168 empty chairs silently represent the people murdered on April 19, 1995?

Because punishing perpetrators and changing laws are not enough.

A civilization must remember and in our case, be confronted with.

Museums are one of the ways societies teach their descendants that something happened which must never be normalized again. They transform statistics into people. They give names to numbers. They preserve photographs, artifacts, testimony and documents long after the witnesses themselves are dead.

They also force subsequent generations to confront a disturbing question:

How could ordinary people have allowed this? And even more appropriate, why does the evangelical community allow it to continue. Especially when there are options?

That question matters because human beings have an extraordinary ability to look backward and recognize evil while remaining nearly blind to the evil accommodated by their own generation.

• We look at Nazi Germany and wonder how physicians participated.

• We look at Stalinism and wonder why people remained silent.

• We look at Mao and wonder how ideology could consume so many human beings.

• We walk through the killing fields of Cambodia and wonder how an entire society descended into something so terrible.

But museums are not principally supposed to teach us how morally superior we are to dead people.

They should teach us how much we resemble them.

That is why societies need memorials after great moral catastrophes. Law can prohibit something. Courts can reverse decisions. Governments can change.

• Memory must do something different.

• Memory teaches future generations why.

• And America has not yet memorialized the unborn children we lost and continue to lose.

The Museum Cannot Hide What Happened

An Abortion Holocaust Museum cannot be propaganda.

It cannot exaggerate statistics. It cannot manufacture quotations. It cannot manipulate photographs. It cannot make medical claims it cannot document. It cannot misrepresent abortion advocates merely to make them easier to condemn.

If anything, its standards must be unusually rigorous precisely because its claim is so serious.

• Everything should be sourced.

• Everything should be documented.

• Everything should withstand scrutiny.

But historical rigor must never become an excuse for sanitizing what happened.

The museum should show human development from conception onward. Visitors should see embryology, ultrasound imagery and fetal development. They should understand what abortion procedures actually do. The silent screams of the baby being murdered. It does not want to be murdered. They should encounter the instruments, medical descriptions, advertisements, political arguments, court decisions and language by which abortion became embedded in American life.

This is how a dead conscience is reawakened, rebuilt.

There should probably be a separate gallery containing photographic documentation of abortion itself. It should be clearly marked.

But it should exist.

Because there is something deeply strange about insisting that an act is morally defensible while simultaneously insisting that people must never be allowed to see what the act actually does.

The governing philosophy of this museum should therefore be simple:

We will not exaggerate. We will not manipulate. And we will not hide.

And Then We Must Talk About Us

This may be the most difficult room in the entire museum.

• Not Planned Parenthood.

• Not the Supreme Court.

• Not Democrats.

• Not feminists.

• Not abortionists.

The evangelical Church.

Christians will always bear a peculiar responsibility for the American abortion holocaust because we knew something the surrounding culture increasingly denied.

We knew who those children were. Right?

The secularist can claim that human dignity emerges from consciousness, autonomy, viability, social recognition or some other philosophical construction.

The Christian cannot. Or simply put - they are not Christian.

We Christians confess that human beings possess dignity because God made them in His image. Greater knowledge brings greater responsibility.

So eventually the museum must turn away from Washington and toward our churches.

For fifty years Christians marched. We voted. We donated. We elected Republicans. We built pregnancy centers. We counseled women. We adopted children. We passed incremental restrictions. We fought court battles. We appointed judges. Much genuine good was accomplished, and many children are alive because Christians acted.

• That history deserves to be told.

• But so does another history.

• For fifty years abortion continued.

So one of the rooms on the first floor of this museum would be called:

The 50-Year Pro-Life Compromise

Because too many of us did compromise. Because too many incremental victories were treated as substitutes for justice. Because good intentions were too often used to excuse moral inaction, and Proverbs 24:12 will not allow that excuse to stand.

And because current and future Christians deserve the opportunity to examine what we did and ask whether our actions were proportionate to what we claimed to believe.

• Did political pragmatism gradually redefine faithfulness?

• Did reducing abortions become an acceptable substitute for demanding equal protection?

• Did exceptions quietly concede the very principle we claimed to defend?

• Did we confuse access to Republican politicians with political victory?

• Did we become so accustomed to losing children by the hundreds of thousands that the extraordinary became ordinary?

• Did pastors speak?

• Did churches act?

• Did fathers accept responsibility?

• Did I?

• Did you?

That last question matters.

Because a Holocaust Museum that exists merely to establish the guilt of those people has failed.

The museum must eventually turn the mirror toward us.

The Rise of the Abolitionist

That is why I would end the museum differently.

The final major gallery on the second floor would be called:

The Rise of the Abolitionist

It would tell the story of Christians who increasingly refused to describe abortion merely as an unfortunate social problem to be reduced and began demanding instead that unborn human beings receive the same protection against intentional killing that everyone else receives. That murdering a baby in the womb was exactly the same as murdering someone on your street.

• No exceptions based simply upon age.

• No exceptions based upon development.

• No exceptions based upon dependency.

• No exceptions because another human being considers their existence burdensome.

Equal protection. Equal criminalization.

Not because the unborn are politically useful.

Because they are human.

Visitors might agree or disagree with the abolitionist movement’s strategies, theology or politics. The museum should allow those debates to appear.

But no visitor should leave without understanding why abolitionists arose.

After fifty years of managing abortion, some Christians began asking a painfully simple question:

Why are we managing something we say is murder?

But This Holocaust Is Not Over

There is one profound difference between this museum and nearly every other Holocaust or genocide museum we have discussed.

We would be building this one in the midst of the holocaust.

There will be an Murder Counter on the wall to illustrate the 3,000 babies murdered everyday.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was built decades after the liberation of the concentration camps. Museums and memorials to the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, Mao’s atrocities and Cambodia’s killing fields look backward upon catastrophes that have ended. Their victims cannot be rescued. Their purpose is remembrance, historical truth and the solemn promise that such things must never happen again.

An Abortion Holocaust Museum would be different.

While visitors walked through The Scale of Loss, more unborn children would still be dying. While families stood inside One Life. One Story, other mothers and fathers would be making decisions about children whose stories have only begun. While Christians stood before the mirror in WE KNEW, we would still know.

That changes the purpose of the museum.

• It could not merely say, Remember what happened.

• It would also have to say, Look at what is happening.

And ultimately:

What are you going to do about it?

Perhaps that is the most unsettling reason to build it now. We usually construct museums after a civilization has reached enough moral distance from an atrocity to condemn it safely. The perpetrators are dead. The regime has fallen. The laws have changed. Everyone standing inside the museum already knows which side history judged to be wrong.

There is very little courage required to condemn yesterday’s evil.

This museum would ask us to confront what is happening in our own time, while there are still children who can be rescued.

So this would not yet be merely a museum of remembrance.

It would be a museum of remembrance, repentance and rescue.

Someday, I pray, the final child will be legally murdered in America. Perhaps generations after that, people will walk through this museum and struggle to comprehend how their ancestors ever permitted such a thing.

Then it will finally become what Auschwitz, the killing fields and other memorials already are:

A museum about something that ended.

Until then, its very existence would testify to something much more uncomfortable.

The history inside the museum would still be happening outside its doors.

I Can See the Museum

And this is where this essay becomes something more than an essay.

Because I can see this place.

Two floors.

The first floor begins with a single question:

WHO IS HUMAN?

Visitors encounter the science of human development and then move into American history.

• One gallery examines The 50-Year Pro-Life Compromise.

• Another traces The Road to Roe.

• Another tells the story of Roe v. Wade and its aftermath.

• And another tells Oklahoma’s Story. The beginning of the Abolitionist Movement.

• Then visitors go upstairs.

• The second floor confronts The Scale of Loss.

• A central memorial called One Life. One Story. takes enormous numbers and restores individual faces to them.

• Another gallery explains How Abortion Works.

• Another is called The Women & The Truth, We will refuse to reduce women to stereotypes or to speak about them as though they are anything less than responsible moral agents. The pro-life condescends to women, making them a victim of abortion as well as the baby. We will speak truth. In an abortion, there is only ONE victim, the baby.

Then comes perhaps the hardest room:

WE KNEW

• The Church.

• The culture.

• The men.

• Where were we?

Who Wants to Build It?

I don’t know what this would cost.

I don’t know where the land would come from. I don’t know who would design it, curate it, fund it, govern it or operate it.

I only know that I can see it.

I can see a country indicted by it, hanging it’s head in shame. I can see families walking through it. I can see school groups standing before the exhibits. I can see an elderly woman quietly entering the memorial garden carrying the name of a child she has remembered for fifty years. I can see young Christians encountering a history they were never taught.

I can see evangelists all over the grounds, helping visitors come to grips with what they saw while telling them there is forgiveness in Jesus Christ. He only requires humility and admitting sin and trusting in His substitutionary death on the Cross.

And I can see pastors walking through the room devoted to the Church and realizing that future generations will judge what we did with the knowledge God gave us.

Perhaps fifty years from now children will walk through The Rise of the Abolitionist astonished that there was ever a time when American law permitted one human being to intentionally murder another because that human being had not yet been born.

That is what memorials are ultimately for.

They preserve the memory of things future generations might otherwise find impossible to believe.

So I’m putting the idea into the world.

An Abortion Holocaust Museum.

Here in Oklahoma.

Historically rigorous. Medically accurate. Unflinching about what happened. Honest about the failures of the pro-life movement. Especially honest about the failures of the Church. And unapologetically committed to the truth that every human life possesses dignity because every human being bears the image of God.

Maybe this remains nothing more than an essay and some architectural renderings.

But maybe it shouldn’t.

Architects. Historians. Physicians. Embryologists. Attorneys. Abortion abolitionists. Pregnancy-resource ministries. Pastors. Researchers. Museum professionals. Designers. Builders. Landowners. Donors. And ordinary Christians who simply look at this idea and think:

Yes. This needs to exist.

Because perhaps the first step toward building a museum is discovering that enough people believe there ought to be one.

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“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Matthew 22:17

Christians have spent enormous amounts of time thinking about what it means to love God with our hearts and souls. I am increasingly convinced that we have not spent nearly enough time considering the final part of Christ’s command: with all your mind.

Artificial intelligence is going to test us on this.

I don’t know where AI ultimately leads. Neither do you. Neither does Elon Musk, Sam Altman, the engineers building these systems, the politicians promising to regulate them, or the people warning that they may eventually destroy us.

That uncertainty is precisely why Christians need to begin thinking seriously about AI now.

For purposes of discussion, imagine a scale.

On one end is Terminator: machines escape meaningful human control, technology becomes hostile to humanity, enormous power becomes concentrated in very few hands, human beings become increasingly unnecessary, surveillance becomes ubiquitous, and eventually something we created becomes something we cannot control.

On the other end is Star Trek: technology produces extraordinary abundance, eliminates enormous amounts of human drudgery, helps cure diseases, expands human knowledge, democratizes expertise, improves productivity, and allows human beings to accomplish things previous generations could scarcely imagine.

Where are we on that scale?

I don’t know.

And neither does anyone else.

At this moment, I think absolute certainty in either direction is foolish. The person who confidently announces that AI is going to create a technological paradise is moving beyond evidence into faith. But so is the person confidently announcing that AI inevitably ends with machines exterminating humanity.

We simply don’t know.

That does not mean we do nothing. Quite the opposite.

“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” Proverbs 22:3.

Notice what Scripture does not say. The prudent man knows with certainty that catastrophe is coming.

He doesn’t.

He sees danger.

He recognizes a possibility, exercises judgment, and acts accordingly.

But there is another biblical warning that belongs beside it. The servant who buried his talent because he was afraid was not commended for his caution. Fear can masquerade as prudence just as easily as recklessness can masquerade as courage.

That leaves Christians somewhere between technological worship and technological panic.

I would call that place stewardship under uncertainty.

And we had better learn it quickly.

AI Is Already Here

One mistake Christians can make is talking about artificial intelligence as though we are discussing some future technology.

We aren’t.

AI has already arrived. It is already changing how people work, learn, create, diagnose disease, communicate, conduct warfare, commit fraud, discover drugs, write software, search for information, and determine what is true. And it is not going away unless God Himself dictates it.

So rather than beginning with predictions about 2040, consider five things already happening.

1. AI Is Democratizing Expertise

This may be one of AI’s greatest contributions to human civilization.

For most of history, expertise was expensive, requiring education or money to access legal, financial, technical, or academic knowledge.

AI is changing that.

Anyone can now interact with a system that explains complex topics, analyzes documents, builds spreadsheets, translates languages, writes code, tutors math, compares arguments, and synthesizes vast information.

That is extraordinary.

It is very Star Trek.

It could be one of history’s great democratizations of knowledge.

But there is another side.

The same system can produce confident, eloquent answers that are wrong. And an even deeper danger is emerging: we may stop using AI to assist thinking and begin letting it think for us.

That matters for Christians.

The question is not only, “Is the answer correct?”

It is:

Does this tool increase wisdom and discernment, or reduce our responsibility to exercise them?

If we are commanded to love God with our minds, outsourcing them cannot be the goal.

2. AI Is Transforming Medicine and Science

The potential good is breathtaking.

AI is already used in imaging, drug discovery, protein research, diagnostics, and large-scale medical data analysis.

• Imagine physicians supported by thousands of virtual specialists.

• Rare diseases detected earlier through patterns no human could track.

• New drugs developed in months instead of years.

• Cancer identified before a radiologist could see it.

Christians should not dismiss this out of fear.

Healing disease, reducing suffering, and understanding creation are good. But questions remain.

• Who owns the data?

• Who controls the algorithm?

• What is it optimizing?

And what happens when the same tools used to save lives are used by insurers or institutions to decide who is “worth” treating?

The technology may be good, but its control can determine whether it becomes humane or dehumanizing.

3. AI Is Changing the Meaning of Work

This is already unavoidable.

AI writes code, creates media, answers customers, analyzes documents, assists professionals, and produces reports, often replacing skilled labor.

There is a Star Trek possibility here: less drudgery, higher productivity, cheaper goods, and powerful tools for small businesses and individuals.

But there is also a concern.

If productivity gains flow mainly to those who own the models, chips, and infrastructure, AI could concentrate wealth and power at unprecedented levels.

Christians must also ask:

What is work for?

If it is only income, automation is an economic shift.

But Scripture frames work as vocation, service, creativity, stewardship, and participation in God’s order.

AI will force a recovery of that deeper theology.

4. AI Is Undermining “Seeing Is Believing”

This is one of the most immediate dangers.

For most of history, seeing was strong evidence. That is no longer true. AI can generate convincing images, voices, documents, and video. This enables powerful uses in art, education, and accessibility—but also deep deception.

People can be made to say things they never said, appear in events that never happened, or fabricate emergencies and crimes.

Worse, even real evidence may lose credibility as people respond, “It’s AI-generated.”

This directly challenges a Christian concern for truth, testimony, and honest judgment.

We are entering a world where truth is harder to verify just as information becomes easier to produce.

5. AI Is Both Decentralizing and Centralizing Power

This is the central paradox.

AI gives ordinary people capabilities once reserved for institutions - research, writing, analysis, coding, and education now accessible from a kitchen table.

That is profoundly decentralizing.

But building advanced AI requires massive capital, energy, chips, data, and infrastructure, pushing power toward a few large actors.

So AI may simultaneously become one of history’s greatest democratizers of capability and one of its greatest centralizers of power.

That tension deserves serious attention.

The AI Trap

This is where I think Christians need to become particularly careful.

I have written previously about what I call the Constitution Trap. Whatever conclusions you reach about that argument, the underlying warning applies here.

Don’t arrive twenty years late.

Don’t wait until powerful institutions have built the architecture, written the rules, established the vocabulary, determined the permissible opinions, distributed the benefits, concentrated the power, and then handed Christians two approved positions from which we are graciously permitted to choose.

Start asking questions now.

• Who owns AI?

• Who controls it?

• Who may access it?

• Who decides what it is permitted to say?

• Who decides what it is forbidden to say?

• Who possesses the underlying data?

• Who benefits economically from its productivity?

• Who bears responsibility when it harms someone?

• Can governments compel these systems to censor information?

• Can corporations?

• Who decides what constitutes “misinformation”?

• Who watches the watchers?

And perhaps most importantly:

What authority are we gradually surrendering to artificial intelligence simply because surrendering it is convenient?

Those are not primarily technological questions.

They are questions of stewardship, truth, authority, responsibility, human nature, justice, power, and ultimately worship.

In other words, they are profoundly biblical questions.

Scripture Doesn’t Mention Artificial Intelligence

Of course it doesn’t.

Neither does Scripture mention nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, smartphones, CT scanners, airplanes, central banking, social media, or the Internet.

That objection fundamentally misunderstands what Scripture gives us.

God did not give mankind a catalog containing explicit instructions for every technology human beings would eventually invent.

• He gave us something considerably more durable.

• He told us what man is.

• He told us what creation is.

• He told us what authority is.

• He told us what truth is.

• He told us what justice is.

• He told us what work is.

• He told us what wisdom is.

• He told us what evil is.

• He told us what human beings do when they acquire power.

• And He told us Whom we are to worship.

Those categories are more than sufficient to begin thinking about artificial intelligence.

Where Am I?

Somewhere near the question mark.

Not because there is no evidence to consider. There is already plenty.

But because I see the what increasingly capable artificial intelligence will produce but always with caution that governments, corporations, markets, militaries, robotics, human psychology, human sin, will use it for evil.

That uncertainty does not frighten me.

But it does make me watchful.

Christians have a better category than either technological utopianism or technological panic.

Watchfulness without panic. Hope without naïveté. Stewardship without surrender.

That is where I want to begin.

Jesus commanded us to love God with all our minds. That was never permission to think only about subjects carrying an explicitly theological label.

If something is reshaping medicine, economics, warfare, education, truth, work, government, communication, family life, and perhaps eventually civilization itself, Christians cannot shrug and say, “That’s technology. I’m interested in biblical things.”

It is a biblical thing because human beings are involved.

The question before us isn’t whether Christians should embrace artificial intelligence or reject artificial intelligence.

That question is far too simple.

The question is much harder:

What does faithful Christian stewardship look like when mankind creates a tool whose eventual power neither its creators nor its critics can presently measure?

I intend to spend some time trying to answer that.

Because loving God with our minds requires us to use them before somebody else decides to do our thinking for us.

Questions for reflection:

1. Where would you place yourself today on the Terminator-to-Star Trek scale, and what evidence, rather than fear or optimism, has put you there?

2. Are you using AI in a way that strengthens your ability to think, discern, create, and exercise wisdom, or are you beginning to surrender some of those responsibilities to it?

3. If AI becomes as consequential as I suspect it will, what should Christians be thinking about and doing now so that we are faithful stewards rather than people who arrive ten years late?

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There are few passages of Scripture more frequently quoted in political discussions than Romans 13.

It has become almost instinctive. Raise concerns about government overreach, civic responsibility, or the Christian’s duty in public life, and before long someone invokes Romans 13. The conversation ends almost as quickly as it began. We must submit we’re told. Sadly, that’s “loser theology” predicated on poor exegesis.

And what if we’ve been asking the wrong question?

What if one of the most familiar passages in the New Testament has also become one of the most frequently misunderstood?

What if our application of Romans 13 says more about our assumptions regarding government than it does about Paul’s actual purpose?

What if the Apostle was not writing a timeless political manifesto, but pastoral instruction to a powerless church living beneath an imperial dictatorship?

What if the Christians in Rome, circa A.D. 56-57, occupied a political world so fundamentally different from ours that applying Paul’s instruction without considering that difference actually distorts its meaning?

What if Paul expected those believers to preserve the Church’s witness precisely because they possessed no lawful means to influence, restrain, or replace their rulers?

What if we do?

Paul’s readers lived under Nero. They did not vote. They did not petition. They did not elect magistrates. They did not replace emperors. They possessed no political sovereignty whatsoever.

They were subjects of an empire. That fact is not incidental.

It is the world into which Romans 13 was written.

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

The question is not whether Romans 13 applies.

Of course it does.

The question is how it applies when the political order itself is fundamentally different.

What if loving God with all our minds requires more than quoting Romans 13 to seemingly end a political debate?

What if it requires us to understand why Paul wrote what he wrote before insisting that his application must be identical in every political order throughout history?

What if faithful exegesis requires us to ask a question we have largely ignored?

Who, exactly, is the governing authority?

In Nero’s Rome, the answer required no explanation.

In twenty-first century America, it does.

Romans 13 teaches without ambiguity that all authority comes from God. Christians have confessed this for two millennia. I confess that.

But notice what the Holy Spirit through Paul does not say.

He does not identify the particular human repository of that authority. He simply speaks of “the governing authorities,” assuming his readers know precisely whom he means.

That assumption worked in Rome.

Does it work just as easily in America?

Perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question.

The issue is not whether God establishes civil authority.

The issue is where, within a given political order, He has chosen to locate that authority. History offers different answers.

Sometimes authority has rested in kings.

Sometimes in emperors.

Sometimes in parliaments.

Every political order answers the same question differently: Where does legitimate civil authority reside?

The American political tradition rests upon a remarkably different premise than imperial Rome.

The Declaration of Independence does not merely announce separation from Great Britain. It articulates a political philosophy: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

That is a remarkable claim. Jefferson does not merely speak of "consent." He relocates the locus of civil authority. Under God's sovereign providence, authority is no longer understood to reside in a throne, a senate, or a parliament, but in the people themselves.

It means the people are not merely governed.

They are the human source from whom civil authority is delegated to those who temporarily exercise it. Consequently, the people retain the authority they have delegated. As Jefferson famously argues, when government becomes destructive of its proper ends, the people possess the right to alter or abolish it and institute another that better secures their safety and happiness. If Romans 13 teaches that there is no governing authority except that which God has established, then this political order must also exist within His providential establishment.

Whether one agrees with Jefferson’s philosophy is almost beside the point.

It is the political order in which we live.

Which raises another question.

Can we simply import the application of Romans 13 from Nero’s empire into a political order founded upon an entirely different understanding of where civil authority resides?

Permit me a thought experiment.

Suppose Paul were writing, not to Christians under Nero, but to Christians living within a political order whose founding principle is that legitimate civil authority resides in the people.

Perhaps his application of the same principle would sound something like this:

“Let every person be subject to the governing authority God has established. In the American political order, God has permitted a nation whose founding principle is that legitimate civil authority resides in the people and is exercised through those to whom they temporarily entrust it. There is no authority except from God, and the authority that exists has been established by Him. Therefore, let every citizen faithfully exercise the stewardship of the authority God has entrusted to the people, and let every public servant faithfully discharge the authority temporarily entrusted to him.”

No, that is not Scripture. Nor is it an attempt to rewrite Scripture.

It is simply an effort to ask how the principle of Romans 13 might be faithfully applied within a political order unlike the one in which it was first written.

The principle has not changed. God remains the source of all legitimate authority. Right?

The question is whether the human repository of that authority changes from one political order to another.

Here we must be careful. To say God has established a political order is not to say He approves of everything that order does. Scripture itself records empires, kingdoms, monarchies, and tyrannies, all existing under His sovereign rule while many simultaneously stood under His judgment. God's establishment of authority should never be confused with His moral approval of those who exercise it.

For perspective, political scientists recognize dozens of distinct forms of government. The CIA's World Factbook alone lists more than thirty: absolute monarchies, constitutional monarchies, parliamentary democracies, federal republics, dictatorships, communist states, theocracies, and many others.

Has God established them all? Romans 13 says He has. And if that is true, does it really make sense to assume Paul's application is identical in every one of them? In other words, if God has permitted and sovereignly ruled over many different forms of government throughout history, why should we assume Romans 13 is applied identically in every one of them?

If it doesn’t, then application necessarily changes even while the biblical principle remains exactly the same.

So again, perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong question all along.

• Perhaps the question has never been whether Christians should submit to governing authority.

• Perhaps the question has always been where God has located that governing authority.

If we have assumed that the answer is always “the government,” regardless of the form of government under consideration, we may have skipped the very question faithful exegesis requires us to ask.

And if we have done that, we may have unintentionally placed a yoke upon our brothers and sisters that Paul never intended them to bear.

The courage required today may not be the courage to reject Romans 13.

It may be the courage to read it carefully.

• Historically.

• Contextually.

• Thoughtfully.

• And honestly.

For perhaps the greatest act of submission we owe to Scripture is allowing it to challenge our traditions rather than asking our traditions to define what Scripture must mean.

A Final Note

This essay is not intended to be the final word on Romans 13. It is intended to ask what I believe is the right first question.

Over the past several months I have been researching and writing a short booklet that examines Romans 13 in its historical context and considers its application within the political philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence. My aim is neither to diminish Scripture nor to elevate American political thought above it. Rather, it is to ask whether we have too quickly assumed that Paul’s instructions to powerless Christians living under Nero apply identically to citizens who, under our political order, bear the stewardship of civil authority itself.

I hope to make that booklet available soon. Until then, I hope this essay encourages you to do what every Christian should desire to do: return to the text, examine its context carefully, and ask whether we have been asking the right questions all along.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1974 essay, Live Not by Lies, was not primarily about Soviet politics. It was about a universal principle. Tyranny ultimately depends upon ordinary people accepting falsehood as the price of comfort. His challenge was simple: refuse to participate in the lie. Even if you cannot overthrow it, do not live by it.

The same principle applies not only to nations, but also to churches.

Civilizations are not ultimately destroyed by military defeat, economic collapse, or foreign invasion. Those events often mark the end of a much longer story. A civilization begins to die the moment it adopts a lie as the foundation upon which it orders its common life. Once truth becomes negotiable, justice inevitably follows, for justice can never rise above the truth upon which it depends.

The church is no different.

Churches rarely abandon Christ through open rebellion. They usually drift through small compromises that appear compassionate, prudent, or practical. I’ve seen this with my own eyes.

A theological innovation is introduced that relieves the conscience while avoiding the cost of obedience. It retains enough biblical language to sound orthodox, yet subtly changes the moral categories through which God’s people are commanded to understand reality.

That is why the church at Laodicea remains so relevant. Christ did not rebuke them for denying His existence. He rebuked them because they had become comfortable enough to deceive themselves. “I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,” they believed, while Christ declared that they were “wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” Their greatest danger was not open unbelief. It was their inability to recognize the lie they had come to believe about themselves.

Comfort has always been fertile ground for theological compromise. I’ve seen this in my own life.

Whenever obedience becomes costly, the temptation arises to redefine reality so that costly obedience is no longer required. The lie need not be outrageous. It need only be plausible enough to soothe the conscience.

Over the past fifty years, I believe one of the most consequential examples has been the church’s adoption of what I call the “two-victim strategy”1 regarding abortion.

To be clear, many women who seek abortions have themselves suffered profoundly, sin always causes suffering. Some have been abandoned, manipulated, threatened, or pressured. Others later experience deep regret and emotional anguish. These realities call for genuine compassion, mercy, and, where appropriate, justice against those who exploited them.

But suffering and victimhood are not identical moral categories.

In an intentional abortion there is one innocent human being whose life is deliberately taken. That child is the victim of the act itself. To describe both participants primarily as equal victims fundamentally alters the moral framework through which Christians understand abortion. Compassion begins to overshadow justice, not because compassion is wrong, but because the categories themselves have been rearranged.

What makes this observation historically significant is that this rhetorical shift did not simply arise organically. Scholars studying the American pro-life movement have documented that beginning in the late twentieth century many organizations intentionally expanded their message from defending the unborn child to emphasizing that abortion also harms women. They describe this development as a “pro-woman frame” or a “frame extension,” noting that it represented a deliberate strategic change in public messaging. More recent research even suggests that this approach proved politically more persuasive than messaging focused primarily on fetal personhood.¹

Whether that strategy proved politically effective is, however, the wrong question.

The church is not called to proclaim the most persuasive political message. It is called to bear truthful witness.

The more searching question is whether, in our desire to appear compassionate, we unintentionally compromised our prophetic voice. Hint: it did. We must be honest to God and to ourselves, the facts are clear, we began speaking in ways that made us more acceptable to the culture while making us less faithful to Scripture’s moral categories.

Even unbelievers understand the importance of distinguishing innocence from responsibility. They may reject Christianity altogether, yet still recognize that justice depends upon clear moral distinctions. If the church appears unwilling to speak plainly about the innocent life that is intentionally murdered, why should the world conclude that our understanding of justice is any clearer than its own?

That question is far more dangerous than asking whether our political strategy succeeded.

It asks whether we quietly exchanged theological precision for cultural respectability.

History suggests that civilizations rarely recover once they begin living by lies. Institutions continue to function. Elections are still held. Churches still gather. Commerce still flourishes. Outwardly, everything appears stable.

Yet beneath the surface, the moral architecture has already begun to collapse.

The same can happen within the church.

Every generation must therefore ask itself a frightening question.

What lies have we accepted because they made obedience easier?

I’m 67 and have been born-again for 48 of those years. I have watched the evangelical community compromise, when we did not have to. We must confess we have been horrible stewards, sinful stewards of the power were were handed from our founding generations. I cover it in my article “Stewardship: what has God entrusted to us?”

So, what lies have we accepted because they made obedience easier? That question reaches far deeper than political effectiveness. It asks whether we have learned to soothe our consciences with theological innovations that preserve our comfort while convincing ourselves we remain faithful.

Christ’s warning to Laodicea still stands. The greatest danger facing the church is not that it will openly deny Christ. The greater danger is that it will become so comfortable with respectable lies that it no longer recognizes His voice calling it to repentance.

Will you join me in repentance?

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Sources

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Live Not by Lies (February 12, 1974). Available through the Solzhenitsyn Center: https://solzhenitsyncenter.org/live-not-by-lies

This series began with the silent screams of children whose lives were ended while the Church learned to accommodate itself to the system that permitted their deaths. It then asked how Christians could remain so politically active, so constitutionally devoted, and yet so ineffective in stopping what we claimed to regard as a great moral evil. The answer has not been that Christians lacked concern, organization, money, candidates, lawyers, or access. We possessed all of these. What we lacked was a faithful understanding of stewardship.

For fifty years, much of the evangelical and conservative movement treated the Constitution not merely as a governing instrument, but as the boundary of moral imagination. We were taught that our responsibility consisted of voting, litigating, lobbying, electing better judges, and waiting for the system to correct itself. When those efforts failed, we repeated them. When the failures became catastrophic, we called for greater patience. When millions died, we reassured ourselves that we had remained faithful because we had stayed within the accepted procedures.

But stewardship cannot be measured solely by procedural compliance. A steward is judged by what he did with what was entrusted to him. If political authority in America rests finally, under God, with the people, then the people cannot escape responsibility by pointing to the machinery of government and saying that the machinery would not cooperate. The question is not merely whether we followed the rules. The question is whether we faithfully used the authority God placed in our hands.

We have now reached the point where analysis must give way to decision.

There are five paths before us.

The First Path: Constitutional Resignation

The first path is the one evangelicals and conservatives already know and sadly are well accustomed to. We can remain politically active evangelicals and conservatives, continue voting, litigating, donating, campaigning, and appealing to the courts, and accept that those with greater energy, discipline, and appetite for power may eventually capture the government created by the Constitution and wield its monopoly on force against us. That is inevitable by the way. Demographics is destiny.

This is not necessarily a path of immediate surrender. It may involve years of political activity. There will still be elections, conventions, fundraising appeals, judicial nominations, legislative battles, and urgent warnings that everything depends upon the next cycle. There will always be another candidate promising to restore the republic, another lawsuit described as decisive, and another constitutional scholar assuring us that the document contains the remedy for the crisis the document has been unable to prevent.

Yet after half a century, this path must be judged by more than its intentions. Its defenders must explain why the repetition of familiar methods should now be expected to produce a different result. They must explain why a system that allows Marxists, secular progressives, organized Islamist political movements, and every other ideological faction to pursue complete control of the federal government will somehow prevent them from succeeding if they possess greater unity, patience, and institutional resolve than their opponents.

The Constitution does not prevent a hostile movement from winning elections, controlling Congress, appointing judges, directing federal agencies, commanding the military, regulating commerce, controlling currency, shaping education, and using the administrative state against its enemies. It provides a process through which those things may be acquired. Conservatives may continue trusting that process, but they should no longer call that trust a strategy merely because it is familiar.

This first path is therefore not simply constitutional conservatism. It is constitutional resignation. It accepts, whether openly or gradually, that the centralized government will continue expanding and that those most willing to seize its powers will eventually prevail. It may postpone the day of reckoning, but it offers no convincing account of how that day will be avoided.

The Second Path: The Jeffersonian Remedy

The second path is to recover the political remedy stated in the Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration does not teach that a people must endure any government indefinitely so long as the government was once lawfully constituted. It says that governments are instituted to secure certain ends, that their just powers are derived from the consent of the governed, and that when a government becomes destructive of those ends, the people possess the right to alter or abolish it and establish new government.

This remedy has been reduced to patriotic language recited on holidays. We quote it, admire it, and carefully avoid asking what it requires.

To recover the Jeffersonian remedy would mean organizing peacefully and openly around the proposition that the present federal government has become destructive of the purposes for which legitimate government exists. It would mean presenting a sustained declaration of grievances, identifying the specific abuses that justify structural change, and proposing a new political order capable of securing justice, protecting life, and limiting centralized power.

Such an effort could not consist of rhetoric alone. It would require men and women willing to build institutions, persuade communities, organize states, draft governing documents, establish legal arguments, and endure the social and economic penalties that inevitably accompany a serious challenge to entrenched power. It would require disciplined leadership and a clear rejection of political violence except in legitimate defense against violence.

Most importantly, it would require Christians to stop treating the Declaration as an inspirational preface to the Constitution and begin treating it as a statement about the moral purpose and derivative nature of government. Government is not sovereign. It is an instrument. When the instrument becomes destructive of the ends for which it was created, the people who established it do not lose their stewardship merely because the instrument has acquired power over them.

Still, this path raises an immediate question: What does it mean, in practical terms, to alter or abolish a government as vast and consolidated as the present federal system? Who would act? Through what political bodies? Over what territory? With what economic and institutional foundation?

That leads to the third path.

The Third Path: Secession of the Thirty-One States

The third path is for the thirty-one states carried by Donald Trump on November 5, 2024, to begin an orderly and peaceful process of withdrawing from the present federal union and forming a new political confederation or republic.

This proposal will be dismissed immediately by many readers as impossible. Some will call it reckless. Others will assume that any new federation would be too small, too weak, too economically dependent, or too geographically fragmented to survive.

The maps tell a different story.

The thirty-one Trump states contain approximately 201.6 million people and represent an estimated $15.07 trillion in combined economic output. Taken together, they would constitute one of the largest populations and economies in the world.

They also contain 188 major military installations distributed across all thirty-one states. They contain 27 deep-water ports across ten states, including major access points along the Gulf Coast, Atlantic Coast, and Alaska. The combined strategic map shows a broad territorial federation possessing substantial population, military infrastructure, port access, and geographic depth.

These facts do not prove that secession would be easy under current federal doctrine, or politically achievable. They do not resolve questions concerning military allegiance, federal debt, currency, trade, interstate water rights, nuclear weapons, treaty obligations, Social Security, federal lands, or the movement of populations across newly formed borders. The maps establish material capacity, not political certainty.

But material capacity matters because it answers the first objection. This would not be a collection of tiny, isolated provinces attempting to survive without resources. It would be a continental political body containing major agricultural regions, energy production, transportation networks, industrial capacity, military facilities, ports, and more than two hundred million people.

The deeper objection is not that such a federation could not exist. It is that Americans have been trained to believe the present union is permanent by definition. The federal government is treated as though it possesses an eternal claim over the states and people, even though the political tradition from which America emerged taught that governments derive their authority from the governed.

Secession would carry grave risks. It could produce economic turmoil, political retaliation, legal confrontation, civil disorder, or even federal coercion. No honest person should minimize those dangers.

But remaining also carries grave risks.

To remain is to accept continued consolidation of federal authority, expanding surveillance, ideological control through education and corporate institutions, increasing hostility toward Christian convictions, and the possibility that a future national majority will use the machinery of government without restraint. It is also to accept that abortion policy, family law, religious liberty, education, taxation, currency, war, and nearly every other major question will continue to be determined within a national contest that rewards centralized power.

The relevant comparison is not between dangerous secession and safe union. It is between two dangerous futures. Prudence requires examining both rather than sanctifying one through habit.

A serious secession movement would therefore need far more than anger. It would require conventions within the states, coordination among governors and legislatures, proposed articles of confederation, a transition plan, economic agreements, a public statement of grievances, and an explicit commitment to peaceful separation. It would need to persuade not only committed conservatives, but millions of ordinary people who simply want to raise families, practice their faith, work, trade, and live without ideological coercion.

It would also need to answer the most important question of all: What kind of government would replace the one being rejected? Certainly NOT the one created in Philadelphia in 1787.

There would be little value in escaping one centralized regime only to recreate it under another name. A new federation would need to recover genuine state sovereignty, strictly limited delegated powers, clear protections for life and family, and a political order that acknowledges God rather than pretending government can remain morally neutral.

Secession is not a complete plan. It is one possible framework within which a plan might be built.

The Fourth Path: Exile

The fourth path is to leave.

Individuals and families may decide that the struggle has advanced too far, that they lack the calling or capacity to participate in national political reconstruction, or that their first responsibility is to protect their children and grandchildren by relocating to a more stable country.

This option should not be mocked. Scripture does not condemn flight in every circumstance. Christians fled persecution. Jesus told His disciples that when they were persecuted in one town, they could flee to another. Prudence is not cowardice, and no man should casually expose his family to destruction merely to preserve his reputation for courage.

For some, exile may be the most responsible choice available.

Yet exile should be described honestly. It may preserve a family, but it does not reform the political order being abandoned. It may provide temporary refuge, but it offers no guarantee that the refuge will remain neutral. The same technologies of surveillance, ideological conformity, financial control, and centralized administration are spreading throughout the developed world. A quiet place today may not remain quiet tomorrow.

There is also a stewardship question that cannot be avoided. Those who leave must ask whether they are prudently protecting what has been entrusted to them or abandoning responsibilities they still possess the capacity to fulfill. The answer will not be identical for everyone. Age, health, family obligations, finances, calling, and local circumstances matter.

But leaving is still a choice. It should not be disguised as political neutrality.

What Faithfulness Requires

I cannot tell every Christian which of these paths he must take.

Some may conclude that constitutional political action remains their duty, though they will need to explain how that action differs from the failed pattern of the past fifty years. Some may become convinced that the people must organize around the Declaration’s authority to alter or abolish destructive government. Some may believe that state-led secession offers the most realistic and peaceful means of political separation. Others may conclude that their responsibility to family requires them to leave.

Circumstances differ, and stewardship is not mechanical.

But one option should no longer remain available: unconscious continuation.

We cannot simply keep doing what we have always done, call it faithfulness, and refuse to examine the fruit. We cannot invoke the Constitution as though it absolves us from responsibility for what the constitutional order has become and the lost lives of the 63,000,000 image-bearers of God. God will not be mocked after all. We cannot point to elections, lawsuits, marches, and political donations while ignoring the fact that the killing continued and the centralized government grew stronger.

• Analysis is not stewardship.

• Concern is not stewardship.

• Voting is not stewardship merely because voting is lawful.

Stewardship means faithfully using whatever authority, resources, position, and opportunity God has entrusted to us for the purposes He has revealed.

That is why the silent screams remain at the center of this series.

They expose every abstraction. They refuse to allow us to discuss government as though political systems were merely intellectual puzzles. While Christians debated constitutional theory, children died. While conservative organizations raised money, children died. While courts delayed, legislatures compromised, candidates campaigned, and churches celebrated political access, children died.

The question is not whether we cared.

The question is what we did with the authority entrusted to us.

We have reached the end of analysis and the beginning of decision. Four paths lie before us, and each carries costs. None can be chosen faithfully without prayer, wisdom, courage, counsel, and an honest accounting of our duties.

But continuing without reflection is not faithfulness, and resignation is not stewardship merely because it has been dressed in constitutional language.

The authority entrusted to a people remains an entrusted authority. It belongs ultimately to God, and He will require an account of what we did with it.

The silent screams have not ceased. While you’re reading this, another 3,000 image-bearers of God were murdered.

The only remaining question is whether the silent screams have finally become louder than our fear.

Reflective Questions

• Have I unconsciously assumed that faithfulness means remaining within the political system I inherited, or have I honestly asked whether God may require something more of me?

• If I reject one or more of these paths, is it because they are genuinely unbiblical or imprudent, or simply because they make me uncomfortable?

• Do I believe political stewardship requires only voting every few years, or does it require me to use whatever influence God has entrusted to me for the protection of my neighbor?

• If the Constitution no longer restrains evil as I once believed, what responsibility remains mine before God?

• Am I waiting for someone else to formulate a plan, or has God entrusted me with gifts, relationships, knowledge, or resources that should become part of the solution?

• When my grandchildren ask what I did while the nation continued its moral decline, what answer will I be able to give with a clear conscience?

• Which of these paths have I dismissed without serious thought, and why?

• If fear were removed from the equation, would I still choose the same course?

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Reader’s Note

What you are about to read may be one of the most surprising essays in this series. Not because the history itself is obscure or controversial, but because many readers will likely finish it asking the same question I asked nearly fifteen years ago:

Why didn’t anyone ever tell me this?

That was my reaction after discovering this chapter of American history in my early fifties. At the time, I considered myself a constitutional conservative. I had served on Capitol Hill. I had spent years studying American government. Yet I realized I had unconsciously accepted a version of our nation’s founding that was more myth than history.

Like most Americans, I had been taught to compress the entire founding into one great patriotic moment. The Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, and the Constitution itself all blended together into a single story with a single cast of “Founding Fathers.” Once I began separating those events and reading the documents in their historical order, I found myself asking questions I had never even thought to ask before.

If you are my age, this essay may be difficult. We have carried this narrative for most of our lives, and it is never comfortable to discover that something we assumed to be true is, at the very least, incomplete.

But my deepest hope is for younger readers.

Many of you sense that something has gone profoundly wrong in America. You have watched institutions lose credibility, economic opportunities become less certain, political divisions deepen, and the destruction of innocent life continue decade after decade. Yet whenever you ask what should be done, the answers almost always return to the same place: vote harder, trust the process, defend the Constitution, and wait for the next election.

If those answers have never seemed sufficient, perhaps it is because you have been taught to begin the American story in the wrong place.

This essay is an invitation to reconsider that story from its beginning.

"The greatest political mistake modern American Christians make is believing the Constitution is America's founding philosophy. It is not. The Constitution was a governmental mechanism. The philosophy came first."

Most Americans have never been taught the American founding. We have been taught an American founding story.

In that story, the First Continental Congress, the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, George Washington, James Madison, and the Bill of Rights all merge into one great patriotic moment. The details blur together into a single narrative in which “the Founding Fathers” collectively produced “the Constitution.”

History is considerably more complicated.

The American founding was not a single event. It was a thirteen-year national argument stretching from the First Continental Congress in 1774 to the Constitutional Convention in 1787. During those years, well over a hundred and twenty prominent Americans participated in shaping the new nation. Delegates came and went. Political alliances shifted. Some men died, others retired, and new voices emerged. They did not all sign the same documents. In fact, only two, Roger Sherman of Connecticut and Robert Morris of Pennsylvania signed all three documents i.e. the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the U.S. Constitution. The men in these various conventions and meetings were not the same, they have varied motivations and incentives to participate. They did not all agree on the same solutions. They did not even agree on what kind of nation America should become.

Like most Americans, I assumed there was essentially one founding generation carrying one great project from beginning to end. The men who declared independence, I thought, were essentially the same men who later drafted the Articles of Confederation and then gathered once more in Philadelphia to correct their earlier mistakes by writing the Constitution.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

History is far more complicated.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written eleven years apart to answer entirely different questions. Between them stood America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, under which the United States fought the latter years of the Revolutionary War, secured British recognition of its independence, and governed as a sovereign nation for years before the Constitution was ever proposed.

We have been taught to think of 1787 as the beginning.

It was not the beginning.

It was a revision.

That single historical fact exposes one of the greatest misconceptions in American political thought. We instinctively treat the Constitution as America’s founding philosophy, when in reality it was a new governmental mechanism built upon, and in some important respects departing from, an already existing political order.

• The moral philosophy came first.

• The amoral mechanism came later in 1787.

If we confuse the two, we will misunderstand not only the American founding, but also our own responsibilities as Christian citizens. Recovering those distinctions is therefore not an exercise in historical trivia. It is essential if we hope to escape what I have called the Constitution Trap.

Every civilization begins with first principles. Before there are legislatures, courts, executives, constitutions, or elections, there are assumptions about reality itself. Every society must answer fundamental questions.

• What is man?

• Where do rights come from?

• Why does government exist?

• Who possesses political authority?

• When may governments rightly be resisted and abolished?

These are not constitutional questions.

They are philosophical questions.

The Declaration answers every one of them. It begins, not with a discussion of governmental structure, but with God.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident...”

The Declaration assumes a Creator. Human beings possess dignity because they were created. Rights are inalienable because they were not granted by government. Governments exist to secure those rights rather than create them. Their powers are “derived from the consent of the governed,” not from kings, legislatures, judges, or constitutions themselves. And to be clear, Jefferson's phrase, "the consent of the governed," has often been treated as though it were self-interpreting. It is not. Consent answers the question of where political authority originates. It does not answer how a deeply divided people like today, holding fundamentally incompatible moral visions, can continue governing one another indefinitely through majority rule alone.

Jefferson then writes that when government systematically destroys those purposes, the people retain both the authority and, at times, the duty to alter or abolish it.

That is America’s political philosophy.

The Declaration establishes first principles. It openly appeals to the Creator, acknowledges objective moral truth, grounds rights outside government, and defines government’s purpose as securing those preexisting rights.

The Constitution does something entirely and fundamentally different.

It abandons the language of first principles altogether. Rather than grounding the new government in an explicit moral philosophy, it constructs a mechanism for exercising political power. It tells us how offices are filled, laws enacted, judges appointed, taxes collected, and powers divided. But it is remarkably silent on the moral ends those powers are meant to pursue.

This distinction matters far more than most post-1973 Christians realize.

Because over time, many Americans became fascinated with the procedural questions while gradually forgetting the philosophical ones.

Conservatives quote the Preamble to the Constitution while scarcely remembering the opening paragraphs of the Declaration. They debate Article I, Article II, and Article III while neglecting the document that explains why if any of those articles possess legitimacy in the first place. If they possess any legitimacy at all. They don’t. Why? Because I don’t consent. Do you?

Additionally, the generation that declared independence did not immediately draft the Constitution. Their first attempt at national government was the Articles of Confederation.

That fact deserves far more attention than it receives. Most constitutional conservatives know little to nothing about the Articles - to their detriment.

The Articles were imperfect, but neither is the Constitution, right? I can even admit the Articles proved inadequate in several important respects, particularly in coordinating finance and national defense. But they were not random. Nor were they an embarrassing historical detour on the inevitable road toward the Constitution.

They were the first attempt to build a political order upon the principles articulated in the Declaration.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Article II.

“Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence...”

Those words sound remarkably consistent with the Declaration’s understanding of delegated authority. Political power begins with the people. The people entrust certain authority to civil government. Governments possess only those powers that have been granted to them. What has not been delegated remains where it always belonged.

Whether one ultimately believes the Articles could have survived is almost beside the point.

The important question is this: What assumptions about political authority do they reveal?

They reveal a people deeply suspicious of concentrated power because they had just fought a revolution against concentrated power.

They reveal a political instinct flowing naturally from the Declaration’s first principles.

Then came Philadelphia.

The Constitutional Convention is often described as though it merely repaired defects in the Articles. In reality, it did far more than improve governmental efficiency. It fundamentally restructured the mechanism through which political authority would operate.

• Article VII established an entirely new path to ratification, bypassing the amendment process prescribed by Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation.

• Article VI declared the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties to be the supreme law of the land.

• Additional provisions created a far stronger national government than anything contemplated under the Articles.

Whether those changes were wise or necessary is not the immediate question.

The question is whether the philosophy in the Declaration remained unchanged simply because a new mechanism was adopted.

• Mechanisms matter.

• They shape incentives.

• They influence behavior.

• They redirect the flow of political authority over generations.

Christians understand this instinctively in other areas of life. We recognize that institutions shape cultures. Families shape children. Churches shape disciples. Laws shape societies.

Why should constitutions be any different?

Over nearly two and a half centuries, Americans slowly transferred their affection from the principles of 1776 to the mechanisms of 1787.

• The Constitution became something approaching sacred.

• The Declaration became historical decoration.

• That inversion created what I have called the Constitution Trap.

When Christians ask only, “Is this constitutional?” they have already accepted the Constitution as the highest framework for political reasoning.

The Declaration asks a prior question.

• Is this just?

• Does this government continue to secure the rights it was instituted to protect?

• Are those exercising authority remaining faithful to the trust placed in them by the people under God?

Can you see the difference? Those are moral questions before they are constitutional ones. And the Constitution cannot answer them because it was never designed to answer them. Which of course explains why the Constitution alone can never preserve liberty.

• It contains no conscience.

• It cannot produce virtue.

• It cannot compel courage.

• It cannot require repentance.

• It cannot distinguish righteousness from wickedness.

The same constitutional processes that elevate a statesman can elevate a tyrant. It is a completely amoral structure. And not a particurly good one either.

The same machinery that protects liberty can, in the hands of a determined majority, be employed to dismantle it piece by piece.

That should not surprise us. A machine has no morality. Only those who operate it do.

The Declaration points beyond the machinery to an objective moral order grounded in the Creator. The Constitution does no such thing.

Post-1973 Roe v. Wade Christians have largely reversed those priorities.

We became experts in constitutional procedure while neglecting the philosophical foundation that started these united States.

As a result, we increasingly analyzed politics as technicians rather than as faithful stewards to the grace God gave us through the War for Independence.

That distinction may explain more about the modern church’s political failures than almost anything else we have examined in this series.

• Stewards do not merely ask whether a mechanism permits an action.

• They ask whether faithful stewardship requires one.

• That is the question the Declaration teaches us to ask.

• It is also the question we have largely forgotten.

If the Constitution has become our intellectual prison, then recovering the Declaration is not an exercise in nostalgia.

It is the beginning of learning to think rightly again.

The chapters that follow will build upon that foundation. We will examine what faithful political stewardship actually requires of Christians who understand that governmental mechanisms exist to serve enduring principles, not replace them.

Only then can we begin to recover what has been lost.

Questions for Reflection

1. When you think about America’s founding, do you instinctively picture one unified event, or have you ever considered that it was a thirteen-year debate involving different men, different documents, and different visions for the new nation?

2. Have you unconsciously treated the Constitution as America’s philosophical foundation rather than as a governmental mechanism?

3. If a constitutional mechanism can be employed by Christians, Marxists, secular progressives, or any other political movement, what does that suggest about the relationship between political mechanisms and moral philosophy?

4. If you had been born in 1787 rather than looking back with two centuries of hindsight, would you have supported the Constitution, opposed it as an Anti-Federalist, or remained undecided? More importantly, what evidence leads you to that conclusion?

5. As you continue through this series, are you willing to reexamine not only what you believe about America’s founding, but also whether those beliefs have shaped the way you think about your own responsibilities before God as a citizen?

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“Well done, good and faithful servant... You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much.” (Matthew 25:21)

Jesus spoke often about stewardship.

He spoke of servants entrusted with vineyards, households, money, talents, minas, and authority. Although the details of each parable differ, they all revolve around the same question. The issue is never ownership, because nothing belongs to the servant. Nor is the issue primarily success, because not every servant receives the same opportunities or produces the same results.

The Master’s question is much simpler.

What did you do with what your Master placed into your hands?

That question has enormous implications for Christians living in America, our origins tied to these sets of words that closed with: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

For decades we have debated constitutions, courts, elections, and legal theories while rarely asking the prior biblical question.

What has God entrusted to us?

Until we answer that question correctly, every discussion about political action will remain confused and impotent - we’re still caught in The Constitution Trap..

That question reaches far beyond our finances or our occupations. It reaches every area of life because everything we possess has first been entrusted to us by God. Our lives, our families, our abilities, our time, our influence, our opportunities, and even the circumstances into which we were born are not accidents. They are trusts. We own nothing absolutely. We are stewards of everything.

For that reason, stewardship is not merely one doctrine among many. It is one of Scripture’s great organizing principles. From Adam tending the garden, to Joseph administering Egypt, to Daniel serving in Babylon, to Paul’s exhortation that believers be found faithful, God consistently evaluates His people by how they employ what He has entrusted to them.

Jesus’ Parable of the Talents brings this principle into sharp focus.

The servant who buried his talent was not condemned because he stole it. He did not squander it in reckless living. He did not hand it over to the Master’s enemies.

• He simply refused to employ what had been entrusted to him.

• His sin was not open rebellion.

• It was fearful inaction.

That distinction matters because many Christians instinctively define stewardship as avoiding evil. Scripture certainly commands us to avoid evil, but biblical stewardship requires much more than restraint. It requires faithful action. The servant was judged, not for what he destroyed, but for what he failed to do.

That raises an uncomfortable question for Christians living in the United States.

What has God entrusted to us?

For nearly two thousand years, most believers have lived under kings, emperors, dictators, and tyrants. Their opportunities to shape civil government were often nonexistent, including Paul’s section of a long letter to the ekklesia in Rome that we refer to as Romans 13. They were called to faithfulness within systems they could not meaningfully influence.

Our situation is different. Very, very different.

Whatever its many flaws, the American experiment placed the final arbitor of civil authority into the hands of ordinary citizens. In other words, under God’s sovereign rule, the final human authority in our system of government was not government, but the people.

The Declaration of Independence did not declare the people sovereign, for God alone is sovereign. It did, however, recognize that civil governments answer to the people, not the other way around as it is today. I explain how this happened to us in The Constitution Trap. So in practical terms, this meant that citizens were entrusted with responsibilities unknown to most generations before them.

Whether the Founders always lived consistently with that principle is beside the point.

The stewardship itself exists.

For the first time in history, millions of ordinary Christians inherited complete influence over the structure and direction of their own civil government. That influence is not ownership. It is absolute authority. It is a trust.

And every trust carries accountability before God. Sadly, we have abandoned that trust and the tables are now reversed upon us.

But the Declaration of Independence has not been “outlawed” by Congress or ruled “out of order” by the courts - it remains the organic law of these United States.

This realization changes the way we should think about abortion.

For more than fifty years, much of the evangelical conversation has focused on analysis. We have analyzed Supreme Court opinions. We have analyzed constitutional doctrine. We have analyzed elections, political parties, judicial philosophies, polling data, and campaign strategies. We have become remarkably skilled at explaining why change is difficult.

But analysis is not stewardship.

Analysis may inform stewardship, just as studying a field informs farming, but no harvest has ever been produced by analysis alone. Eventually the farmer must put his hand to the plow.

Likewise, no servant ever heard, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” because he possessed an accurate understanding of his Master’s estate while refusing to employ it. No, the Gospel is a lived out way of life.

The tragedy of the modern church is not that we have lacked information.

It is that we have often mistaken information for obedience.

Proverbs 24 does not ask whether we correctly diagnosed why someone was being led away to death. It commands us to rescue those being taken away to death. The child about the be murdered in the womb via legal abortion does not need another constitutional lecture. The child needs faithful stewards willing to employ whatever God has placed into their hands to save them.

That is where the previous essay left us.

The Constitution has become a trap because it has convinced many Christians that their stewardship begins and ends with whatever the federal government permits. Once that assumption is accepted, faithful action gradually gives way to perpetual commentary.

• Every election becomes another opportunity to analyze.

• Every Supreme Court decision becomes another occasion to explain.

• Limbaugh analyzed the problem to death over his year in radio.

• Beck, Levin et. al continue today.

• Podcasts with younger analysts pop-up every day, waxing eloquent about the problems with expert guest to back them up.

Yet year after year, hundreds of thousands of children continue to die while those entrusted with extraordinary responsibility reassure themselves that nothing more could have been done. We voted. We exposed.

And the silent screams continue, around three -thousand times per day.

Jesus never praised servants for correctly explaining why their talent remained buried.

He praised servants who employed what had been entrusted to them.

If that principle governs every other area of the Christian life, there is no biblical reason to believe it suddenly disappears when the subject becomes civil government.

The question before us, then, is no longer whether Christians possess stewardship.

The question is whether we have faithfully exercised it.

And if stewardship requires action, another question immediately follows.

How does a Christian people faithfully employ the authority God has entrusted to them without abandoning either biblical ethics or ordered liberty?

That is where we now turn. Part V will argue that the answer is found, not first in the Constitution, but in the document that gave birth to the constitutional order itself: the Declaration of Independence.

Reflective Questions:

• If Proverbs 24:11-12 is addressed to me, what does faithful stewardship require of me today, not merely what do I hope others will do tomorrow?

• If the silent screams of unborn children are real, what would a faithful steward do differently after hearing them?

• Have I buried any talents, opportunities, influence, or authority because fear, comfort, or uncertainty seemed safer than faithful action?

• If I had lived under a king, would I have longed for the measure of civic stewardship God has entrusted to me? If so, why have I regarded that stewardship so lightly?

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A Note to the Reader

Part III is longer than the previous essays because it addresses what I believe is the central mechanism that sidelined the evangelical church after Roe v. Wade. In Part I, we examined Christ’s warning to Laodicea and the danger of self-deception. In Part II, we considered how sincere Christians can mistake an “angel of light” for faithfulness. This chapter asks the next question:

How did that deception become so deeply embedded in the political imagination of the evangelical church?

If this argument is wrong, much of what follows should be rejected. But if it is right, it explains not only the past fifty years of evangelical political engagement, but why millions of sincere Christians opposed abortion while remaining confined within a framework that could never resolve it.

Part III - The Constitution Trap unfolds in four stages. First, we will examine whether the Constitution is the Christian covenant many evangelicals have been taught it is. Second, we will trace how that belief entered evangelical culture during the late twentieth century. Third, we will see how constitutional procedure gradually became the practical boundary of evangelical political action. Finally, we will ask what repentance requires if that story is true.

There is a sentence we have heard in our churches until it carries something close to the authority of a creed: “The Constitution is not the problem. The people are.”

We rarely say it to begin an argument. We say it to end one. The sentence functions almost like a verse, settling the matter before anyone has examined whether it is true.

I want to persuade you that this belief has become a dangerous trap, that conservative evangelicals entered it relatively recently, and that the door has quietly closed behind us. Inside that trap, we still vote, campaign, and organize, but we have surrendered the freedom to imagine political action beyond the boundaries the system gives us.

I call it the Constitution Trap.

But even more importantly, I want to persuade you that walking back out of the trap would not be an act of rebellion against our country. It would be an act of repentance before our God.

The trap is not merely that Christians have come to admire the Constitution too highly. It is that the Constitution has gradually become the outer boundary of our moral imagination. We have become nearly incapable of imagining faithful political action except through the procedures it provides. Before asking what justice requires, what love demands, or what God commands, we have learned to ask what the Constitution permits.

That is a profound inversion, and millions of silently screaming children have paid for it with their little lives. Our constitutional devotion has contributed to a Laodicean loss of conscience: instead of judging the Constitution by the righteousness of God, we increasingly judge righteousness by the Constitution.

We no longer judge the Constitution by justice. We judge justice by the Constitution.

A Devotion Younger Than We Think

The reverence most patriotic evangelical Christians now feel toward the Constitution, the sense that it is a near-sacred, providentially produced, essentially Christian charter, is not an inheritance handed down unchanged from 1787. In its present evangelical form, it is roughly the age of a grandparent. For instance, I’m 67 and witnessed this reverence emerged with my own eyes. For a while, I even embraced it myself. But it never sat right with me as an evangelical Christian.

For much of American history, thoughtful Christians did not treat the Constitution as untouchable. They regarded it as what it is: just a human instrument—sometimes useful, always fallible, open to amendment, and subject to the judgment of a higher moral law.

• Christian abolitionists openly condemned its compromises with slavery.

• Patrick Henry warned that its concentration of federal power endangered liberty.

• Even later figures such as Robert E. Lee believed fidelity to conscience and political community could require disunion rather than unquestioning submission to the constitutional order.

They disagreed profoundly with one another, but they shared an assumption largely foreign to modern evangelicalism: the Constitution itself stood beneath moral judgment and not as a final moral arbiter.

The proof is written into the Constitution itself. When earlier Americans judged the constitutional order defective, they did not merely praise the wisdom of the framers and resign themselves to patient endurance. They amended the document. Others went even further. Delegates gathered at the Hartford Convention in 1814 to consider constitutional amendments and, among some, even the possibility of New England’s secession from the Union. Whether one agrees with their conclusions is beside the point. The historic fact is that they did not regard the constitutional order as morally or politically untouchable.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were made politically possible by Union victory, but they also reflected decades of moral pressure from abolitionists, including many Christians who refused to regard the Constitution’s compromises with slavery as morally untouchable. The temperance movement, driven in substantial part by Protestant churches and reform organizations, later sought to place its moral vision into national law through the Eighteenth Amendment. The amendment was eventually repealed, but the episode still reveals something about the Christian posture of the period: the Constitution was an instrument to be corrected, not a sacred inheritance that criticism would profane.

Slavery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned the Constitution on July 4, 1854, condemning it as “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell” because he believed its compromises and operation protected slavery.

Garrison believed the constitutional compact was morally corrupt and should be rejected. Political abolitionists believed it could be interpreted and employed against slavery. Yet both sides placed the Constitution beneath moral judgment. Neither believed that the document authenticated its own righteousness.

• They judged the Constitution.

• They did not permit the Constitution to define the limits of justice.

The National Reform Association, organized during the Civil War era, provides another revealing example. For decades, it campaigned to amend the Preamble so that the Constitution would explicitly acknowledge God and Jesus Christ. Its members believed the original document was religiously deficient precisely because it contained no such acknowledgment.

The near-sacred Constitution now celebrated as the product of an explicitly Christian founding was once criticized by devout Protestants for failing to be Christian enough.

• That is the tradition from which American evangelicalism actually emerged.

• Not unquestioning sacralization, but moral evaluation and correction.

The question now is - what happened to us?

Not the Christian Document We Were Sold

Read the Constitution with the care we bring to Scripture.

• It never names God.

• Article VI prohibits religious tests for federal office, a remarkable departure from the practices of many earlier European and colonial and eventual state governments.

• The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion.

These are not oversights that disappear under a more reverent reading. They are part of the design. These were no accidents, but design elements into the document.

This does not mean the Constitution is hostile to Christianity. It means it 100% is not a Christian covenant that most modern evangelicals have come to believe it is.

To be sure, Constitution defenders may argue that religious liberty allowed Christianity to flourish, and there is truth in that claim. But a political system that permits Christianity to flourish is not the same thing as a political order founded upon a confession of Christ. The distinction matters because modern evangelical political history has often blurred it.

Respected evangelical historians warned us about this decades ago. In 1983, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden published The Search for Christian America, challenging the romantic account that America had been founded as an explicitly Christian nation and then simply fallen from its original purity. Their concern was not hostility toward Christianity or America. It was historical honesty.

Sadly, those warnings did not prevail. Instead, generations of sola Scriptura Christians were taught to treat constitutional procedure as the practical boundary of political faithfulness, even when God had already spoken with unmistakable clarity:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work? (Proverbs 24:11,12)

The contrast should disturb us - sadly, in many cases, it doesn’t.

On one hand stands a human governing document that tells us how political power is exercised. On the other stands the living God, commanding His people to rescue those being led away to death. Yet for decades, millions of Christians have instinctively treated constitutional procedure as the higher authority. Before asking, What does God require? we ask, What does the Constitution permit?

Imagine standing before the Judge of all the earth and explaining that His explicit command to rescue the innocent had to wait because the political process had not yet run its course.

To be sure, Scripture never requires what God, in His providence, has made impossible. Wisdom always considers calling, circumstance, responsibility, and ability. But it does require that our first instinct be obedience to God rather than deference to human procedure. The question is not whether every Christian can rescue every victim. The question is whether we have allowed constitutional process to become an excuse for doing less than God has actually placed within our reach.

Against this historical and theological backdrop, we must come to a point where we ask: then how did evangelical community in America become coopted by Constitutional procedure and an inaccurate romantic narrative about our founding?

Simple, the more emotionally satisfying story came from elsewhere. The Light and the Glory, published in 1977 by Peter Marshall and David Manuel, presented the American story through a providential framework that resonated deeply with evangelical readers.

1. America possessed a unique calling from God.

2. Its founding reflected God’s special providence.

3. Its moral decline represented a departure from that calling.

4. National restoration required a return to the founders and their constitutional vision.

This near-catechism presented a very simple formula that every evangelical could understand and take part in, even if that part was praying for restoration.

The providential history story had enormous power because Christians are a people of story. And the appeal of this story is not difficult to understand. By the late 1970s, many evangelicals felt as though the nation they had inherited was slipping away. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s had overturned long-held assumptions about marriage, sexuality, education, authority, and public morality. Then came Roe v. Wade, placing the intentional murder of unborn children under constitutional protection. To many believers, it felt as though America itself had entered a kind of exile.

Again, as Christians, we are people of story. We were very vulnerable to this story, I myself was.

We understand ourselves through creation, fall, covenant, exodus, kingdom, exile, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and promised restoration. We teach our children the stories of Abraham and Joseph, Saul and David, Babylon and Nehemiah, the birth of Jesus, the Acts of the Apostles, and the final triumph revealed in Revelation.

Our faith is carried through the true account of what God has done in history.

That gives us a special capacity to recognize providence, but it also makes us vulnerable to national stories that borrow the shape of redemption. The Christian-America narrative gave us chosen founders, a national covenant, a fall into secularism, judgment through cultural decline, and the possibility of restoration through constitutional recovery.

The founders became patriarchs. The Constitution became covenant. Secularism became apostasy. Republican victories became revival.

The story did not need to be entirely false. Propaganda rarely does. It needed enough truth, enough selected quotations, enough prayers, enough Christian influence, and enough providential coincidences to make the larger interpretation believable.

The framers were presented as more uniformly Christian, more morally serious, and more intellectually inaccessible than the historical record warrants. Their disagreements were softened. Their ambitions and compromises were treated as exceptions. The bitter ratification debates disappeared. Article VI’s prohibition of religious tests was transformed into evidence that the Constitution was somehow distinctively Christian. The Enlightenment-era document’s silence concerning God became almost irrelevant.

Most importantly, its inability to prevent the legal murder of unborn children was never allowed to diminish its sacred status.

The myth survived because it did not arise primarily from the archives. It arose from a movement.

It was carried through Christian publishing, homeschooling curricula, church conferences, conservative colleges, voter guides, political ministries, radio programs, patriotic sermons, and popular presentations of the founding. David Barton and WallBuilders became among the most visible popularizers of this providential account. Pastors quoted the founders from pulpits. Presidential candidates learned to speak the language of conversion, prayer, biblical values, and national restoration. The Republican Party increasingly presented itself as the political home of born-again Christians.

• The near-sacred Constitution was not simply inherited.

• It was built, taught, repeated, and emotionally reinforced.

The Decisive Turn

The late 1970s and 1980s mark the decisive transformation.

Roe v. Wade had created a profound moral crisis. The Supreme Court had placed the intentional killing of unborn children under constitutional protection. Evangelicals were slowly awakening to the scale of the slaughter. Christian-school controversies, secularization, feminism, communism, changing sexual norms, and the breakdown of older cultural assumptions added to the sense that America had departed from its foundations.

A political movement emerged to explain the fall and prescribe the remedy.

Francis Schaeffer argued that Western civilization had abandoned the biblical and Reformation foundations necessary for law, liberty, and human dignity. He also defended resistance to unjust government under higher law, an aspect of his work that modern evangelicals have often neglected. Ironically, while Schaeffer called Christians to measure every political order against God’s higher law, many of his readers came to focus primarily on recovering America’s constitutional foundations. In doing so, they often emphasized the preservation of the constitutional order more than Schaeffer’s insistence that every human government remains accountable to a law above itself.

Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979, helped organize conservative Christians into a national Republican constituency. Pat Robertson and other religious broadcasters joined Christian identity to electoral mobilization. Republican presidents and candidates learned that evangelical language could activate millions of voters. Christian voter guides reduced moral responsibility to selected issues and approved candidates. Talk radio later carried constitutional restoration into millions of homes, vehicles, workshops, and church conversations. And flags on the stage of the typical protestant evangelical church became the norm.

This small but revealing symbol illustrates the change. For much of American history, Protestant sanctuaries centered their visual attention on the Word, the Table, and the gathered people of God. During the twentieth century - and especially during the Cold War - the American flag gradually found its place beside the pulpit in countless evangelical churches. Whether intended or not, the symbolism was powerful. The kingdom of God and the American republic increasingly appeared not merely compatible, but visually intertwined.

In time, constitutional originalism, providential history, Republican politics, and opposition to abortion merged into a single evangelical identity.

To be sure, Christians rightly believe God governs history, I do as well. The difficulty begins when we presume to identify His specific purposes with the confidence of inspired prophets. Scripture gives us inspired interpretations of Israel’s history because the prophets spoke by revelation. We possess no such revelation concerning the American founding.

The logic driving this political story was remarkably convenient. America had been founded upon Christian principles. The founders had given us an almost uniquely (hint: perhaps divine) wise Constitution. The country had fallen away from that inheritance. Roe was the clearest evidence of the fall. Restoration would come by electing the right presidents, appointing the right judges, recovering original meaning, and returning the nation to constitutional government.

This gave Christians a noble identity and a completely unmanageable assignment: convince hundreds of millions of Americans that our reading of God’s providential purposes for the nation was correct. It is a sobering thought. The prophets spoke with certainty because God had spoken to them. We speak without that privilege. Humility should have made us far more cautious. Sadly we weren’t.

Evangelicals were told they did not have to reconsider the legitimacy of a political order capable of protecting mass killing. They were told to restore that order by working faithfully within it.

• The system that had abandoned the children became the system Christians were commanded to save.

• I witnessed this with my own eyes. I’m 67 and I’ve been faithfully following the Lord since 1977.

How the Trap Works

The Constitution is largely procedural. It establishes institutions, distributes authority, describes offices, sets methods for selecting leaders, and provides rules by which political power is exercised and transferred. It does not possess a conscience. It cannot distinguish righteousness from wickedness except where the text itself draws a legal distinction.

Constitutional conservatives often answer, “We’re a republic, not a democracy,” as though that resolves the issue. It does not. De jure, the Constitution establishes a republic with checks, balances, and multiple restraints on raw majority power. De facto, however, every institution within that republic ultimately responds to political majorities and governing coalitions.

• Elections determine Congress.

• Elections determine presidents.

• Presidents appoint judges.

• Senators confirm them by majority vote.

Over time, political majorities shape every branch of government. The Constitution does not prevent majorities from governing. It is built upon them. Look at what has happened. Don’t ignore what your eyes see - especially the silent scream whose fate was decided by a 7-2 majority.

Which is precisely the point. The Constitution provides procedures for exercising power. It does not guarantee that those who ultimately acquire power will govern righteously.

And here’s the dirty little secret about Constitutional procedure: if enough citizens, legislators, executives, and judges embrace evil, the constitutional machinery will faithfully administer their decisions. The system cannot manufacture righteousness.

It does not reward objective truth. It was not designed to.

Unfortunately, since the late 1970s, that procedural neutrality was presented to Christians as protection. We were taught that the Constitution, rightly understood, would preserve the conditions necessary for a Christian America. We were taught to remain ever hopeful, that constitutional procedure, faithfully followed, would eventually correct our national course. Election after election, lawsuit after lawsuit, appointment after appointment, we were assured that if we simply remained patient, the system would work.

Yet the babies being murdered, slaughtered were still silently screaming for us to help them.

Hope is a Christian virtue, but hope must rest in the right object. Over time, many of us placed our confidence not in obedience to God’s revealed commands, but in the promise that constitutional processes would eventually produce righteous outcomes. While we waited for the next election cycle, the next Supreme Court appointment, or the next legislative victory, millions of children continued to be led away to death. We became remarkably patient with procedures while growing increasingly indifferent to the urgency of Proverbs 24.

And so the same procedures can deliver power to a people who reject Christian morality, deny the humanity of the unborn, redefine marriage, punish Christian conviction, or use government against the church.

We’re witnessing this right now with the emerging Marxist/Muslim coalition.

The Constitution does not prevent such an outcome merely because Christians believe the nation was providentially founded. If those who oppose Christianity master the institutions, win the elections, control the courts, shape public opinion, and operate within constitutional forms, the machinery will transfer power to them lawfully.

• The Constitution promises procedure.

• It does not promise Christian results.

By sacralizing the mechanism, evangelicals weakened their ability to judge it. We stopped asking hard questions of the system precisely when hard questions were most necessary, because we had been trained to experience those questions as disloyalty.

A people who cannot criticize their tools will not recognize when those tools are being used against them.

Battlefield Shaping

The military uses the concept of battlefield shaping to describe actions taken before decisive engagement to arrange the conditions under which the battle will occur. Terrain is studied. Supply lines are established. Enemy movement is restricted. Some options are made easier, while others become difficult or nearly unimaginable.

The evangelical political imagination was shaped in much the same way.

Christians were not told to leave the battlefield. They were given an approved battlefield, approved weapons, approved leaders, approved timelines, and approved definitions of victory. They could vote, donate, lobby, distribute voter guides, attend rallies, support judicial nominees, call radio programs, and pray for elections.

• Because these activities required effort albeit little effort, Christians could believe they were engaged.

• Because they took place within constitutional procedures, Christians could believe they were faithful.

• Because pastors and respected leaders blessed the strategy, Christians could believe they were obedient.

• But the boundaries had already been set.

Christians could oppose abortion so long as they did not seriously challenge the political order that protected it.

• They could grieve the dead, provided they continued to honor the system under which their killing remained lawful.

• They could call abortion murder, provided they treated its prevention as one political issue among many.

• They could declare every child precious, provided they remained patient through another election, another judicial nomination, another fundraising campaign, and another generation of slaughter.

But in reality, the evangelical Christian entered the battle with his hands tied behind his back. Sadly, because he was permitted to vote, campaign, and petition his government, he believed he was fighting.

The deepest trap was not constitutional law.

It was the gradual inability to imagine moral responsibility outside constitutional procedure. This happened to me early in my Christian life.

Tragically, this way of thinking was not confined to the pew. It shaped the teaching of thousands of pastors and Christian leaders who sincerely believed they were guiding the church wisely. James’s warning presses heavily upon them now in the midst of an abortion holocaust: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” (James 3:1). Those words are not written to condemn, but they should humble every man who has stood behind a pulpit - including the one writing these words. I once believed all of what I write about the Constitution.

• We must be humbly honest here.

• Rescue became voting.

• Faithfulness became participation.

• Political patience became Christian virtue.

The continued death of children became an unfortunate consequence of respecting the process.

And our conscience became the victim. Pray that God will soften it.

Why the Constitution Instead of the Declaration?

The choice of the Constitution as the center of modern evangelical political devotion deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.

Why was The Light and the Glory not primarily a story about the Second Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence? Why did providential history become centered on the constitutional machinery created in 1787 rather than the moral standard announced in 1776?

The Declaration is far more dangerous to an unjust government than the Constitution because it provides a standard by which government itself may be judged. It declares that human beings possess unalienable rights given by their Creator. It asserts that governments are instituted to secure those rights and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. It further declares that when government becomes destructive of those ends, the people possess the authority to alter or abolish it.

• The Constitution organizes power.

• The Declaration judges that power.

Had evangelicals centered their political imagination on the Declaration after Roe, they might have asked whether a government that licensed the intentional killing of unborn children had become destructive of the purpose for which government exists. They might have asked whether allegiance to the system had become morally subordinate to rescuing its victims. They might have reasoned from first principles rather than judicial precedent.

A Constitution-centered political theology (and don’t think it’s not a theology) produced a different set of questions:

• Which candidate should we support?

• Which justice might retire?

• How many votes do we have?

• What restriction could survive judicial review?

• What does precedent permit?

• What remedy fits within the existing structure?

These are not meaningless questions. They become morally disastrous when they replace the question that should come first:

What do we owe the child being led away to death?

The Inversion

The generation of the founding did not regard the Constitution as the highest source of political authority. The Declaration grounded political legitimacy in something prior and higher: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” a Creator who grants rights that government does not create and therefore cannot rightfully destroy.

• In that order, the Constitution is an instrument.

• Higher law is the standard by which the instrument is judged.

We evangelicals have turned that order upside down in our minds. We have taken the instrument and made it ultimate, while forgetting the higher law that alone gives human government moral legitimacy. We increasingly judge justice by the Constitution rather than judging the Constitution by justice.

• That is more than bad civics.

• For a Christian, it approaches the sin of idolatry.

The Constitution may contain prudent structures. It may restrain certain abuses. It may protect valuable liberties. None of that makes it sacred. None of it places the document beyond moral judgment. None of it allows Christians to appeal to constitutional procedure as an excuse for abandoning those being slaughtered.

The most dangerous idols are not objects we openly call gods. They are good things to which we assign the trust, reverence, or authority that belongs only to God.

Israel’s golden calf was presented as a visible and manageable representation of deliverance. It gave the people something they could see, celebrate, and carry before them. That is part of idolatry’s attraction. It attaches the unseen things of God to something human beings can possess and control

Constitutional idolatry does something similar. It attaches justice, liberty, order, providence, and national hope to a political document. It assures us that preserving the system is an act of faithfulness, even when the system protects what God hates.

There are six things that the Lord hates, or even seven things:

Eyes that show how proud a person is.

A mouth that speaks lies.

Hands that kill people who have done nothing wrong.

A mind that chooses to do wicked things.

Feet that hurry to do evil things.

A person who tells lies in court.

A person who causes trouble in a family.

This is why the Constitution Trap is emotional as well as intellectual. To question the document’s sufficiency feels like betraying our country, our parents, our teachers, our pastors, our heroes, and our personal histories. Many believers do not merely think the Constitution is wise. They need it to be wise because they have built their political identity and their understanding of American providence around it.

But the silently screaming child has no obligation to preserve our emotional security. There screams should bring the heavy weight of shame upon us.

The Cost of Our Comfort

Let us name what this comfort has cost.

For more than fifty years, millions of children made in the image of God have been murdered in the womb under the protection of American law. Even after Roe was overturned, abortion continues across much of the country through state law, abortion pills, interstate travel, institutional support, and political determination.

Yet many Christians still speak as though the constitutional process itself establishes the boundaries of their responsibility.

• We voted pro-life.

• We supported originalist judges.

• We distributed voter guides.

• We elected Republican presidents.

• We followed the approved strategy.

• We remained respectable.

• All the while, millions silently screamed.

Proverbs 24 does not say, “Rescue those being led away to death, provided the courts approve, the votes are available, precedent has been reversed, and the constitutional process has reached its conclusion.”

It commands rescue, then warns us against claiming ignorance:

Rescue those being led away to death;
hold back those staggering toward slaughter.
If you say, “But we knew nothing about this,”
does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

We will answer to God for this holocaust. I will answer to God.

God weighs the heart, not the voter guide. You are now accountable to God for His words as they relate to Constitutional process and procedure. Will you bend your knee to the God of the Universe, or continue bending it to the golden calf?

• We may tell Him that we voted correctly.

• We may tell Him that we supported constitutional judges,

• honored the founders, respected the courts,

• and trusted the strategy recommended by Christian leaders.

• We may explain that the political circumstances were complicated,

• that public opinion was divided, and that more direct rescue seemed unrealistic.

But we will not be able to tell Him that we did not know. You will not be able to tell Him you did not know.

The central question is not whether the Constitution has accomplished some good, nor whether Christians may work through constitutional processes.

The question is whether we have allowed those processes to define the limits of obedience.

• Have we confused patience with faithfulness?

• Have we confused legality with righteousness?

• Have we confused political participation with rescue?

• Have we preserved the system at the expense of its victims?

What Faithfulness Requires

The way out of the Constitution Trap does not begin with contempt for the Constitution. It begins by returning the document to its proper place.

It is just a human governing instrument, not a covenant with God. It may be used, defended, amended, resisted, or abolished according to the demands of justice. It possesses no authority to suspend Christian obligation and no power to absolve us before God.

The first summons is therefore to shepherds, elders, teachers, and those who have instructed the church politically. As mentioned, Scripture warns that teachers will be judged with greater strictness. Do you take that instruction from the Holy Spirit through James seriously? Those who helped place constitutional loyalty at the center of evangelical political faithfulness must be willing to ask whether they sinned when they mistook a strategy for obedience and a governing document for a moral authority.

That examination must not become mechanical. Repentance is not the completion of a checklist before moving on to the next political strategy. We must allow the silent screams to do their work upon our consciences.

In fact, there are babies screaming for rescue as you read this. Thousands of them. A famous quote puts it this way: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”

Have we evangelicals hardened our conscience towards the innocent silent screams and made them a statistic? Factual evidence suggests we may have.

We must recover the older Christian instinct that placed every human authority beneath the judgment of God. We must again be willing to examine whether our institutions serve justice, whether our laws protect the innocent, and whether our political habits have become excuses for failing to rescue those being led away to death.

Christian action must always remain governed by the dignity of every person made in the image of God. Genuine repentance does not produce reckless zeal or violent overreaction. It first humbles us before God, then compels us to reexamine our assumptions, recover moral clarity, and imagine a more faithful course of obedience. Repentance is not merely sorrow for sin; it is a renewed willingness to think differently because God has spoken.

We cannot defend one image-bearer by denying the image of God in another. We may not do evil so that good may come. Yet neither may we invoke the fear of excess as an excuse for inaction. The possibility of acting wrongly does not absolve us from the responsibility to act rightly. Wisdom is not found between action and passivity. It is found in humble obedience to God’s revealed will.

Faithfulness may require costly resistance, public confrontation, peaceful direct action, political reconstruction, secession, redefining the very nature of the Union, or other actions we have not yet been willing to imagine. The specific path will require wisdom, courage, humility, and sustained prayer.

But the first step is intellectual and spiritual liberation. We must begin to imagine again.

We must stop allowing the Constitution to decide in advance what obedience is permitted to look like.

The Way Out

Come out of the trap.

Not to despise the Constitution, but to stop worshiping it so that we may be free again to think as Christians.

• Free to place every political system beneath the judgment of God.

• Free to ask what justice requires before asking what precedent permits.

• Free to resist unjust laws and accept the cost.

• Free to recover the moral courage of Christians who once confronted slavery without asking whether their criticism would offend constitutional sensibilities.

• Free to rescue the perishing.

• Free to repent.

For fifty years, the evangelical church praised its political engagement, celebrated its electoral victories, honored its constitutional heroes, and waited for permission to save the children. Think about the ghoulish underbelly of that statement when we serve the God of Creation! Permission?

• The Constitution did not merely fail to rescue them.

• Our reverence for it helped persuade us not to.

Finally, Justice Robert Jackson once warned that the Constitution is not “a suicide pact.” Whether one agrees with the context in which he made that statement is beside the point - I’m not arguing the context of his use. His words alone expose a question the evangelical church has largely refused to ask.

What if our devotion to constitutional procedure has become its own kind of suicide pact?

Not because the Constitution demanded it, but because we gradually elevated it beyond what it was ever intended to be. We came to believe that faithfulness required us to honor the process even while the process protected the destruction of those God explicitly commanded us to rescue. We waited. We organized. We voted. We litigated. We campaigned. We remained hopeful.

The children continued to die. They continue to scream.

At some point, the issue ceases to be political and becomes profoundly spiritual.

God is not mocked.

• He will not be persuaded that our procedures excused our obedience.

• He will not confuse constitutional patience with faithfulness.

• He will not mistake our political activity for compliance with His revealed commands.

• The Judge of all the earth will not ask whether we faithfully honored eighteenth-century procedures.

• He will ask whether we obeyed Him.

That is why this series is not ultimately about Roe, the Constitution, or even America.

It is about conscience, the conscience of the evangelical who claims Scripture is sufficient and authoritative in all matters of faith and practice.

Is there still enough tenderness left for the Holy Spirit to search us? Is there still enough humility to confess that we may have mistaken political prudence for biblical faithfulness? Is there still enough fear of the Lord to fall to our knees and ask Him to expose every cherished assumption that kept us from rescuing those being led away to death?

Or has our constitutional devotion become our golden calf?

Israel danced before theirs believing they were worshiping the God who brought them out of Egypt. Idolatry is rarely recognized by those committing it.

That is the question before us now.

Not whether the Constitution failed.

Whether we did.

And I KNOW I did.

And I repented. I failed those silent screams I still hear.

Questions for Reflection

• Has the Constitution become the practical boundary of what I believe Christians are permitted to do politically?

• Have I treated voting, campaigning, or supporting pro-life candidates as though these actions completed my responsibility toward children being led away to death?

• Would I have admired Christian abolitionists who condemned the Constitution’s compromises with slavery, or would I have accused them of going too far?

• Am I willing to place the Constitution beneath God’s judgment, or has criticism of it begun to feel like criticism of God’s providence?

• When I stand before God, will I be able to say that I did everything within my ability to hold back those staggering toward slaughter?

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“And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.”
2 Corinthians 11:14

One of the most unsettling truths in all of Scripture is that deception rarely presents itself as open rebellion against God. If Satan openly invited Christians to reject Christ, almost no one would follow him. If evil always appeared ugly, it would deceive very few people. Instead, Paul tells us something far more disturbing. Satan disguises himself as an angel of light, which means deception often appears righteous, compassionate, prudent, balanced, and even biblical.

That is precisely why it is so dangerous.

In Part I, we considered Christ’s words to the church at Laodicea. Their greatest problem was not open rebellion but self-deception. They sincerely believed they were spiritually healthy while Christ declared them poor, blind, and naked. Their conscience had reached a place of rest long before the Lord rendered His verdict. That should terrify every Christian because self-deception rarely remains personal.

Over time it becomes institutional as:

• congregations reinforce it,

• seminaries teach it,

• pastors repeat it,

• and entire movements inherit assumptions that few ever stop to examine because everyone around them speaks the same moral language.

This is how an angel of light works. He does not persuade the Church to hate righteousness. He persuades the Church to redefine it.

For much of my Christian life, I believe that is exactly what happened to me through the modern pro-life movement.

I do not question the sincerity of millions of pro-life Christians. I question something deeper, namely the fallen human heart.

Scripture repeatedly reveals that we are masters at avoiding responsibility while convincing ourselves we have fulfilled it.

• Saul spared King Agag and the best of the Amalekite livestock, insisting he had obeyed the Lord, even as Samuel declared that obedience is better than sacrifice.

• The Pharisees meticulously tithed herbs while neglecting the weightier matters of the law, believing their outward precision satisfied God.

• The rich young ruler confidently claimed to have kept the commandments until Jesus exposed the one thing he would not surrender.

Again and again, Scripture shows fallen people seeking the path that demands the least sacrifice while allowing the conscience to remain at peace.

That tendency is not merely an observation about the pro-life movement. It is an observation about me. For decades I believed I was obeying Proverbs 24:11-12. I voted faithfully, celebrated pro-life candidates, prayed for better Supreme Court justices, marched, supported ministries, and did everything the evangelical movement told me a faithful Christian should do. Yet throughout those years the silent screams of babies being legally slaughtered continued, and only much later did I begin asking the question that should have governed everything from the beginning: Had I inherited a strategy before I understood the command?

Before we go any further, we must settle a question that lies beneath every moral controversy, not only abortion.

Who has the authority to define justice?

For Christians who confess sola Scriptura, the answer should be immediate. God alone determines what justice is because justice is not an abstract principle existing outside of Him. It is an expression of His own holy character. We do not discover justice through public opinion, therapeutic language, or political consensus. We receive it from the One who will one day judge every human being according to His righteous standard.

That reality has profound implications. It means we are not free to improve God’s moral categories, even when our intentions are compassionate. We cannot soften them because they appear too severe, nor may we sharpen them because they seem too lenient. Our responsibility is not to edit the Judge of all the earth but to submit ourselves to His judgments, trusting that His definitions are wiser than our own.

And when we fail in this task, the objective of the faithful follower is not despair, excuse making, giving up, the objective is admission and repentance.

This principle is woven throughout Scripture. Again and again, God refuses to allow His people to redefine what He has already spoken.

• Saul insisted he had obeyed the Lord, yet Samuel exposed his selective obedience for what it was.

• David undoubtedly found countless ways to justify taking Bathsheba and arranging Uriah’s death until Nathan stripped away every excuse with four unforgettable words: “You are the man.”

• The Pharisees believed their meticulous religious performance demonstrated faithfulness while Jesus exposed a righteousness that had carefully preserved outward appearances but neglected the weightier matters of the law.

The pattern is remarkably consistent. Fallen humanity does not usually reject God’s standards outright. We reinterpret them just enough to preserve our conscience while avoiding the full cost of obedience.

I believe this is exactly what happened within the modern pro-life movement, and I include myself in that indictment.

For decades, evangelical Christians have repeated a phrase so often that it has become almost unquestionable: abortion has two victims.

At first hearing, the statement sounds compassionate. It feels compassionate. It appears to magnify grace, and because we rightly grieve for women who have been abandoned, manipulated, threatened, or deceived, the language seems almost self-evidently Christian.

But Christianity has never been permitted to define truth by how something feels.

The question is not whether the phrase sounds compassionate.

The question is whether God speaks that way.

Consider the moral categories present in every intentional abortion.

There is an unborn child who has committed no offense, exercised no moral agency, offered no consent, and whose life is intentionally ended. Scripture’s categories are not difficult here. The child is innocent.

The mother’s circumstances, however, may be unimaginably complex. She may have been abandoned by the father, pressured by her family, threatened with the loss of her education or employment, manipulated by physicians, or overwhelmed by fear. Every one of those realities deserves our compassion and, where appropriate, our protection. The Church has often failed women in precisely these moments, and we should confess those failures honestly.

Yet none of those circumstances answers the question before us.

Can suffering and moral agency occupy the same person?

Of course they can.

• David suffered.

• Saul suffered.

• Judas suffered.

• The rich young ruler undoubtedly suffered as he walked away from Christ.

Human suffering does not automatically remove human responsibility.

Indeed, one of the great tragedies of the Fall is that sinners are often also sufferers. We wound others, and we ourselves are wounded. We commit injustice, and we experience injustice. Scripture never asks us to choose one reality over the other. It simply refuses to let suffering erase moral agency.

That distinction changes everything.

If God distinguishes between the innocent child and the morally responsible adult, by what authority does the Church merge them into the same category of victimhood?

• That is not a political question.

• It is not even primarily an abortion question.

• It is a question about whether we fear the Lord enough to let Him define justice, even when His definitions confront our deepest instincts.

Every generation of God’s people faces the same temptation. We long to improve upon His wisdom, to make His judgments more acceptable to our culture and more comfortable to our conscience. Yet every attempt to soften His categories ultimately does the opposite of what we intended. What begins as compassion slowly becomes confusion, and confusion eventually produces a counterfeit peace that leaves the conscience restless before God. Think of how an observing world views Christians who claim there are two-victims in the murder of a child. What do they think of the God who we claim to follow?

Perhaps that is why the Holy Spirit refuses to flatter us.

He convicts.

Not because He delights in our pain, but because He delights in our restoration. Conviction is not the opposite of love. It is often its highest expression, for only a conscience brought into agreement with God can finally experience the peace that comes through genuine repentance.

Finally, if this chapter has unsettled you, resist the temptation to move too quickly toward a new strategy.

That is another danger facing the evangelical Church.

We are remarkably good at replacing one program with another, one political philosophy with another, one movement with another, while leaving the deeper work of repentance unfinished. We can exchange “pro-life” for “abolition” as easily as Israel exchanged one idol for another if our hearts remain fundamentally unchanged. The problem has never been that we lacked strategies. It is that we have often sought strategies before allowing the Word of God to humble us.

Humility always precedes repentance.

Until we see ourselves as Laodicea saw itself, rich, increased with goods, and in need of nothing, we will never understand why Christ’s assessment was so devastating. The church believed it was healthy. Christ declared it wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. The great question left hanging over Revelation 3 is not whether Jesus knocked. He did. The question is whether anyone inside opened the door.

That same question now confronts us.

• Have we allowed God’s Word to expose us, or have we hurried to defend ourselves?

• Have we humbled ourselves beneath His definitions of justice, or have we continued editing them to preserve our peace?

• Have we allowed the silent screams to accomplish their work upon our conscience, or have we spent decades searching for ways to quiet them?

These are not questions that can be answered by a statement of faith, a voting record, a political platform, or even a commitment to abolition. They can only be answered before the face of God.

There is also a sobering possibility that Scripture warns us about. A conscience repeatedly ignored can eventually become seared. If that has happened, the silent screams of children being slaughtered will no longer disturb us because we have trained ourselves not to hear them. That should frighten every one of us. Yet as long as Christ is still knocking, there remains hope. The very discomfort you may feel as you read these pages could itself be evidence of His mercy, refusing to leave you where you are. You conscience may not be seared.

• Do not silence that voice.

• Do not rush past it.

• Do not treat repentance as another item to check off before embracing a new strategy.

Remain there, before the Lord, until your heart comes into agreement with His.

Only then will whatever follows, whether abolition, sacrificial rescue, political engagement, secession or any other act of obedience, become the fruit of repentance rather than a substitute for it.

Throughout this series I have returned again and again to what I have called The Silent Screams. They are not merely the cries of children who were never allowed to speak who were being slaughter since 1973 when the evangelical community abandoned them. They are also the sound of the Holy Spirit refusing to let Christ’s Church make peace with what grieves the heart of God. Those screams are not meant to destroy us. They are meant to lead us to the One who still stands at the door and knocks.

I opened the door a decade ago and repented - will you?

God’s Word possesses a power that no political strategy can imitate. It pierces “to the division of soul and of spirit... and discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Constitutions cannot do that. Courts cannot do that. Elections cannot do that. Even the best movements cannot do that. Only the living Word of God can awaken a sleeping conscience, humble a proud heart, and produce the kind of repentance that bears lasting fruit.

That is why my hope does not ultimately rest in abolition, constitutional reform, or any strategy devised by men. My hope rests in the living Christ, who loved His Church enough to confront Laodicea, who loved David enough to send Nathan, and who loves us enough to keep knocking until we finally open the door.

Will you?

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Every generation of Christians faces the same danger. It is rarely the temptation to renounce Christ openly or abandon the Church altogether. Far more often, the danger lies in evaluating ourselves by our own standards rather than by Christ’s.

That is why this series must begin in Laodicea.

Few passages in Scripture have been applied to modern Christianity more frequently, and few have been handled less carefully. Before we ask whether Christ’s words expose the evangelical movement in America, we must first understand what they meant to the first-century ekklesia that first received them. It’s a great exegetical principle taught by Dr. Gordon Fee, “we must know what it meant before we can know what it means today.”

Laodicea was a prosperous city. Commerce flourished there, banking brought wealth, medicine and textiles made it well known throughout the region, and after a devastating earthquake the city rebuilt largely through its own resources rather than relying upon Rome. Prosperity and self-sufficiency had become part of the city’s identity, and it is against that backdrop that Christ addresses His Church.

“For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing,’ not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.”
Revelation 3:17

We should be careful not to read these words as though the Christians in Laodicea literally walked through the streets proclaiming, “We need nothing.” Jesus is speaking prophetically. Throughout Scripture, God often reveals what His people truly believe, not by quoting their lips, but by interpreting their lives. Actions always betray what we believe, right?

Israel professed covenant faithfulness while trusting idols. The Pharisees professed devotion to God while loving the praise of men. Likewise, Christ exposes the assumptions that governed the hearts of the Laodicean believers.

• That distinction is essential.

• The issue is not merely what the church said.

• The issue is what Christ saw.

There was a profound difference between the church’s assessment of itself and Christ’s assessment of it. The Laodiceans believed themselves spiritually healthy because everything around them suggested success. Christ saw poverty where they saw wealth, blindness where they believed they possessed clear vision, and nakedness where they believed themselves well clothed.

• Their tragedy was not open rebellion.

• It was self-deception.

That should cause every Christian to pause. It did me.

If Christ examined the evangelical community in America as He examined the church in Laodicea, what would He see? What would He see in me? What would He see in you?

He would not merely listen to our doctrinal statements or public professions. He would weigh our hearts. He would examine what we celebrate, what we tolerate, what we quietly accept as normal, and what we have convinced ourselves constitutes faithfulness. He would not measure us by attendance, conference registrations, ministry budgets, publishing houses, political influence, media platforms, or expanding institutions. Those may all be good gifts, but none of them are the measure Christ uses when He judges His Church.

That question becomes especially uncomfortable when viewed against the backdrop of the last half century.

Since 1973, around 63,000,000 millions of unborn image bearers have been led to the slaughter while, during those same decades, American evangelicalism experienced remarkable institutional success. Churches grew larger. Seminaries expanded. Christian publishing flourished. Broadcasting multiplied. Political organizations promised that greater influence would eventually produce justice. Prosperity increased. Home ownership expanded. Credit became easier. The evangelical world learned how to build increasingly sophisticated institutions while the silent screams continued in the background.

None of those developments are sinful in themselves.

The question is whether they became the lens through which we interpreted God’s favor.

• Did our visible success gradually persuade us that we must also be spiritually healthy?

• Did affluence make self-examination more difficult?

• Did political access become a substitute for prophetic faithfulness?

• Did the ordinary rhythms of prosperous evangelical life slowly become so familiar that we ceased asking whether Christ agreed with our assessment of ourselves?

That is the question Laodicea refuses to let us avoid.

It is also why Proverbs 24 unsettles me so deeply.

“Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?”
Proverbs 24:11-12

Notice where Solomon directs our attention.

He does not begin by examining what we knew.

He examines the heart.

The issue is not simply ignorance. It is whether our hearts remained attentive enough to perceive what God expected us to see. The writer of Proverbs leaves little room for comfortable excuses because the God who weighs the heart also knows what we should have known, what we could have known, and whether comfort, prosperity, or complacency dulled our moral perception. It dulled mine and I’ve repented for that. I was wrong.

That possibility for the entire American evangelical church is sobering.

For many years I read these passages in Revelation 3 assuming they described other people. But I also knew they didn’t. About a decade ago, eventually I realized Christ was asking me to stop evaluating the Church through my own eyes and begin seeing her through His. That realization did not make me the subject of the indictment. It simply reminded me that I stand under it with every other believer here in the U.S. If there is guilt to assigned (and there is), it is to all of us, who could have rescued those being led to slaughter.

63,000,000 screams from the grave indict me, indicts you, indicts us all.

Christ’s words to Laodicea are not preserved to satisfy our curiosity about a first-century church. They have been preserved because every generation of God’s people is capable of the same deception. We can sincerely believe we are faithful while quietly measuring ourselves by standards Christ never gave us. We can mistake prosperity for blessing, influence for obedience, activity for faithfulness, and institutional success for spiritual health.

Finally, it is no accident that immediately after exposing the Laodicean church, Jesus says:

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me.” (Revelation 3:20)

We often hear these words quoted as an invitation to unbelievers - that is not at all what is going on here. These words in their context are addressed to Christ’s own ekklesia. The image is almost unbearable. A church convinced of its own health has become so self-satisfied that its Lord stands outside, patiently calling His own people back to Himself.

That is also our hope. That was my hope as I hit my knees a decade ago.

Christ does not expose His Church because He delights in condemnation. He exposes her because He loves her. He knocks because He desires fellowship. He calls because He delights in repentance. He wounds in order to heal.

As we begin this series, my prayer is not simply that we would think differently about Roe, constitutionalism, or evangelical history. My prayer is that we would hear the voice of our Shepherd standing at the door of His Church once again. If He graciously reveals where we have been blind, may we not harden our hearts. May we open the door. May we welcome His searching gaze rather than fear it, trusting that the One who exposes our sin is the very One who gave Himself for sinners.

Only then will we be able to examine the last fifty years, not through our own eyes, but through His.

That is why this series begins here.

• Before we examine Roe.

• Before we examine constitutionalism.

• Before we examine the modern evangelical movement.

We must first allow Christ to examine us.

The central question is not whether we believe we have been faithful.

The central question is whether Christ, who walks among the lampstands and weighs the hearts of His people, would say the same about us. About me. About you.

Would He? Is He knocking at our door?

Questions to reflect upon:

1. If Christ examined my life instead of my profession, would His assessment of my faithfulness match my own?

2. Have I mistaken prosperity, comfort, or visible success for evidence of Christ’s approval?

3. Are there injustices I have quietly accepted simply because they have become normal in my lifetime?

4. What assumptions about faithfulness have I inherited from my Christian culture rather than from Scripture?

5. If Jesus were writing a letter to my church today, what might He commend... and what might He lovingly rebuke?

6. When was the last time I asked Christ to show me where I have been blind instead of assuming I already see clearly?

7. Have I allowed political influence, ministry activity, or institutional success to become substitutes for simple obedience?

8. Do I welcome Christ’s searching gaze, or do I instinctively defend myself when His Word exposes my heart?

9. If Christ is standing at the door and knocking, is there any area of my life, my church, or my thinking that I have quietly kept closed to Him?

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The Sin of Roe is a multi-part examination of how American evangelicalism responded to the greatest sustained injustice in our nation's history. It is also the story of my own repentance. Before I came to question the Church's assumptions, God first confronted my own. This series is offered in that same spirit, not to condemn Christ's Church, but to call her, beginning with myself, back to wholehearted obedience. Before the walls fall. And please know that I did not begin this journey looking for flaws in the evangelical Church. I began by asking why, after fifty years, I could still hear the silent screams. I still do.

• Part I: Laodicea: How comfort, prosperity, and self-deception prepared the modern evangelical church to tolerate what should have been intolerable.

• Part II: The Angel of Light: How deception rarely appears as open rebellion, but instead presents itself as wisdom, prudence, and even righteousness.

• Part III: The Constitution Trap: How constitutional process gradually displaced biblical responsibility in the evangelical imagination.

• …

• Epilogue: Repentance Before Restoration

Every civilization has moments that later generations cannot comprehend.

How could an educated nation embrace slavery while reading the same Bible every Sunday? How could churches in Germany continue their ordinary routines while evil slowly wrapped itself around the nation? How could people who believed themselves decent, moral, and even devout become so accustomed to injustice that they eventually ceased to notice it?

Those questions are easy to ask when history is safely behind us.

They become far more difficult when history is looking directly at us.

For more than fifty years, America has legally permitted the intentional murder of her own children. During that same period, much of evangelical Christianity has assured itself that it has been faithfully resisting this evil. Millions have voted. Millions have marched. Countless sermons have been preached. Organizations have been built. Elections have come and gone. Court cases have been celebrated and lamented. Yet the killing has continued.

The obvious question has rarely been asked.

Not whether abortion is evil.

Almost every evangelical already agrees it is.

The question is why a movement that correctly identified the evil failed so utterly and completely to stop it.

That is the question this series seeks to answer.

The answer will not be comfortable, because it will require examining ideas many Christians have never considered open to examination. Some have become so familiar that they function almost as articles of faith. They are assumed, defended, and rarely inspected. Yet our Lord never commanded His followers merely to inherit ideas. He commanded them to love God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their mind.

Don’t look past those words. Reread them, slowly, prayerfully, contemplatively.

Because that command leaves no room for intellectual complacency. In other words, it is sin not to love God with our minds? Have you? Do you?

If the fruit from our pro-life efforts has been catastrophic, then faithful disciples have a duty to examine the tree.

This series is not written to condemn the Church but to call her to repentance.

That call, however, had to begin with me.

Had you known me ten years ago, you would have found someone making many of the very arguments I now challenge. I was convinced I understood the problem. I believed I was faithfully opposing abortion. I had inherited assumptions about politics, constitutional processes, and Christian responsibility that I had rarely examined because they were simply the air I breathed.

Then something changed.

For years I could not escape what I have come to call the silent screams. I found myself wrestling, sometimes unwillingly, with questions that refused to leave me alone.

• Why had this evil endured for so long?

• Why had so many sincere Christians, including myself, accepted results that would have horrified previous generations of believers?

• Why did our strategies seem to preserve our consciences while failing to rescue those we all agreed ought to be rescued?

I do not believe I reasoned my way out of those questions by my own intellect.

I believe the Holy Spirit, with patient mercy, refused to let me look away.

What followed was not merely a change of opinion. It was the familiar work of God in every believer’s life: conviction, growing awareness, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration. Or at least should be. God standard is perfection after all and we cannot be perfect, so what is the remedy to stay sane as a Christian…repentance.

So the conclusions you will read in these essays were born out of that process. They are not presented as the triumph of my reasoning but as the fruit of God’s patient discipline toward one stubborn disciple.

That is why I write with urgency, but not with superiority. If there is error to expose, I have already found it first in my own heart.

Some readers will disagree with my conclusions. That is expected. My request is only this: follow the argument wherever it leads. Examine the Scriptures. Examine history. Examine the incentives that have shaped modern evangelicalism. Above all, examine whether our confidence has rested more in inherited political traditions than in the explicit commands of God.

The essays that follow will challenge modern evangelical assumptions about the Constitution, political engagement, church culture, the nature of repentance, and the subtle ways Christians can become convinced they are fighting evil while leaving evil firmly in place.

This is not ultimately a series about abortion.

It is a series about how a people who sincerely desired to obey God became convinced that faithful intentions were an acceptable substitute for faithful action.

If that diagnosis is correct, then abortion is only the first symptom.

Far greater judgments lie ahead.

The question before us is not whether America is in decline.

The question is whether the Church will recognize why before the walls finally fall.

Before reading the next essay, I encourage you to spend time with these questions, questions I asked myself:

• Have I ever stopped to ask why abortion has endured for more than fifty years despite overwhelming evangelical opposition?

• Have I inherited assumptions about Christian responsibility that I have never examined?

• If God were to expose one of those assumptions, would I be willing to repent?

• Am I more interested in defending my traditions than discovering whether they are true?

• Can I still hear the silent screams?

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For years I have listened to Christians and conservatives argue that the Constitution must be used immediately to secure the border, deport those who entered illegally, and restore the rule of law. There is a sense of urgency to these discussions that is unmistakable. People believe their communities, their culture, and the future of their children are at stake. They expect immediate action.

And they are correct by the way, but that will be another Substack.

The point is that when politically engaged Christians perceive an immediate threat, they instinctively reject passivity. They do not say, “The constitutional process takes time.” They do not counsel patience over several election cycles. They do not suggest we simply appoint better judges and hope the problem slowly corrects itself over the next generation.

They want action.

Now place that instinct beside another issue.

The same Christians will often tell you that abortion is the intentional taking of innocent human life. It is murder they will insist. They will rightly remind you that every child in the womb bears the image of God. They will quote Psalm 139, Jeremiah 1, and other passages affirming God’s knowledge of the unborn. They will insist that abortion is the greatest moral evils of our age.

If that is true, then a question cannot be avoided.

Why does the urgency disappear?

For more than fifty years, millions of unborn children have died in the United States. As I mentioned earlier, around 3,000 will be murdered today in fact.

Please tell me your conscience is bothered by this fact. I can “hear” their silent screams in my mind right now as I write this. Can you?

Even after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, abortion continues in the country. Yet the dominant response among conservative Christians has been remarkably patient. I insist, we’re sinfully patient. We are told to trust the constitutional process, elect better representatives, appoint better judges, wait for the next legislative session, and continue the long political march.

Notice what has happened.

When the perceived victims are our communities, our jobs, or our national identity, constitutional mechanisms become instruments of immediate action.

When the victims are unborn children, constitutional mechanisms become reasons for delay.

I am not arguing that immigration and abortion are morally equivalent. They are not.

I am asking why our instincts are so different.

If Christians truly believe abortion is the intentional murder of innocent image bearers, why has procedural patience become the dominant strategy? Why has constitutional process become something we are willing to let unfold over decades while lives continue to be lost?

That question demands an answer. Not at an organizational or political level - but at the “you” level. After all, it will be you who has to answer for your approach to this issue.

Someone will rightly point out that many faithful Christians have devoted their lives to rescuing the unborn. They have prayed, adopted children, supported pregnancy resource centers, stood outside abortion clinics, endured arrest, and sacrificed careers. Their witness should be honored.

But they have not represented the dominant political instinct of modern evangelicalism.

The dominant instinct has been different. It has been to place confidence in constitutional politics itself, believing that if we simply work the system long enough, righteousness will eventually prevail.

I no longer believe that is a biblical instinct and I traded clear biblical instruction for political pragmaticism, “thinking” that was all that was needed to honor God.

But was I honoring Him? The clear answer is no - and I hit my knees in repentance. I was wrong and I took the easy, pragmatic, pro-life way out.

But the silent screams in my mind never ended.

Scripture does not teach us to become indifferent while innocent lives are being destroyed because proper political procedures require patience.

Consider Proverbs 24:11-12:

“Rescue those being led away to death; hold back those staggering toward slaughter. If you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?”

The passage is striking because it says nothing about political timelines. It says nothing about election cycles. It says nothing about constitutional procedure.

It begins with a moral obligation, a positive command.

Rescue (נָצַל).

Root meaning is "to snatch away," "to deliver," or "to pluck out." It implies a forceful, active intervention to remove someone from imminent danger, death, or an enemy's hand.

Of course, that verse does not answer every prudential question. But the instinct Scripture cultivates is unmistakable. It is the instinct of immediate concern for those being led away to death.

This is where I believe something deeper has happened within conservative Christianity.

Many of us have unconsciously adopted a constitutional ethic that now shapes our moral instincts. We have come to believe that faithfully participating in constitutional processes is itself the highest civic virtue and dismiss divine commands.

Rescue (נָצַל)

Over time, process has become almost as important as the lives the process is supposed to protect.

Yet when our own interests are threatened, that commitment to procedural patience quickly disappears. Deport all non-citizens!

Imagine if tomorrow thousands of American toddlers were being legally executed in the public square every day. Would conservative Christians respond by saying, “The constitutional process takes time”?

Would they counsel patience while waiting for another election?

Would they insist that the courts would eventually sort it out?

Of course not.I hope!

They would demand immediate intervention. They would expect governors, legislatures, law enforcement, Congress, and every lawful authority to exhaust every available means to stop the killing. They might even physically intervene to stop the government slaughter.

Why?

Because their moral instincts would rightly tell them that innocent life takes precedence over procedural comfort.

• That contrast should trouble us.

• The issue is not whether we are politically pro-life.

• The issue is whether our actions reflect what we claim to believe.

Jesus repeatedly warned that our hearts are revealed by our conduct. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” He taught us to examine fruit rather than merely professions.

Our political instincts reveal our theological instincts more than we often realize.

If we demand immediate action when our own communities appear threatened, but decades of procedural patience when unborn children are threatened, what does that reveal about what we actually love?

That is not primarily a constitutional question.

It is a discipleship question.

It is a question every Christian who seeks to love God with all his heart, soul, and mind must answer honestly.

I did.

I found I was in sin as a hypocrite and for being duplicitous.

And I repented.

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