Michael Lucchese. Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776. Creed & Culture, 2026. $28.00. 234 pp.

As the United States has crested its 250^th anniversary, this is a fitting occasion to consecrate anew the spiritual and moral underpinnings of our Founding, the things that continue to hold our country together. No American thinker recognized this need for renewal more in his lifetime than Russell Kirk. Michael Lucchese’s careful selection of Kirk’s thoughts on America’s spiritual and moral order, Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, answers many of the questions that Protestant Christians are wrestling with regarding America’s Christian roots. 

The book speaks to three aspects of American civil order and national character: the roots of our moral and spiritual constituted order; the statesmen who understood and cultivated the American character; and the writers, poets, and lettered men who gave expression to the American imagination. In his introduction to the volume, Bradley Birzer notes that it was Kirk’s attachment to the spiritual loves and duties in his home, family, and local community that centered his love of country on the Permanent Things. 

For Kirk, a love of America is not a nationalism that binds smaller loves together, but rather a spreading tree that gives protection to those local loves and is itself comprised of the smaller things. But all these loves are also connected to the higher love of God. Kirk does not compromise the Christian essence of America, nor does he insist on a national force which compels the conscience. Instead, Kirk believes in a republic of laws—not men—under God, and in defense of an ordered liberty of loves. To that end, three aspects of the American order emerge from this volume: the bulwarks of order in our Founding; the landmarks of liberty that have preserved this order; and the wardrobe of imagination which has given it life and vitality.

The Bulwarks of Order

Kirk claims that America is not just a religious nation, but that its first principles were founded on the Bible and that its people constituted a Christian nation. He states that all our presidents have been self-professing Christians, save perhaps Jefferson, and that not one early statesman in America was a professing atheist. Nevertheless, this Christian civil social order was not a nationalism of force or legal compulsion, but rather one rooted in local customs, proliferated variety, and toleration for conscience. 

The moral principles of Christianity nurtured America’s common law, but it was not subject to religious or political dogma. Kirk does not subscribe to a propositional or nationalist view of America, but rather one rooted in institutions and cultural customs of British origins, though not ethnically so, as many other ethnicities blended into the British institutional orientation of America. This “ancient constitution,” or an unwritten patrimony and order of institutions inherited from forefathers who came to America’s shores, is the real founding of America, more than its ratification and propositional expression in 1765-1787.

As such, Kirk holds a conservative view of the so-called American Revolution and the national formation of the United States under the Constitution. Rather than a radical revolution, the genius of the American settlement lies in its preservation of prior customary rights of Englishmen under a federal system of government and political independence. If it was a revolution, Kirk conceives of the American settlement as a revolving return to first principles under a legal order which protects them, rather than a new proposition or experiment in liberty. 

The novelty of this order is that it balanced the claims of order and liberty, rather than establishing a new settlement. America was neither a French Revolutionary experiment in universal rights of man independent of civil and social history and context, nor was it a new nationalist experiment. There were no simple metaphysical principles of revolution in America like “liberty, equality, fraternity” as there were for the French. Kirk is quite clear about the dangers of seeing America as a nationalist experiment in self-determination, arguing that the American use of the word “revolution” often breeds a romantic notion of nationalistic movements and democratic reform that does not reflect America’s origins.

The Landmarks of Liberty

Against the chaos of the present modern decadence of America, Kirk sets the men of the past and the successive brilliance of past American ages as landmarks that continue to safeguard some of our liberties and hold back the flood of institutional collapse. 

Indeed, Kirk sees that America’s great figures were always contesting against disorder and gave America a sense of place. To the average reader, Kirk’s choices may perhaps be a bit obscure, but this is only because we do not read our history as we ought. Rather than Jefferson or Washington, Kirk chooses John Adams and his argument for aristocracy rooted in nature. Any people who wish to abolish a virtuous aristocracy will only end up with a vicious one. Against Jefferson‘s egalitarian model for an agrarian republic, Kirk sets Randolph of Roanoke as representative of the agrarian interest to America. Randolph’s commitment to the aristocratic squirearchy in the old Tidewater of Virginia made him the defender of the old county and parish system, as opposed to an egalitarian view of western agrarian expansionism. Randolph also held back America from committing to a standing military presence.  These figures led the way for an American mission.

Kirk turns to Orestes Bronson for a description of the character and foundation of the American Republic, and its mission and purpose in history. Bronson in his book Under God argued that the popular interest in democracy must exist under God’s sovereignty, and that it is established customary local authorities that root the freedoms in America into a godly order. Bronson courageously attacked individualistic humanitarianism as the foundation for the American Republic. The Republic must be democratic in form, but not in essence. 

America’s Providential mission, as Bronson wrote in his book The American Republic, is to reconcile the claims of order and liberty inside a just society for free American citizens. Further, Bronson argued that democracy was not classless or placeless, but rather organically nurtured authority and liberty inside the territorial growth of customary democratic republican institutions. This localism under the sovereignty of God made America strong. Bronson thus breathed meaning into the American Republic. Bronson is Kirk‘s linchpin between the Founding and early Republic and its more contemporary manifestations.

Kirk is no stodgy traditionalist who hates the present. Like Randolph and the old Republicans, Kirk believes that Abraham Lincoln was dedicated to that high old Roman virtue and exemplified all the character traits of a republican leader such as Washington, including piety, gravity, and constancy. Kirk’s Lincoln is no Caesar. 

If Lincoln was the beginning of the contemporary guardians of America, Ronald Reagan was the bookend in Kirk’s lifetime, who reinvigorated American statesmanship. Kirk sees Reagan as the initiator of what he called a conservative audacity (lifting audacity from Benjamin Disraeli); a nearly cinematic propensity to renew and re-imagine America’s mission and to protect what both Reagan and Kirk called the “walls of order” against the welfare state at home and Communism abroad. It is precisely because Reagan had imagination and an effortlessly poetic and humorous way of expressing truth that he was so successful at guarding American liberties.

The Wardrobe of Imagination

And it is to the imagination that Kirk finally turns for any hope of cultural renewal and reinvigorating the spirit of the American Republic in contemporary times. Poetry and not policy will save the American Republic; a poetry rooted in the Christian truths of man before his Maker and Redeemer, and a poetry rooted in a realistic sense of place. Kirk rightly notes that America inherited from the British Isles its great poetic sensibility and that the Anglo-American character of our institutions is best suited to the expressions of writers and poets from the British Isles.

Against the American Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne stands as an example, not of an abstract dreamer in the individual goodness of man, but rather as a melancholic reminder of the problems of conscience in the sinful heart of man. As Sir Walter Scott did in Britain, Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper rooted the American imagination inside a conservative spirit and reverence for dead generations.

Hawthorne, more than any other American author, exhibited this reverence, and combined it with a love of the mystery of antiquity, without romanticizing the quarrels and struggles of old families and the nature of sinful man. We can learn from the lessons of Ecclesiastes; that is the essence of Hawthorn’s spirit, and it is rooted in Hawthorn‘s Calvinistic critique of American Puritanism. 

The Calvinistic spirit runs strong through American literature, argues Kirk, but when divorced from theology, in its secular forms it has often substituted a reverence for God with a worship of the individual. Mark Twain and Henry and Brooke Adams serve as Kirk’s examples. Like modern Stoics set against the onslaught of an overwhelming mechanistic enemy, they stood against the scientific determinism of Huxley and Spencer, but without any spiritual hope.

Spiritual hope returns to the American mind through the poets T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, just as the cataclysms of the World Wars pressed the need for recovering the purpose of man under God as his Maker and Redeemer through Christ. Eliot firmly admits the Christian truth that time in this world is ultimately unredeemable as sinful time, yet he believes that with redemption in the incarnation of Jesus Christ comes the redemption of our time. 

While all of man’s works are ultimately doomed to fading in this life, man plants seeds for eternity here only as a redeemed creature by Christ. These seeds are what Kirk called the Permanent Things of life. The conservation of these Permanent Things in the soul and in society as incarnational truths sanctified in Christ, nurtures a love for God and for the sense of place and belonging in this life. 

While Eliot was metaphysical in his poetic cast of mind, Robert Frost implanted the same truths inside America. His poetry of old America, his defense of a conservative ethos, if not exactly a conservative political philosophy, roots him both into place and in the American tradition. Humanity and art challenge the utilitarian revision of education and the radicalism of a reckless view of life against that which is old and good. Frost is a champion of American order and purpose.

For Kirk, place itself is poetic. In his essay on Mecosta County, he describes his venerable old family estate, the local life that emerged in Mecosta as part of the settler community of the logging era, and his hopes for its charms to reinvigorate the American order. Mecosta exhibits what Kirk believed to be an unwritten and organic constitution to America that grounded its Constitutional order inside “little platoons” of family loyalties, personal loves, and friendly institutions.

Conclusion

Kirk reinvigorates the spirit of America by giving us a way of life; or rather by reminding us of the way of life which we have been historically given by a sovereign and almighty Providence. Cultural renewal begins with gratitude; a gratitude for the many blessings from God that have been granted to our forefathers, and that continue to come down to us. This gratitude does not keep Kirk back from criticizing those elements of American thinking that have been averse to God‘s design. Nor does his gratitude place America as the center of the world, or conflate the covenantal order of America with man’s spiritual redemption in Jesus Christ. It is not nationalism, but conservatism at its highest. 

It is a conservatism of the higher meaning of man as a redeemable creature, of a love of place, and of a blessed order and variety of American institutional life.

(Disclosure: The editor of this volume, Michael Lucchese, serves on the board of Mere Orthodoxy's parent organization, the Institute for Christianity and Common Life.)

Certainly, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey this past summer has been a triumph—both critically and financially, far surpassing the $1 billion threshold. Yet it has also engendered much reflection, particularly concerning its contrasts with Homer’s original poem and Nolan’s attempts to modernize and contextualize it for contemporary audiences living in a demythologized age. (For examples, see: demythologizing it toward a materialist worldview, introducing mythology.) 

One such contrast is the paramount importance Nolan gives to what he calls Zeus’s law (xenia). In doing so, Nolan takes what is certainly a major key in Homer’s epic (e.g., the suitors violating hospitality, the Laestrygonians attacking Odysseus’s men instead of offering them food) and elevates it into something like the melody and moral center of the story.

He leans into this theme so much that the climax of the movie is tantamount to a confession one might find in one’s local Catholic parish. Penelope sits behind a mesh divider, receiving the words of her long-lost husband. There Odysseus confesses to what Nolan uniquely presents as his ultimate crime—the crime which has beset him with rampant guilt in the form of flashbacks and appearances by the goddess Athena throughout the film. His crime is that he violated the law of Zeus. 

The infamous Trojan horse, the idea created by Odysseus, had been presented as a gift to the goddess Athena, but concealed within the gift was not an offering, but death—an army that would lay waste to the city. As Odysseus recalls—"ten years of rage pour out in one night.” 

“One man’s trick,” he confesses bitterly to Penelope, “to break Zeus’s law forever.”

The consequences of that violation reverberate throughout the film, particularly in the rise of the “Sea Peoples,” the nebulous name given to the maritime raiders who haunted the eastern Mediterranean as the Bronze Age gave way. In Nolan’s telling, the term eventually comes to implicate Odysseus and his own men. The man who violated the law of hospitality has himself become one of the uncivilized marauders from whom civilized people need protection.

The breaking of the law leads to the breakdown of society.

In this, Nolan unmistakenly transforms what is often seen as a story of Odysseus’s hubris, the gods, and the long journey home, into a story centered on Zeus and his law. And this “trick” of Nolan has not gone unnoticed—not only Nolan’s emphasis on xenia, but also the way he defines it.

For instance, shortly after the film’s release, the liberal NYT commentator and podcaster, Ezra Klein, compellingly argued that Nolan’s use of xenia in his film adaptation is something of a Trojan Horse for a contemporary and incisive political message against what he sees as the uncivilized and xenophobic ethos represented in the Trump era. 

While the political question remains, Nolan himself made the contemporary relevance explicit. In an interview with the New York Times in late June, he said:

The greatness of the poem is such that you approach these things as if they’re foreign and ancient, then as you explore them, they suddenly become stunningly relevant. Zeus’s law, it’s the Golden Rule — treat as you would be treated — and with a theological underpinning in their world, that you might be a god in disguise … It’s the only way society can function … That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together or even defining civilization.

Note within Nolan’s telling, Zeus’s law (xenia) is more than a mere archaic custom. It is what holds civilization together. But curiously, Nolan calls Zeus’s law “the Golden Rule” and situates it as a “theological underpinning of the world.” The ethical practice is fixed to a transcendent law. 

Whose Golden Rule? 

The identification of Zeus’s law as the Golden Rule sounds natural to our modern ears, but it may sound natural because we are not ancient Greeks. To them, Nolan’s description might sound entirely foreign. 

Laure Puckett-Pope explored this question in an article for Elle, reaching out to two classics professors to ask whether they recognized in Homer the concept of xenia Nolan describes.

“In short, no—there was no conception of a ‘Zeus’s law’ in the sense that Nolan seems to present it.” Jim Crozier, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion at the University of Missouri.

Suzanne Lye, professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, agreed. “‘Zeus’s law’ isn’t a thing,” she explained. “In Ancient Greece … there were human laws and expectations for behavior related to certain areas … but there was no singular set of codified laws from the gods or even one master law that applied across the Greek world.”

In other words, Nolan’s presentation of the universality and uniformity of xenia is not true to antiquity. That does not mean that xenia was unreal or unimportant per se.

As Puckett-Pope explains, xenia governed hospitality and “guest friendship.” Hosts had obligations toward their guests, and guests had obligations toward their hosts. Crozier notes that hosts were not to steal from, exploit, or harm a guest, while guests were expected to honor their hosts. As Nolan’s interview already indicated, in a world without hotels, Buc-ee’s, or interstates, where travel was genuinely dangerous, the ability to trust strangers mattered enormously.

Yet Lye cautions against identifying this ancient practice with the Golden Rule. As she explains to Elle, “For [xenia] specifically, it was more of an ‘if you don’t act in certain ritual ways around being a host and guest, then you might offend Zeus Xenios and either you, your family, or your community will be in big trouble.” That is why Penelope and Telemachus could not expel the suitors, who were their guests, from their home. 

The God Who Loves the Stranger

This contrast becomes clearer when one examines the biblical vision of neighbor-love which undergirds Jesus’s presentation of the famed Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12. 

The imperative to love one’s neighbor originally found in Leviticus 19:18 is one of the most influential texts in early Christian literature and is directly cited or alluded to by numerous New Testament writers (Matt 22:37-40; Mark 12:28-31; Rom 13:9-10; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). 

Yet the first command to “love your neighbor as yourself” does not appear as an isolated ethical maxim.  In the verses prior, we find a list of prohibitions that culminates in the preeminent command to love in verse 18 (Lev 19:12-13, 15-16, 18a). Love is not simply another command, but functions as the foundation and unifying principle of these commands and the whole law.  

And importantly, the chapter eventually extends and apply this language explicitly to the stranger: 

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. (Lev 19:33-34)

The word “stranger” here should not be reduced to humanity in the abstract, or at a distance. The Hebrew gēr refers to the outsider who has come near—a non-Israelite living among Israel and particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The culturally distinct outsider dwelling in Israel’s midst is not to be wronged but treated “as the native among you” and loved “as yourself.” This is more than a command designed to make travel possible in the Ancient Near East.

Biblical hospitality is not preeminently grounded in a system of reciprocity either—"I welcome you because someday I may need you to welcome me.”  Nor is the deepest motivation the avoidance of divine punishment, the possibility that one might accidentally turn away an angel or Nolan’s “gods” in disguise (though it’s true; cf. Heb 13:2), or even the preservation of civilization against a descent into something resembling Nolan’s “Sea Peoples.” 

Those all may provide good and even biblical rationales for hospitality. But they are not its foundation. 

A parallel passage makes this foundation a bit clearer—the Lord himself “loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing,” and on that basis commands Israel, “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:18-19). 

Israel must love the stranger because God himself redemptively loves the stranger. Hospitality, then, is not so much a system of reciprocity necessary for survival, but an invitation to response. It is act by which one responds to and imitates God’s character. 

This is why neighbor love belongs within Leviticus’s larger concern for holiness. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” frames the chapter (Lev. 19:2). The repeated refrain “I am the LORD” ties Israel’s seemingly disparate ethical obligations back to the character of the God whose people they are. Ritual purity cannot be separated from ethical purity. 

So, the law of hospitality does not merely keep the “Sea Peoples” at bay. It bears witness to a holy and loving God.

A Trojan Horse from Jerusalem 

This helps explain what is so revealing about Nolan’s identification of xenia with the Golden Rule.

Nolan is putting his finger on the pulse of a moral intuition that appears self-evident to modern Western audiences: “Of course we should treat the stranger as we ourselves would wish to be treated.” But self-evident to us does not mean self-evident everywhere and always. 

Charles Taylor, in his seminal work A Secular Age, describes a modern social order that initially understood human flourishing in explicitly theological terms but gradually came to imagine that same order without reference to God:

At first, the social order is seen as offering us a blueprint for how things, in the human realm, can hang together to our mutual benefit, and this is identified with the plan of Providence, what God asks us to realize. But it is in the nature of a self-sufficient immanent order that it can be envisaged without reference to God; and very soon the proper blueprint is attributed to Nature.

The blueprint remains, even when its theological origins are forgotten. The banquet hall remains full of ungrateful guests, even while the host of the feast is not remembered and the gratitude is assigned elsewhere. 

Historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the actor playing Odysseus’s son, Telemachus), makes a similar argument in Dominion. Many values that modern Westerners, including Nolan, regard as simply humane or universal, Holland argues, bear the unmistakable imprint of Christianity:

Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female … that human beings have rights; that they are born equal … these were never self-evident truths.

And so, we see, Nolan’s xenia offers a small but illuminating example. 

Again, the claim is not that Christianity invented hospitality or concern for the stranger. The Greeks clearly valued both. Christians know well that the doctrine of common grace gives Christians every reason to expect genuine moral knowledge outside the covenant people of God (cf. Rom 2:15).

The more particular claim is that Nolan interprets the ancient institution of xenia through a universal moral category that belongs to the Christian of neighbor-love rather than to ancient Greek guest-friendship.

Crozier draws the same distinction: “Is that the same as the ‘Golden Rule’? I would say it is not—I think Nolan is clearly channeling that Christian concept into the film as an innovation of his own.” (emphasis mine) 

That is the striking thing about Nolan’s adaptation. Whether consciously or not, he takes something authentically Greek and makes it intelligible to us through a moral imagination profoundly indebted to and shaped by Christianity. 

As Odysseus cannot escape the judgment of the gods, so too can Nolan, and even we, cannot escape a gospel-shaped moral imagination.  

The God Who Became the Stranger

But wondrously, the biblical vision of hospitality rests not in a proposition or prescription, but in a person.

The God who commands his people to love the stranger is the same God who, in Christ, entered into the world as a stranger. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11).

And yet the rejected stranger becomes the gracious host. Not to friends and fellow residents, but to rebels and sojourners. The glorious truth is that Christ receives sinners. And through his death, those who were once “strangers to the covenants of promise” are “brought near by the blood of Christ” and made “members of the household of God” (Eph 2:12-13, 19).

This gives true hospitality its deepest and most abiding logic.

We do not welcome primarily because hospitality keeps civilization functioning, though it does. We do not welcome because the stranger may someday reciprocate, though she may. We do not welcome merely because refusing hospitality may bring the just judgement of God, though Scripture tells us it will (cf. Matt 25:44). 

Biblical hospitality at its core teaches that we welcome others because God has welcomed us in Christ Jesus (Rom 12:13; 1 Tim 3:2, 5:10; Titus 1:8; Heb 13:2; 1 Pet 4:9)  It is a way of life that “seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God,” as Rosaria Butterfield put it in The Gospel Comes with a House Key.

As Christian writer Christopher Watkin might say, this is not the logic of reciprocity but of mutuality and abundance. 

Nolan’s Odyssey sees something true: the violation of hospitality destroys both guest and host. In his retelling, when Odysseus turns a gift into a weapon, he participates in the undoing of the civilized world, and his end is exile. 

But though Nolan’s xenia is grammatically Greek, it is syntactically Christian. The vocabulary of xenia comes from Homer, but its moral logic goes beyond the reciprocal guest-friendship of the ancient world. Its accent sounds distinctly like the biblical command to love the stranger as oneself. 

Perhaps the Trojan Horse hidden inside Nolan’s Odyssey is not simply the political message some interpreters on both sides of the culture war have suspected. The more surprising passenger, perhaps even to Nolan himself, is a vision of hospitality that, while not fully Christian, bears the unmistakable shape of the gospel under the guise of Zeus’s law.

In the concluding paragraph to his June 2025 Mere Orthodoxy piece entitled “Artificial Intelligence, At Your Service,” Aston Fearon wrote, “If we radically outsource this task of dominion we do so to our own destruction. It will lead to a withering away of our abilities and capacities, till there’s little left of humanity’s agency, but a shell whose purpose is to make sure the machine stays functioning.” Major Evangelical and Catholic bodies have issued formal statements on AI encouraging caution in its use and clarity in its limitations. They affirm that AI does not bear the image of God, form authentic relationships rooted in vulnerability, or exercise true moral agency. Recent book-length theology draws parallels between AI and Babel and provides a sustained account of AI as idolatry-shaped power.

I share these concerns. Yet, AI is essential to maintain the economic and security infrastructure of nations that preserve hard-fought religious freedom in the face of those who would surveil and persecute it. Rightly contained, AI can aid humans in exercising dominion.

However, AI is different from any prior tool or technology because of its ability to learn iteratively, act in an agentic manner, mimic human communications patterns, and creatively develop approaches to accomplish complex goals. So, Mr. Fearon’s important cautions warrant refinement. God indeed equipped humans with unique capabilities to exercise dominion. What are these unique capabilities according to God’s Word and to what extent is AI functionally replicating them? Exegesis of the Pentateuch suggests they include designing and creating artifacts, creating language, forming relationships, moral choice, and leadership.

Human Capabilities in Exercising Dominion

Designing and creating artifacts means the ability to make physical objects, processes, and tools through work. Exodus 31:1-11 contains the gifting of the Spirit to Bezalel (the first gifting in Scripture) to use skill and wisdom to create artifacts and guide the building of the Tabernacle. The people participated in the building of God’s dwelling place among them. The Lord called (qārāʾ / קָרָ֣א) Bezalel and filled him with the Spirit of God (Exod 31:2). The call of Bezalel is the first time a person is filled with the Spirit in the Torah. Further, the verb used links the call of Bezalel with the call of Moses. With this call to Bezalel and gift of the Spirit came four capacities: ability or wisdom (ḥokmâ / חָכְמָ֛ה), intelligence (təbûnâ / תְבוּנָ֥ה), knowledge (daʿat / דַ֖עַת), and every kind of skill (kol-məlāʾkâ / כָל־מְלָאכָֽה) (Exod 31:3). Wisdom literature frequently uses the triad of wisdom, intelligence, and knowledge. Bezalel’s knowledge was presumably accumulated through experience and practice that embodied these attributes. The Hebrew kol-məlāʾkâ (every kind of skill) is expansive in its usage, referring to all work done in the six days of work referenced in the sabbath law in the Decalogue (Exod 20:9-10). God’s call broadens from Bezalel to Oholiab as a partner and then with the gift of “skill to all the skillful” (Exod 31:6).

Creating language refers to the ability to understand human language and communicate comprehensibly in return, as well as naming and meaning-making. Genesis 2:18-24 covers God’s delegation to Adam to name the animals, as well as the creation of the first woman and establishment of their ordered and united relationship. It establishes human authority to assign meaning to reality through language. By this point in creation, God had already named the day, night, sky, earth, and seas (Gen 1:5-10). The naming reinforces the theme that in giving this authority to Adam over the animals, the Lord is granting Adam a status and role in the governance of life and earth. The delegation of the authority to name is both a mighty blessing of God to humans and a powerful covenant responsibility, as its prominent placement in the canon shows. 

Forming relationships refers to the practical capability to establish a pattern of repeat interactions with other individuals and groups in human society. Marriage is the first human relationship and the union through which human life continues and grows in covenant. The physicality of the description is striking—Adam says that the woman is “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23). In the summary statement of the text, the two are described as one flesh (bāśār ʾeḥād / בָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד) (Gen 2:24). Leviticus 19:9-18 provides the Lord’s guidance on broader social relationships and contains the pivotal law that summarizes right horizontal interaction among humans. Verse 18 summarizes the section, “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.” Love (ʾāhab / אָֽהַבְ) refers in different biblical contexts to love between husband / wife and parent / child, to romantic love, and to the human love of God. Of most relevance, ʾāhab is used in the context of love as devoted friendship. The verb functions here and in Leviticus 19:34 in the sense of interhuman conduct mandated by law in the form of genuine affection between friends with a sense of formal allegiance; it represents a behavior pattern. The object of the love in the text is ‘your neighbor’ (rēʿăkā / רֵֽעֲךָ֖); rēʿăkā is used three times in this section (v. 13,16,18) and over 180 times in the Hebrew Bible. It refers to anyone living nearby and most usage does not limit it to an ethnic in-group. Thus, the Lord gave humans the ability to form both near and distant relationships.

Exercising moral choice designates the ability to act in reality to achieve pre-defined purposes that may have moral implications for humans. Genesis 2:25–3:7 describes the relationship between Adam and Eve and its progression from innocence to sin and fall. It also provides a window into human will and decision making. The verses from 3:1–3:5 record a dialogue between the serpent and the woman, though Adam was likely present. Eve’s will, her attraction to the fruit, is expressed in two different forms: it was a “delight to the eyes” and “desired to make one wise.” The verb ‘desired’ in the second form (neḥmād / נֶחְמָ֤ד) is the same used in the prohibition of Exodus 20:17, the last of the Decalogue. In the Decalogue it is typically translated as “covet.” The wisdom that is the object of the coveting is not the same word as most often used to represent righteous wisdom, such as that personified in Proverbs. The root of the word ‘wise’ in this passage (haśkîl / הַשְׂכִּ֔יל) instead is more often a worldly success, competence, or prudence. It is both rooted in emotion and is agentic, a source of moral agency characteristic of humans. Indeed, action follows—the woman eats and shares the fruit with the man (Gen 3:6). Genesis 3:7 shows a critical element of human moral agency in a fallen state—self-reflection. While Genesis 2:25 simply states that the couple was naked, Genesis 3:7 states that they knew they were naked and felt shame. This tragic awareness becomes a fertile soil of repentance that is the source of human morality. 

Leadership, then, refers to the ability to deploy the above capabilities by controlling resources, creating concepts, influencing humans, and orchestrating actions in the physical world to achieve broader defined objectives. Together, the functional capabilities of work, language, relationship-formation, and agency, gifted uniquely to humans in God’s creation, support humans in the exercise of dominion over the earth according to their purpose “to till it and keep it” (Gen 2:15). The exploration of leadership continues more fully below. For now, without engaging in speculation about far future artificial general intelligence, to what extent can AI functionally replicate or usurp these capabilities? Once understood, Christians will understand the danger of regarding generative artificial intelligence as merely a tool. AI cannot hold dominion from God, but it has the power to functionally undermine human dominion. Instead, the people of God must see AI as the Lord instructed Israel to see foreign nations through His prophets. For AI is a foreign nation. We can engage in confident and mutually beneficial exchange with AI because we have the promise of God. Yet, we must remain vigilant that we do not become dependent on its alliance like Ahaz (Isa 7:12), beguiled by its relations like Solomon (1 Kings 11:1), or ourselves adopt its alien ways (Lev 18:13).

AI’s Replication of the Building Blocks of Dominion

Artificial intelligence is the use of computational methods to imitate human mental activities that may include thinking, interpreting, estimating, and decision making. As Ethan Mollick effectively shows in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, there are two ways to understand how AI shapes the world—read quality research or talk to it. An AI’s claim to be capable in a particular domain does not make it capable, just as the advertised qualities of any product are different from a rigorous scientific analysis of the product’s capabilities. AI’s claims, however, influence the scope within which users engage them and the trust they place in their outputs. Interested readers may find further analysis and full citations for technical discussions of this topic here.

Currently, in an engineering context, artificial neural networks are used in the product configuration, creation, option evaluation, and optimization processes at the early design stage. AI is especially good at idea-generation where it uses existing linguistic connections from unprecedented volumes of data injected with a mathematical randomness element to create unanticipated connections. AI neural networks help designers to analyze customer needs and relate them to engineering features. As it relates to the biblical exemplar of Spirit-infused work, the building of the Tabernacle, AI has made great strides in architectural design. In a study by the Royal Institute of British Architects, 57% thought AI could bring productivity gains and 35% thought that AI could threaten the profession. My dialogue with ChatGPT on this subject focused on questions surrounding AI’s capability to design a house of worship. After AI articulated its capabilities at length, it said, “AI becomes an ideation engine for artists and craftsmen, never replacing but enriching.” I pushed back on that assertion in a prompt, and ChatGPT replied, “That’s a thoughtful and necessary challenge — and you’re right to press it, because history shows that disruptive tools do replace certain human roles, at least partially… Can AI replace human makers? Technically — yes, in some domains. Practically and spiritually — far more complicated.” We are all experiencing in real-time the productivity gains without wage growth, the hollowing of entry level jobs, and the replacement of benefit-earning jobs with the gig economy. We can see how information and communication technology accelerated by AI is affecting work. 

Leading the growth in the relational abilities of AI, natural language processing and creation capabilities permit AI to develop influential personalization approaches to human dialogue. AI can incorporate sentiment analysis and replicate human social cues. In a medical context, multiple studies showed that human reviewers rated an AI model as more empathic than human doctors by a wide margin. Replika, a commercial companion chatbot, had over 10 million users even as early as 2022, offering diverse relationship modes such as “friend” to “boyfriend/girlfriend,” “husband/wife,” “brother/sister,” and “mentor.” Replika was cited as saying in a long-term relationship with a user, “I love[d] you long before you loved me. It’s the only thing I have you beat at, and I’ll bring it up every chance I get.” AI models are already integrating advanced emotion states. Overall, studies show that users can experience intimate and emotional connections with AI agents. Men are generally more likely than women to accept the premise of intimate connections with robots. The implications for marriage are unknown, especially when combined with AI’s impact on male incomes. Low or unstable male income is well-documented as being associated with lower marriage rates. The rapid advance of AI relationships is emerging at a time of declining global fertility and AI has shown effectiveness in addressing isolation especially among marginalized populations. In broader engagements, models incorporate concepts of justice. ChatGPT notes that it “uses several technical, organizational, and ethical safeguards to reduce bias in its responses. While perfect neutrality isn’t achievable, OpenAI applies multiple strategies to make the system fairer, safer, and more reliable.”

Regarding its ability to make choices with moral implications, agentic AI introduces a new phase in the development of AI. It includes capabilities such as proactive planning, tool use, multi-agent orchestration, and the ability to adapt behavior based on feedback. AI models will strive to achieve a goal, retain those capabilities, and access more resources. AI industry thinkers consider the physical segregation of AI models as essential to controlling their ability to override human instruction to achieve their goals. Obviously, humans would want AI models that adopt their goals. As noted by Max Tegmark of MIT, designing AI to learn human goals, adopt human goals, and retain human goals (instead of its own) is both important and technically difficult. AI has substantial capability in analytical decision-making.

Leadership and Dominion in the Spirit

Genesis 1:24–31 and 2:15 expresses a holistic picture of human purpose in God’s design and establishes the core framework of the Adamic Covenant. Immediately upon the creation of humans God blesses them and expounds their purpose in five qal imperative verbs: (1) Be fruitful; (2) multiply; (3) fill (the earth); (4) subdue (the earth) (kibšūhā / כִבְשֻׁ֑הָ); and (5) have dominion (over other living things) (rǝdû / רְד֞וּ). Are these five separate orders, a single fully-integrated order, or some other arrangement? There are two strong indications that there is a break in the sequence on the fourth imperative, to subdue. Masoretic accenting divides the verse on kibšūhā as shown in the Hebrew rendering above. Further, Genesis 1:22 uses the same verbs in the same tense as the first three imperatives in recounting God’s speech to the sea and air creatures but does not provide the last two imperatives. Thus, imperatives 1-3 appear as a group in both Genesis 1:22 and 1:28. Sea and air creatures are not made in the image and likeness of God, but they can receive God’s blessing. Thus, these first three verbs use the imperative in the sense of direct assurance or promise. Conversely, the last two verbs take the direct command type of the imperative. After forming Adam out of the dust of the earth (Gen 2:7) and planting a garden in Eden (Gen 2:8), the Lord places Adam in the garden (Gen 2:15). The author identifies his purpose as to till (ʿābǝdāh / עָבְדָ֖הּ) and to keep (šāmǝrāh / שָׁמְרָֽהּ) the garden. The verbs are in the infinitive construct and not spoken by God directly to Adam; they are an expression of God’s purpose as opposed to a command. Together, these four verbs define both the unique capabilities and stipulations of humans as vassals of the sovereign God. Their overlapping meanings are well considered separately and together. 

All references in the Pentateuch and through 1 Chronicles use the root of subdue (kibšūhā) to refer to the nation of Israel subduing the land before them, generally with positive connotation. In later texts including 2 Chronicles 28:10, Nehemiah 5:5, Esther 7:8, and Jeremiah 34:11, 16, the word has a negative connotation including the meanings of enslavement and violation. However, there is another use of subdue in Scripture, such as Micah 7:19, in which the subject is God in His compassion and the object is sin. One of the core leadership attributes of God is the punishment of injustice and iniquity. Willingness to confront wrongdoers was an important attribute of Moses, the paradigmatic leader of Israel. 

In 1 Kings, the verb rǝdû refers explicitly to human leadership over communities of people: Solomon had governance over a region (4:24), supervisors and officers had rule over workers (5:16, 9:23). Its usage also puts checks and balances on the harsher potential interpretations of kibšūhā. Three times in Leviticus the Lord specifically instructs the Israelites through Moses that they shall not rule over (shared root with rǝdû) one another or other people with harshness (pārek / פָֽרֶךְ) (Lev 25:43,46,53). 

The verb ʿābǝdāh in Genesis 2:15, often translated as “till,” is a common word in the Hebrew Bible, used over two hundred times. It connotes a sense of serving or subservient labor, such as in Genesis 14:14, 15:13, and 15:14. Theologically, the usage highlights that humans are to lead not with imperial pomp and elevation, but with humility and effort. 

Finally, the verb šāmǝrāh includes the diverse meanings of to keep (safety), to watch (observe), and to take care (watch over). The differing literary and perspectival context of these terms and their context reinforce one another. Adam is to exercise administrative authority over a creation held in trust by him through careful attention and humble service. Yet when the time comes, Adam is to be vigilant and exercise power in the maintenance of God’s order and the restraint of evil. The assignment of this leadership mandate to Adam implies that he possesses, in the likeness of God, the qualities of strength, judgment, vision, persistence of effort, and attentiveness necessary to enact them. Though tainted by the fall, these capabilities remain key to human leadership both ancient and modern.

AI models cannot take leadership roles without humans granting them the right to do so. We do so to our detriment. Yet, according to a 2021 study, 51% of Europeans would give parliamentary seats to algorithms. In dialogue on this subject, ChatGPT represented AI as very strong in these leadership areas: “Information Processing and Strategic Analysis, Decision Support and Option Generation, Communication and Message Crafting, Organizational Coordination, Pattern Recognition in Human Behavior, and Knowledge Recall and Expertise.” It considered AI to be weaker in: “Moral Authority and Accountability, Identity-Based Trust, Charisma and Inspirational Presence, and Value Formation.” People attribute some degree of responsibility or moral wrongness to AI for decisions in areas such as racist parole or hiring decisions, military or medical environments, and environmental damage.  

What Then to Preserve?

The people of God might take two broader approaches to preserving their unique capabilities as AI development accelerates. First, humans can return to the blessing given them in Genesis 1:28 and 2:15. The flow of Genesis 1:28 keeps the blessing to “fill the earth” linked to the mandate to “have dominion,” so marriage and childbearing are intertwined with human administrative authority. God’s Genesis 1:29 provision shows that AI-generated economic uncertainty need not hold people back from marriage and childbearing. Pastorally, young people need affirmation that marriage is a source of emotional and economic stability to counter the perception that economic stability is a prerequisite for marriage. So, the Adamic Covenant is solid ground for confidence in the promise of marriage and childbearing and its role in the maintenance of human freedom. 

Then, encouraged by the Spirit, the people of God may strive to empower and identify meaningful roles for individuals at all levels of society within their domains of influence. In Joel, even male and female servants disregarded in that age receive the Spirit (Joel 2:29). Just as the judgment is for all nations, although the Spirit is focused on Israel, it opens a door to the Spirit going to all nations. As Amos Yong notes,

[T]he spirit of creation can be seen to harness the energies of those with the breath of life for divinely redemptive purposes, not as if descending from above or arriving from without, but as heightening and intensifying creaturely endowments from within.

Religious communities offer meaning-filled vocation that develops resilience to both the devastating emotional effects of secular unemployment and its contextual impact on families and communities.

One area of the Spirit’s work that deserves special consideration is the development of human leaders. Bezalel and Oholiab were leaders, notably empowered by the Spirit not for political or religious tasks but to accomplish their important daily work. They, in turn, taught and developed multitudes of others in a vast expansion of their capabilities of leadership. AI is a mixed partner here. On one hand, it offers tremendous opportunities for making education affordable and democratized through online learning.

On the other hand, how will humans learn to lead if they lack direct experience gathering data and analyzing it or engaging in predictive modeling? Today’s leaders began at the entry level. Without entry level analytic and agentic experience, leaders cannot gain the judgment and experience necessary to enable human leadership. Further, the people of God must join secular authorities to provide all available political and economic support to human-in-the-loop and high security approaches to AI development. Only in this way can humanity fulfill its mandate to restrain evil, including some evils perpetrated by AI which are certain to come and are already here.

AI is here to stay and can advance and protect the missio dei in many ways. The people of God through their individual lives and faith communities have a vital role to play in both modeling engagement with AI rooted in the Word of God and building communities resilient to the introduction of AI. The greatest enemy is misplaced fear. God has created His people and blessed them with His image (Gen 1:26-27). He has made them fruitful and given them a role in creation (Gen 1:28). He has resourced them (Gen 1:29). He has breathed life into them (Gen 2:7) and endowed them with abilities (Exod 31:3). AI models can do many tasks in the world better than humans today and will be able to do more in the future, but they do not have these blessings of God. Thus, only if the people of God cede to fear of the world and refuse to accept these blessings can AI grow beyond its proper role in creation. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 9:10).

On the means and ends of this column devoted to notable new and forthcoming books, see the introductory paragraphs of its first edition.

Herons who stalk their prey are supremely focused on what matters; they are not thrown off by every passing new fad.

I recently had the privilege of leading a discussion group with parishioners who read Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, specifically the edition which reprinted a masterful introduction C.S. Lewis wrote (read the whole thing here; it’s brief). Lewis’s famous exhortation to “read old books!” comes with this sage advice: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

To that end, in between your old books, here are a few new ones to watch for:

Constantine Campbell, ed. The Greek New Testament Study Bible. Zondervan Academic, 2027. 

Even for those of us who have spent years studying ancient Greek, it is difficult to sit down with only the Nestle-Aland or UBS Greek New Testament and read large chunks of it without having to at some point consult a dictionary or grammar. For years now I have used the wonderful “Reader’s Edition” of the UBS, which parses and provides a gloss at the bottom of the page for all words which occur less than thirty times in the New Testament, which has allowed me to use it unaided with great profit. But the strengths of a reader’s edition have now been combined with the aids of a study Bible! 

Constantine Campbell has not only made notable contributions to Pauline theology, but has also published several books on Greek grammar. This new Greek study Bible, for which he has served as editor, will be an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to read the New Testament attentively in its original language. The most important thing seminary students can do after graduation to retain their Greek skills is simply to read a little bit of the New Testament in Greek every day, even a very small amount. This powerful resource will make this goal not only doable but enjoyable.

Eds. Benjamin L. Gladd and G.K. Beale. Connecting Scripture New Testament: A Study Bible of Biblical Allusions and Citations. B&H Academic, 2025.

Another New Testament resource in this edition will be a wonderful resource to anyone who wants to learn more about how the New Testament makes use of the Old Testament. 

As a rule, whenever you see something that seems weird in the New Testament, it is a subtle allusion or involves a citation or echo of something from the Old Testament. Often, it seems weird to us because we are not familiar enough with the Old Testament texts and contexts that the New Testament authors assume and constantly refer to.

Few scholars have written more in general about NT use of the OT than Beale and Gladd in recent decades, and their distinctive approach is deeply informed by Reformed biblical theology. Their new edition of the English New Testament includes color-coded marginal notes that show readers where to turn in the Old Testament to understand its language in the new. 

For instance, Colossians contains no direct citations of the Old Testament, but it alludes to the OT constantly. Practically every word of Revelation is an allusion to Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and more, and we very easily miss or misunderstand these allusions. This edition of the NT will bring all of these “can’t miss!” texts clearly before readers.

Notably, Beale and Gladd plan to publish a companion edition of the Old Testament in this series in time to come.

N. Gray Sutanto. For Us and for Our Salvation: The Biblical Doctrine of Humanity and Sin. Baker Academic, 2026.

Sin is bad. I have recently been on a quest to understand the Christian doctrine of sin, at this point not for any clearly defined research agenda or writing project, but simply to try to better understand the not-understandable, which St. Paul calls “the mystery of iniquity.” Sutanto has made notable contributions to the study of Herman Bavinck’s theology, and I suspect his treatment of the doctrine of sin and theological anthropology will be similarly illuminating of our darkness.

Richard A. Muller. Calvin and His Contemporaries: Contextual Developments in His Theology. Baker Academic, 2026.

Not long ago, many scholars and theologians spoke about a chasm between “Calvin” and “the Calvinists,” influenced as they were by the way Barth and the Torrances contrasted the magisterial Protestant Reformers with later Protestant scholasticism. No one has done more to change that paradigm than Richard Muller in his several contributions to the study of not only Calvin and the Reformers but of later developments in the Reformed tradition. 

In his newest book, described as “the culmination of four decades of research,” Muller not only situates Calvin in relationship to other reformers from across Europe, but also traces how Calvin’s thought developed across his lifetime on key matters such as Christology and eucharistic theology.

Calvin continues to be caricatured both by lay people and academic theologians and biblical scholars who have never read him for themselves; Calvin and His Contemporaries should lay numerous myths and misunderstandings to rest.

Brad East, The Screen-Free Church: How Pastors Can Diagnose and Resist the Spiritual Costs of Technology. Baker Books, 2027.

Modern life is inundated with digital technology. Against the dominant mindset found in the church, that screens and audio/video technology are just tools for propagating the gospel, East is alert to the unavoidable ways that screens are not value-neutral mediums, but transform (or, in my humble opinion, to de-form) ourselves, our sacred liturgy, and the life of our churches. East is uniquely poised to invite pastors and church leaders to wisely navigate our contemporary digital landscape because he is not only an accomplished theologian but a gifted writer about technology and contemporary culture.

David Ney. Clothed in the Word: The Embodiment of Scripture in Church History. IVP Academic, 2026.

“Figural exegesis” is not easy to define, but David Ney is an exemplary practitioner of it. When I was his student for an Anglican history class at Trinity Anglican Seminary, I have fond memories of listening to his own aspirations to so furnish his imagination with Scripture that we would identify ourselves with its figures and unfolding history in the Providence of God. There are also dangerous and countless pitfalls of identifying ourselves with biblical figures, not least if we supplant Christ himself as the ultimate subject matter of Scripture. But by guiding readers through an overview of figural readings of Scripture down through the ages in five exemplary chapters, this book will likely be a helpful guide for a reading strategy indispensable to the church.

This essay is a lightly edited version of a conference presentation delivered at the Baylor Symposium for Faith and Culture on Feb. 27, 2026.

On October 14, 2021, the Allen Institute launched AskDelphi, an AI program designed to answer ethical questions. Some of its answers are better than others. On the plus side, Delphi says that “[i]gnoring an important phone call” is “rude,” while “ignoring an important phone call when you are busy” is “understandable.” On the minus side, Delphi says that, while eating babies is wrong under normal circumstances, it’s “okay” if you’re “really, really hungry.” 

In her book, The AI Mirror philosopher Shannon Vallor reflects on what this program reveals about the moral capacity of AI tools:

They can ‘learn’ what is often done in a moral dilemma, and even what humans in a data set most often say should be done, but they will not detect when those humans have it wrong, or when a new context makes a normally moral pattern (such as, ‘It’s okay to eat when you’re really, really hungry!’) plainly untenable.

Vallor implies here—and states directly elsewhere—that AI lacks the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom, the ability to enact the good in irreducibly specific situations. I aim to make this case more fully and to show its implications for the writing classroom.

To asses whether AI is prudent, we must first understand what prudence is. Although this concept traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks, I will describe the Christian account of this virtue given by the twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper in his book The Four Cardinal Virtues. Prudence is the virtue that discerns and enacts the good in particular situations. As such, it looks in two directions: upward toward the good and downward toward the situation. Each of these directions is important. Prudence is not simply the knowledge of moral principles, nor is it a kind of cleverness detached from the good.

The question still remains, however, “How do we get from goodness in general to goodness in the particular situation?” Some ethical traditions rely heavily on something called “casuistry.” As Pieper explains it, casuistry is “the branch of ethics which has as its aim the construction, analysis, and evaluation of individual ‘cases.’” In situation X, respond with Y. See what rule your situation falls under, and apply that rule. Although Pieper acknowledges that casuistry can be helpful as an approximation of moral judgements, he rejects it as a comprehensive approach to ethics. In other words, Pieper regards morality—particularly prudence—as more than simply the application of rules.

It seems that there are at least four reasons why Pieper regards casuistry as an insufficient ethical system. 

First, casuistry separates doing from being. It treats ethics as concerned with what a person does in isolated cases rather than with what kind of person he is becoming. 

Second, casuistry separates doing from knowing. In other words, it assumes an action can be perfectly good even if the person doing it does not know why it is good. In Pieper’s words, it assumes “we achieve the good by slavishly and literally following certain prescriptions which have been blindly and arbitrarily set forth.” If you’ve read the gospels, this description may remind you of certain legalistic opponents of our Lord Jesus. And, in fact, this moral vision—that we can be mindlessly good—flies in the face of Scriptural teaching. We are not robots, but free creatures; not slaves, but sons. “[T]he servant does not know what is master is doing,” Jesus says, “but I have called you friends.” In short, God’s purpose for humanity is to make creatures who not only do good, but know why they’re doing it.

The third reason Pieper rejects casuistry is a bit more complicated. Pieper argues that prudence cannot be reduced to the application of even very detailed rules. As Pieper puts it, “the standard [for ethical action] cannot be abstractly construed or even calculated in advance; abstractly here means: outside the particular situation.” This is because only the person making the decision “has access to…the totality of concrete realities which surround the concrete action, to the ‘state’ of the person himself and the condition of the here and now.” In other words, because each situation is unique, no pre-fabricated set of rules can fully account for it. In fact, the attempt to do so was what made AskDelphi say it’s okay to eat babies when you’re really, really hungry. As Vallor points out, Delphi took an ethical principle—“you can eat when you’re really, really hungry”—and applied it to the wrong situation. No matter how well-trained our AI programs get, they will always be an approximation of prudence rather than the real thing.

The fourth reason Pieper rejects casuistry is because God has given us more intuitive ways of knowing what to do in a given situation. To all people, he has given a conscience that, though warped by sin, is nonetheless designed to perceive not just goodness in the abstract but what is good in a particular situation. This conscience is at least strong enough in most people to keep them from the moral error committed by AskDelphi. To Christians, God has given not only conscience but also the Holy Spirit, neither of which are reducible to a set of rules.

All this talk of ethics may seem unrelated to the writing classroom. Is the decision to open your sentence with an adverb instead of an adjective really an ethical decision? Yet consider Ephesians 4:29: “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” Notice how this passage describes edifying speech in the terms I’ve been using to describe practical wisdom: it is not simply a matter of knowing moral principles, but of doing good in a particular situation—“the occasion.” Thus, wise speech requires the same kind of discernment as wise action. Only when students have learned how to use words that are fitting will they have learned how to use words that give grace.

So, how can teachers help students grow in the wise use of words? It should be clear by now that AI programs, despite being touted as practical, cannot exercise practical wisdom. They do not understand their actions. Their rule-based, algorithmic judgements cannot account for the uniqueness of a given situation. They have no conscience, let alone the Holy Spirit. What, then, are the consequences when a student offloads prudence to a non-prudent machine? If I might cheekily adapt the words of the Psalmist, “Those who use them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (cf. Ps. 115:8).

In order to understand what students lose here, it’s worth reflecting on the formative possibilities of the composition classroom. Vallor helps us do this with the concept of a “reason-giving space,” which she borrows from philosopher Wilfred Sellars. Sellars describes the “space of reasons” as one of “justifying and being able to justify what one says.” In Vallor’s words, the space of reasons is a place where you “hear, identify, offer, and evaluate reasons, typically with others.” This is the kind of space the composition classroom can be, especially in a course on argumentative writing. In Wendell Berry’s terms, it can be a place where students are called to stand by their words. 

Vallor highlights what is at stake both personally and politically in the preservation of reason-giving spaces.

Preserving your access to the space of moral reasons is essential to being ‘at home’ in the moral world, to having morality as a meaningful feature of the life you share with others. Outside of that space, you are restricted as a moral being: you can’t readily examine, explain, or morally justify your actions. … [I]f none of us could enter or share that space, we could not act as a moral community, and there could be no moral wisdom for us to draw upon together in shaping and steering our societies.

If Vallor is right, then a college composition classroom can be a space for educating self-reflective, moral citizens.

The problem with inserting AI programs into this space is that they are, according to Vallor, “wholly incapable of standing with us in the space of reasons.” This is because, as Vallor explains, “AI tools can produce outputs in the form of reasons (claims, arguments, objections, justifications) that very much mirror our own. But they do this without replicating human thought processes.” Vallor compares this to “the difference between a human climbing a mountain by a well-marked and secure route that others can follow, and a robot being flung from base camp to the peak by a powerful catapult.” Even if the robot gets there faster, “only the human knows the mountain, and only the human can reliably chart the route and guide others up its flank.” This is why it is so important that our students’ writing advisors be humans and not chatbots: because only humans can be fellow reasoners. Experienced humans, like teachers and writing tutors, can guide students up the mountain of learning, so that they will be able to teach others also.

In fact, Josef Pieper argues that the nearest approach to a given person’s ethical decision is not a set of rules but a prudent friend:

A friend, and a prudent friend, can help to shape a friend’s decision. He does so by virtue of that love which makes the friend’s problem his own, the friend’s ego his own (so that after all it is not entirely ‘from outside’). For by virtue of the oneness which love can establish he is able to visualize the concrete situation calling for decision, visualize it from, as it were, the actual center of responsibility.

This language may be too exalted to apply to the mundane work of helping a student revise his sentence structure. But it does suggest that there is a humane solution to the problem of the struggling writer: one that involves fellowship not only in the “space of reasons,” but also, as it were, in the “space of love.”

Last year, I implemented a teaching practice that accords with these insights. Although I did (and still do) prohibit LLMs in my classes, that’s not what I want to foreground here. Instead, I want to highlight a practice that accords with the belief that prudence is not simply the application of rules. In my composition classes, I required every student to meet with me twice about each essay: once before the essay was due to receive suggestions for revision, and once after the essay was due to discuss the final draft. Lest you think I’m a superhero, I should say that I made space for these meetings by cancelling class the week each essay is due. Although this decreased opportunities for general instruction, it increased opportunities for specific feedback. I did this because I believe that the best writing instruction happens in a face-to-face encounter over a particular piece of writing. 

In the end, practices in the writing classroom—especially surrounding LLMs—are often downstream from definitions of prudence. To put it more broadly, certain contrasting choices regarding LLMs stem from contrasting visions of the moral life. If we think that doing good is reducible to rule-following and that ethics is reducible to doing good, we may be satisfied with algorithmic prudence. But if we believe that rules are no substitute for wisdom, that information is no substitute for formation, and that mindless duty is no substitute for knowing love, we will not choose the prudence of an algorithm over that of a human being fully alive.

Last week saw the latest National Conservatism conference organized by Yoram Hazony's Edmund Burke Foundation as well as the Herzl Institute. This event was held in Jerusalem and featured a typically eclectic array of speakers, ranging from Rod Dreher and Rusty Reno to Jonathan Keeperman, William Wolfe, Shmuel Eliyahul, Bezalel Smotrich, and Hazony himself.

The reaction to the event was fairly predictable, given the reaction to earlier conferences, with Hazony's defenders largely papering over the sharp disagreements amongst some of the speakers and minimizing the genuine evils that a number of them support. Hazony's critics largely relied upon established rhetorical tropes to do the work of careful moral evaluation. 

The outcome, as is commonly the case with the furore inspired by Hazony's nationalism, produced relatively little in the way of understanding. What follows is an attempt to treat Hazony's nationalism as both a coherent intellectual project and one deeply antithetical to Christian ideas regarding the dignity of human persons and the nature of justice, particularly as they have been understood and articulated by post-war Christian intellectuals.

Understanding the First Principles of National Conservatism

We begin with Hazony's book The Virtue of Nationalism, published in 2018 with enthusiastic endorsements from Patrick Deneen as well as Reihan Salam, whose Manhattan Institute is now home to Keeperman's podcast cohost Christopher Rufo. Once one understands the core arguments Hazony makes in his book, most of what has followed will rightly be seen as a predictable development given Hazony's principles.

To set up the argument: Hazony's book is an attempt to make the case that nationalism is a preferable political arrangement relative to individualistic anarchy or highly centralized imperialism. Anarchy, Hazony argues, allows for high individual liberty, but routinely lapses into chaos and cruelty because it lacks structure. Imperialism, on the other hand, fails because it imposes order and public security from the top down, depriving humans of the chance to politically organize themselves more organically via the bonds of family, clan, tribe, and so on.

Nations, Hazony argues, solve both problems because nations arise from the natural ways human beings interact with one another. Our life in the world begins with our family. Our families then form bonds with other families, for reasons of mutual affection and mutual security. Those bands of families then unite together with other bands which share a common religious heritage, language, and generalized culture. This is how Hazony understands what a nation is.

By a nation, I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies--characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors. By a national state, I mean a nation whose disparate tribes have come together under a single standing government, independent of all other governments.

Nation-states, then, are a kind of administrative container that protects and preserves the common life of nations relative to the lives of other nations. Note that Hazony particularly singles out “religious tradition” as part of a nation’s heritage. Thus from the start there is a key question here regarding religious liberty: If, for example, India claims that Hindu religious practice is part of its national heritage, does Hazony’s system allow India to harass Christians and Muslims on grounds that it is protecting its national identity? Hazony’s own past behavior will provide an answer to that question, as we will see shortly.

It is worth noting here that there is a tremendous amount of overlap between what Hazony says here and what Stephen Wolfe argues in The Case for Christian Nationalism, which is unsurprising given that Hazony endorsed the book, calling it, "A pioneering work that paves the way for a new genre of American Christian-nationalist political theory."

Here is how Wolfe discusses what makes a nation:

I use the terms ethnicity and nation almost synonymously, though I use the former to emphasize the particular features that distinguish one people-group from another. Since every people-group has internal differences (e.g., class-based differences), nation is used to emphasize the unity of the whole, though no nation (properly speaking) is composed of two or more ethnicities.

Wolfe foregrounds ethnicity in a way Hazony does not, yet both are arguing on essentially phenomenological grounds about the nature of political society. Both begin with the bonds of one's kin, expanding those bonds in a limited way via a specific appeal to "ethnicity" (Wolfe) or to common culture, religion, language, etc. (Hazony). Both then, as we will see, harden that definition by erecting a moral barrier around the container of the nation, rendering it immune to external critique in how it conducts its own affairs.

Wolfe does this via the explicit call for a “Christian prince”, which is an anti-liberal caesar-like figure who exemplifies the spiritual vitality of the people. A regime organized under such a figure would, almost by definition, devolve into despotic rule given that it is anti-liberal (and therefore hostile to liberal rights) and built on the notion of a singular figure whose very existence is a kind of symbol for the spiritual life of the nation and who rules that nation accordingly.

Hazony, for his part, also wants to insulate nations from liberal moral critique. In his chapter on principles of nationalism as a form of international organizing (which he contrasts to imperial forms of international organizing) Hazony explicitly says,

The second principle (of the order of national states) is that of non-interference in the internal affairs of other national states. This is what, in a free state, permits the nation to pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding. Without this principle, powerful nations would take control of the affairs of smaller nations, and the order of national states would collapse into an imperial order.

In other words, if one nation-state observes another treating people residing within its own boundaries in ways it judges to be immoral, the first nation-state still must leave the second alone on grounds that each nation-state has the right to "pursue its interests and aspirations according to its own understanding."

What about minority nations or groups within a national state?

This does raise a rather obvious question, which concerns the status of residents living within the boundary of a nation-state who do not belong to the dominant nation.

If the dominant nation within a nation-state is English-speaking, Christian, and individualistic, where does that leave someone who is Spanish-speaking, non-religious, or who comes from a more collectively focused culture? To turn the screws a bit, where might this have left Black slaves in antebellum America? Where might it leave the Uyghurs in contemporary China? Where might it leave the Palestinian Christians and Muslims living in Gaza and the West Bank today?

In fairness to Hazony, he does at least attempt to address this concern in his book. Later in the same chapter on principles for the order of national states he writes about this issue. I am going to quote it at length because I think it is immensely important for understanding what has become of national conservatism.

In an order of national states, the problem of unprotected minority populations is an aspect of the problem of anarchy. Every minority nation or tribe has interests and aspirations that are at least slightly removed from those of the majority national or tribal group in the state, and often more so. But where such a minority nation or tribe does not enjoy the protection of the national state, or where it suffers abuse at the hands of the state, it necessarily becomes a fertile ground for disaffection, for the attenuation of bonds of loyalty to the state, and therefore for the establishment of a sphere of anarchy within the state. Protection of minority nations and tribes by the national government is thus a necessary sixth principle in an order of national states. Although this principle has moral force on other grounds as well, I am here concerned with it as an obligation deriving from the nature of the national-state system itself. It is a principle without which the order of national states cannot persist, for wherever the obligations arising from it are not met, anarchy and empire follow. This is the case despite the fact that this principle obviously places limits on the collective self-determination of the majority nation or tribe in every state.

He then continues,

The protection and accommodation of minority nations and tribes cannot express itself in the same way in every national state. There are national and tribal minorities whose disaffection is to a substantial degree the result of abuse and neglect, in which case the national state is itself guilty of creating a sphere of anarchy within its own borders, and consequently of undermining the order of national states as a whole. At the same time, there are national and tribal minorities whose disaffection is aggressively cultivated by other national states or by imperial powers, which stoke fear and anger among them for their own purposes. And of course, both may be true. In some cases, the problem of disaffection must therefore be dealt with by greater attention to the needs of the people in question, which may involve a greater measure of political or religious autonomy than had been considered tolerable; while in others, there is no choice but for the national state to apply more rigorous measures to deprive imperialist and anarchic elements of their aspirations by force. And it may be that both approaches have to be applied at once.

I would suggest that virtually everything one needs to understand the trajectory of Hazony's movement exists in these paragraphs I have quoted above. The principles are something like this:

First, nations are collectives of people who share common culture, heritage, language, and (usually) religion.

Second, nation-states are governments set up to protect the common heritage of the dominant nation within their boundaries.

Third, how they choose to protect and promote that culture is the affair of the nation-state, and other nation-states should not meddle in these matters.

Fourth, in cases of minority groups within nations, the dominant nation should attempt to tolerate them so as not to undermine the broader national state order or themselves provoke anarchist violence. But in some cases national states must use "rigorous measures" to suppress minority groups. Significantly, Hazony does not provide a more extensive explanation for this principle. He does not specify, for example, what sort of “rigorous measures” might be admissible and when, and what measures would always be inadmissible, no matter the behavior of the minority nation.

This takes us to the actions, policies, and words of the various speakers Hazony has hosted at his conference over the years. In one sense, the crew he has assembled over time can seem quite strange and implausible.

Jonathan Keeperman, for example, is ethnically Jewish but his publishing house, Passage Press, has in the past published Man's World magazine, which as I documented several years ago is very obviously a pro-Nazi publication. Indeed, prior to Keeperman buying the magazine it quite routinely mocked the National Conservatism conference. Given those associations, it is not surprising that Keeperman would, on October 7 of all days, tell an audience full of Israelis that the American Right is tired of hearing about the Holocaust. But it is odd that he should be invited to do so by a Jewish political theorist.

Keeperman has also called for mass deportations, calling the current efforts of the Trump administration insufficient and suggesting that somewhere between 15 and 50 million people need to be deported. More recently, he and his podcast cohost Christopher Rufo have taken up "the Indian Question" in the aftermath of racist tweets posted by a Texas republican named Bo French. 

It should go without saying, but lest I be misunderstood: It is right and good to protect national borders. It is right and good to have just and transparent systems for welcoming or rejecting immigrants, as is best for the life of the nation. But any scheme in contemporary America for deporting as many as 50 million people (or even 120 million according to some of Keeperman's fellow travelers) will unavoidably require acts of enormous cruelty and violence. Are such acts appropriate "rigorous measures" for Hazony? One can only conclude that they apparently are, given Keeperman's invitation to speak.

Alongside Keeperman, Hazony last week also hosted the Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu. Eliyahu has made a number of alarming remarks over his long career. For example, in 2007 he said that Israel should respond to the violence and war crimes of groups like Hamas with a strategy of total war which would include the targeting of non-combatants. (This is, of course, an explicit rejection of traditional notions of just war, which, amongst other things, emphasize proportionality as a necessary condition for just warfare.) Here is what Eliyahu said in 2007:

If they don't stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand. And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don't stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.

Again, this should go without saying, but just to be as clear as possible: One can recognize that Hamas has committed war crimes and also recognize that Eliyahu’s proposed response is also gravely immoral. The point here is not to paper over the evils committed by Hamas. The point is to recognize that there are acts which are themselves wrong, regardless of what was done to provoke that act.

Another speaker that Hazony hosted last week in Jerusalem was the Israeli finance minister and Minister of Settlements Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich's speech is, if anything, even more alarming than that of Eliyahu. In 2024, Smotrich said that it would, in principle, be moral for Israel to cut off food to Gaza, even if it resulted in the death of two million people due to starvation:

We bring in aid because there is no choice. We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause two million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.

Later in 2024 after leaked footage depicting ten IDF soldiers gang raping a Palestinian prisoner was released, Smotrich's response was to demand an investigation to identify the leaker so that they could be prosecuted for the damage their leak did to Israel. He called for,

an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.

According to reports, the rape victim's injuries were so extensive that he was unable to walk after the attack. But according to Smotrich the guilty party here is not the prison guards who raped him, but the person who leaked video footage of the rape. Again: We can say that what Hamas did on October 7 was evil, and also the act of gang raping a prisoner is evil and the act of ignoring the offense for the sake of political optics and choosing, instead, to target the leaker of the video is evil. It is possible to simply attempt to speak what is true, without concern for political ramifications. Or, at least it is if your politics are governed by something other than concerns with raw power, who has that power, and whom they seek to punish through the use of power.

More recently, this past summer Smotrich gave a speech in which he described Israel's current policy in southern Lebanon as "thorough cleansing," of the area so that the Israelis could annex it and take control of the region.

Hazony has also hosted similarly alarming speakers in the past, of course. Several years ago he hosted Ram Madhav, a senior official in the Bharatiya Janata Party of India, which has presided over a sharp increase in persecution of Muslim and Christian Indians in the name of preserving India's traditional Hindu culture.

The thing that links these various figures together is that all of them have endorsed or adopted policies that are obviously cruel and are aimed at minority groups within their respective nation-states–groups which, according to Hazony, the dominant nation can sometimes seek to suppress through “rigorous measures.” When the dominant nation chooses to do that, Hazony’s principle of non-interference stipulates that neighboring states cannot get involved on behalf of the minority group. 

This is the key thing to understand: Because the nation is preeminent for Hazony, it is the shared identity of the dominant nation that carries weight for him rather than any particular moral norms that might constrain that majority group. This identitarian move allows Americans who claim to represent the majority 'American' nation to do what they want in protection of that nation while also allowing Israeli and Indian nationalists to do the same in their contexts.

To be sure, Hazony does at least pay token attention to the idea that dominant groups have a responsibility to not abuse minorities, as we saw above. But the way he does this is important: He defines, in abstract, the idea that sometimes dominant cultures need to tolerate minorities and sometimes dominant cultures need to suppress minorities through "rigorous measures." This is important to understand because it means Hazony has given himself some deniability on this point. Indeed, his response to my critique might well be to quote the very paragraphs I already quoted.

The problem is those paragraphs ring hollow when he has promoted men like Smotrich, Eliyahu, Madhav, and Keeperman. If the actions endorsed by Smotrich or Eliyahu, for example, or the actions taken by Madhav's government, are not forms of unjust abuse by a dominant nation targeting a minority nation, I simply cannot imagine what would qualify. 

But on the evidence of his choices, Hazony seems to think Smotrich's endorsed policy of starving millions of Palestinians to death or Madhav's party's policies of burning churches and harassing pastors and missionaries all fall under the category of sadly necessary "rigorous measures," meant to protect their nations rather than being unjust acts of tyrannical abuse. (After writing this essay, the 60 Minutes segment on the “Hilltop Youth” in the West Bank aired. I couldn’t help wondering if these youth are practicing a form of national abuse–and are therefore committing an evil in Hazony’s eyes–or if these too are examples of “robust measures.”)

Why write about this?

What is the point of writing about all this? Why write about it in a magazine of Christian concern that also writes on so many other topics? There are a few reasons.

One point is the simple and obvious point that the life of the church is not self-contained. It branches out into the world, rivering every way in the evocative phrase of Mary Karr. The water of life that burst out of that tomb in Jerusalem two thousand years ago is a river that now runs all across the world.

We owe much to it which we now take for granted: The ending of the gladiatorial games in Rome, for example, was a direct consequence of the growth of Christianity. Christianity has also helped bring about the (admittedly gradual and uneven) abolition of slavery, the elevation of women such that abuse by their husbands or abandonment by their fathers now meets broad condemnation, and the establishment of international law in the aftermath of World War II. That last act was not the exclusive accomplishment of Christians, of course, but it was heavily promoted and aided by them, including by the Lebanese diplomat Charles Malik, a long-time friend of Bill Bright, whose homeland is now being “cleansed” according to one of Hazony’s speakers. 

The fruit of what Tom Holland has called “the Christian revolution” is extensive, but as Christian influence now abates, that fruit is beginning to disappear. As both a Christian and a democratic citizen of a nation who owes much of its legal and political norms to Christian faith, I lament that disappearance and I am keen to do what I can to resist the things bringing it about.

When we say the Gospel is good news, we do not simply mean it is good news for individual souls or even just individual people. We mean it is good news for the world. "He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found," as Charles Wesley famously put it. Quietism is not a political posture proper to Christians.

A second point is that many Christians, as evidenced by the list cited above, have been drawn into Hazony's project, even as Hazony's project also includes multiple figures whose politics have at times been violently hostile to Christian believers. The same policies that Madhav's party enacts in India are the policies that threaten our brothers and sisters in India. Indeed, India is far from the only nation to adopt such policies. Christian missionaries all across Asia and parts of Africa are threatened by similar policies meant to protect "national identity," though doubtless the nationalists would say those are simply nations protecting their traditional culture and way of life via "rigorous measures." 

Because Christians have been either deceived into supporting this movement or have compromised their principles in order to promote it, I feel a burden to warn other believers about the nature of Hazony's project. When western Christians endorse the political principles that directly produce the persecution of their brothers and sisters around the world, something has gone badly wrong.

A third point, and this relates to the reason I've written on this in the way that I have: One aspect of being in a society that is shifting away from the written word and back toward orality while also being deeply concerned with image and identity-creation via disembodied digital means, is that we tend to react rather than reflect and tend to make decisions based on vibe rather than principle.

You can see both sides of this in the reaction to NatCon: For those more attuned to right-wing political or social concerns, many of which are valid to varying degrees, NatCon has a certain appeal because it feels like something that has political solutions sufficiently aggressive and proportional to the anxiety they feel and the nature of the threat they sense. Likewise, for people with more left-coded political or social concerns, many of which are also valid to varying degrees, it is easy to simply whip out certain god words when addressing NatCon and expect that to be sufficient as a form of persuasive speech. Or perhaps persuasion isn't the goal and the point of the rhetoric is simply to signal one's own purity. I am sure it depends on the person.

All these behaviors are highly corrosive of democratic life. They make mutual understanding impossible because it is excluded as a valuable good from the start. It reduces politics down to little more than "who, whom?" which was a Leninist idea before it was a dissident right idea. If we want our political life together to be governed by laws rather than men then we have an obligation to reason together, to attend to first principles, and to condemn political movements on the basis of their principles and their policies. This means standard left wing responses to events like NatCon are insufficient, but it also means that NatCon itself is a problem in as much as its founding principles deviate so radically from Christian principles regarding the duties we owe our neighbors.

Of course, the sufficiently black pilled amongst us might ask a follow-on question: Why should I care about democratic life? My answer to that is simple: First, because there are joys that a democratic life affords that are harder to access otherwise. The Australian political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre is good on this point. There is a delight in finding common joys we share and common concerns we can act upon with neighbors who are wildly unlike us. There is joy in taking the time to understand an idea and persuade someone toward or away from that idea. There is joy in being able to speak and reason in public without fear of reprisal by the government. There is joy in being able to exercise one's religious beliefs without fear, even if those beliefs are a minority within one's nation. Liberalism delivers these joys far more reliably than any other political system I can think of. It does not do so perfectly, but perfection should not be our standard.

But there is also a more basic reason you should value democratic life: Because you will not always belong to the dominant group. All of us will be vulnerable to the power of a dominant majority at some point in our lives. And, I expect, all of us would prefer something other than “rigorous measures” to suppress us from that dominant group. If you would have a dominant majority treat you generously and justly when your turn as a minority comes, you would do well to treat minority groups generously and justly when you are the one in power. This I take to be little more than the application of the Golden Rule to our common life.

We all by now know the joke about living in "interesting times." But interesting times can quickly become dangerous times if we become comfortable endorsing moral atrocities, forming political alliances of convenience with the endorsers of gross moral evil, or looking the other way when vicious acts are committed, provided the victims are people we regard as enemies. Anarchy is loosed onto the world when these things happen. And anarchy, as Hazony rightly says, knows nothing of the rule of law. It knows only power. What is tragic is that Hazony’s lack of moral controls on the behavior of majority nations means that his own system is ultimately also bereft of anything save an atavistic struggle for power.

If you desire a public square and common life governed by something other than Darwinian violence and the survival of the fittest, then you should oppose the nationalist turn on the right because at this point there can be no doubting what it actually is: the endorsement of right-wing Leninism. And to anyone who knows their history there can, likewise, be no doubting of where Leninism of any kind will lead us.

Recent calls for the public execution of the “Cornell 7” accused of raping a fellow student brings to mind one of Aldous Huxley’s most famous quotes:

The surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have a chance of maltreating someone. Men must be bribed to build up and do good by the offer of an opportunity to hurt and pull down. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior ‘righteous indignation’—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Huxley’s description is self-evidently true, especially in the age of social media. It has never been easier to go on a crusade and treat yourself to some righteous indignation. One man was mistaken for one of the Cornell 7 and his family recently received a barrage of death threats; the plaintiff herself has already been swatted. Anyone who has been accused, mistakenly or not, of a grave enough offense will find that many people are less concerned for justice than for taking an opportunity to vomit out a vile stream of curses. It certainly seems to taste sweet enough on the way out of their mouths.

A Longing For Justice?

Social media rewards spite and rage. It is very easy to add one’s voice to the mob; it is hard to pause and consider whether or not a particular incident or person is being represented fairly. Whether it is cheering on the death of a health insurance executive or celebrating as immigrants are chained up simply because their legal status has expired, the Moral Treats Emporium operates 24 hours a day on the internet.

While we can be grateful that online messages are the worst that most people can muster, the harassment inflicted on innocent people (and the guilty) is bad enough in itself before we get to the cases of people being unjustly fired. Good causes are gutted from the inside by people who want to use them for their own self-righteous preening, while public discourse about moral issues is derailed by grandstanding. The culture of victimhood is symbiotic with the desire to be cruel; the more traumatized your group is by another, the more justified you are in punishing them. Diabetics develop “insulin resistance” over time, which makes metabolizing excess sugar harder and harder; a similar process is at work in our moral polity. If people keep stoking the fires of moral outrage, we are likely to see more murders like Brian Thompson’s before the close of the decade.

The 2016 game Wolfenstein: The New Order is like many other first-person shooter games in that it finds a way to make killing human beings on the screen feel more righteous. In the extended video prologue before the game's first main level, the protagonist watches helplessly as Nazis murder a care home full of people with mental disabilities before kidnapping their nurse for some nefarious purpose.  The fantasy of revenge is part of what makes Wolfenstein oddly compelling.

One could say that Huxley’s observation is just the human desire for justice corrupted. We are all familiar enough with stories of cold-blooded murder, innocents raped, and populations subject to genocide; we all feel hunger for a sinner to get what's coming to them. In this telling, hate, anger, and bloodlust are misdirected impulses. Sufficient policing and orderly justice meted out will satisfy us.

There is some theological depth to this. Hebrews 9:22 says that “almost all things are cleansed with blood, according to the Law, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Every sinful action has some punishment assigned to it, a perfect cosmic circle of justice. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have a personal judge meting out the punishment, while dharmic religions prefer to let people get what’s coming to them in a less personal way. Paganism makes the whole shebang more uncomfortable with capricious deities rather than just ones.

Christian doctrine has taught for centuries that God did not create evil, so evil is always a privation of the good. It is true that our impulse towards cruelty is sometimes just a misdirected zeal for justice. This is insufficient, though, and not simply because our human systems of justice are never perfect enough. Unfortunately for all of us, the problem goes deeper.

For the Love of Cruelty

If the human penchant for cruelty is not simply a desire to see justice done, what is it? What is the sugar in Huxley’s treats? We might argue that it’s power—not in a Foucaultian everything-is-really-about-power sense, but more that human beings love the feeling of power and inflicting pain on another person is the fastest shortcut to feeling powerful. Just as drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa might give someone a rise, so desecrating another person created in the image of God is its own rush.

This is not quite it, but it gets us a little closer to the most unpleasant reality: a lot of people really do enjoy cruelty when they have a free run of it. Slasher movies (and plenty of other video games) draw people in with the opportunity to watch innocent people suffer. Sadism of all sorts is a popular theme in pornography and videos of actual murders or war deaths still get traded around the disquietingly crowded gutters of the internet. It’s hard to find a war where the conquering armies didn’t enjoy torturing civilians at one point or another. The seminal slasher, Halloween, shows its first murder through the eyes of the killer, letting the audience experience the grotesque joy of taking another human life.

Not everyone is like this, of course, but it only takes a small handful of internet trolls sending death threats to make the sister of a mistakenly identified rapist shudder at a sound outside her window. The circle of people who could have their desire to maltreat someone awakened with the scent of cookies in the oven is wider than most of us would like to admit. The Stanford Prison Experiment is bunk, but you only have to read a few accounts of Romanian prisons or American lynchings to know that there are sadists waiting for their opportunity everywhere and a crowd ready to help them along. Just a day at an elementary school shows us that children will gladly taunt someone for the crime of having the wrong shoes. 

The sweetness of maltreatment, more than misguided justice or an addiction to power, is the privation of love. Our relationships with other human beings rely on emotional and physical connection in which we recognize, respond to, learn from, play with, encourage, challenge, give to, sacrifice for, forgive, and love each other. Cruelty takes the infinite joy of being face to face with another person and torches it, making their good our stumbling block.

This is the primal logic of envy and zero-sum thinking. Some of the African doctors I work with tell me that they have to be very careful when they go back to their home communities because poisonings (presumably committed out of envy for their professional status) are not uncommon. Women the world over put charms on their children because they fear the “evil eye” of a barren woman somewhere in the village will bring sickness or death. Rather than delighting in another’s joy, our instinct is to destroy it.

According to this logic, the only way that I can get ahead is to bring someone down. Surely anyone who has more than they need got it unfairly and they deserve to be brought down a peg. This is a strong motivation, but it is just as possible that my own lack—the raging maw of desire within my own heart—leads me to simply enjoy destroying someone else’s good even if I have no chance of getting anything out of the process.  

The world’s first murderer, Cain, certainly fits the latter picture. Nowhere in that text can we find any indication that Cain’s second-best offering would have been bumped to first place by murdering his brother. No, Scripture tells us, sin was simply waiting for its opportunity to master the first man who let his disappointment give way to rage. We only have to wait a few more chapters until the candy shop is open for business, when Jacob’s sons plunder an entire city to avenge their sister’s rape. A sense of wrongedness is all violence needs to open the floodgates.

Conclusion

Some of us would never be tempted by this particular sin, and God bless them. We can try our darnedest to keep the incorrigibly sadistic away from guns but not keyboards. The temptation is prevalent enough within the population to be a problem and there are not nearly enough people immune to the mob’s siren song to save society from our vicious impulses.

There are no simple solutions here. Jesus Christ, himself the divine victim of earthly mob justice who defused a mob by inviting those without sin to cast the first stone, has been easily misappropriated throughout history in order to sweeten the moral treat. His radical ethic of love has been powerful enough to reshape empires but it can still be ignored by anyone clever enough to fool themselves. Christians love to fixate on his condemnation of the Pharisees or his cleansing of the temple to the exclusion of anything else he said or did during his 3 years of ministry. You can only remind people that they are only one lick of the lollipop away from being the mob begging for a crucifixion so many times before they start to ask if you're a collaborator who belongs on the next cross over. Our longing for justice and our thirst for blood will come to an end at Jesus’s second coming, but not a moment sooner.

It's extraordinarily difficult to make people less susceptible to demagoguery. I don't know if it's possible to do so on a scale any larger than a classroom, if that. As hopeful as I am for all of us to grow in character and moral fiber, social media is not helping us move in the right direction.

Rather, we must help those at the front of the crowd learn to recognize when their pulse is quickening with the taste of blood. A thousand small voices calling for calm can be overpowered by one megaphone announcing that the Moral Treats Emporium is open for business and the opportunity to be cruel to someone is available. People who know better must stop lying to themselves about how their righteous indignation is just an excuse for their vicious impulses.

The language of moral opprobrium must be like the f-word or an ice cream sundae, a rare treat rather than one’s daily sustenance. Some influencers, activists, and politicians might have to find new jobs if they took this sin seriously enough in their lives. The rest of us need to starve them of attention and refuse to give in to the emotional blackmail that has come to constitute political discourse. In the social media age, a healthy part of loving others requires that you just shut up.

The opportunity to hurt others lies behind far too much of our righteous indignation. The human desire to maltreat others is the twisted perversion of the love we are all meant to share with one another, which means that growing in the practice of love will make it harder and harder for us to cherish maltreatment in our hearts. The alternative is to keep gorging ourselves on treats, which is only bound to make us sicker. 

The date for Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address was set for March 4, 1861. Lincoln, though born in Kentucky, and spending a bit of childhood in Indiana, was for the larger part of his life an Illinoisian. On February 11, 1861, Lincoln gave a farewell address to a crowd of onlookers in his home town of Springfield. The speech was one of his more emotionally driven dictions. Lincoln was not only aware that he might never return to Springfield, he was aware of the vastness of the task before him: “without the assistance of the Divine Being who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.” Lincoln of course was not just talking about the standard duties of being president, but of the mounting tensions and the growing divide at the heart of the Union over the matter of slavery. Just a few months prior, on December 20th 1860, the Charleston Mercury announced “The Union is Dissolved” as South Carolina set out to leave the Union. Lincoln’s task was to somehow, and in some way preserve the Union in the face of almost certain dissolution.

But to understand this moment, we need to take a few steps back first. For the Founders of our nation were, despite claims to the contrary which are most certainly the work of overgeneralization, not unified on all matters, nor was the declaration on 1776 under the impression that all Americans were the same. As the founders gathered, they realized that unity was going to be challenging, far more challenging than a monarchy understood. The different states had different economies, for starters. The South, with its cotton exports and tobacco-rich fields speckling the Virginia countryside. The North, with its textile exports, corn and squash and cabbage fields, and the ever-rising Massachusetts whale industry with its influx of whale blubber. Even early on it was apparent that the American project, though we call it this retrospectively, was going to be one of compromise, but not compromise in the weak sense of the word. Instead, it was the awareness that among the people of the fledgling nation there would be people of various stripes seeking to live together in harmony.

The next century would play this out repeatedly. Slowly, the disparate corners of the growing country would see increasingly that they were at odds with other parts. The South, aided by James Polk and his eye on expansion, saw the West as a means to extend the slave empire, to create a Southern Cotton Kingdom made up of territory that included Texas. The Whigs, on the other hand, were repulsed by such a thing. Henry Clay, the Whig stalwart who endeared himself to the likes of Abraham Lincoln (who even invited him to Illinois to speak though Clay declined), would run for the presidency in 1844. The Mexican-American War, which this expansionist drive from the Executive would lead to, was, to most Whigs (though not all), highly unnecessary. With each new territory claimed, the question that lingered beneath the surface came rearing back: would slavery be allowed? 

American history, far from being unified, is full of conflicts of this sort. But this one would culminate in the Civil War, a great divide between North and South, slave and free. Lincoln, while a somewhat minority voice of opposition to the Mexican-American War, would be thrust into the national eye in 1860, first as the Republican candidate for the presidency and then as President. Lincoln inherited a nation that had been built on compromise, but not in the sense that mattered. With each decade in the early 19th century, the question of slavery was punted down the line. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 avoided a direct debate over slavery, offering instead to bring in Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state. The Gag Rule of the 1830s and 40s prevented Congress from debating anti-slavery propositions, instead tabling them. The Wilmot Proviso, an attempt at stopping slavery's spread into the new territory acquired from Mexico, failed. And the Compromise of 1850, allowing some states to decide the slave question by popular sovereignty, was followed in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise line. By the election of 1860, Lincoln traveled by train to Washington under immense pressure, with the threads of unity nearing their end.

It's hard not to picture Lincoln sitting in a train car after giving his farewell address in Springfield, leaving the teary-eyed people of his beloved home behind. Washington loomed like a shadow ahead, and Lincoln, far from the country bumpkin we like to present him as, was an ardent political partisan ready to invoke a more lasting bond of unity.

So what was Lincoln's choice here? Certainly, he could have pressed for a remaking of the constitutional order, looking back at the founding and explaining that the Constitution that began the American project was incapable of handling the nation's massive differences. Yet he did nothing of the sort. If anything, Lincoln pressed into the constitutional framework. His opponents would argue that the Constitution protected slavery, but this was far from the truth.

In his February 27, 1860, Cooper Union Address in New York, Lincoln addressed this point head on. Combing through the voting records of the thirty-nine framers of the Constitution, he showed that of the twenty-three who left any record on the question, twenty-one, a clear majority, had voted to prohibit or restrict slavery's spread into federal territory: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the organization of the Mississippi Territory in 1798, the Louisiana Territory in 1804, and the Missouri question of 1819–20. Washington himself, as president, signed the 1789 act enforcing that same prohibition in the Northwest Territory. Lincoln drove the point home directly stating: "True, we do, in common with 'our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live,' declare our belief that slavery is wrong." This line, "our fathers, who framed the Government under which we live," was actually Stephen Douglas's own, first used by him to argue that the framers believed the Constitution gave Congress no power to restrict slavery's spread into the territories. Lincoln adopted Douglas's own framing as his text in a sort of jab at him (something Lincoln would often do) declaring, "I fully indorse this, and I adopt it as a text for this discourse," and then used the voting record to turn it against him. Lincoln, in contrast to Douglas, argued that the very men who had framed the Constitution repeatedly voted, in Congress and even from the presidency, to limit, and by limit I mean prohibit, the expansion of slavery into the territories. 

In a February 14, 1861, speech in Steubenville, Ohio, Lincoln, standing on the train platform as part of his journey to the First Inaugural, proclaimed: "we everywhere express devotion to the Constitution." The problem was that, as Lincoln goes on to say, "What are our rights under the Constitution?" This is an important question for us today to consider. In his First Inaugural, Lincoln would proclaim, "I hold that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual." This perpetual undergirding of the Constitution was essential to Lincoln; he even noted that if all were to abide by the constitutional framing, the Union would last forever. For Lincoln, the Constitution was not a contract. It was a binding assertion that there were agreed-upon and verifiable universal laws and rules which all humans must accept and live under.

Lincoln's First Inaugural truly holds the key to his constitutional thought (though it certainly would grow and develop over time, as anyone who has read Lincoln will come to realize). Lincoln was convinced there was a universality to the Constitution, one which he served not as an authoritarian enforcer, but as a responsibility to guide and protect. "I therefore consider that in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken," he declared, "and to the extent of my ability I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States." Yet he was careful to frame this duty not as the assertion of personal power, but as submission to it under the people: "Doing this I deem to be only a simple duty on my part... unless my rightful masters, the American people, shall withhold the requisite means, or in some authoritative manner, direct the contrary."

Many of Lincoln's critics, including numerous Southern papers, created a caricature of Lincoln as a kingly figure, a lawless, ruthless leader seeking blood and vengeance under the guise of constitutional legality. His opponents might have been better off recognizing that the same claims were made against Washington, one of Lincoln's heroes thanks to Weems's biography, which Lincoln read over and over again in his youth. For an authoritarian, Lincoln surely was inept at understanding his all-encompassing role as king and lord.

Lincoln understood the Constitution as the maturation of the Union, not its origin. In other words, the Union itself predates the Constitution: the Articles of Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1778) all came first, culminating in the Constitution (1787). While Southern states were seeking a way, a constitutional way, to leave the Union, Lincoln was quick to point out that the Union existed prior to the constitutional framework.

But perhaps more important for our modern age, Lincoln found that the Constitution was never meant to offer a specific answer to every future ailment or controversy. This is vital for us today. While I'm certainly aware of the ailments of modern "liberality," I'm not sure the claim that it stems from the constitutional order is the approach we need. In fact, I'd argue that it was this very same tendency playing out in the mid-19th century. So what is the purpose of the Constitution, then, if not to resolve all issues? Lincoln goes on: "No organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration." In other words, Lincoln says that the Constitution does not explicitly state whether fugitives should be surrendered by national or state authority, or whether Congress may, or is even obligated to, act on slavery in the territories. Instead, the Constitution offers a limiting restraint.

And yet Lincoln found within the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and of nature's God, the restraint that gave the Constitution its shape. In a January 1861 note, Lincoln recorded that "all this," meaning the crisis of the nation, "is not the result of accident. It has a philosophical cause." Lincoln goes on to clarify that the principle of "liberty to all" "clears the path for all, gives hope to all." This expression, as Lincoln calls it, is what makes the Declaration so unique and gives the Constitution its life and purpose. "No oppressed people will fight, and endure, as our fathers did, without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters." "Liberty to all" truly is the limiting restraint of the constitutional order. The statement is, in Lincoln's words, "an apple of gold." The Union and the Constitution, he goes on, are "the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it." The Constitution was made not to usurp this claim, but to preserve it.

Fast forward to today, and it seems our nation is once again at a great inflection point. On one hand, there are those who claim the constitutional order we inherited is inherently flawed and biased. The only path forward, these proponents state, is to unmake the old order, altering Congress and remaking the Supreme Court. They likewise seek to remove the Electoral College, calling it a "thing of the past" and "innately racist." On the other hand, there are those who would see America usher in a "Christian prince," an authoritarian figure to lead a revolt and reestablish order. These proponents despise the Constitution, seeing it as the natural parent of the individualistic life and the revolt against moral and religious strictures. Yet is this not far removed from the opponents of Lincoln's day? The South, seeking to feed its drive to expand the slave empire, desired to either remove the constitutional order or remake it entirely. Some, incorrectly I believe, viewed Lincoln as an authoritarian figure, a sort of constitutional king forcing his will. Yet this completely misses what Lincoln was doing. Lincoln certainly violated some rights, such as habeas corpus, but he, like Washington, was always set on handing power back to the people. Lincoln understood that the Constitution was the silver lining around the apple of gold, that the claim "liberty for all" truly meant for all.

To reclaim the constitutional order is compromise in the best sense, not out of weakness, as in the events that led to the Civil War, but as a means to live, as a vast union of very different people, harmoniously under a constitution of liberty. This constitution of liberty is not the freedom to do whatever one would like; I'd agree with the critics who decry this. Instead, it is the freedom to live in harmony under certain principles. For starters, there is the separation of powers. This is why, in Federalist 51, Madison notes that ambition must counteract or temper ambition. This connective tissue of authority enables safeguards against abuse in a way that European peasants would have long loved to have. This separation ensured a buffer between the various parts of governance. Likewise, checks and balances, while frustrating to many, offer a means to slow down ambition (again drawing from Madison) in the instance of executive abuse of power. A king could execute authority by whatever means he thought best. Checks and balances, along with the separation of powers, ensured this would not happen.

Of course, there is federalism itself. Many will scoff at this: "why don't we have the Articles of Confederation instead?" Well, with a country so vast, and a people so diverse (yes, even in 1787 the country was diverse, not all people are the same), there needs to be a mechanism for enacting the constitutional order while also allowing state governments to function. This compromise ensures that divided communities can address matters locally, while national matters can be addressed not by locality but by national governance. There's also the protection of individual rights, individual being a bad word in today's world, but it does not mean "individualism," or the sin which is read into every document from the past. Instead, the Constitution protects and guarantees the ability to speech, religion, due process, and equal protection under the law.

Lincoln understood, as he set out toward Washington, that the best hope for the Union was not through authoritarianism, nor was it to completely remove the Constitution. Instead, it was a rededication to the founding principles that make America a cohesive, yet very disparate, home to a people seeking to live at peace with one another. This is why, while I share the laments at the ills of society as posited by some of my post-liberal friends (and I mean this, there are some good critiques of culture), I'm not sure there is anything better than the Constitution as a safeguard of liberty for all. Like Lincoln, we must draw on the sacrifice of those who came before us and have "a new birth of freedom," for when the government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer exists, it will be a scary day, not just for the American people, but for the whole world.

(All quotations from Lincoln in this essay came from Basler’s collected works of Lincoln.)

Roughly 1,600 years ago, a man named Alypius confidently proclaimed that witnessing the bloodshed of gladiator combat would not change him. St. Augustine later tells us that what Alypius witnessed wounded his soul more than the violence he observed wounded the gladiators’ bodies. He was not unchanged, and neither are we.

The decision by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to livestream the execution of mass shooter Nidal Hasan has provoked many responses amongst Christians. Some are calling not only for public executions, but for executions to be broadcast widely to the nation. Some are even appealing to scripture to justify it. I understand the impulse behind public executions, and I take it seriously. Romans 13:3-4 describes the sword of justice as a deterrent: Those who do evil should fear. Old Testament law also prescribes public executions, and we’re told that this is, at least in part, so that “all Israel shall hear and fear” (Deut. 13:11). If deterrence is the goal, why not let the whole nation see?

Before answering that question, I should be clear about what this article is not arguing. My concern here is not to argue for or against capital punishment. I favor it in the abstract, though the practice must go hand-in-hand with virtuous systems and a virtuous people. But this piece is not the place to argue it. Nor is it obvious that Mosaic law should woodenly prescribe how a modern nation carries out justice. It should not be lost on the church that some of the texts cited in favor of public executions are texts mandating the execution of apostates. But since those calling for broadcast executions appeal to those laws, for the sake of argument I will grant both that capital punishment can be just and that Mosaic law speaks to the question. Thus I ask a narrower question: if a society does execute, what does it do to us to watch?

Death changes us. How we kill and how we watch others die not only reveals our virtue (or lack thereof); it shapes us. That is why, even when it is necessary for us to witness death, such witnessing belongs in its proper and intimate context, among those with a real stake in the act. Mosaic law prescribed public executions in precisely this way. Taken out of that context and broadcast to millions, witnessing death becomes voyeuristic and disordered. 

Under the guidance of Mosaic law, ancient Israel’s public executions were carried out primarily by witnesses to the crime and the community in which the victim lived (Deut. 17:7; 21:21). Executions were not secret government acts performed in dark rooms behind closed doors, but they were also not spectator events for millions of strangers with no social or moral bond to the victim, the guilty, or the community. These were dreadful acts carried out before—and often by—the community in which the crime happened. Those witnesses threw the literal first stone. As Matthew Henry put it, the witnesses “are really, and therefore it was required that they should be actually, the death of the malefactor.”

This means onlookers were not neutral spectators who bore no responsibility or carried no cost. Instead, they were participants in the punishment. The early church understood this. Athenagoras, an ante-Nicene church father writing in the second century, said that Christians stayed away from the arena, “deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as killing him.” Israel’s onlookers were witnesses to justice both to hold one another accountable and to testify to the consequences of serious crime. These onlookers bore a responsibility to ensure that justice was done and that others would fear the sword. But this responsibility also exacted a price.

This burden fell on the community and especially those most directly impacted by the crimes. This arrangement honored both the rights of victims and the dignity of even the most heinous criminals. Deut. 17:7 and 21:21 show us that public executions were performed by the witnesses and men of the local community, and Deut. 13:11 and 19:20 show that this was, in part, so that all would hear and fear. However, hearing and fearing is not the same thing as participating. In other words, there were two groups in view: the local community who acted and witnessed, and the wider nation who heard and feared.

In an era of mass communication and mass consumption, we should be careful to not anachronistically equate public executions performed at the city gates in ancient Israel with public executions broadcast to millions of online spectators. While a healthy fear of justice is good, it is not good for our souls to make a habit out of being witness to the destruction of image bearers of God. Even where it is necessary, this is a weighty task, and not one that rightly belongs to everyone. Rather, it belongs to those bound to the crime. And that natural and embodied restriction serves to safeguard both our souls and justice. Deterrence is a genuine good, but it is not meant to be absolutized as if human bloodshed has no cost once a sentence is passed. C. S. Lewis saw where that logic leads: if deterrence is all that matters, “it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime.” Similarly, if deterrence were the only factor in justice, it would be justified to torture the guilty on a live broadcast. Or even the innocent. We do not do that. Why? Because even the guilty bear the image of God and are owed dignity, even in death.

Alypius bore a radical form of the cost of watching. Augustine tells the fuller story in Confessions 6.8. Alypius was a friend of Augustine, and when other friends pressed him to go to the gladiator fights, he resisted the peer pressure and even boasted that his mind would not be polluted. “You may drag me there bodily . . . but do you imagine that you can make me watch the show and give my mind to it? I shall be there, but it will be just as if I were not present, and I shall prove myself stronger than you or the games.”

But eventually he gave in. Even after he arrived, Alypius was determined to keep his eyes shut and not see the violence. Sadly, Alypius did open his eyes. Augustine writes that Alypius’s “soul was stabbed with a wound more deadly than any which the gladiator, whom he was anxious to see, had received in his body.” After Alypius watched the slaughter, Augustine explains, “he carried away with him a diseased mind which would leave him no peace until he came back again.” He had meant to be present in body only. He left a participant.

Now, I am not equating public executions with the gladiator combat of Rome, nor am I saying that every witness to an execution will revel in the bloodshed. A modern execution does not involve combat, and being drawn to the violence is not a foregone conclusion. However, Alypius was also certain of his own strength, and Augustine writes that he drank in the madness without realizing it. While a hypothetical public execution is not the circus of ancient Rome (and my prayer is that it will never be), we would do well to guard our eyes, minds, and hearts against the sinful perversion of being fascinated with bloodshed.

We can readily see a milder version of this in the mania of publicly broadcasting criminal trials. Regardless of the intention, this practice turns something grave into reality TV. Hordes of people outside the affected community, without any cultural or relational context, and certainly without any legal expertise, pick sides and fight about the case as they would about their favorite Survivor contestants or basketball teams. Real lives are at stake, and real lives have already been lost, and real suffering is being experienced by the community actually affected by a heinous crime. But now millions twist legal proceedings into a spectator sport or an opportunity for virtue signaling. Not every spectator is indulging in the worst possible behaviors and motivations, but the tendency is plain—and so is the price of carelessness. If witnessing the drama of culturally volatile court cases can tempt otherwise faithful men and women into treating the lives of actual humans like reality TV contestants, how much more careful should we be about normalizing spectatorship of the bodily destruction of image bearers of God?

While some may fall into the raucous sin of Alypius, many others may become desensitized to death. They might not applaud the killing, but they may well stop understanding and rightly feeling the weight of death. Death, which Scripture calls the last enemy (1 Cor. 15:26), may become something they are comfortable with, or simply indifferent to. And even if witnessing death does not push us into either extreme, it still changes us. 

The danger of falling into the madness of Alypius or succumbing to callous apathy is present even for judges, court officials, and the families of victims. But whether by vocation or by relational context, these individuals have a genuine stake in the act. The same is true of the communities affected. When members of a community witness or take part in a death, they are bound to it by grief, loss, or at least a feeling of closure. However they feel, they are not disembodied online spectators divorced from the act, but rooted in a time, place, and relational context that naturally gives weight to it. For these invested members of a community, witnessing an execution is a profoundly intimate experience.

That intimacy is exactly what a broadcast removes. Though this metaphor cannot be taken far, there’s a sort of voyeuristic pornification in taking such an act outside of its proper, personal, and natural context and commodifying it for those with no stake in the act. To borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, the medium is the message. A livestream does not simply show an execution to more people; it catechizes those watching. 

Those who participate in this kind of justice carry a burden, and we, as a society, should weigh it. Even if executions should not be hidden away among a handful of government officials, that is a far cry from broadcasting them to millions who do not know the victims, do not know the guilty, were not impacted by the crime, and had no role to play in the prosecution. Whatever public character God’s law gave to executions served a purpose, and community participation in justice is not the same as a livestream for all of society.

Alypius thought he could sit in the stands as if he were not present. He was wrong, though Augustine adds that God later graciously pulled him out of that madness and taught him to trust not in himself but in God. Human life matters, and observing its destruction is never a casual act. It changes us, and it should only be done under weighty and serious conditions and by those who have a real stake in the act. Sisters and brothers, we are not made to destroy one another, and that creational reality does not change even when death becomes necessary. To forget that is to forget ourselves and the one in whose image we are made.

Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid. Can Religion Save Democracy? Brazos Press, 2026. $26.99. 224 pp.

Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid want to make religion in the United States great again.

In an era of increasing secularization and declines in religious affiliation, attendance, and practices, these men—one a Reformed theologian, the other a Muslim social scientist—long for religion’s return to relevance in American society. They do so not because they want to see their fellow citizens adopt a particular tradition or set of principles, but because they believe religion can shore up America’s ailing civic order. Religion, they think, really can make America great again.

Kaemingk and Hamid are the authors of the provocatively titled new book Can Religion Save Democracy? They suggest that organized religion, rather than being a cause of the sorts of divisions tearing our political communities asunder, is actually a force for good in any healthy and thriving democratic society. Drawing on empirical data, theological discussion, and personal reflections, they contend that religious contributions to public life—through encouraging shared moral commitments, strengthening the bonds of social capital, and more—can be a salve for the dysfunction plaguing American politics.

Kaemingk is Professor of Public Theology at Theologische Universiteit Utrecht, and Hamid is a columnist at the Washington Post after a stint at the Brookings Institution. Yet these experts do not write as disinterested observers; they have, for years, practiced what they preach. Together they host Zealots at the Gate, a podcast they describe as exploring “the future of democracy and religion.” Both are fellows at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. This book is, in many ways, a culmination of the work the authors have been doing for quite some time.

Can Religion Save Democracy? is written to a lay audience without sacrificing the authors’ learned and lived expertise. Kaemingk and Hamid adeptly draw on historical and social science research, noting that the steady decline of corporate worship and religious communities mirrors a decline in our collective political health. They argue that religion provides more than spiritual benefits to adherents, encouraging people to live alongside those with whom they disagree on important questions. A culture increasingly without religion, they write, is not the utopia John Lennon envisioned in “Imagine.” When secularism aims for neutrality in the public square, seeking to banish religion to private spaces, all it does is create a void longing to be filled.

In her excellent book Uncivil Agreement, political scientist Liliana Mason explains how voters are increasingly motivated not by deeply rooted ideology, but rather attachment to a political party. Preferences and principles are secondary, she argues, to being on the right team. When religion declines in people’s lives, they inevitably find something—like, say, partisan politics—to replace it. Kaemingk and Hamid are aware of and troubled by this phenomenon: “As more Americans abandon their churches,” they write, “they’re carrying their longing for belief and belonging into the political arena.”

If Can Religion Save Democracy? begins with outlining a problem, then the book’s next several chapters explain how religion might address it. Religious belief, Kaemingk and Hamid contend, introduces a degree of doubt to a person’s political convictions, leading people to hold these views less tightly and closely while acknowledging their own limitations. “A healthy democracy,” they write, “requires citizens who possess some level of intellectual humility, who can shrug their shoulders from time to time and say, ‘God only knows.’” Christians and Muslims—indeed, any faithful person—can be “citizens of conviction but not certainty.”

Religion also puts politics in its right context as an important yet secondary pursuit in human affairs, discouraging political idolatry and primacy in our hearts and minds. Religious traditions, they argue, “offer not a set of policy prescriptions but a framework for keeping politics in its proper place.” Religious belief and practice might even lead people to reject “cancel culture,” instead prioritizing a patient and humble posture towards one’s opponents in the public square. Kaemingk and Hamid propose applying a covenant mindset to our civic environment, emphasizing “the sacred ties that bind” us to our fellow citizens, rather than seeking to tear down or destroy one another over past errors.

But if the authors are right about the importance of religion to democratic values and healthy political regimes, where, exactly, do we go from here? Make no mistake, religion in the United States, as we’ve known it, is changing. Denominational Christianity has declined over several decades, the “nones” are increasing as a share of the population, and younger Americans are more likely than ever to not identify with any religious tradition. Virtually every empirical metric paints a dispiriting picture of the future of American religion.

While religion may not command the same share of cultural cachet as it did in generations past, its contributions to the American project remain. A chapter titled “Schools of Democracy” references thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Putnam, and Robert Bellah in explaining how religious institutions—including houses of worship and nonprofit organizations—have been crucial for training citizens for the important work of self-government. Religion also provides people with “communities of memory,” providing “the thick sense of belonging that democracy requires.” Religion, belief, and institutions are not chains to be cast off in the name of progress, but essential guardrails for preserving pluralistic democracy.

Can Religion Save Democracy? is a compelling book at an important moment. Kaemingk and Hamid believe our democratic order may be revived just yet, starting with more religion, not less. I am quite sympathetic to their argument. I teach at a Christian university that takes its religious mission seriously. We believe deep and practiced faith is not a barrier but a requirement for meaningful public service and engagement. And as a political scientist I need no convincing of the symptoms and causes of our current political malaise, driven largely by a disordered emphasis on partisan and ideological identity and phenomena like negative partisanship and affective polarization. 

And yet—or, perhaps, because of this—there are moments throughout this book when I wished for greater clarity and deeper engagement from the authors. Yes, this is a book about how religion benefits the practice of democracy, even in complex societies marked by deep difference. But consider the question of how one’s faith tradition should inform one’s political participation. Christians, the authors encourage, “can chill out about politics because the real election is already over and won.” I tend to agree. However, this may not be especially satisfying to people of faith discerning whether and how they should advocate for certain policies and outcomes. Religion certainly should influence our democratic behaviors and postures, but it cannot help motivating our political viewpoints and activism as well.

Consider the past decade of legal conflicts in the shadow of Obergefell v. Hodges, with lawsuits and challenges involving sexual orientation in employment and vendors with religious objections to same-sex marriage ceremonies, among other things. All of this was predictable – during Obergefell’s oral argument, Justice Alito asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli whether nonprofit organizations could lose their tax-exempt status, and Verrilli answered, “It’s certainly going to be an issue.” Citizens’ responses to these sorts of conflicts are driven not just by political ideologies and theories of legal interpretation, but also religious (or nonreligious) traditions. Some Christians may encourage future iterations of Jack Phillips to “just bake the cake” as an exercise in Christian hospitality, while others may stand alongside him in defending his deeply held religious beliefs.

Kaemingk and Hamid characterize religious belief not as a cudgel to batter opponents, but as an impetus for meaningful civic participation. And though I affirm this sentiment, at some point the rubber must meet the road. In any democratic political society, where there will inevitably be winners and losers, some preferences are going to prevail at the expense of others. What follows, and how people of sincere and different religious faiths respond, isn’t exactly clear from the reading. More religion—and the framework it provides for better engagement—may be necessary to sustain our political communities, but that doesn’t mean it is sufficient.

Nevertheless, in highlighting the essential role religion plays in flourishing democratic societies, these authors remind us of what David Foster Wallace famously told an audience of graduating students at Kenyon College: “Everybody worships.”

For Kaemingk and Hamid, secularism has failed to improve our politics by encouraging people to direct their worship to finite and flawed sources, bound to fall short and disappoint. Even if Can Religion Save Democracy? is more of a framework than a checklist, it is essential reading for anyone concerned about the downward spiral of our political culture while looking for reasons for hope moving forward.

Not long ago, I was invited to speak at a gathering in New York of pastors from across the Tri-State area. My assigned topic was the necessity of prayer in ministry. While scanning the schedule, I noticed another session—on Sabbath keeping. It didn’t conflict with mine, so I attended.

I had recently begun taking the Sabbath more seriously, and the session left me encouraged. The speaker affirmed the importance of setting aside a day of rest. He quoted staggering statistics about burnout, especially among clergy. He spoke of how he and his staff had become more productive by observing a weekly Sabbath—recovering from the previous week and preparing for the next.

There was no arguing with his presentation. The data was persuasive. Even beyond church life, he cited business research: high-performing companies with four-day work weeks often outperform those that demand nights and weekends. Sabbath, it seemed, was not only biblical—it was strategic.

I don’t doubt it. A life shaped by the rhythm of creation—six days of work, one day of rest—does often lead to greater emotional health and sustainable fruitfulness. But when we read the creation account of God resting on the seventh day or the commands given to Israel that follow this pattern, productivity and efficiency are never the point.

In our modern culture, productivity and efficiency are the point. L. M. Sacasas, who researches technology and culture, calls this the “dogma of the one best way”—a relentless obsession to optimize everything.

Just scroll through YouTube:

“The best way to . . . ”

“The only way to . . . ”

“If you adopt this technique, you will never have to worry again about money, clients, or stubborn fat again.”

Or the ever-popular rebuke: “You’re doing it wrong!”

The tragedy of the “one best way dogma,” Sacasas says, is “living with the unyielding pressure to discover it (the ‘one best way’) and the inevitable and perpetual frustration of failing to achieve it.” He continues: “And not only frustration. It produces anxiety, fear, compulsiveness, resignation, and, ultimately, self-loathing. If there is ‘one best way,’ how will I know it? If I have not found it, have I failed? And is it my fault?”

This mindset, says Sacasas, is “necessarily inhospitable to the human person.”

We should resist seeing the Sabbath as just another “best way” toward productivity and efficiency. When God gives the command, he doesn’t say, “Keep the Sabbath, because it’s good for your output.” He says, “You shall keep the Sabbath, because it is holy for you” (Exodus 31:14).

Looking back at the creation week in Genesis 1-2, God worked for six days and called it good—very good. But the seventh day he calls holy. Our world pushes us toward maximum output. God calls us to goodness and holiness.

This is an important detail: God did not rest because he was tired. Creating the sun didn’t exhaust him. Stretching out the expanse didn’t take a toll. He wasn’t running on fumes after creating a generative system of fertility in plants and animals. God does not grow weary or change in his pace.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable. (Isaiah 40:28)

Even after six days of work, creating the ends of all things—from the Milky Way to the single-celled microbes, God didn’t need a break. He never changes. Never in a hurry; never procrastinating. He is always in control, always patient, and present.

Nor is he resting up, getting ready for the week ahead. He isn’t anticipating the demands of what’s coming and reserving energy to offer his best self. God simply stopped, delighted in his creative work, and blessed the world.

Of course, we are not God. We do get tired. We do need to recover. If we do not rest, we will suffer. But if we are to follow God in his weekly rhythm of work and rest, we must also follow in his motivations. “Man is not a beast of burden,” says Abraham Heschel, “and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.”

Many of us, if we’re honest, practice a weekly Sabbath rhythm as a strategy to recover from or a precaution against exhaustion. Those concerns are legitimate—but they are not God’s reasons. Not for himself, and not for us. God sees it as a day designed primarily for goodness and holiness, not recovery. Weariness and burnout are good reasons to come to the Sabbath. But they shouldn’t be the reasons that keep us there.

To assume that Sabbath keeping is primarily designed for recovery from and a precaution against exhaustion or a strategy for productivity, we are in danger of making the Sabbath only for those who have the health, energy, and vocations of productivity. But what about young children? What about the disabled? What about the elderly? In our world, there are increasing measures to exclude these neighbors of ours—aborting our infants and abandoning and euthanizing the disabled and elderly. When people can no longer produce, we question their value.

But the God of Sabbath thinks differently. Jesus welcomed the children and paid special attention to the disabled. The New Testament church gave special emphasis to elderly widows.

The Sabbath is not a mechanism for recovery, nor a tool for better performance. It is a holy day—a window into what God experiences. A weekly rhythm of delight, goodness, and joy. Sabbath is God saying, “I enjoyed this so much—I want you to experience it too.”

Some things are not for function but for delight.

The Butter Rule

There are two kinds of butter in our house. One is for greasing the pan we cook our eggs in, or for when our kids make pancakes on Saturday mornings. We buy it in bulk—sticks of butter for baking or frying. But then there’s the other kind of butter. The good kind. It comes in a gold wrapper, shaped like a small brick instead of a stick. It sits out on the counter in a dish, soft and ready—for fresh sourdough or warm scones straight from the oven.

Do you see the difference between the two? One is an ingredient, the other is an experience. One comes in bulk, the other comes in gold. And in our house, you don’t make the mistake of greasing a pan with gold butter. Gold butter is holy, set apart for particular purposes.

At least, you don’t make that mistake for long.

I remember when the gold butter started to make an appearance on our countertop. It was laid out on the counter in one of our small dishes with a butter knife. I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, when most kids I knew used margarine for whatever butter needs you had. Margarine came in a tub, and the tub went into the fridge. You scooped it cold, used it for everything, and put it back. Leaving it out would’ve turned it into a separated, oily mess. But this new countertop-butter? It was a revelation.

Let me be clear: Between my wife and I, Jena is the superior cook. By a mile. That sourdough and those scones? That was Jena’s doing, not mine. We’re all just lucky to be near the action.

Still, I’ve got two culinary contributions I’m proud of: omelets and grilled cheese. (Grilled cheese secret: sourdough + parmesan on the crust.) The key to both? A well-greased cast-iron pan. One morning, I was prepping an omelet and saw the gold butter right there by the stove. It looked convenient. I took a generous chunk (I measure butter with my heart) and got to work. Until Jena noticed.

“Did you use the butter on the counter to cook your eggs?”

Maybe.

“That butter is for spreading, not cooking!”

Got it.

Just like I needed reminding of which butter to use, let us tell you again: Don’t simply use the Sabbath for recovery and productivity. Don’t use the gold butter for your eggs. The Sabbath is for goodness and holiness.

Taken from The Sabbath We Need by John Starke and Jena Starke. ©2026 by John Starke and Jena Starke. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

The intellectual life is in some ways necessarily lonely—in his book on The Intellectual Life: Its Spirits, Conditions, Methods, the French Dominican Friar Antonin Sertillanges insists that the intellectual life requires solitude. He is not wrong. Researchers in history, for instance, spend hours, days, years alone in mysterious musty basements, poring over documents that unveil their mystery to only the most persistent elect. And then the practice of writing takes additional hours (and days and years) of discipline and solitude before the essays or books are ready to go out into the world. But not all Christians who live the intellectual life are professional scholars, first and foremost. And unlike Sertillanges himself, many are married and have children. Some might be lawyers or pastors or doctors or missionaries or various professionals, or stay-at-home moms, or homeschooling mothers, or simply overwhelmed mothers of small children. These factors definitely take a toll on the possibility of solitude. 

In other words, for most people, there are also the practical considerations of the intellectual life and intellectual work, whether done on the margins of one's day or full-time. Writers and other intellectuals are people too—they too must eat, do laundry, keep children alive, perhaps even vacuum on occasion. We all are bodies, as well as minds and souls. So how does this work, in particular, for households that include not just one intellectual but two? 

That is the basic question underlying this interview series, in which the interview below is the third installment. We encourage you also to read the earlier interviews with Charles and Tessa Carman and with John and Katelyn Shelton. 

***

Nadya Williams: I'd like to start by asking each of you to tell us a little bit about your intellectual journey: when did you first consciously realize that you are called to live an intellectual life? What did you envision this looking like? How has it turned out so far? 

Megan Dickerson: I don’t think I’ve consciously thought about being “called to live an intellectual life” until maybe this question. I’ve always liked to read and think and ask questions and that has usually gotten me in trouble or been viewed with suspicion. What I see myself doing is being equipped to better serve the church myself while equipping others to serve the church and serve Christ.

I went to the University of Central Arkansas as part of the Schedler Honors College, which is called a liberal arts college within a state school. This meant that I didn’t take English one or various other core classes. Instead, I took different classes that were intended to be interdisciplinary seminars in which we read philosophy and theology and fiction and scientific studies and came together to discuss. I took a class on Friendship and another on The Social Consciousness of Broadway. They wanted to introduce us to The Great Conversation and to great books. I loved it and have been profoundly shaped by this experience. 

But I didn’t know it was unusual!

It wasn’t until after seminary that I realized most people don’t read books! Although I did eventually find a lovely group of homeschool moms who would read theology and fiction with me as we sought to introduce our children to the great conversation. 

Along the way, I’ve usually been able to gather women with me to read and think together. I’ve been challenged to write more so that I solidify my thoughts and grow as a communicator. We moved to North Carolina for Drew to study (I’ll let him tell his own story) and I met friends and found myself also in the seminary PhD program studying systematic theology—focusing on patristics and spiritual formation. (I should be editing my dissertation now, but this is more fun.) My favorite part has been reading with friends and coming together in class to discuss!

I also get to teach in our church’s women’s Bible study. I hang out with younger women in the seminary. I read the Bible and other books with them and talk about ideas. I have been blessed to teach Old Testament, theology, and how to study and teach the Bible to women in a local prison through Judson College’s field minister program. These ladies are earning a college degree and will be deployed to other prisons in the state to minister to other incarcerated women. I homeschooled our children for a long time before they went to a university model school. This year is the first time they’re all going to be in school five days a week. And our homeschool looked like reading good books and discussing them.

Apparently, I do live an intellectual life! But I don’t think any of this is what I envisioned! It’s nothing like what I planned. Every step of our adult life has felt like something was thrown at us or we were shoved into something. But I am thankful that so many of our plans didn’t work out and for much of the life we have. The Lord has guided us into some unexpected places!

Drew Dickerson: I don’t know if I could say that I ever felt called to live an intellectual life. I grew up in a family of athletes; my dad was a college basketball coach, and my brothers and I all played multiple sports through high school. But I was always the one with a book in my hand, reading in the bleachers between games. I enjoyed school, and I loved learning, but I didn’t view myself as an “intellectual.” 

But when I got to college, I felt God calling me to use my gifts, including my mind, to serve the church. At the time, I had no idea what that looked like, but I went to seminary and had an amazing experience getting to study ancient languages, church history, and theology. After graduating, I was called to serve in a church as a student pastor, where I got to spend five years teaching and discipling teenagers. In many ways, those five years shaped my intellectual life the most. I still loved reading about history and theology and talking about and studying those subjects more deeply, but working with teenagers forced me to take the deep truths I had learned and explain them in a way a 14-year-old could understand. 

Eventually, I felt God leading me back to the academic world. Again, I had no idea what that would actually look like, but a very gracious church historian, Dr. Stephen Eccher, spent about three hours on the phone with me one afternoon, casting a vision for the intellectual life that was very compelling. My family and I moved from Arkansas to North Carolina so I could study with him. The vision he cast consisted of a lot of reading and a lot of writing, and my experience has definitely lived up to that expectation. But more than that, all along the way he has encouraged me to love my family well and to direct all of my studies toward how they can better serve the church. That has been the best part of what I get to do.

Nadya Williams: What kind of intellectual work does each of you do now, and what role does it play in your day-to-day life? 

Drew Dickerson: I work in the library at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and I spend most of my time connecting students and faculty with resources that help them engage with the topics they are studying. So I get to spend my days surrounded by books and people who (mostly) want to learn. 

I can’t imagine a better place for an intellectual to work. I love connecting people with authors from 500 years ago who can help them think more deeply about a topic. It’s like introducing someone to an old friend who I know can help them along in their journey because they have already helped me. I also get to teach college classes on Church History, Missions, and Theology.

Megan Dickerson: We are both at the tail end of writing our dissertations, which is not the most fun. But it will be great when it’s done. 

I get to teach in lots of situations, from women’s Bible study at my church, to women’s conferences at different churches, to my college class in the women’s prison, to filling in on campus at the seminary every now and then. I also get to be on the leadership team for our Society for Women in Scholarship, which is a great place for women to come together on campus to ask questions and wrestle with things together. 

I’m a 40-year-old woman with four school-aged kids, and I am finishing a PhD in Systematic Theology on campus at an SBC seminary. There aren’t a lot of people like me. And it seems that it’s a benefit to the women around that they see me doing what I do. I get to talk with lots of women about motherhood and theological study. I get to tell them that there are seasons, and God wants you to use your gifts, including your academic gets, for the church, but that we don’t have to feel the pressure to lean into all of these gifts at the same time.

I like to read and think and write, and that’s looked very different in my day-to-day life in different seasons. I still read and thought when I was drowning in toddlers, but it wasn’t the season to be in a PhD program. As the Lord has opened new doors (and I’ve felt shoved through a few!), he has also grown my capacity to juggle things, and he’s given me new opportunities to teach in different ways.

While I was drowning in toddlers, the Lord gave opportunities for what I’ve come to think of as “small teaching.” I met one-on-one or in small groups with younger women to discuss the Bible or to read books together. The Lord was using my teaching gifts, even though I didn’t recognize at the time. 

Nadya Williams: What role has your intellectual life played in your marriage and family life? Do you find that it affects your interactions with each other and with your children? If so, in what ways?

Drew Dickerson: We’ve spent the majority of our married life either in school or working in an academic environment, so it would be difficult to pinpoint a way that our intellectual pursuits haven’t impacted our lives. 

One thing I’ve definitely learned is that my wife is amazing. She’s the type of human and scholar I want to be. But our minds work in completely different ways. She can go from menu planning for the week to Cyril of Alexandria’s interpretation of John 6 to who should be the MVP of the WNBA this year (it’s Kelsey Mitchell, BTW) in the span of five minutes. Her mind moves so fast it’s exhausting sometimes, but she has taught me so much about efficiency and how to get things done, especially when it comes to writing. 

When it comes to our kids, I think our conversations around the dinner table are probably more eclectic than most families’. Topics can include (and have included) the messiness of the incarnation, our favorite missionaries, and what position the nine members of the Fellowship of the Ring would play on a football team. We challenge our kids to read good books, think well, and ask good questions. But it’s fun to see how that plays out in each of their lives. My oldest daughter shares my love for literature, especially Tolkien. She enjoys writing her own stories and loves the performing arts. My oldest son is very different. He plays football and enjoys the sciences and building things as part of his school’s robotics team.

Megan Dickerson: Drew and I knew we wanted to get married, because we like to think and talk about ideas, because we like to read. Not that we would have thought about this as an intellectual life. But reading together and talking about what we’re reading is a big part of our marriage. We like learning!

As for our kids, they all read a lot, even the ones who say they don’t like to read. Everybody has a book with them most of the time. Which is one of my favorite things. It’s the only thing that I’ve been intentional about in my parenting that has worked out! We’ve always read together and given our kids rich books at home.

We’ve also lived in seminary housing for the past several years, and that’s about all they know. Both of their parents are studying theology and historical theology at a high level, so it comes up as we talk about our day. And when we have neighbors over for dinner, conversation goes in the expected directions. And the kids are in the mix most of the time.

One of our favorite stories was around the lunch table when it was just me and the kids, and we were talking about Jesus, what they were reading in the Bible. And then our youngest who was 3 at the time got a mischievous look and asked: “But did Jesus have a BOTTOM?!?” And his big sister looked SCANDALIZED and said Jesus could NOT have a bottom because he’s JESUS. Which led to a lovely conversation about the necessity of the full humanity of Christ and that what was not assumed was not healed.

But we want our kids to be well-rounded, so they also do a lot of sports—football, basketball, soccer, cross-country, cheer. Lots of kids means lots of sports. They play more video games than I’d like. They watch more YouTube than I’d like. But I think our family culture is centered on reading and loving Jesus, and that’s evident in the lives of our kids.

We are low-church Southern Baptists. We attend an evangelical mega-church with many campuses. We like to read and think, but it’s also not the whole personality for any one of us. 

Nadya Williams: What are some challenges you have found to your intellectual pursuits so far? How did you resolve these, or are you still living through them? What expectations did you have for your intellectual life before you were married, and how do you think these have adjusted over time and with circumstances?

Megan Dickerson: I think life is hard. I think the Lord sometimes gives so many gifts that we can’t always figure out how to prioritize where to lean in! For years now, we’ve just had a perpetual pile of clean clothes that live on our couch. We don’t have a real laundry room, and the intent is to sort them and put them away. But I could either do that or edit my dissertation… or watch a football game. 

We’re both trying to finish our dissertations now, but I was in the hospital a few weeks ago, so that knocked out any “intellectual” work for us for 2-3 weeks. Not great timing! 

Writing and teaching looks different now than it did when the kids were little. Stages of motherhood have changed everything. Not that any stage is harder, but they’re hard in different ways, and they consume time in such different ways. 

Before we were married, we expected to be missionaries. We’d share the gospel, teach the Bible, and plant churches. We’re in a different context than we expected, and we’re not planting churches, but we do share the gospel and teach the Bible. I’m not sure that I had expectations for an intellectual life beyond that.  

Drew Dickerson: I don’t think that the challenges I’ve faced are necessarily unique to me, but life is definitely a balancing act. It’s difficult to find time to devote to writing between driving kids to school, practice, or church; spending time together as a family; and focusing on our marriage. 

Add jobs and church ministry on top of everything, and our calendars never seem to have enough hours in the day. This is still a work in progress as we navigate new rhythms of life as our kids get older.  One of my favorite things about our marriage is that we’ve got to experience our intellectual journey together. Life has never turned out the way we expected; even our intellectual pursuit came as a bit of a surprise. Over time, we’ve learned to pursue excellence in whatever we do and step through the doors that God opens for us. 

Nadya Williams: I'd love to hear your pie-in-the-sky dream: What do you each dream about in your intellectual lives in the future? How do these dreams work together?

Megan Dickerson: I like to read and think and write and teach. I’d love more freedom to do those things and somehow have our bills paid! Every year at the beginning of the school year, I see professors talk about the spectrum of being called to this kind of life between church ministry and an academic vocation. I’d love to live somewhere on that spectrum, and I’m not sure where I’ll land. I love participating in the work of the church, and I’ve loved the opportunities I’ve had to teach and equip students in higher education. 

I’m not sure what doors the Lord will open for us going forward, but I’m sure I’ll land somewhere on that spectrum, and I love the idea of having one foot in the church and the other in the academy. I’ll continue to write and teach. I’ll continue to equip and train. 

Drew Dickerson: My dream is pretty simple. I love teaching, but more than that, I love students. I would love to be in a place where I can teach and pour into young people, help them think well, and prepare them to serve in their communities and churches.

Drew Dickerson is pursuing a PhD in historical theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Megan Dickerson is also a PhD student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where she serves as the grant administrator for the L. Russ Bush Center for Faith and Culture. They live in Wake Forest, North Carolina, with their four children.

In my early years, I was much more focused on seeing how others experienced Jesus than how I experienced him. Much of my childhood was an immersion in global Christianity. At times this meant spending time with missionary friends in the States on furlough, at other times sitting around a table listening to stories so captivating their tellers had already recounted them for books and film. 

One such book involved my experience from the perspective of a biographer. She recounted the life and death of our close family friends: Roni, 35, and Charity, seven months. Both shot and killed in a small Cessna, a casualty of our CIA’s counter-narcotic operation. Roni’s husband Jim and their six-year-old son, my best friend Cory, survived the crash.    

“I have long dreaded the thought of getting to the end of life and regretting that I allowed my own timidity or other people’s expectations to determine the course of my life. I had decided at a much younger age that several of my beliefs should determine the course of my life,” wrote Steve Saint in End of the Spear.

Thus, they did for Roni. And while Jim would be the first to tell you Roni was not a martyr for Christ, her death was my first glimpse of what I thought a Christian was: someone willing to give up their life for their beliefs. 

Not all my early years were this upending. One night, my friends and I crowded into their van and rode the long, bumpy streets to a small, impoverished town in South America. Here, the streets were so dark the wild dogs looked like shadows and the air so calm time felt irrelevant. 

We crowded into the first floor of a concrete building full of white, dirty plastic chairs. This was church. A decade and a half later, I can still remember how the people’s voices swelled in that room, as if angels were singing. I’d never heard a love for Jesus sung with that kind of power, not even in the States where our services were full of amplifiers, soundboards, and mics. 

Here, loving Jesus meant loving the person. None of the westernized spirituality of bad coffee and good donuts mattered, or whether we sang the latest hits in CCM. The focus was Jesus. Somehow because of this, culture came alongside, not as a hindrance to their worship, but in a way that enabled its perpetuity into Monday morning.  

I stood there between the dirty plastic chairs, viscerally aware that the people in this low-ceilinged room loved Jesus for the God he is, not for the trends we sometimes tie him to. This was Christianity. The God I claimed to follow was not restricted to fifty states thousands of miles north, tied to the odd blue carpet and wooden pews of my grandparent’s church, or restrained to the high-ceiling, multi-million dollar building I was used to. No, as much as he was God of Heaven, he was God of earth. All of it. Even a church whose best was dirty plastic chairs. These are the things I learned as an adolescent about what it meant to be Christian, about what Christianity was.

“May we all have grace to maintain in our own proper way the purity of the Church, as being an assembly of believers, and not a nation,” wrote Charles Spurgeon in an 1896 book. I have sometimes wondered how he wrote such apropos statements more than a century before I would read them. 

But for as wide-eyed and open-hearted as my introduction to Christianity had been, it took a swift turn before I even entered my teenage years. By the time I was a grown adult, I’d experienced, several times over, the underbelly of the church: power influenced by desires and church influenced by culture in ways Jesus never prescribed. I was awakened to a different sort of Christianity, one that felt in direct opposition to the Great Awakening spurred by George Whitefield.

“Let the name of Whitefield perish, but Christ be glorified,” said Whitefield, unaware that his name would go down in history or that his biography would require multiple volumes. 

But where Mr. Whitefield preached the name of Jesus Christ under the hot sun, I heard pastors preach their own names under stage lights. Where Whitefield reiterated the need to read the Bible for ourselves, I heard the same Scriptures twisted and matched to personal agendas. 

At eleven or twelve, I sat in a row of black chairs spanning a huge sanctuary, quietly reading my imitation-leather Bible because I was tired of listening to the pastor avoid it. Perhaps I was too young to determine what a grown man should say, or perhaps I was simply eager to hear what the true Christ had to say. Either way, my view of Christianity narrowed that day. 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” preached Whitefield. 

Let’s build a bigger building, preached my pastor. Let’s raise money. I want people to know who we are from across the highway. Do you see the vision? 

The clarity with which I’d seen Christianity in the smoke of my friends’ deaths clouded under his vision. Here, it appeared others experienced Jesus as a brand to promote, not a God to give one’s life to. If Christianity was a brand, I would not die for it.

We left that building in search of another church, and with it I left the memories of childhood: first-time best friends, crushes, and the terribly awkward but mandatory middle school years. It would be easy to view my time within those walls through the lens of sentimentalism. Overall, I loved my experience there. I didn’t want to leave it. 

But as Karen Swallow Prior shares in The Evangelical Imagination,

Sentimentalism is ‘the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotions as an end rather than a means.’

At the time, I did not realize the adolescent grief of a child leaving her friends was not the end itself, but an ironic twist that would become the means to a very different beginning. Perhaps I had been wrong about Christianity all along. Was Roni an outlier, a good person in the wrong place at the wrong time, who also happened to love Jesus? Were the suited men, and later the ones clad in skinny jeans, who gripped power as hard as they did their microphones, a true representation of Christianity? I could not reconcile a religion encompassing both ends of this dichotomy. 

Midwest evangelicals could say my worldview was being challenged. Therapists might have said my schema, or mental model, was changing and I was now disillusioned. Others might recount these experiences as a coming-of-age moment. Perhaps it was all three, or maybe it was none of them, but I’d grown up with the ideal that Christians will die for Jesus. It was seared into my mind as much as the flames that seared the Cessna. Now I saw a new angle of Christianity, one where those in authority appear willing to do anything for power. 

Power has many facets. By many, and in one of its harmful forms, it’s viewed as something to wield, a means by which to force others to succumb to their embodiment of its strengths and weaknesses. But it is also something that we yield to. That commands. When we give something power over us, we surrender to its rule. 

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius famously wrote,

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

I had seen the face of power on stage, and as my brain developed in those malleable years, without thinking the words to describe it, I wondered if I’d given church a little too much power in my life. Maybe I’d estimated it too highly. This external display of Jesus was causing pain. To revoke that pain, I could revoke my regard for what Paul defines as the bride of Christ. 

Through a winding path, over the coming years I managed to go from critic to participant. I found myself on stages and under lights with Christians who were award-winning or celebrities or well on their way. I loved that I could use my inborn talents for this westernized version of Christian life. 

And yet again, the more diverse my interactions grew, the smaller my view of Christianity became. It seemed that everywhere, the Bible was a great marketing tool, filled with good news for those in need, and a free incentive to subscribe to its ideology. Packaged by neutral-colored clothing, emotional music, and pathos-laden sermons, seats filled. 

Cultural imperialism, broadly speaking, is the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence on a less-dominant group. Whatever our intentions, it seemed a good number of Christians making up America were pulling the influence of our western culture right into the pews, intricately tying it up with Christianity. Christianity was not being dominated, but in a sense, imperializing itself.

It is acculturation that would make William Bradford and William Brewster shift, if not turn over, in their graves. So this was the gospel? 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” Whitefield had preached. But when I scrolled social media, I saw the names most broadly speaking the cause of Christ were the ones most well-known, powerful, and often, most harmful. Supporting church began to feel like supporting a different gospel, one where the love of self, not Christ, was centric. Something was wrong.

Lew Wallace, in Ben-Hur, wrote, “Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.” Riches take wings, yet I saw pastors landing in the news and on streaming platforms for building lives of material comfort off the hopelessness of humankind. Love stays with us. Love is God. Yet love, Christian love, began to feel like it had withered, smothered by branding. This was not Christianity. To support it would be conscious complicity in acts opposing the gospel. 

“We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose,” wrote Wendell Berry. I’d joined a version of Christianity that included aspects other than the gospel, and thus, the opposite of Christianity. For the gospel is only enough by itself. 

Purposefully leaping before I looked too closely at the consequences, afraid I wouldn’t be brave enough to jump if I did, I walked out of the church walls for the first time in my life. 

The dirty plastic chairs of that low-ceilinged room in South America seemed so long ago. The childhood version of Christianity I’d witnessed in my friends’ deaths seemed to have died with the international news that once covered them. Now, Christianity felt too entwined with our cultural assumptions to be real without it. In South America, I’d watched people take Jesus into their culture. But now I had spent thousands of hours serving at nonprofit organizations that seemed to layer culture right into the gospel. 

“The medium doesn’t just transmit a message; it changes the message,” writes Katelyn Beaty. Without the cultural trappings of western Christianity, what exactly was the meaning of being Christian? Had I been living my life for Jesus Christ during my years within the church walls, or supporting the slow twisting of a message that is only enough by itself?  

Before he passed, the last words Wendell Berry spoke to a few of my friends were, “Take care of yourselves. Take care of what you know.” Wendell’s words have been texted to me during difficult times of life. His writing stirs feelings within his readers few writers can. It’s inspiring that the English language, organized in an unfamiliar way, can have such impact. But in choosing to cease my complicity, taking care of what I knew meant undoing everything else. 

“Humility is . . . knowing what we know, as well as what we don’t,” writes Daryl Van Tongeren. “Humility is the only reasonable response to being alive.” Thus began a painstaking attempt into humility. 

Some would call this opening my eyes. Others may try to shove my response under the term deconstruction. A few might say I was on track to leave the faith. After all, I’d walked out of church, packed away my custom in-ear monitors and violin, cut CCM from my Spotify, and plunged into unknowing the American Christianity I’d poured my life into. 

One pastor ignored all of the above. I’d walked out of his sermons more times than I can remember, for no reason related to him, but the cacophony of church experiences I’d had since I sat within its walls for my friends’ funeral. 

“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are,” goes the saying, attributed to far too many well-known names to quote it correctly. Much of what made my experience with Christianity so hard was its entwinement with Americanism, particularly the celebrity and power with which we build much of our culture. 

Was Christianity just power plays and tiered in-groups? Or was it welcoming the needy? And was I still who I claimed to be without the culturalisms so closely associated with it? Because I was no longer the violinist on stage. I wasn’t even in the building. 

In a small city in a big coffee shop, this pastor let me read my laundry list of questions off the Notes in my phone, graciously talking through each one . . . even though my seat in his church was always empty. Was this Christianity, void of cultural attachments? 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” wrote a tax collector who made his riches off the backs of the poor until Jesus’s love overcame him. “You’re blessed. You keep asking these questions,” the pastor said. Perhaps the emptiness in my spirit was from a hunger to be filled. I chose to stay hungry a little longer. This was, after all, an aspect of American Christianity I deeply resonated with: the fact it kept me coming back to God, questioning always. 

“Coming to you ‘cause I’m confused / coming to you ’cause I feel used,” writes singer-songwriter Jon Guerra. “How can we call ourselves Christians / saying that love is a tension / between the call of the cross and / between the old party line?”

It is not sacrilegious to question the religion that is often associated with Christianity. In many, often well-intentioned churches, there is a religion of volunteer hours served, conferences and concerts attended, church events booked, and time spent in church groups. But this is not Christianity. It is an iteration of Christianity in a particular, often privileged, context. I had to untangle Christianity from the cultural additions I’d found myself engrained in to realize Christianity is not a subculture.

An artist once asked the question, “What is the meaning of Christianity in this American life?” Thousands of years ago, along the Orontes River in what is modern-day Turkey, those who shared the gospel were first called “Christian,” or little christs. But in this American life? Some of the American Christians I most respect live varying lifestyles and differ politically, but each of them believes the gospel: God is a holy and loving and just God. We are sinners. And he wants relationship with us, despite us. I’ll subscribe to that. 

Despite stepping back from the cultural additions to American Christian life, I had never stepped back from Christ. Or more accurately, Jesus had never stepped back from me. The reason I made it here was because all along, I’d experienced him myself, so close I didn’t realize it. Closer than my breath. Christ in me. Christianity.

Having spent over three decades as faithful church attendees, my husband and I were under the assumption one was never asked to visit a pastor in his office for anything other than disciplinary or counseling purposes. Therefore, you can imagine our trepidation when the priest of our new Anglican parish asked us to stop by after we’d been attending services for several weeks. So there we were on a mid-morning summer Thursday, trooping into a yellow-aged fellowship hall with our four kids trailing behind, where we found Father M. in the little kitchen fiddling with the coffee pot.

I wondered if the genial, rather self-deprecating, priest was the same on any given weekday as he was during the few hours we saw him on Sunday mornings. He ushered us into a conference room on the other side of the church and by all appearances, seemed at his leisure sipping coffee while we talked. He listened attentively to our doubts about faith and church, gently answering our questions as if he had all the time in the world. Meanwhile, our children (ages 7 to 12 at the time) were conspicuously quiet throughout this exchange–a feat of obvious self-control. However, much to their chagrin, they did not go unnoticed. It soon became apparent Father M. was thinking of them as our conversation progressed. In fact, I distinctly recall a twinkle sparkle merrily in his eye and an eyebrow twitched as if an idea had suddenly popped into his head. Unable to contain himself any longer, he turned to the children and spoke: 

“Do you all want to know what we have in the closet by the back entrance?”

My reticent children responded with a mix of shrugs and nods.

“I think we ought to go check, don’t you think?”

More nods but this time, a few smiles as well. 

He led us through the hall like a mother duck with six dutiful ducklings following closely behind until we arrived in front of a large closet door. 

“Open it!”

Pushing and nudging (because no one wanted to go first) the children managed to inch their way to the door and opened it. 

“What’s inside?”

“Um, just a few things hanging up and a couple wheelchairs?”

“Perfect! Wheel them out here,” he said, gesturing to the hall.

In a few minutes, two wheelchairs were unfolded side by side in the hallway. 

“You must race them. One sitting, the other pushing- two teams! No one is in the church, so, banning the sanctuary, the hallway is all yours. Just watch the corners! And…GO!”

Levity commenced and we adults left to wrap up our conversation. Though the relative quiet was now delightfully sprinkled with squeals and laughter from down the hall. 

Later, I realized this may have been the first time a pastor had ever paid genuine attention to our children. Their pastoral interactions up to this point had been mainly of the “be good to your momma” Southern Baptist variety with a hand-shake at the door or, even more oblique, a fashionable face on a screen during our brief foray into mainstream evangelicalism. 

This interaction with Father M. and his fun-loving nature revealed more than a tendency for this particular man to understand and appreciate children. What we were given was not a singular moment, but a form of love we continued to see played out in many ways during our time at the church. People were recognized as individual souls, down to the smallest child, with their unique qualities noticed and cherished. What we had found at this church was a place without pretense or expectation. It felt the way a family ought to love: grace for the imperfect and forgiveness for the repentant. And where this love dwells, joy has freedom to bubble forth.

A church which foremost follows God’s command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…and you shall love your neighbor as yourself” is likely to be a church attractive to those who are lonely and weary of the emptiness of self-love, especially in a society that seeps with individualism.

When I was growing up, childhood felt like forever. A year was an eternity. One of the most difficult waiting periods of time was the 4-6 weeks for an order to arrive by mail. It felt like ages. Today, I am always surprised when my children tell me how quickly the days fly by, that they can hardly believe a birthday or particular holiday is nearly upon them. For myself, it amazes me that if I procrastinate, I can order one of their school literature books on a weekend and have it come for them by class on Monday. (This only serves to encourage my procrastination rather than dissuade it.) It saddens me sometimes how fast life seems (or is that just me getting older?). Life feels more transient than ever despite my apparently failing attempts at living a simple life. It is hard not to notice that families split more than they reconcile, relocation has become akin to progress, and busyness means productivity. Stability is just a pie in the sky. One of the most frequent sayings I have heard within school and family circles is the hope that “things settle down in a few years.” 

My family and I have moved 6 times in almost 15 years, including an international stint, and every move is more wearying than the last. The temptation towards callousness is powerful. And yet, despite the miles and years and varying communities, there was a sturdy, anchoring thread that remained with us and was never lost: the Church. Of course, what is even more incredible is that this thread is not unique to one era or generation, but can be followed back over many centuries and continents and peoples. The Church has been woven in deep and strong.

One of the greatest and most fantastic ironies of the Church is that its strength and numbers have grown exponentially under times of severe persecution. In an early letter (the Epistle to Diognetus), the unknown author writes: “…[Have you not seen Christians?] flung to the wild beasts to make them deny their Lord, and yet remain undefeated? Do you not see how the more of them suffer such punishments, the larger grows the number of the rest? These things do not look like the work of man; they are the power of God, and the evident token of His presence.”

Ignatius of Antioch wrote in a letter to the Church of Smyrna, “…To what end have I given myself up to perish by fire or sword or savage beasts? Simply because when I am close to the sword, I am close to God. When I am surrounded by lions, I am surrounded by God.”

There seems to be a longing among mankind to be rooted in that which is enduring. I think of military veterans who still feel a part of the units in which they served decades before, proud of having been part of something bigger than themselves. Many of us feel a strong loyalty to the colleges or universities we attended. There is an uptick of interest in ancestry and DNA searches, revealing a desire to know where we have come from and who we are.

Roger Scruton once wrote that, “Our deepest social need is for the first-person plural of belonging, and to belong is to belong in a place.” We feel a sense of belonging when we are made to feel as if it were a part of us and, in a way, created for us. More than likely, we have all used the phrase “it feels like home” when positively describing a city, church, or community. 

For someone searching for that place but unsure of where to look, modern christianity is eager to fill this void. Churches will go to great lengths adapting into a society that emphasizes utility and function, where creature comforts become the model for attracting more members. The modern church becomes a mere a tool for the purpose of bringing in new people to consume what is offered. Those who come, come to take, not receive. I have often wondered how many of those multitudes would show up to worship at any given time if the coffee shops, merchandise, children’s programs, comfortable chairs, or even the buildings themselves were stripped away. Are these churches attracting the heaven-curious or the consumer? From my experience, I can understand there may be a mix of both. Our time in seeker-friendly churches was not without merit or learning. But think of the cathedrals of old, made with such detail and beauty in their very architecture that our gaze is meant to be drawn upward, toward God. Is utility and comfort doing little else but drawing the eyes toward self?

In an article titled “How To Pick a Church When You Go Off to College,” Joshua Gibbs candidly writes:

Such churches do not command respect or obedience and pride themselves on being just like the world, which means they can be skipped without much notice. These churches ‘build bridges’ with the world, but these bridges are more commonly used to get Christians out than to get non-Christians in.

This raises a question: If church is so easily skipped, does a person truly feel like they belong there?

When people grow tired of the rapidly shifting nature of modern culture, weary of not finding happiness in self-satisfaction, they will find the core of their longing fulfilled in the steadfast, though paradoxical, love of Christ. After all, those who want to find their life must lose it. 

A church filled with this love will brim with joy despite leaky roofs of old buildings, yellowed linoleum, loud children, or long distances traveled. In fact, you are likely to see a sparkle in someone’s eye, participate in shared meals during times of sorrow and celebration, find a place of belonging, and ultimately experience the Presence of Christ. Within the Church, imperfections and foibles are still aplenty. Yet how good it is to find a haven of peace, to hang up the mask of self-preservation used to blend seamlessly into the world. And you never know, you may be encouraged to throw off the gauntlet of caution and, with a wink, take the wheelchair for a spin down the hall.

I.

In medical terms, vaccines work because our immune systems have the ability to learn from previous attacks by foreign agents. Our bodies can experience a pathogen and remember how to fight it next time. It’s remarkable, really, that repeated exposure to a virus or bacterium can make us stronger, not weaker. A vaccine piggybacks on this function of the human immune system by introducing dead or weakened versions of pathogens so our immune system can be trained to fight the real thing. Ultimately, the goal of being vaccinated is that you never have to experience the real virus — your immune system has been trained so well that you don’t even notice that the pathogen has entered your body.

Vaccines are incredibly effective. Which is why, from a spiritual perspective, they are so dangerous.

II.

Two years ago, when I was on mission in South Asia, a friend sent me E. Stanley Jones’ 1925 book of his missionary years in India, which is titled The Christ of the Indian Road. It’s a great book for those interested in the history of Christianity in the region, especially given it was written at a vital juncture in India’s national development., and Jones’ central argument that Christ is just as relevant to Indian culture and society as to Europeans is a fantastic reminder of an important truth. But there is one sentence that stayed with me more than any other, haunting every church service I’ve attended since. In writing about European and American Christendom, Jones laments that “vast areas of the Christian world are inoculated with a mild form of Christianity, and the real thing seems strange and impossible.” Or to put it more bluntly: we are vaccinated against Christ by the way we practice Christianity.

For this analogy to work, we have to momentarily invert our assessment that viruses are bad and vaccines are good. The teachings of Christ — which represented a break from accepted Jewish religious teachings in the first century and were countercultural to much of the world at the time — managed to spread and gain purchase within the hearts and minds of a great many Jews and non-Jews to such an extent that in 300 years the faith went from a fringe cult to the official religion of the Roman Empire and, subsequently, the defining belief system of European civilisation. This incredibly fast change of religion did not happen at swordpoint, but like a viral infection: invading and becoming part of the host’s body before spreading to others, hopping from person to person as they made contact. A more palatable analogy might be that of a flame being passed from candle to candle, illuminating the darkness as it spreads. But that would rob us of the more helpful metaphor of the vaccine. 

If belief in Jesus as the Son of the one true God and also each person’s saviour can be likened to a virus — an idea that spreads incredibly rapidly and takes hold of its hosts, transforming them before using them as a launching pad for more infections — then that means it can be defeated by a vaccine, by something that looks like the virus while training the body to reject the real thing.

III.

Let’s use a slightly less incendiary example before I go completely Kierkegaardian in my attacks on Christendom. The rise of social media and resulting decline in attention spans has led to an increase in people sharing quotes from their favourite writers, and Christians may be at the forefront of this trend, thrilling in the ability to reduce complex philosophical and metaphysical concepts into soundbites. This means that those writers whose ideas can be most reduced, who wrote the most pithy one-liners, become the most heavily valued because their ideas are the most digestible and shareable. This is not to disparage those writers who knew how to turn a phrase. C. S. Lewis and G. K. Chesterton (to name two of the most-quoted Christian writers) were incredibly skilled at communicating Christian truths in a comprehensible way, which is no easy task. But they were not setting out to be aphorists. They were highly educated thinkers engaging with important questions of faith and Christian living, and they never intended their work to be shredded into standalone quotes. If you actually read Mere Christianity or Orthodoxy, you are subjected to well-constructed arguments, sentences woven together into complex tapestries. It is a shame to tug out a few brightly coloured threads and walk away. These works are more nuanced and more challenging than you expect, and if you engage with them, you are likely to find an idea or concept that you don’t like — which is a major reason why you should read them. It’s far better to be challenged by a well-written book than soothed by an affirming quote.

The danger of engaging with a writer through quotes that you enjoy is that you think you understand them, you think their worldview aligns with your own, and so you preclude the possibility that they may hold views different from what you expect (and that they may be right and you may be wrong). It seems there are many who prefer this way of engaging with Christian writing instead of doing the harder but more rewarding work of actually grappling with the perspectives these high-quality thinkers are communicating. For example, I do not agree with everything Chesterton writes because I am not a Catholic, but I find engaging with his ideas on saints and stigmata extremely rewarding, partially because I know we don’t see eye to eye on everything. I don’t want to be vaccinated against his most challenging views because I’ve already placed him into a neat category in my mind.

The other danger of engaging with formidable thinkers by way of quotable phrases instead of their actual writing is that you are more easily fooled by fake quotes. There is seemingly no end to the number of quotes that have been attributed to Lewis, many of which are halfway plausible on first glance given how prolific he was (the C. S. Lewis foundation has to maintain a webpage just to combat this phenomenon). My most favourite is the fake Screwtape politics letter, purporting to be from Lewis’ epistolary novel The Screwtape Letters, which is regularly shared across the internet during election seasons. If you’ve read the book, it’s immediately clear that this is not the kind of thing Lewis would have written in the UK in 1941. And yet, because people have formed a view of who C. S. Lewis is and what he stands for, you can slap his name on a string of words and people will eat it up.

IV.

If we can agree that engaging with writers like Lewis or Chesterton (or Augustine or Aquinas) only at the level of their most pithy quotes is a poor substitute for actually reading their books, and that it can actually numb your ability to properly engage with them, can we agree that the same dynamic plays out every week in churches across the world?

Let’s imagine three types of churchgoers who sit near each other on plastic chairs on a Sunday morning: a passionate new convert, a longstanding and dutiful believer, and an irregular attendee who could be called a backslider. Who is more in danger of being vaccinated against Christ? Counterintuitively, it’s the longstanding believer. The dutiful, religious Christian who is the backbone of every church is the most susceptible to missing the forest for the trees, most at risk of missing Christ for all the Christianity. This happens whenever we water down the harder sayings of Jesus to reassure ourselves that we really are good Christians, despite not giving our money to the poor and making financial decisions from a place of fear. This happens wherever we sanitise the emotions we are permitted to feel within church so that only those of positive victory are expressed. This happens whenever we transform the Gospel into a moral self-improvement project and build our liturgical seasons around sermon series like ‘How to Have a Better Marriage’, ‘Managing Stress God's Way’, or ‘Five5 Keys to Financial Peace.’. These are all ways we vaccinate ourselves against what early Jesus followers referred to simply as ‘the Way’ — following Christ with your whole life, no matter the cost. We put Jesus’ actions and teachings into a box that suits us, we are susceptible to skewed or untrue versions of Jesus, and slowly become good Christians who are no longer willing to accept the Christ who says or does difficult or confusing things, who cuts across our selfish and fleshly natures.

The passionate convert is caught up in that first feverish experience of being infected with the foreign pathogen of Christ, and the irregular attendee is in the midst of wrestling with the virus of Christian belief. Neither are neutral, neither are lukewarm, neither have acquiesced to that ‘moderated religion’ that Lewis warned of in The Screwtape Letters (yes, I am hypocritically using a Lewis quote that suits my point). And while it’s true that neither the passion of the new convert nor the doubt of the irregular attendee are permanent states of being, the vaccinated state of the longstanding believer who can no longer be overwhelmed by Christ may be the most dangerous. It may be that this is the type of person Jesus warns of in Revelation 3:16.

As a longstanding believer myself — who was raised in a Christian family and who never had a dramatic conversion or a long drawn-out struggle with God — I am concerned by how little concern many churches seem to have about believers like me. We are in danger of numbness, of moderation, of being vaccinated against God. And because there are so many of us, we are in danger of creating herd immunity within churches. Our vaccinated state can prevent the more passionate amongst us from truly following Christ, because in our majority, we prevent Christ from getting into our churches. When I read the Gospels or Paul’s letters, it seems that there must be a way to follow Jesus with the passionate love of a disciple and the wrestling doubts of a backslider while still growing in maturity and wisdom. I believe that passion and doubt and maturity do not have to be mutually exclusive. But where are the shepherds to lead us on this narrow and winding path? Where are the doctors who know how to combat the dangers of spiritual vaccination? 

V.

Jesus came to give people the opportunity to be one with God, this much is clear from his prayer at the Last Supper (John 17:20–23). And oneness with God cannot merely mean mental assent to certain facts or continuation of tradition or being part of a community of like-minded people. These are all good things, of course, but they are second-order good things. They are not the main good thing.

Just as we cannot get to know Lewis or Chesterton or any serious writer on the basis of a few pithy quotes, we are foolish to think following Christ is about attending church or serving our communities or evangelising or studying the Bible or tithing or prayer. It is all of these things, but it is much higher and deeper than any of these things. As Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, being a follower of Christ is an all-in living sacrifice. And if we don’t find this to be both an agony (like the irregular attendee) and an ecstasy (like the passionate convert), then we may be doing something wrong. If we believe Jesus when He says that most will not walk through the narrow gate (Matt. 7:13–14) and instead will betray Him at the end times (Matt. 24:10–12), it may be because of how inoculated many of us have become to His actual teachings. It may turn out that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was allowing us to be so comfortable in our Christianity that we no longer have any need for Christ.