Trump has consistently banked the vast majority of evangelical voters; 70-80% or more. All this, when Trump himself stands as an emblematic example of what Christians should not be: the desires of the flesh, personified. Our entire Thing is that we are regenerate! We are little Christs! We are held to a higher standard! We are (allegedly) the moral skeleton that binds America together! But when the most transparently debauched presidential candidate in decades came along, we flocked to him without a murmur.

I have been told, of course, that voting for Trump is the lesser of two evils. I have not been convinced. Either way, the problem really isn’t the voting. It’s the championing. It’s about the evangelicals who have consistently mortgaged their principles to enforce a double standard, the Megan Bashams and Franklin Grahams of the world. I won’t, and can’t, list all of them, but names spring immediately to your mind: Christian men and women who have raised their unquestioning support for Trump dangerously high. These are the true victims of the “culture war,” Christians whose reputation amid both their fellow believers and the world is not gospel first, but politics first.

But let’s set that aside for a moment. Trump’s popularity among evangelicals wasn’t only present in the general election. Here are two charts. First, Republican primary voters’ choice in 2016, sorted into groups by how often they attend church:

To be fair, Trump support decreases with church attendance, but he still leads every bracket except the most committed church attenders, where Cruz narrowly edges him out. Remember that this was in 2016, before he was the incumbent, when his only track record was that of the stereotypical TV star playboy, in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape and countless other scandals. What about eight years later, when the Republicans had an opportunity to move on from Trump and take advantage of a weak Joe Biden presidency to get back to their staid, boring, rule-of-law, fiscal-conservative roots? After multiple serious legal scandals, the January 6th riots, and the open disapproval of half his original cabinet?

Trump performed better among evangelicals than among the rest:

Wait a minute. I was told the justification for voting for Trump was that he was the “lesser of two evils”. But in the Republican primaries, evangelicals somehow picked the only evil available to them. Both in 2016, when he had no incumbent advantage, and even more so in 2024, by which time his candidacy was thoroughly compromised on both moral and political levels.

So maybe the problem is the voting. Maybe evangelicals were given an easy chance to prove themselves; to defend the nation from obvious moral rot. Maybe we were passed the ball before an empty goal only to fall flat on our face.

In this article, I am doing one of the things I hate most: treating a large group of individuals as one single moral agent and criticizing the group’s actions as if each member were responsible. “Evangelicals” are not a monolith, nor are they a hivemind. Just as a nation cannot have a walk with God, evangelicalism does not act or vote as a collective. I know lots of evangelicals and lots who voted for Trump, each for their own reasons and justifications. And that’s… fine. It is not everyone’s duty to carefully follow politics.1 There are more important matters than who is chosen to rule us. I am going to share heaven with these folks someday, for which I am thankful. I don’t mean this article as a personal attack.

But the evangelical movement has done itself immense reputational damage by its enthusiastic support of Donald Trump. We are sent to bring Christ’s gospel to a watching world. How can we pretend our testimony is unsullied if we are unwilling to condemn this man? His personal life is a disaster. He cast aside his Christian policies long ago. He openly commits sacrilege and blasphemy. The test of “will you compromise your values to espouse this politician?” should be dreadfully easy. The bar is flat on the floor, and yet we stumble. Even the world can see this man for what he is; it is not as if Trump has been subtle about it. There have been no surprises on the road to our self-degradation, no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that he is, at heart, a good person, just a little rough around the edges. We cannot pretend that our support has been unwilling or misgiven. There are too many MAGA hats in our closet for that, too many social media posts, too many bumper stickers in the church parking lot. Our support has not been quiet. The world is not fooled.

It is easy to criticize the Other Team. It is also more fun. But much more important is the ability to criticize your own team. We, believers, are the ones held to the higher calling. We are the ones commanded to be lights in the world. When a man like this arises, even as part of the Republican party, we must not look the other way. It is not difficult to distance ourselves from him. Trump’s story is not yet over. Neither is evangelicalism’s. But it is our reputation at stake, not his. The world needs to know this is not who we are.

Pastoral Landscape by Claude Lorrain, 1648

It was late Spring in Oddland when the king was about to depart on a diplomatic visit to Upper Pomerania. He was expected to be away until the Fall at the earliest with many expecting it to be much longer than that. In perfect accord with the law of Oddland, no sooner had the King departed from the palace than all members of the castle rushed into the palace courtyard to pass out the royal lots. Everyone from the baker to the butler had dropped their work to appear in this courtyard. This was one of the few activities in Oddland that was done with the utmost solemnity and decorum. While everyone was still coming in, the royal lots were hurriedly brought out. The lots were a set of gold cylinders about the size of a pencil and housed in an opaque silver chalice supported on a pedestal set in the center of the courtyard. The pedestal was made of ivory and no more than three feet tall. The chalice was a rather plain silver chalice with the three words, “Fortuna caeca est,“ engraved on the side. The pedestal, chalice, and lots were arranged and brought out by two men, both of them blindfolded. Once the pedestal had been set, the men turned their back to the chalice, removed their blindfolds, and walked toward one of the walls of the courtyard. With the chalice in place, everyone who worked at the castle, from the stable boy to the Royal Chancellor, queued up in front of the chalice with total solemnity and gravity. The royal members arranged themselves in the queue with perfect propriety so that the gaps between people were of the same distance. There were so many that day that the line soon snaked about the courtyard with an almost mathematical exactitude. It was both rapid and methodical the way in which each person approached the chalice, extracted their lot, and hurried off to the wall of the courtyard where they would stand, back to the wall, clutching their lot with both hands. When all had selected their lot and the chalice was empty, the Royal Chancellor approached the pedestal, raised his eyes, and shouted with a loud voice, “Whosoever has the lot with the blue dot shall be the despot.” The courtyard soon rustled with the noises of people inverting their lot and inspecting the lower face. It didn’t take long before a shrill voice interrupted the noise with a shout,

“It’s me! I’m the despot!”

All eyes turned to look at the speaker. The speaker was a boy who worked in the King’s stable. He was a boy of about 12 named Casimir. Casimir had only been working at the Castle for 3 months, yet that still qualified him to be present at this lottery. No one knew much about Casimir’s history. He was hired by the Stablemaster not because of ability but because of pity. The Stablemaster saw him wandering about the street one day, gaunt and hungry, yet still quite careless. He offered Casimir a job tending the King’s stables and mentioned that there would be plenty of food as none of the King’s workers went hungry. Casimir gladly accepted the offer, though none really knew if he was truly poor or starving. It became clear later that Casimir always looked gaunt and hungry. He also never acted like he was poor or had ever been poor. He seemed more like a vagrant than a vagabond. This led the Stablemaster to wonder if his pity was misplaced. Casimir had never before witnessed this odd ritual, but participated in it with complete calmness and familiarity.

“The despot has been chosen. Long live the King! Long live Casimir!” Shouted the Royal Chancellor.

“Long live the King! Long live Casimir!” Cried those present in the courtyard.

As everyone distilled out of the courtyard to resume their normal jobs, the Royal Chancellor rushed Casimir into the throne room. He placed Casimir on the throne and kneeling before Casimir said,

“King Casimir, your servant Davor is before you. I have faithfully served the King as Royal Chancellor and I will gladly serve you as well. I am at your service, most excellent King Casimir.”

Casimir leaned back and with as royal of an air as he could muster, responded by saying,

“Thank you, Davor. The King is grateful. You may go.”

We’ve all likely imagined what it would be like if we were instantly made ruler of a kingdom. Casimir likely did too for the first few days of his reign consisted of the most childish lavishness. It was a rule by the order of King Casimir that every meal was to consist of fried chicken covered in candy and topped with ice cream. Casimir ordered pictures to be painted on the walls of the stables (he didn’t really care what pictures, he just thought the walls were boring without them). He also had a robe made with the words, “King Casimir, the Great” stitched onto the back. There was no doubt that he was enjoying being king. Unfortunately for Casimir, the enjoyment didn’t last and after the first week, he was irrepressibly bored.

“Davor,” said Casimir while slouched in the throne, “I’ve decided that I want to be an actual king. But more than that, I want to be a popular king. I want to be the most popular king in the world. Do you know how I could do that, Davor?”

“Yes that’s very wise,” said a monotone Davor. “It’s also quite easy to be a popular king. Just lower taxes.”

“Lower taxes? That will make people like me?”

“Of course it will. Tax cuts are always popular whether they’re a good idea or not.”

“That’s a great idea then! But who should I cut taxes on?”

“That is quite simple. Whoever is paying you the most in taxes should have their taxes cut.”

“That’s another great idea! Thank you, Davor, you’re really helpful. Who is paying the most taxes?”

“Currently, the richest people in this country are paying the most taxes.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“You’re too young to understand the full wickedness of men but the barbaric practice of ‘income tax’ makes it so.”

“That’s horrible! I will end it at once! Davor, grab a pen and paper and let me dictate to you an immediate proclamation.”

Thus King Casimir began to end this barbaric practice he had just discovered. Yet it should be noted that Casimir dictated a proclamation to Davor not because of convenience but because it was necessary. You see, Casimir had never learned to read or write. He never saw this as a problem before he was king and now that he was king, he saw it as even less of a problem. Davor was always more than willing to copy whatever Casimir dictated. Yet perhaps he was less “willing” and more “eager.” As King Casimir’s reign continued, Davor began to embellish the dictated proclamations. For example, in this proclamation just dictated by Casimir, Davor embellished it slightly so that only his family would be exempt from all taxes. This was clearly not what Casimir intended, but Davor reasoned that Casimir could hardly care less. For the most part, Davor was right. After the proclamation was made and the law was sealed with the King’s seal, Casimir’s popularity did increase. It especially increased among a certain large and wealthy family. Casimir only noticed the increase in popularity and thus wasn’t suspicious in the slightest. As the months rolled by, however, King Casimir began to see a steady decline in popularity. This did worry Casimir slightly and so he had Davor write more and more laws in the hopes of increasing his popularity. He wrote a law that every household in Oddland was to receive a new coach with the words, “From King Casimir, the Great” painted on the side. He wrote a law that two Wednesdays of every month would be a paid holidays. He ordered pictures to be painted on the sides of all houses so as to “lighten the mood” of all citizens. Yet after all of this, it was clear to Casimir that his popularity wasn’t improving. Once looked out his window and could see people grimace at him whenever they caught a glimpse of his face (he also saw one very happy group of people in a shiny carriage departing from Davor’s estate, which cheered him up slightly). Casimir began to be troubled. He was so troubled that one day he didn’t get out of bed. This was very unusual for Casimir but not very unusual for a King. None of the members of the palace took much notice and simply had meals brought up to him. When it was about dinner time on this day, the cook brought Casimir a dish of his favorite fried chicken and freshly made strawberry ice cream.

“Here you are, your highness,” said the cook warmly. “The royal dish ordered by King Casimir the Great.”

“Oh it’s all a lie!” Shouted a distraught Casimir from underneath a pile of pillows. “I’m not the greatest king! I’m not even the most popular king!”

Up until this point, the cook was simply performing his duty, but hearing Casimir in this state made him worry. Yet this worry soon gave way to another feeling of opportunity and ambition. For you see, Davor was not the only one keen to exploit young Casimir. This cook was not a native Oddlandian. He was a political exile from Upper Pomerania. He had snuck across the border of Oddland and started a new life here, eventually working his way up to the royal kitchen. This cook, whose name was Florien, was a secret revolutionary. He had started an uprising in Upper Pomerania that exiled him and forced him to flee. He was in Oddland waiting an opportunity to return to Upper Pomerania as a stronger revolutionary. Seeing a simple King wanting only to be popular, Florien, the eternal opportunist, seized upon a plan.

“Oh you want to be a popular king?” Said Florien with as much cordiality as he could muster.

“Yes I do!” Said the pouting Casimir. “I want to be the most popular King in the world!”

“Oh is that so? Good! That’s a very noble goal, but you’re going about it all wrong.” Said Florien with the tact of a serpent.

“Really? What am I doing wrong?” Asked Casimir with a hopeful tone.

“You’re trying to make yourself popular with your own citizens! You have to have more citizens. Better yet, you have to free more citizens. You have to find the cruel countries in the world and emancipate their citizens! Make your country bigger and your popularity will be bigger as well. Only then could you be the most popular king in the world. After all, who wouldn’t want to be under such a great King?”

Casimir sat up and peered at Florien from behind his mound of pillows. It was clear that he was thinking the matter over.

“But are you saying I should invade other countries?” Queried Casimir, becoming more comfortable with Florien’s idea with every second.

“No of course not!” Cried Florien. “It’s not invading, it’s freeing. You’re not declaring war, you’re emancipating a people.”

“Oh good!” Said Casimir, his face immediately brightening. “I was worried you were talking about war but that’s not war! That’s just being a good king! That’s an excellent idea. Will you dictate a law for me?”

A grin spread across Florien’s face. “I would be more than happy to, my King.”

Davor was on his way up to the King’s chamber when he met Florien coming out.

“The King has just declared war on Upper Pomerania.” Said Florien as bluntly and spontaneously as he possibly could. Davor froze in place as his jaw plummeted. He instantly turned a ghostly white and began to tremble all over.

“W-w-WHAT did you say!?!” Shrieked Davor in a tone of disbelief and horror.

“He just sealed this order that I dictated for him,” replied Florien frankly. He handed Davor the piece of paper containing a red, royal seal. Davor reached out a pale, trembling hand as he read,

“By order of the Great King Casimir,

The crimes and atrocities of the Kingdoms of Upper Pomerania have come before me. Their leaders are cruel, corrupt, and filled with mischief. Therefore, it is with great fervor that I, the Great King Casimir, will invade, attack, and utterly wipe out the Kingdoms of Upper Pomerania. My General, Florien the Mighty, shall devour you as the lions devour their game. To the end that no tyranny should long live on this earth, I set my sword against you and vow to free your people from the yoke of their government.”

Davor nearly swooned upon reading these words. He shook violently and turned an even whiter shade.

“As you can see, the King has made me his general. I’m on my way to gather the troops and begin the invasion.” Said Florien with morbid calmness and frankness as he grabbed the paper from Davor’s hand. Davor’s eyes locked with Florien’s in a look of rage and horror. He was still trembling all over as he shrieked,

“You raving anarchist! You’ve gone mad! You devil! You.....*gasp*...you’re going to kill us all!”

“Then we all are martyrs for the great cause of anti-tyranny,” shouted Florien over his should as he walked away. Davor collapsed into a pile of trembling limbs.

“Madness! Anarchy! Ruin!” He mumbled to himself as he lie trembling on the floor. After a span of several minutes, Davor was finally calm enough to stand upright and stumble away.

“Flight,” thought Davor to himself. “Flight, that’s the only answer. The law cannot be reversed. This is the end. I must gather my household and flee south. I must do so quickly!” The limping and trembling figure of Davor went through the gate of the palace and then was seen no more.

Casimir was excited about the military procession out of the capital. He rode in one of the new carriages he had given out to the people. It was his favorite type of carriage. He had driven one a few times while he was a stable boy, but now he was a passenger. This carriage was special as it had “King Casimir the Great” stenciled on both sides of it. Florien led the procession out of the capital with Casimir behind him flanked by two cavalry generals. Behind him marched the army of Oddland, the cavalry following up the carriage and the infantry following up the cavalry. The road towards Upper Pomerania involved crossing the mountains forming the northern border. It was at the top that the border of Oddland ended. When Florien the Mighty and his army crossed this border, it would be an official invasion. Oddland would be at war.

Casimir looked out of his carriage. They were a good distance from the capital and he could see the army filling the narrow road for miles downward. He assumed the army had accompanied as a formality. Florien had assured him it wasn’t an invasion so he didn’t give it another thought. He was too busy observing the road. He enjoyed the view. Since it was officially summer, the weather was a crisp warmness common to the mountains. He saw Florien ahead of him, riding his horse at a fairly rapid trot. The road and sky framed Florien in a most aesthetic manner. He also heard the birds chirping and the grass quivering in the wind. He was not prone to sensitive moments, but at this moment, he was illimitably pleased and sensitive.

“I’m going to be a good king and make people as free as those birds.” He thought to himself with a smile. They had nearly reached the top and he was able to see the plain on the other side. He was quite deep in his freedom meditation when he was interrupted by the thunder of Florien’s horse as it sped by him. Florien had a panicked look on his face as he raced by Casimir back in the direction of the capital.

“Where are you going?” Shouted Casimir, but Florien was already too far away to hear him. “General, please go and bring him back to me. I can’t imagine why he’s heading back.” The general on his right nodded and with a whistle, detached his cavalry regiment to go over take Florien. Casimir looked back over his carriage and squinted after them. He saw that they eventually did over take him and that Florien appeared to be arguing over the demand to return. Eventually, the cavalry officers surrounded Florien and he had no choice but to return back to Casimir.

“I wonder why he was trying to get away,” mused Casimir to himself as he sat back down in his carriage. As he sat down, he looked up and saw another entourage approaching them. The entourage was led by a tall man in a purple cape. Both entourages had come the top of the hill. A border marker stood between Casimir’s army and this other entourage. The man at the front of the entourage Casimir knew immediately. It was the King returning from Upper Pomerania. Casimir was truly glad to see the King and was sure he would take over this emancipation crusade. However, as soon as this tall man crossed the border into his own Kingdom, Casimir forgot that he was no longer King Casimir the Great. The general on Casimir’s left bowed as the King approached the carriage. He stopped a bit, with a look of confusion as he saw the army stretching down the road, the title on Casimir’s carriage, and the now pale faced Florien coming up the road surrounded by cavalry officers.

“What is the meaning of this? Are we at war?” He said, looking down into the Casimir’s carriage. His tone was one of anger, but Casimir didn’t feel he was angry at him.

“Oh no of course not!” Replied Casimir, happily. “We’re not fighting, we’re freeing. We’re going to set people free so that they could see that I’m the greatest Ki-” Casimir stopped short as he stared into the face of the King. The King’s face softened a bit as he said,

“I see. And who told you this?”

“It was the loyal cook!” Answered Casimir with a carefree air. “He was the one who proposed this magnificent mission! I was so grateful I made him in charge of it!” At these words, Florien turned a deathly white and began to tremble. Before Casimir could understand what was happening, a tent had been setup on the Oddlandian side of the border and he was seated, next to a bound and trembling Florien, while the King slowly but furiously wrote the following proclamation,

“To the Kings of Upper Pomerania,

The people of Upper Pomerania have always been our allies and the kingdoms have always been our brothers. My Kingdom seeks only peace and cordiality between our two nations. However, recent reports regarding an invasion of your nations by my nation may have reached you. Because the proclamation were made and sealed with the King’s seal, it cannot be revoked. There will still be an invasion of Upper Pomerania. However, the invading army will be led by ‘Florien the Mighty.’ He alone will be invading Upper Pomerania. I believe you will find him to be thorn about which we spoke during conference. This revolutionary that has been causing trouble in your kingdoms has come down to me and now I ‘return’ him to you as my invading party. Do with him as you see fit.”

And as the proclamation from the King ends so does our tale. Poor Florien was taken captive the instant he “invaded” Upper Pomerania and he was never seen again. Casimir, as is the custom in Oddland, went back to his post as stable boy. He enjoyed his job more now that there were pictures on the wall. The King also ordered Casimir to be supplied with a dish of chicken and ice cream once every month in addition to the food normally given to the King’s workers. And with these final partings, our story of this odd little country comes to a close.

I’ve decided to write this now because I’ve noticed my consumption of Chesterton’s writings has fallen off. I still read the odd article and revisit an old quote, but I have read considerably less of Chesterton in the recent months. This is in stark contrast to where I was even two years ago, reading two or three of his books in a year along with a dozen or so articles. Anyone within ear shot of me would have heard me regularly quoting him. In fact, it may be accurate to say that since I read Orthodoxy in the summer of 2020, I have ceased to have a truly original thought about the big and important things of life. This isn’t all that surprising. I want to be right about the big and important things in life. Chesterton is right about the big and important things in life. No need for originality there. But I have been reading less and less of him. I think part of the reason is that I’ve run out of his major works. Since discovering G. K. Chesterton six years ago, I have read approximately 17 of his books, a splattering of some two or three dozen articles, every Father Brown in existence, a handful of his poems (including his hymn), and even the biography of his wife, Francis Blogg. I discovered and read whatever I could from Dale Ahlquist at the Society of G.K. Chesterton. I read the works of those in Chesterton’s orbit such as C.S. Lewis, Hillarie Belloc, and Ronald Knox (not an exhaustive list). Even having read all that, I still come across a book I had never heard of or an essay I had never seen. This is not surprising given that he wrote over 80 books, 4000 essays, 200 short stories, and hundreds of poems. Nevertheless, I am reading less and less of him. Partly because I want to take a step back and evaluate Chesterton, and partly because I think I have evaluated him. I think I know what he was getting at. That’s what I want to describe here. Taking all that I have read, I want to summarize his main point, the thesis of his life, so to speak. Or, to put it in a more Chestertonian phrase, I have looked at Chesterton nine-hundred and ninety nine times, and now I will look at him for the thousandth time in the hopes of seeing him for the first time.

Who Chesterton Was

Let me start off by saying what has been said about Chesterton so that we can get it out of the way. Ronald Knox once said he,

“[had] never had an argument which threatened to get to the root of things without finding myself tempted at some point to fall back on the phrase, ‘Chesterton says somewhere.1’”

C.S. Lewis says of him:

“His humour was of the kind which I like best--not ‘jokes’ imbedded in the page like currants in a cake, still less (what I cannot endure), a general tone of flippancy and jocularity, but the humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the ‘bloom’ on dialectic itself. The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.2”

The Thomistic scholar Ettienne Gilson once said of Chesterton:

“Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty.3”

All of this I can attest to being the utmost truth. Chesterton’s impact is quite impossible to overstate. He wrote about politics, faith, apologetics, feminism, eugenics, Hitler, and socialism. He wrote poetry, plays, novels, mysteries, and hymns. I loved everything I ever read from Chesterton. So now I want to ask the broad and nearly impossible question, what was he trying to get at? If you could boil all his writing down, what would you get? What is the point he is trying to make every single time he writes? I’ve thought a lot about it, and I will make my humble suggestion in the next paragraph.

What Was Chesterton Getting At?

I think the point in all of Chesterton’s writing comes back to the very last line of Orthodoxy:

“There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.4”

Reflecting on the Chesterton I have read, this sentiment seems to sit consistently in the background. This concept of the deep, hidden mysterious of God, are actually the really good things. That somehow, if we could understand the mind of God, we might also understand a colossal inside joke. That mirth is more mysterious than despair and laughter more puzzling than a paradox. Part of the reason I think this is simply because of how Chesterton writes. Neil Gaiman put it best when he said,

“I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.5”

One always gets the impression that Chesterton himself is telling a joke with every clever paradox or witty turn of phrase. But it isn’t a derisive joke, or a pun, or one with a punchline. It’s often a shift in perspective that shows the fundamental humor in reality6. He once said the earth spun because it is constantly looking over its shoulder7. He once complained that man is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful, and therefore must be a woman (much funnier in context, see footnote)89. He solemnly compared marriage to a duel and stated that there was never such a thing as a “prudent marriage”10. One of his novels has such an incomprehensibly grave and yet situationally funny plot: an atheist and a theist try and duel to the death, but the police keep interrupting them11. In all these examples there is a whisper of a humungous joke. They are all quite funny and yet he has told no joke. He has written no punchline. He has merely said a truism, which was the bravest thing he said anyone could ever say12.

All this is suggestive of something so much bigger and so much funnier. If you still aren’t convinced, I commend his essay “A Defense of Baby Worship” to your reading13. I think it typifies in the best way the mystery of humor and truth.

The Fundamentals of God

What I am suggesting goes deeper than a mere literary summary of an early 20th century author. Chesterton speculated, with no idle words, that deep within the secrets of God, was laughter. We have very little evidence to suggest that God does laugh. St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom say He never laughed and that we ought not as well. This idea has been developed elsewhere, but in many ways we find no evidence because we have sinned and grown old and don’t know what laughter is141516. That’s why Chesterton speculates it to be something hidden. A riddle and a question, more satisfying than the answers of men17. To put it in a more Chestertonian way, the way of saying truisms without explaining them, the Gospel tells us to become like little children, and little children laugh.

The United States birth rate (TFR) fell to 1.57 this past year. There is the usual handwringing about what has caused this, and what we should Do About It. I’m a staunch supporter of Occam’s Razor, and that applies here: people aren’t having kids because they don’t want to have kids. Yeah, the nuclear family and the breakdown of marriage and the cost of living and suburban living spaces yada yada. If they wanted to, they would. And the strong general trend of modernity has been that as soon as women can easily prevent pregnancies and aren’t economically incentivized to have children, they don’t.

More precisely, they do less often. Because my second insightful observation is that lots of people are still having plenty of kids, and that doomerism about the birthrate is a little bit pointless. There are eight billion people in the world, and even if that starts to decline, I’m sure there will be some uncomfortable economic effects, but nothing catastrophic. Not while I’m alive, anyway.

But generally, we think of kids as being a good thing, right? And now we are told fewer kids are being born. The Number is going Down. Which means less of a good thing, hence, this declining birthrate is Bad. Unless you’re Paul Ehrlich, anyway.

Immanuel Kant famously gave us the categorical imperative, a definition of morality most well known in its first formulation: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But more relevant here is the second: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”

Always treat humanity as an end. Humanity itself. It’s such a concise way of conveying the idea that we should all inherently realize. There is something sad about a culture slowly dying out, failing to produce enough people to replace itself. Because that is the goal. Humanity itself is a goal, an end, something we value for its very sake.

I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Kant’s imperative is de facto a Christian moral code, or surely compatible with it. It’s essentially the Golden Rule, derived from reason instead of Scripture. (Was not Christ treating humanity as an end when he came to earth to die for us?) It’s a rephrasal of the imago Dei; the idea that humans are inherently valuable, merely because they are. But what interests me is that Kant’s imperative and its implications aren’t necessarily or exclusively Christian. Kant’s imperative is an attempt to derive a moral law from reason alone, or to believe that humanity should be its own end.

We hear a lot these days about “empathy”. If you’re empathetic, that means you value the other person, you sympathize with their feelings, understand they are living their own life, making their own choices, believing their own beliefs, just as you are, etc. The idea’s natural conclusion is that we ought to respect that. Even if you disagree with someone, you should be able to empathize with the way they arrived at that decision, given their priors, their situation, their life experiences. That’s the argument, anyway, for the principle that undergirds a lot of modern-day secular thought. This principle is no longer Christian, but it is still Kantian. How can you be empathetic to your fellow man without this principle of humanity as something worth respecting? Specifically, why should you be? It presupposes the idea that the humanity around you is something inherently of value, not something to be used, not an irrelevant detail, but itself an end to preserve.

Empathy is not a utilitarian ideal, and I say that approvingly. While it is a way of dressing up a Christian virtue in secular terminology, that doesn’t change the fact that it is a Christian virtue. But more relevant to what I’m arguing here is that empathy is also diametrically opposed to the needs-of-the-many utilitarian reasoning seen in arguments like Ehrlich’s. Empathy is necessarily individualistic in the sense that it has no point if you don’t value each person as their own individual.

Kantian ethics are thus the final rebuttal to men like Paul Ehrlich. If humanity is an end, how can you be anti-human? How can you so openly and vocally oppose the very life of the human race? If you value humanity, if you think humanity is worth respecting and preserving, how can you argue there should be fewer humans? It’s a self-defeating argument. We cannot sacrifice the few for the many, or trade the inconvenient for our own comfort.

But that’s not the only ramification of a Kantian worldview. For if we take “treating humanity as an end” to its natural conclusion, what better way to fulfill this mission than to … create more humans? If humans are inherently valuable, shouldn’t we want more of them?

This discovery won’t help us fix the birth rate, of course. If someone doesn’t want to have kids, I doubt quoting Kant at them will change that. (I guess you could give it a shot.) Having a baby is a major decision, frankly, a life-changing decision: babies are a very big deal on the individual level, but a very small deal when viewed from the state level. Incidentally, this is why governments should not be allowed to adopt a utilitarian line of thinking. Governments need to be Kantian too. The American Founding was based on this rational, Enlightenment-era concept of individual liberties (Kantian2), not the more utilitarian concepts of socialism or collectivism.

But here’s the good news: this problem is self-solving, for readily apparent reasons. The people still having kids are going to be the ones who reproduce. It is their offspring who will make up the next generations. This is a really easy way to check if your worldview passes this Kantian test. For example, the fertility gap between liberal women and conservative women is now so large that (assuming these rates hold, in a frictionless vacuum, etc) by 2100, conservatives’ descendants would outnumber their liberal counterparts 4 to 1.3 Even if that example is a little far-fetched, understand the point I’m making: one of the easiest ways to further your worldviews and eclectic musical tastes is to bestow them on a large number of children. Worldviews are self-replicating. But not all of them. And that is the point we’re here to make.

Paul Ehrlich’s narrow, short-sighted, anti-humanity worldview is, in a grand sense, suicidal. It is hopeless and cold-hearted. (But don’t take my word for it. Take his!) We should measure beliefs by their results (should we? How about:) We can measure beliefs by their results. And a belief system that leads you to discourage and despise the very creation of life itself cannot be a good one. A worldview (explicitly or otherwise) that instantly withers away and dies (literally) is doomed to deserved failure.

To this point, we’ve kept this discussion on a rather esoteric, philosophical level, but these ideas have tangible, real-world effects. States where it’s cheaper to live and find housing (states where it’s easier to start a family) have seen marked population growth, as Americans move away from their more bureaucratic, expensive counterparts. These effects will likely be significant enough to affect the electoral map next census:

Red states may gain as many as ten electoral votes by virtue of doing exactly nothing except making it easier to live there.

To live there. Shouldn’t that be one of the primary goals of a state? To have people in it? Without its people, what is it? States are created by the people for the people. If they fail to treat their inhabitants as an end, they have failed their purpose. But this applies to more than just electoral votes.

Statecraft is a common conceit in the modern day. We’ve all got lots of time and leisure, and we’ve all got opinions on how we could Do It Better. Some of this is a natural result of the Founding and the liberal tradition: the Founders designed a government from scratch and did a great job! But we are prone to a callous arrogance when we discuss too carelessly how people and populations are to be governed.4 Soon, the state ceases to be For the People and starts to exist for its own sake.5 Instead of protecting the humanity entrusted to us, we think of how we can enact the most efficient tax rates and fund the most effective social programs: we trade the rights of the individual for the good of the collective. All of which leads me to say this:

There is a real problem with the comfortable, liberal-consensus, lightly-socialized, subsidized-healthcare states that make up the West. The problem is this: 37% of healthcare spending is on old people (aged 65 and up). This group is 17% of the population but incurs 37% of the cost, five times as much (per person) as children, and 2.5 times as much as working adults. And with the birth rates what they are, this problem will get worse before it gets better.

So if you’re a government looking to cut healthcare costs, improve efficiency, and lighten the tax burden on your working people who actually foot the bill, what’s the obvious answer? Wouldn’t it be convenient if some of those fragile, elderly citizens just…stopped incurring their burgeoning hospital bills? If we decided those last declining years weren’t worth the strain on our overtaxed healthcare system? How high a quality of life would those years contain anyway? The solution is disconcertingly obvious. MAID (Medical Assistance In Dying) is already far too common in places like Canada. But if you fail to treat humanity as an end, how do you arrive at any other result? It is a necessary conclusion of the state that has developed its own incentives and interests, rather than protecting the interests of its citizens. That state has become utilitarian, rather than Kantian, which cannot be permitted.

The Kantian ethic gives us a moral yardstick with which to measure beliefs. If life is worth living, we will value life: since life is worth living, we must value life. Paul Ehrlich’s ideas were transparently reprehensible, a cartoonish illustration of worldviews we intuitively recognize as evil. But the danger remains. Human nature is selfish. Human nature wants to trade others’ good for our own. It is self-love that tears us apart. But it is loving others as ourselves that will create good families, good societies, and good cultures. Realizing each human is inherently valuable and empathizing with their personal thoughts and struggles — their person — is what allows us to build each other up. And that, more than any policy, is what our countries need.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hasan Piker, he is essentially the leftist version of Nick Fuentes: equally anti-semitic and equally anti-America. No, really: Hasan is on the record saying America deserved 9/11 and is a vocal supporter of Hamas, the communist Cuban regime, and the CCP. (Horseshoe theory might be the realest thing ever.) He’s also a self-described socialist, advocating rent control and other rote leftist policies, all with a bent towards violent, radical rhetoric. (As usual, ye shall know them by their fashion choices.)

A few months ago, the online right went through a bit of a tussle over how big the “tent” should be. Essentially, should a right-wing, MAGA coalition be large enough to include individuals with the increasingly radical and transgressive views of a Nick Fuentes or a Tucker Carlson, or should the movement cut such figures off to preserve a semblance of decency and respect? Is the opportunity to reach these influencers’ respective audiences worth the damage they could cause?

With Hasan, the Democratic Party finds itself in a similar quandary. Desperate (publicly) for their own version of a Joe Rogan, a common-man type of influencer who can help their dismal relationship with America’s young men, there is a legitimate discussion among mainstream Democratic voices as to whether Democrats should campaign alongside Hasan. Some prominently leftist Democrats have appeared on his show (including AOC, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, and Zohran Mamdani).

There are two strong arguments against platforming Hasan and his ilk. The first is practical. Hasan will not help the Democrats win elections. He will not successfully appeal to unreached voter classes. He will not convince voters Dems are something they are not. He will not bring in more voters than he costs them. The 2024 election was not a landslide, but it should have been — for Democrats. If Trump 2016 and 2020 was a bad candidate (and he was), he certainly wasn’t any better by 2024. But the American people chose him over Kamala Harris, because they saw her as too far to the left. Even now, with Trump’s approval ratings cataclysmically low, the Democratic Party is still a few points behind the Republicans in voter approval (28 to 32).

This is the image, deserved or not, that Democrats need to fix, not reinforce. When voters see you as radical leftists, the solution is not to move further to the left, even if it would please a vocally online minority. Platforming Hasan would throw free gasoline on the Republicans’ campaign fire. A plethora of reprehensible clips1 would be broadcast all over cable TV, displaying, in his own words, the type of figure Democrats had partnered with this time. In fact, they already are. Hasan is a caricature of what your Fox-News-beholden elderly relatives believe Democrats to be, but he’s a real-life person propounding these views to a real-life (albeit niche) following.2

The second reason not to promote Hasan is that it would be bad. It would be wrong. Hasan Piker is not an admirable character. He is not a thoughtful individual. He does not care for our government or our nation. His language is puerile and his views inexcusable. This is not the sort of person Americans want anywhere near our positions of power or influence. Sound familiar? Democrats’ main advantage in the coming elections is Donald Trump and the poor job he is doing in the presidency. Their pitch is to reinstate a semblance of competency in the federal government (and not much else).

Hasan’s views are not shared by the majority of Democrats. That is a good thing! That is a positive for Democrats, and for all of us. Publicly condemning this sort of radical anti-American behavior should be routine and unremarkable if they are the party of reasonable, centrist government they want and need to be perceived as. (And it’s not like they haven’t. Here’s CNN doing so.)But the fact that this is even a debate reflects poorly on them (as the Fuentes debate did Republicans). Democrats should be seeking to prove the lesser-of-two-evils Trump voter wrong, not right.

The Democratic Party has been a rudderless ship since Obama’s presidency ended, held hostage by the most radical minorities inside and outside of it. Any prominence it gives to Hasan Piker is emblematic of that. America benefits from healthy political parties that can police the most unsavory influences from within, or would, if it had any. Rebuffing Hasan and his influence should be a no-brainer, just as it was for Nick Fuentes on the right. It is both the practical and the moral thing to do.

Recently, Turning Point Action endorsed Ken Paxton in this Senate race. “Oh well,” you say, “at least he’s not perfect. But he’s still better than a Democrat, right?” Except Paxton isn’t yet running against a Democrat. He’s running against twenty-four-year incumbent Republican John Cornyn in the Republican primary. Cornyn’s crime? Too moderate. For TPUSA, voting with Trump 99% of the time is not good enough. While Cornyn’s been busy being a “normal, Texas conservative Republican” (his words), even confessing that Democrats are “not our enemy”, Paxton has been busy appearing at TPUSA rallies, supporting Trump’s election denial claims, (and, as mentioned, cheating on his wife).

This is a post about Trump, of course. The corruption starts at the top. But what I want to show is that his embrace by the MAGA right is a pattern, not an anomaly. For this post is no longer just about Trump. It is about him, and RFK Jr., and Paxton, and Pete Hegseth, and Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Matt Gaetz, Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski. That’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a list that immediately comes to mind. All of these have a history of seriously compromised moral integrity, whether that is (multiple) marital infidelities, accepting bribes and other pleasantly convenient kickbacks, and/or undisguised substance abuse. Countless more have lied and looked the other way to allow them to keep their power. The new right has a morality problem: Trump is not the exception, he is now the rule, and there is a pool of filth at the top. You’d be ashamed of this behavior in your sons and appalled if people this reprehensible showed up to date your daughter.

You can say the Democrats are just as bad. Go ahead. Both-sides this all you want. At least the Democrats don't pretend to be reestablishing a Christian society while they're doing it. (Except James Talarico, for some reason.1) The hypocrisy is what makes this so intolerable. That applies to the people who support it, as well. The Christian Nationalism crowd should be all over this: if you genuinely wanted to set up a God-honoring, Christ-centered state, shouldn't you have qualms about a historically corrupt, unrepentant serial adulterer being the guy in charge? Doug Wilson is happy to lead a “worship service” at the Pentagon at the invitation of Pete Hegseth, but doesn’t seem to have an issue with Hegseth cheating on his second wife with his future third, or his concerning history of alcoholism. (Adultery would be a crime in the Christian Nationalist state Doug Wilson would like to live in, by the way.) Much of the heavy Christian Nationalists’ argument is structured around the idea that we can and should give the government the responsibility to legislate morality and establish a Christian state, because we know that the good guys (Christian men) will be in charge. Words can hardly express how quickly and thoroughly that line of reasoning repudiates itself when these are the public officials CNs endorse and celebrate.

When it gets to the point where you simply and transparently do not care; to the point where winning or owning the libs is more important than the values you claim to uphold, how can you claim to have achieved anything at all? How many times can you willingly trample your claimed ideals before you realize that it was never about the values at all? That the values were merely a convenient means to an end, a front to placate the block of evangelical voters that were the easiest means to achieving power? Not that those were ever any more than a front. This administration is not pro-life. They routinely infringe on free markets and free speech. Trump has pardoned the worst of society, while his family members enrich themselves at taxpayers’ expense. We’re asked to tolerate these flaws as a small price to pay for all the great conservative, Republican, Christian achievements we get in return, but any actual accomplishments form a pattern of happy accidents rather than thoughtful, upstanding governance. Even the Supreme Court, which is and will remain Trump’s most positive legacy, is chastised when they depart from MAGA-first results.

In fact, the regularity with which the MAGA movement casts principled men and women to the side indicates that not only are principles and virtues irrelevant to the MAGA movement, but they often are a hindrance to any sort of prominence in the movement. Mike Pence stood up for what he believed in the wake of January 6, and was discarded. Ben Sasse, one of the most admirable politicians I can remember, did the same, was called a “RINO” by the president, and eventually resigned from the Senate. Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are similar stories: principled conservatives who did not allow their party alliances to take precedence over their beliefs, and were punished for it. That courage is exactly what you should want in your politicians. It’s a rare quality. But it is unwelcome in today’s Republican Party.

On the other hand, we have men like JD Vance. On the surface, perhaps, Vance is one of the admirable statesmen we’re searching for. He’s married with a cute young family, scandal-free, and a professing Catholic. But what, we wonder, does Vance actually believe? What principled constants undergird his worldview? Once upon a time, it was convenient for the young Mr. Vance to criticize the emerging presence of Donald Trump, and Vance was more than willing to.2 Some years later, the only paths to power in the Republican Party lay through Trump himself. Not to worry! Vance was more than willing to seize the day. What changed? Not the president. Only a couple of years ago, Vance was calling for the release of the Epstein files. What changed? He has now been relegated to carrying out the administration’s dirty work, tanking much of the bad press from unpopular decisions. At the same time, precious few of his own new postliberal policy positions are implemented. Instead, he gets to lie to his machiavellian heart’s content about tariffs, ICE, or his own church, while accusing the (admirably conservative) Supreme Court of “lawlessness”. Vance’s principles had to stand up against MAGA, and MAGA won.

Perhaps you think this is too high a standard, that this behavior is run-of-the-mill for politicians. (You’re not incorrect.) But that, my dear reader, is my entire point. Because these guys cannot go five full minutes without telling us how they are saving America, how they are reestablishing the forgotten virtues of peace, patriotism, and justice, saving us from the Left, the Deep State, government waste, illegal immigrants, free trade, or whatever else the day’s flavor happens to be. (They named their latest bloated legislation the “SAVE America Act”: frankly, a little on the nose.) Even the “Make America Great Again” slogan from Trump’s insurgence ten years ago necessitates two things: (inimically) that America is no longer great, and (implausibly) that Trump and his coalition are the ones who will restore its greatness. Here’s the thing: I can complain till I’m blue in the face about how this administration isn’t Constitutional enough, how they don’t respect the rule of law, etc. They know that. The Constitution was never the point, simply for the fact that they do not care. “He who saves his country does not violate any law”, etc. Trump is probably the most lawless president America has ever had (not that that’s a measurable metric). However, since they wish to discard the Constitutional structure, the entire justification rests on the premise that what Trump and the administration are doing is “good”: that they are actually saving the country, as they claim.

Even if they were doing some good, that small gain is not worth scrapping the entire Constitutional structure. But the point of this article is to prove that they are not. More precisely, the small goods that are achieved are thoroughly outweighed by the scope of moral corruption that riddles the current right, both in the administration and its influencer class. This is not a “everyone has good days and bad days” situation. This is not a “King David was a good man despite the faults” situation. Rather, the decade-long pattern is a morally bankrupt, self-centered man in charge of a morally bankrupt, self-centered administration. If they're the good guys, as they desperately want you to believe, why don't they do good?

This Sunday I will be a confirmed Missouri Synod Lutheran. It’s an odd label for me since I don’t consider myself Lutheran even though my beliefs largely align with the denomination. I believe in the five Solas and the importance of the sacraments in one’s spiritual life. I like hymns and liturgy. I believe baptism saves and believe it can be given to infants. I’ve written elsewhere why I believe this (see here) and my arguments follow somewhat unconventional lines (unconventional for Lutherans anyway), though I remain far less settled on that than I probably should be. Regardless, I will become Lutheran, I guess.

It would be long and extremely uninteresting to relay the sort of theological upheaval I experienced going from Southern Baptist to Confessional Lutheran. Most of it are personal events that have nothing to do with the theology and more to do with being at the right place at the right time. For instance, the Missouri Synod church I am attending is a liturgical lighthouse in a sea of nondenominational megachurches. Even if I didn’t agree with the theology, I would still be drawn to it simply because I don’t have to wear earplugs during worship.

But this whole experience has raised a larger question for me. What on earth is the point of denominations? I’m not asking why they exist. They usually exist because somewhere someone decided to break off from someone. For example, the Wisconsin Lutherans broke from Missouri Lutherans in 1961 which led the Church of the Lutheran Confession to break with Wisconsin because Wisconsin didn’t break from Missouri fast enough (yes, really). So what on earth is the point of all this? It can’t be for doctrinal clarity because that’s clearly not the result. It can’t even be for unity because that also hasn’t happened. It also can’t be for expurgating heresy as these denominations are 99.99% similar. Does converting mean I am choosing a side in a quarrel I never started?

Of course it doesn’t. Nevertheless, this is why I don’t readily accept the label of Lutheran. The history of the Lutheran schisms has helped me frame my exact reasons for converting. Whatever my reasons are, it isn’t because I read all the synodal documents from the 1960s and settled on Missouri being correct. Nevertheless, I will hazard a charitable reason for the existence of denominations. My reason is an attempt to be historically accurate in the sense that my explanation will try to make a charitable interpretation for the existence and formation of denominations. Thinking about it in this way has helped me reconcile theological convictions with the messy question of “but now where do I go to church?”

The point of everything is Jesus. Jesus is someone I certainly cannot go without. All of Jesus is someone all of me needs. The sacraments are a special way Jesus gives all of himself to all of me (as has been recognized by basically every Christian ever). Therefore, participation in the sacraments is important because Jesus is important. That is all. Denominations have arisen because Jesus is so important. Rightly or wrongly, schisms and breaks have been made because some felt, in some way, Jesus was being infringed upon. And Jesus is important. Pride and malice do not enter into this interpretation because I am trying to be charitable and not assume such things (even though Paul warns of them). So my conversion to a denomination is an attempt to get more of Jesus through the ways other people have tried to be faithful to Him. And at the end of the day, I am trying to be obedient to my Lord and Savior by participating in the things He commanded me to participate in.

We cannot do theology in a vacuum, for prudential and practical reasons. The prudential reason is merely that theology should inform practice. What you believe about God will dictate what you do for God. You can’t do theology in a vacuum in the same way you can’t think in a vacuum. Thoughts and theology do things to us and make us do things. The practical reason is simply that you have to go to church somewhere. It seems reasonable to go to the church or denomination that has similar convictions. And for this reason, I have landed with the Lutherans. The importance of history and the sacraments has put me at odds with most Baptist churches in my area. I don’t think Baptist theology is at odds with history or the sacraments, but if every Baptist church nearby seems to be at odds with it, where else should I go? To Jesus, obviously, even if I have to go to a denomination to get Him. That is all. I ask the charitable readers to remember me in their prayers. Thank you for reading.

This was a problem for despots, as their entire business was bossing people around for their own benefit. History has definitively shown that a nation’s best route to prosperity is rarely to sail the stormy sea of a single man’s whimsy. When permitted to act in their own interests, men unfailingly do so. When a society is allowed to choose actions that benefit themselves (rather than just those in command) the result is economic growth and societal stability. Logically: when each benefits, the whole benefits (although this does not necessarily mean all benefit). All this is widely accepted free-market dogma.

But libertarianism has one nagging problem. No matter how free your society is, that freedom will never make your society good. Man’s default is to benefit himself, as just said, but that does not mean his default is to be virtuous. In fact, the two are contradictory: no matter your moral groundwork, it’s a pretty dismal code of ethics to argue virtue is self-service. Most are quite the opposite: virtue (according to most interpretations, including the correct one) involves being good to others, something we are not good at. Libertarianism’s entire philosophy is that it can’t (or won’t) make you, the citizen, be good, and that if you’re going to be good, you’re going to have to choose it yourself. You can even choose to be bad. (Is that, for some, an allure, rather than a drawback? We may never know.)

Let’s consider three separate-but-related issues: recreational marijuana, alcohol usage, and sports gambling. In the past few years, here in the US, both marijuana and sports betting have largely gone from illegal to legal (one hundred years ago, alcohol did the same). The policy reasoning was fairly straightforward: you, an individual, might believe that any one of these activities is bad or harmful, but somebody else might disagree, wishing to pursue them. Since all of these are personal activities that don’t affect other people, why should the government be the one making value judgments for you? (This is better known as the “harm principle”; that the only reason a state may justly override a citizen’s will is to prevent harm to other people.) What right has the state to tell you what is right and what is wrong? (Ostensibly. Certainly, in the cases of marijuana and gambling, well-endowed lobbying played an equal role.)

On the surface, all of that sounds great, and I don’t mean to discredit these arguments at all. This line of argument (whether or not government should be making value judgments for its citizens) is legitimate and worth consideration. The answer, as we’re about to discuss, is sometimes ‘yes’, but there is real danger in allowing the state to overreach its bounds. In fact, the mindset of “libertarian until proven otherwise” is not the worst rubric with which to approach policy questions.

But when we apply a strictly libertarian/ liberal framework to these three issues, we start to get unpleasant results. There were good arguments for marijuana usage to be legal, beginning with the most pragmatic: functionally, it already was. It feels bad to be giving people felonies for what feels like relatively common and minor offenses, which is the point that weed usage had breached. Pot smoking isn’t connected with the violent crimes and abuse that drunkenness too often is, etc; the majority of the time, it didn’t affect anyone other than the smoker. Even if it has deleterious long-term physical effects, so does smoking (which is legal). So does drinking (which is legal). So does office work (to a lesser extent).

By 2023, this view (that marijuana use should be legal) was shared by an overwhelming majority of the US population (70%, according to Gallup). But then, something odd happened. As more and more states began to legalize marijuana, its support noticeably declined, after rising almost uninterrupted for three decades.

Weed legalization was, by all accounts, the clear majority position, yet upon its introduction, the people started to regret it. Something being popular does not make it good. Something being legal does not make it good. And it turns out that the idea of marijuana being legal is a little more appealing than the reality.

There are several reasons for this, both related and unrelated.1 I’m not here to argue that marijuana should go back to being criminalized. I believe, unfortunately, that there are many good arguments on both sides. I’ll just make the very broad point that most weed use is bad for you, legalizing weed means we have more weed users, and a society full of stoners is now a worse-off society. That’s what we’re here to demonstrate: more freedom made society worse.

The sports gambling epidemic is a similar story. Americans wagered nearly $170 billion on sports in 2025, and casinos took home about 10% - a delicious profit margin. (Don’t worry, it all went to make delightful commercials.) Again, this is an issue that affects only the user; what right have I or anyone else to forbid young men from throwing their money away, if that’s their preferred mode of entertainment? At the same time, should we, the responsible citizens, watch stoically as our fellow men throw so much of their futures and livelihoods away? While the urge that somebody ought to do something about that is not necessarily a conservative one, I’m not here to tell you it’s a bad one.2 Again, in this instance, this freedom made society worse.

That is why you shouldn’t be libertarian. But I bring up alcohol as a counter-example. Upon reflection, alcohol seems to have a much more scurrilous effect on society. In the US, over ten thousand people die in drunk driving accidents every year. The correlation between alcohol usage and domestic violence is extremely strong. In short, the negative effects of alcohol’s legality are undeniably worse than the effects of either marijuana or gambling. So why is banning alcohol not in the same converation? Think of the lives spared on the highways, or the family lives repaired by a return to sobriety.

You can point to alcohol’s alleged positive effects (“lubricating the cogs of society” or whatever euphemism you prefer for the fact that sober people … don’t like each other as much.) Additionally, you can point to the fact that once upon a time, we famously did exactly this. The Eighteenth Amendment did prohibit the sale of alcohol, and all of society’s ills magically, instantly, disappeared.3 If only. Rather, the underworld alcohol trade instantly stepped up to meet the unquenched demand. Bootlegging gangs ran rampant in the streets of New York and Chicago, as Prohibition effectively kickstarted the mob in the United States. Violent crime and corrupt officials abounded. Horrified, the nation discovered “second-order effects”.

So while the freedom we’ve received regarding marijuana and gambling may well make society worse, we can’t assume that the prohibition would have the opposite effect. Sometimes, prohibitions make society even more worse. Because the problem we’re discussing isn’t a problem of law. It’s a problem of man. And while this problem is most clearly illustrated by libertarianism (or would be, real libertarianism has never been tried), it underlies any political system, and indeed human life itself. Societies and governments that ignore man’s flaws are in for a rude awakening. Because it’s not a political philosophy problem, it’s a human problem: the fact that humans are doomed to imperfection and certain to make poor decisions. All of them! You’ll recall that the worst (maybe not the worst) thing about tyranny is that you have no control over who gets to make the bad decisions. But even when you do have control, bad decisions are still going to be made. Men still want to gamble and drink and smoke and do drugs and cheat and steal. And because they want to, they will, as long as they can get away with it. This problem is not unique to liberalism. In short, if freedom is good, why are free people still bad? Freedom was never supposed to make you good. But freedom at least gives you the opportunity.

A couple points of meta-commentary before we conclude. First, the American Constitution is not a libertarian document. It establishes rules for government and rights that that government may not infringe. But outside of those fundamental rights, we can make whatever laws we want. Drinking and gambling are not expressions of your first amendment rights. It is just as Constitutional for Utah to ban sports gambling as it is for Florida to permit it. Both of those are well within the bounds of the age-old American question: how shall we govern ourselves? If it sometimes feels like there’s no right answer, that’s probably correct: either side is going to come with benefits and downsides, tradeoffs that must be considered, not denied. That, in a nutshell, is governance.

Second, a possible solution from the policy wonks (to whose ranks I aspire) is that, instead of prohibiting, we heavily tax the vices (drinking, gambling, drugs, etc). Ideally, this would have a triple benefit: allowing and regulating such behavior (as opposed to a black market), while economically discouraging it, all while counterbalancing the negative effects with added revenue for state and local governments. Yes, this would potentially encourage a cheaper black market to offer the same sins at a lower price, but it seems like a compelling compromise.

Finally, if you are to come away from this article with anything, remember these two points. First, man is imperfect (depraved, even). No system that relies on man can ever achieve perfect results. (It’s cliché at this point, but correct, that if men were angels no government would be necessary.) But second, man’s imperfection is not, in fact, another convenient proof that your pet theory to solve civilization is actually correct, even if it’s easy to point to as proof that the status quo is not working. Bad things happen under liberalism. Bad things happen under tyranny. Bad things happen under communism. Man’s imperfection is a constant. A constant that can be (must be) dealt with in any number of ways, but not denied and not ignored. The goal of a system of government cannot be to prevent everything bad from happening. That’s unrealistic and impossible, and is thus an unfair and unhelpful measure of what we want out of our government. Even a good government can’t prevent you from being evil. But a good government can protect your opportunities live an upright, virtuous life. And how else, I ask, will you prove yourself worthy of freedom?

You do not understand what a billion dollars is. You do not understand how many a billion people is. We know the terms, of course: a billion is a thousand million, a million is a thousand thousand. In fact, we hear about these figures every day. But that doesn’t mean that those numbers mean anything real to us. As these numbers approach the stratosphere, they leave our finite human brains behind. Even the factoids, meant to help illustrate these terms to us, fall short. One million seconds is only eleven days, while a billion seconds is almost thirty-two years. One million dollar bills is a thirty-story building, while a billion reaches seventy miles into the air. If you’re lucky, you might get to experience thirty-two years twice or three times. If you’re insane, you might someday walk or run seventy miles. But either way, it’s hard for our minds to put these numbers into their proper context.

It’s not controversial to suggest that as mathematical figures thus exponentially increase, our brains lose the ability to meaningfully grasp them. But what I’d like to suggest is that while this is fairly universal among humans, we don’t account for it as much as we should. Nowadays, hearing of figures in the millions and billions is commonplace, in reference to both money and people. And we pretend to understand. Of course I know what a billion is: it’s 1,000,000,000. But we can no longer put that number into a meaningful context. The figure has lost its precision.

Let me put this point into real-life terms. Think of all the people you know. If you lived for eighty years and met three new people each day (which seems to be a gross overestimation), you would meet about ninety thousand different people in your life, which sounds like a lot. Actually, it is a lot. But that’s my entire point. Because those ninety thousand people are fewer than those who fill the University of Michigan’s Big House every fall Saturday. They pale in comparison (2.5%) to the 3.5 million that ride the NYC subway system every day. And when you consider that the United States’ population is about 340 million, the tininess of human cognition comes into perspective. The world you inhabit is a minuscule fraction of the country we live in and the planet we live on.

And that’s where our brains begin to break. Humans are naturally self-centered, naturally self-interested. Being anything otherwise takes conscious and difficult effort. We are consumed by focus on ourselves: on our career, our appearance, our influence, our success. Then there are our immediate relatives: our spouses, our children, our parents, siblings, cousins, and the people we interact with regularly: coworkers, colleagues, and friends. We understand the world through our own experiences and the experiences of those around us: those are the only experiences we have. But those experiences are, again, the most miniature portion of the experiences that exist in the world. Forgive me for tumblr-posting, but the neologism “sonder” starts to get at what I’m saying here. It is a fully Christian idea to acknowledge that every human has individual thoughts, feelings, and struggles just as real as you do. And it is equally madness to try to comprehend it all.

At a certain point, this effect becomes tangible. Our inability to comprehend the world we live in damages our understanding of the world around us. Not that the world minds. The eight billion people on our planet will go on with their lives, whether you can understand them or not. But it hurts us. In our hubris, we consider ourselves worthy, capable of safeguarding the thoughts and feelings, the preferences of millions. We talk about politics, we talk about government, we talk about economics, always as if we know. We have to. This is the world we live in. The age of information has given us unfettered access to the entire rest of the world. And so we know about it. But we do not know it. The world beyond our immediate reality becomes an unsatisfying blur of larger and larger figures, words that, like all things, cheapen through their own abundance.

The onlineness of our time has enhanced this effect, of course. But it is not unique to us. In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith wrote:

Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connexion with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befal himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paultry misfortune of his own.1

This phenomenon is not new, but it is greater. For now, thanks to our terminal2 connection to a chosen few internet accounts—(that is part of the problem. We suppose the internet connects us to everyone. It does not. It connects us with a very vocal minority, often with financial incentives to keep us coming back)—we have a window to all over the world. Through that window we see glimpses only, cherry-picked facts and mangled quotes, edited videos and implied motives. We see the one, missing the ninety-nine. But because our view is so narrow, limited by our human experience, we are forced to reason backwards. We see the one, and assume it is characteristic of the ninety-nine; rather, the ninety-nine million. We forget that each of those ninety-nine million is an individual, created by God in his image, with thoughts and feelings and upbringings and desires wholly foreign to our own. The real psychological warfare is to not treat the some as the all.

If there is a political conclusion to draw from this, it should reinforce the idea that limited and local governments are preferable. Giving single men and even single governments grand power over millions of men is doomed to failure. But the larger reminder is that we must focus on Real Life. The sphere of influence we do have is, in comparison, quite small. We must not sacrifice it for the distractions of distant, imagined issues. The only way to fight our internet-driven polarization is with genuine, real-life personal relationships. Even if ragebaiting is more fun.

To this:

Those who understand the process, both the foundational mathematics and the software doing the math, are counted as “wizards” in their own niche field. Crystallography is built on the slow, rigorous progress of many brilliant minds over centuries. Understanding crystallography isn’t easy, even for motivated initiates.

I am a protein crystallographer (in training) and I knew this about crystallography well before I started. I knew about thick books of symmetry tables, FORTRAN code written in the 80s, and a small taste of the foundational mathematics known as group theory. I get why it is hard. I get why the older generation of crystallographers are considered to be “wizards”. I understand the decades of study needed to fully master this field, and it’s why I joined an email forum of established protein crystallographers from around the world, a place where you could ask questions and share knowledge.

Why is all this important? Because I am not a financial analyst. I am not someone who has any background whatsoever when it comes to market trends, finance, or the motions of money past a CD or IRA. I am a crystallographer. I do crystallography. I consult crystallographers on crystallographic things.

One day, I was reading the crystallographer’s email forum on some obscure problem in crystallography related to someone’s protein crystals. All these big names were addressing this problem. People from Harvard and European Synchrotrons were answering a question. Yet among all the answers, from the big shots and the “wizards”, there was a paragraph written by the infinitely prolific ChatGPT. Someone, one of these big wigs, had asked ChatGPT the crystallographer’s question and it had spit out an answer. And the answer, surprisingly, was quite good.

I will reiterate, I am not a financial analyst. I don’t know how to properly value companies. I am familiar with the proverb, “when your taxi driver is talking about stocks, it means it’s overvalued.” What I am positing is that, while that may certainly be true, the converse could also be true. Everyone has seen the news talking about the overvaluation of OpenAI. Everyone has seen people talking about the bubble mechanics of AI. There have been endless articles written about AI overuse, philosophical problems, and the danger it poses to creative arts. But has anyone stopped using it? Will my crystallographers stop using it? Will I stop using it?

I asked ChatGPT to make me a workout plan. I then asked it to turn that into a PDF for me. It said it couldn’t turn it into a PDF, but it did give me python code that would generate it for me. I wasn’t signed in. I didn’t pay a dime for that. But in two queries it was doing the work of Google, Youtube, VSCode, and even Adobe. A single tool is functioning as a search engine, coach, IDE, and even PDF manipulator (I would love it if ChatGPT replaced Adobe Acrobat). The giants of 2010s tech are being surpassed by a single tool. That just might mean it really is worth the hype after all

My thesis is really simple, people are using LLMs more than they realize to the point where it will soon become a bedrock technology. Because of this, OpenAI may end up being worth more than we realize. If you’re still skeptical about my thesis, just go out and observe people. Observe yourself. Do you see people using it? Are you using it? Does it seem like the the headlines are matching up with daily use? In my opinion, it isn’t. And in this particular instance, I will trust the daily use over the headlines.

I’m not saying any of this is a good thing. I don’t know if it is. I am just saying AI use has even gotten to me, in a field notoriously impenetrable and hard to understand. What does this mean for the future? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll ask ChatGPT.

We finished the last article with the conclusion that your constitutional rights (life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, leading to free speech, free religion, carrying weapons, private property, etc) are not God-given. There is nothing inherent to your status as a God-created individual that gives you any "right" to express yourself freely, or to carry an assault rifle, or even to enjoy personal liberty (in the human sense of the word). Instead, God created us with the duty to glorify him. Your life is not your own, for you are bought with a price, etc (1 Cor 6:19-20). 

What that means is that all the rights we in America value so highly are established by government, not by God. And although that should recalibrate our perspective of them, I don't mean to devalue constitutional rights. Just understand this correctly: that's all they are. They are formed and granted by our constitutional system, and that is where they get their power, for better and for worse. If three-fourths of the states passed a new amendment repealing the Second Amendment, according to the process detailed in Article V, that would be the law of the land. Conversely, the more we disregard the constitutional order in our society, the less the rights it does grant are worth.  

This brings us to the second major point I would like to make regarding Christian Nationalism: America is not a Christian nation. 

There are two main obvious arguments to support this, either of which would be sufficient. First, consider the obvious. The First Amendment grants all Americans the right to worship as they choose (or not at all). Religious freedom and the separation of church and state were core tenets of our founding and our constitutional system. This was not limited to "religious freedom, as long as it's some sect of Christianity" as revisionists have claimed. Many of the Founders were not Christian, as far as we can tell. Thomas Jefferson, one of the more obvious examples, was clear in multiple places about his desire to protect all religions. Nor was he the only one. But even apparently-Christian founding fathers fully supported religious liberty for those of all faiths. George Washington's letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport is probably the most famous example. Roger Williams remains one of the most famous Puritan supporters of the separation of church and state. 

The Founders' original intent seems clear: when they wrote "free exercise of religion", that's exactly what they meant. Given the care and precision they characteristically put into these sorts of details, that shouldn't be surprising. These guys were classical liberals. They were reading Locke and Paine. Do you think that when Washington wrote (emphasis mine):

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

--that he somehow wrote that on accident? No! The Founders meant to establish a nation where all men could worship freely, and that's exactly what they accomplished. (You could argue that it doesn't really matter what their supposed intent was, and that what matters is the actual text of the law, and you might well be correct. But it is now irrelevant, since the text of the law does match the intent of the authors. Originalism and textualism can be friends). 

So that's the first argument: that our government set up to protect free religion means exactly that. It seems almost too simplistic, but this isn't really groundbreaking territory. A nation that protects all religions equally cannot at the same time be in any meaningful sense an explicitly Christian nation. It would be unconstitutional (and therefore, fundamentally anti-American) to establish laws protecting the expression of one religion and forbidding another. (A topic for another day is the fact that the explicit separation of church and state should be fully supported by Christians, both in result and in process. But I fear I wax eloquent.)

The second argument is slightly more reductionist. I'll begin by emphasizing (as I have before, and I will again) the distinction between people as moral agents, and pretty much everything else as not. Simply, nations cannot be Christian. Therefore, America cannot be a Christian nation. Christians are people. Christian people can and do live in nations. But that does not make the nations Christian. Nations are not moral agents. Towns, cities, states, laws, organizations, systems, procedures, cannot be Christian. They are not moral agents. And this, once correctly understood, makes the anti-Christian-Nationalism argument very easy. America is not a Christian nation, because it cannot be. There has never been a Christian nation. 

Let's make sure we can understand the details precisely. Sure, we personify nations when we make broad generalizations. "America loves hamburgers". This does not mean every person in America loves hamburgers. Nor does it mean that America's laws require you to love hamburgers. Nor would that change anything if it did. It's a generalization: many American people love hamburgers. This is how it's used in verses like Isaiah 34:2 ("For the Lord is enraged against all the nations") and Jeremiah 10:25 ("Pour out your wrath on the nations that know you not"). The nations are not individual moral agents that have angered God, but they are composed of people who have rebelled against God. 

So the nation is not a single moral agent. It's a box that we use to describe a group of people. And since it is people who sin against God and people who must come to an individual relationship with him, no amount of legislation is going to make America a Christian nation. If a theocratic system could have made a people righteous, should not the people of Israel have been more righteous than any nation before or since? And yet they struggled to walk with God like all the rest of us. In passages like Numbers 11:1, was God judging the nation for laws not drawn from Scripture or was he judging the people who had sinned against him? 

This is a good spot to mention the prominent fact that the words "Christian Nationalism" mean lots of different things to lots of different people. If you want America to be a Christian nation in the sense that America, in a perfect world, would consist of mostly true, Gospel-believing Christians, that we should spread the gospel so that more and more Americans trust in Christ, then we share that goal! That is fully Biblical (and fully Constitutional, for that matter). But if you want to modify the Constitution to legislate your view of Christian morality, your position is both futile and unBiblical. That's the Christian Nationalism I seek to combat, since it damages both Christianity and America. If you're Christian Nationalist because you're post-millennial and are seeking to set up the kingdom on your own, well, reconsider your eschatology. Any attempt to create a Christian nation by means that don't involve changing the hearts and minds of the people that compose that nation is doomed to conspicuous failure. 

The thrust of this matter lies in how you view the term "Christian". Christianity is not some blanket term for outward adherence to 1800s (or whichever era you prefer) moral norms. Christianity is not some golden key to establish the model state after God's own image. Christianity is not some team we have to force everyone to join. All of these distort true Christianity to fit man's desires. All of them are wrong. Christianity is a personal, radically life-changing relationship with God, and some of the current conversation about Christian Nationalism almost trivializes that. Christianity is not painting a map. It is not found in polling numbers. It is not a tool that can be wielded to create a better society, or a group that can be leveraged for political power. And although I believe many Christian Nationalists to be well-intentioned, their aims are neither American nor Christian. 

I recently finished Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. I quite enjoyed the novel, though it took me a couple of years of sporadic reading to get through it. As has been recognized for the better part of a century and a half, Dostoevsky’s novels are masterpieces. Together with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky’s writing is to Russian literature what the pyramids are to Ancient Egypt. Immense fixtures, solitary products of their time, standing alone on the horizon. In fact, the one criticism that seems to hold some merit, namely, that it is too long, is also something the man himself admits in his letters¹. This book alone has no doubt minted hundreds of later writings from simple blog posts (such as this guilty piece) to PhD theses. This is why I was quite surprised to find, after reading some of these umbral writings, that Myshkin is quite a controversial figure. Many seem to be confused as to whether he is a hero or, at the very worst, a misguided idealist ^2,3 . One perspective even claims Myshkin is more Nietzschean than Orthodox⁴. Another claims Myshkin is weak and a crippling romantic (this was expressed to me verbally by someone else who had read it). All these perspectives are signs Myshkin is neither. In fact, this, I think, is further proof that Myshkin is who Dostoevsky intended him to be, an Orthodox Christian, and a “positively beautiful man.” In this article, I will attempt to defend Myshkin and argue for his standing as a true hero.

                I will give a warning that this essay will spoil The Idiot. Even if it is spoiled for those of you that have not read it, I encourage you to read it anyway. Sometimes knowing the rough skeleton of a book (especially a long book), can aid in reading it. To all be on the same page, I will summarize the relevant parts of the book, the parts that are controversial for Myshkin.

                The book starts with Myshkin going to Moscow. From the very beginning, we see that Myshkin is different. People find him disarming. They are struck by his sincerity, and he quickly gains a standing as a simple person, deeply interested in individual lives. Myshkin himself is called an Idiot, a term that doesn’t mean a stupid person, but more like a simpleton. Myshkin is coming from a mental institution in Switzerland. Though he is better, he sometimes has epileptic fits.

                The controversy of Myshkin centers around his relationship with two women, Agalya Epanchin and Nastasya Filippovna. In the beginning of the book, Myshkin has pity on Nastasya because of her struggles, saying she has “suffered terribly” (pg. 36)⁵. Because of his pity, Myshkin offers to marry her. She initially seems to accept but then changes her mind last minute and runs off with a man named Rogohzin. This is the end of book 1, the rest of the novel concerns Myshkin’s growing relationship with Agalya, the daughter of General Epanchin. Agalya is more even tempered than Nastasya. Even though she doesn’t often express that she loves Myshkin, she is stably committed to him. Myshkin and she become engaged and are on a path to getting married when Nastasya, who had been unheard of for most of the novel, shows up. Myshkin and Aglaya visit her. The visit becomes heated and ends in Agalya giving Myshkin a choice, turn his back on Nastasya and be committed only to her, or be with Nastasya and shut Agalya out forever. Myshkin hesitates and the hesitation is too much for Agalya who leaves him. The rest of the book details Myshkin’s new engagement and wedding with Nastasya. On the day of the wedding, Nastasya once again abandons him at the doors of the church and runs off, in the sight of the guests, with Rogohzin. Myshkin eventually tracks down Rogohzin and finds the body of Nastasya in his apartment. She had been stabbed through the heart by Rogohzin. Myshkin never recovers and returns to the sanitorium in Switzerland.

                Even in this summary, you have probably formed an opinion of Myshkin. Some have described his story as one of “spiritual squalor” and of a “diseased Christ”⁴. More charitable interpretations have called him “paradoxical”². In any case, it is hopefully clear why a defense is needed. Even so, this need of a defense is my first proof. Myshkin is controversial. You don’t even need to leave the novel to know that. No one in the book knows what to do with Myshkin. Myshkin is a mystery to everyone. Aglaya finds his love mysterious. Nastasya finds his pity mysterious. Rogohzin finds his trust mysterious. Lizavéta Prokófyevna finds his lack of pretense mysterious. On and on throughout the novel we find people confronted with Myshkin, as if he had suddenly come upon them and interrupted the normal flow of life. Everyone concluded he was a good man, but no one agreed on what made him good. The disagreement continues to this day in the thousands of people who have later read The Idiot. Myshkin is still mysterious even to us who live over a hundred years after publication. This is the first proof Dostoevsky may have succeeded in crafting a Christlike figure, for no man was ever so controversially good as Christ.

                Nevertheless, controversy alone is not a virtue. Unraveling the mystery of Myshkin will take more than simply saying he was mysterious. It will also do us no good to make him more complicated than he was. Some commentators have claimed Myshkin is an embodiment of the tension between spiritual and physical worlds, and a nexus between Western and Russian civilizations⁷. I personally find this approach more complicated than it needs to be, even if there is some truth in it. I would rather appeal to another Dostoevsky novel to help us illuminate Myshkin. As you may already know, Dostoevsky wrote Crime and Punishment before The Idiot. Two novels that are exact opposites. One has a nihilist as the protagonist. The other, has a man of “pure innocence”¹. Both immense novels in their own right, but sort of pointed in opposite directions. I posit that, while these novels are incredible works of literature, they are not Dostoevsky’s best. I would argue Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last novel, is his best. It is his best for this reason: it is essentially two books in one. It is as if Crime and Punishment shared the same story as The Idiot. Both the innocent and the nihilist are the protagonists. Myshkin is Alyosha Karamazov. Raskolnikov is Ivan and Smerdyakov. The interplay of these two opposite personalities drives the story, and it is here I think we can finally see what Myshkin means.

                The comparison between Alyosha and Myshkin has been made before³. They both are described as innocent and without guile³. They are both intensely interested in the lives of the people around them³. Both take pity on a woman who treats them poorly (Lise and Nastasya). Both have a moment of crisis that drives them to near insanity (the death of the Elder and death of Nastasya). The difference between them is that Myshkin’s crisis ends The Idiot. Alyosha’s crisis is, in my opinion, the climax of the novel. Myshkin’s life is only the first half of Alyosha’s. Alyosha is the continuation of Myshkin’s story. Alyosha, like Myshkin, experiences a death of ideals, and, some might say, of faith. But unlike Myshkin, Alyosha’s faith is resurrected. Alyosha’s faith comes back stronger and better informed, and it is that faith which carries the suffering persons for the rest of the novel. A faith that is not blind idealism, but a concrete understanding of the mission of the man of pure innocence. A faith that cannot be obtained unless it first dies and is resurrected. “Unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone” (pg 316)⁸. In The Idiot, we only see the kernel of wheat dying in the soil. We do not see the rebirth. We do not see Myshkin become Alyosha. We see the crucifixion but not the resurrection.

                To elaborate on this comparison, it may be helpful to explain a little bit more about Alyosha. Alyosha, like Myshkin, is the hero of the story. Dostoevsky makes this clear in the introduction⁸. He is described like this in the 4^th chapter,

                “…everyone loved this young man, wherever he made an appearance, and that had been so from the earliest days if his childhood. When he entered the house of his benefactor and patron Yefim Polenov, everyone in that household grew so attached to him that they treated him as one of the family…his gift of arousing a special kind of love in people was, as it were, inherent in his very nature, artless and spontaneous.” (pg. 29)⁸

                Alyosha then grows up and joins the monastery under the supervision of Elder Zossima. However, it’s clear to the Elder, and later to Alyosha, that he is not meant to stay in the monastery.

                “This is what I think of you: you will go forth from these walls, but you will live in the world like a monk. You will have many adversaries, but even your enemies will love you. Life will bring you happiness and you will bless life and make others bless it-which is what matters most. But that is how you are.” (pg. 316) ⁸

                It is hopefully clear how similar Myshkin and Alyosha are. They have the same heart and do the same things. If we can see how they are similar and accept that they represent the same man, the mysteries of Myshkin can be unraveled. The big differences between Alyosha and Myshkin lie mostly in the order of the events of their life, not in their core character and action. Unlike Myshkin, Alyosha experiences his moment of crisis in the second chapter of book 3, the death of Elder Zossima. The Elder doesn’t just die, but his body begins to decay. In the Russian Orthodox church there was and is still (as far as I can tell), a belief that the bodies of exceptionally holy persons do not decompose at death. Alyosha was brutally crushed when this did not happen for Elder Zossima. This crisis is the pivot of Alyosha’s life and we get a small commentary on this moment:

                “…there was confusion, it had arisen in spite of everything and it was so painful that Alyosha thought of that sorrowful day as one of the most painful and fateful days of his life. If, however, I were to be asked frankly: ‘Could all this distress and so great an anxiety have arisen in him simply because the elder’s body, instead of beginning at once to exercise healing powers, was, on the contrary, showing sign of early decomposition?’ I should reply without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Yes, it certainly was so.’ I would only ask my readers not to be in too great a hurry to laugh at my young hero’s pure heart.” (pg. 374)⁸

                What follows is I think the best defense of Alyosha, and by extension, Myshkin.

                “No doubt, some other youth, who responded cautiously to heartful impressions, who knew how to love not passionately, but lukewarmly, whose mind, though reliable, was a little too reasonable for his age,…such a youth, I say, would have avoided what happened to my hero; but as a matter of fact, in some cases it really is much more admirable to give way to an emotion, however unreasonable, which springs from great love, than not to give way to it at all.” (Ibid.)

                This is why Aloysha and Myshkin are such a mystery to people. Myshkin and Alyosha both had a great love. It made no sense to anyone in the story and far less sense to anyone reading The Idiot today. Myshkin loved Aglaya and Nastasya both. No one understands what that means, even people in the story didn’t get it. Because everyone around them was too reasonable, too rational, and filled with lukewarm love. They were Evgeny Pavlovich and Rakitin. They are you and I. They were every critic of The Idiot that would come after. And it’s why they are the heroes and not us. We cannot be overcome by these powerful loves. We are too rational to have such an irrational force come over us. We would never choose the Cross and it’s why we could never save ourselves. If there was ever a person in the entire history of humanity who loved so irrationally, so incomprehensibly, it would be Christ. Nothing about the Love of God makes rational sense. But if we follow the story after the crises, and wait patiently for Sunday, the irrational is resurrected, and the meek inherit the New Heaven and New Earth. That’s why Myshkin is a hero. He loved.

                If you are still not convinced, reader, then I encourage you to read Brothers Karamazov. If you are convinced, I encourage you to read Brothers Karamazov. Rereading parts of it has reminded me why it is such an incredible book and why those who have written on it have not written enough.

Works Cited

 (1)         Yen, J. Interpreting Prince Myshkin: The Idiot. An Unexpected Journal. https://anunexpectedjournal.com/58390-2/#sdfootnote1sym.

(2)          Terestchenko, M. Literature and the Good (II): Prince Myshkin, the Perfectly Beautiful Man. Revue du MAUSS 2013, 41 (1), 312–325. https://doi.org/10.3917/rdm.041.0312.

(3)          McDonough, C. The Earth and the Portrait: A Comparison of Dostoevsky’s Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Myshkin.

(4)          Ferguson, I. Nietzsche and the Prince. Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal 2015, 8, 19–27. https://doi.org/10.5840/stance201582.

(5)          Dostoevsky, F. M. (1821-1881). The Idiot; Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2002.

(6)          SLATTERY, D. P. The Idiot: Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Prince. Ph.D., University of Dallas, United States -- Texas, 1976. https://www.proquest.com/docview/288112885/citation/432B5966E2234150PQ/1 (accessed 2025-12-03).

(7)          Tucker, J. G. Dostoevsky’s “Idiot”: Defining Myshkin. New Zealand Slavonic Journal 1997, 23–40.

(8)          Dostoevsky, F. M. (1821-1881). The Brothers Karamazov; Folio Society: London, UK, 1964.

"The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine."

Adams referred, of course, to his role in the still-ongoing Revolutionary War (this letter was sent in 1780) and his upcoming role as the second U.S. President. Adams saw the oft-unpleasant exercises of statesmanship as a necessity that was both his duty and opportunity to achieve, in order that future generations might have the freedom and resources necessary to practice the gentler arts, such as philosophy and pottery. 

This is a noble aim, and one that motivates much of mankind's progress. Men do not plant trees for their own shade. But Adams' paragraph does not encompass all of mankind's experience. Not all of us take naturally to painting and poetry, even when given ample opportunity. In fact, the desire to compete, to fight, to succeed, to conquer is an innate biological desire in much of mankind (especially men, although I'm going to generally refer to the whole of mankind). Men are fallen. Unless restrained, little holds us back from our worst, most self-satisfying desires. And this is why much of human civilization's history records societies marked by might-makes-right, dog-eat-dog battles for supremacy. 

In the past four hundred years, society as a whole has slowly progressed to the point where our normal lives are rarely interrupted by wandering raiders, and much of civilization can live relatively (shockingly, compared to human history) peaceful lives. But that biological urge to conquer stuff has not left us. And that is where sports come in. 

As America has become increasingly wealthy and leisurely, organized sports have grown from literally nothing in the late 1800s to a near-trillion-dollar industry today, which perfectly correlates with the point I'm making. Our men aren't being sent overseas to waste their lives in the trenches of Saint-Mihiel (an unvarnished positive), but we haven't lost that innate urge to compete. We still want that thrill of competition, the exhilaration of drawing up careful battle plans. So what fills the void? Sports. 

This is why sports is society's virtue. We have achieved that human goal of "not having to kill each other to survive." (Killing each other, in this author's perspective, is bad and unneighborly). Instead, we confine ourselves to the more civilized battlefields of the gridiron or the basketball court, where we have some of the same exercises of skill, strength, and cunning, but everyone shakes hands at the end of the day. This is a good! It is good that our young men are learning to throw baseballs instead of grenades. It is good that our sharpest tactical minds are drawing up plays to defeat the Green Bay Packers instead of the U.S.S.R. We still need men and women who are competitive, strong, and confident. Sports train up those impulses that make us better people. Sports are one of the last things helping to unite local communities in an increasingly online world. Sports help us work together as a team, instead of withdrawing into the subdued loners that our mothers fear we'll all become. I speak of sports as society's virtue; that is, it makes our society as a whole better. This does not mean sports is inherently or necessarily good, that it is always good, or always has good effects on those who participate. You, personally, may have a harmful relationship with sports, as you may with pretty much anything. But in the net, our society profits from it. 

Video games, to a lesser extent, fill some of this void as well. (Yes, esports are sports. Yes, chess is a sport.) Video games allow us to become heroes, to become the main character of our favorite story. Video games allow you to save the princess, solve the mystery, or save the world. And I think that's also a desire most of us have, albeit unfulfilled. Real life is not heroism. Real life is the routine, the day-to-day consistency of doing what's right, making good but boring choices. (You could, if prone to cloying, describe that as the Real Heroism. I shall refrain.) But in that dreary day-to-day consistency, at least we have sports to give us entertainment and community. 

With that being said, let's get to work. In short, this post will show that the concept of rights, as we typically understand it, is a man-made concept, not a Biblical one. If that seems bold or counterintuitive, walk with me.

What do we mean by "rights"? Let's define our terms before we get into the weeds. The rights I'm talking about are the rights in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights; rights that (ostensibly) are included with your humanity. Rights that, if or when violated, justify the seeking of reparations or retribution.

Let's dwell on the Declaration of Independence (hereafter, "DoI"), for it's fairly crucial to the discussion at hand. The DoI lists the rights to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as "inalienable", endowed to all men by their "Creator". If a government violates these rights, the DoI argues that it is not only the privilege of those such governed to "alter or abolish" that government, but their duty.

That "right to revolution" is crucial to the discussion here. I'd agree that it's good when these conditions exist (when men have life, liberty, and the ability to pursue their own happiness), i.e. if we were drawing up a perfect world, men would have those abilities. That's not the point at discussion. Instead, we're asking if the Bible gives all men those rights and, when they're violated, the right, nay, responsibility to rebel against such a tyrannical government.  

And the answer is clearly "No." You may think that the Declaration's wording proves that America is a Christian nation. Many have made that exact argument. The only problem is that the DoI's claim -- God endows us with inalienable rights -- isn't a Christian worldview. It's not a Christian argument. It's simply not Biblical; it's a misinformed belief Christians should avoid.

This issue is criminally underdiscussed and widely misunderstood. The crux of this argument, in fact, the crux of this problem, is the failure to grasp the fact that individual rights aren't something God-given. Again, this may seem counterintuitive. Perhaps you've never stopped to question it: "Does the Bible support an inherent right to life? Does our creation in God's image necessitate a right to liberty? Or a pursuit of happiness?" The concept we have of rights is intensely individualistic (I'd chalk that up to our national American persona, but that's just gratuitous). Rights in the DoI context give each person their own meaning, their own individualistic value. Value that's housed in themselves, rather than in their relationship with God. "But wait," you object, "it literally reads 'endowed by their Creator'." Are they? Let's discuss.

Easiest to begin with is the "pursuit of happiness". The DoI, with its focus on individual rights and freedoms, claims that this right is among those endowed to each man by his Creator. In other words, every man and woman is free to determine for themselves what happiness means to them. This aligns, of course, with the freedom of religion enshrined in the First Amendment. As long as it doesn't interfere with the equal rights of your countrymen, you're free to pursue and believe whatever you like. This is a fundamental piece of the American founding and the freedoms we enjoy today, but it's nowhere close to a Biblical doctrine.

For the Bible is not libertarian. Believers are not free to act however they like. Their happiness is not their final goal. Instead, we are commanded-- commanded to trust in Christ for salvation (Acts 16:31). He is the only way; there is no other option (John 14:6). Believers are commanded to walk in love by the Spirit (Gal 5:16-26), being imitators of God (Eph 5), and to teach the Gospel through all the world (Matt 28:16-20). Happiness in a truly Biblical sense isn't some sense of personal fulfillment. It's not a determination each individual gets to find for themselves. Instead, believers find true happiness in following and living for God (Psalm 37:4). 

We're obligated to approach this discussion with some nuance. Carefully understand what I'm saying here. It's not unBiblical that the DoI and Constitution grant us this right. It doesn't contradict any tenet of the Christian faith. At the same time, neither is it Biblical. It is extra-Biblical; it is neutral. In clearer words, the right to pursue personal happiness is not some transcendental human right. It is not some prerogative bestowed upon you through your status as an image-bearer of God. And if someone violates that right, they have not (necessarily) sinned against you. 

I hope you see where this is leading. You are not endowed with your right to pursue personal happiness by your Creator, you receive it from our man-made government. You are not entitled to moral reparations if someone violates this right. You may be entitled to legal recourse under the American legal system, but (shocker!) the American legal system is not inspired by God. 

The right to liberty illustrates this even more clearly. Reason with me for a moment. The DoI claims that liberty is an "inalienable right" that "all men" are endowed with "by their Creator". If this were true, slavery (the deprivation of liberty) would be always, inherently wrong. However, Paul's letters indicate otherwise. In Ephesians, Paul is writing to Christian slaves and Christian masters. If slavery was such a clear human rights violation, you'd expect him to instruct the believing masters to release their slaves, giving them back the liberty with which they were endowed by their Creator. But does he? Quite the opposite! Instead, he instructs the slaves to obey their masters all the more, for "whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free" (Eph 6:5-9). Not only that; Paul makes the exact same point a second time in a second letter (1 Tim 6:1-2). 

I hope that's enough to demonstrate the point. Other instances (Lev 25:44, for example) illustrate that while slavery certainly isn't good, it's not the inherently wrong violation of "inalienable rights" the DoI would seem to indicate. So does Paul's entire letter to Philemon. (Slavery is bad, especially racially motivated, pejorative slavery and the abuses that accompany it. Please don't presume anything I'm saying suggests otherwise). The point is not ‘the Bible condones slavery, therefore contradicts the DoI’. Rather, passages such as Ephesians and Philemon’s relationship with Onesimus reinforce the idea that a Biblically structured relationship between ‘man’ and ‘man’ far surpasses our earthly class considerations, such as ‘master’ and ‘slave’, which is the greater point. Paul clearly understands that our earthly conditions are brief and unimportant, meaningless in the context of eternal life. And “earthly conditions” includes your legal rights in the United States.

But that's not the only basis of this argument. The Scriptural prescriptions for a Christian's relationship with government are several, but nowhere do we find a mandated responsibility (or even the permission to) overthrow a right-infringing government. Take the most famous example of all in Paul's letter to the Romans. Writing to believers in Rome soon after Nero became emperor, Paul writes, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment" (Rom 13:1-2). Nero's mistreatment of Christians is well known, and he might be the one eventually responsible for Paul's martyrdom. Nero was constantly violating Roman Christians' lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness. Yet Paul instructs believers to respect their government, not overthrow it. This is almost exactly opposed to what the DoI claims to be our God-given responsibility. 

These aren't the only examples. It's difficult to provide a holistic NT theology of individual rights in these few paragraphs, but I hope that's enough to illustrate the point. It's time to bring this towards a conclusion. So what? How does any of this matter? 

This is a crucial foundation to the Christian Nationalism conversation we're about to embark on. Your Constitutional rights are not God-given. Frankly, that should be obvious, but it's something we don't often take the time to consider. Instead, your rights are given to you by the American government (specifically, the Constitution). Again, I'll stress the distinction between extra-Biblical and anti-Biblical. These rights are not anti-Biblical; they do not contradict Biblical teaching. In fact, I believe it's good that our government provides and protects these rights. But your Constitutional rights are extra-Biblical (i.e. not found in the Bible). We must view them less as some tenet of the Christian tradition (because they're not) and more as ... merely the way in which our government is set up. Effective? Clearly. Good? I believe so. But inspired by God? Endowed by the Creator? Definitely not. 

the Father almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible….”

A couple of months ago, I installed Substack. I didn’t know much about Substack before installing it and after having used it (as a reader not a writer), I still don’t know much about it. Nevertheless, downloading it and entering the stream of inchoate thoughts intensified a sentiment I had been ruminating on for some time. I think if there is any conclusion to be drawn from the proliferation of content in our age it is that most of everyone has not much to say. Everyone is a writer and not many people have anything worth writing. Everyone has opinions and not many people have opinions worth eight cents. Everyone has something to say and, at the same time, nothing to say. In other words, giving everyone a platform has made us (or, rather, me) realize that no one really deserves one. 

I am, of course, nothing but a hypocrite in saying this. I am writing my opinion of other people’s writing. Who is to say mine is better? This isn’t to say I think everyone should stop writing. Quite the contrary, actually, but that is a subject for another time. Nevertheless, what I would like to lay out here is something that I would hardly say is my opinion. In fact, it is probably the opposite of an opinion. My point in this bit of writing is to ask, what is the point of all these opinions? What is the point of all these ruminations? Is there a point? It should go without saying that more people attempting intelligent discourse is a good and necessary thing. At the same time, we must also ask about the excess. Where does this philosophy lead? Surely the endless discourse must have an end. They say the pen is mightier than the sword. But at least both pen and sword have a point.

While I was an undergraduate, I once set out to write a poem about how much I hate libraries. Happily, it never saw the light of day. In any case, I still maintain the sentiment. I understand why libraries exist. I know their value and I will champion for their persistence. Nevertheless, libraries are some of the strangest places on earth. If they are not strange, they are at least quite funny. It is the only place where you can find people arguing against burning books next to books that ought to be burned. They are the only place on earth where the heretic and the heresiologist stand next to each other. In times past, only a gallows would bring them together. I once came across Augustine’s Confessions right next to a book on Queer Theory in Augustine. I understand the system that brings these books together, but is it not a strange thing? It is as if they were placed to cancel each other out. It is this simple proximity that seems to be the first whiff of the carrion of thought. A proliferation of this sort of commentation leads to a dilution. When everyone must have their take, everything is taken away. To put my point a bit more bluntly, I will not deny the Queer Theorist of Augustine their platform. I would only maintain their platform belongs in hell. 

The strange habit of this age is to debate on settled matters. It seems that whatever persuasion one might be there are an endless set of thinkers and apologists ready to defend it. My recent perusal into Substack confirmed this. Any religion, habit, philosophy, or theory has its own community, served up by an algorithm eager to feed its bloating children. In our day and age, the Devil has a thousand advocates. This is really quite unfortunate since the Devil had his own day in court and no amount of arguing will ever put him back in Heaven. This activity of debating on settled matters, of exhuming Augustine to put him on some modern perverse trail, is more than just wrong, it is the death of philosophy. The virginal search for dialectic wisdom ends in the fog of opinions, and the young man falls out of the window because he fell asleep while listening. 

Perhaps I simply do not have the patience to listen to every nuanced opinion from the latest heretic. Perhaps libraries are really quite benign things never meant to be taken as seriously as I have here. In any case, no matter what one thinks about the current state of public philosophy, it is quite clear that philosophy still must end. Philosophy, taken here to mean the original “love of wisdom”, is no good if you don’t actually get wisdom in the end. The dialectic is worthless if, at the end of the day, one cannot distinguish between the good and the bad. Taken simply, the end of philosophy lies in dogma. In our age, no philosophy really ends in dogma, and thus dies in its own apathy. In previous ages, perverse philosophy at least had the strength to get there, even if it was quite bad dogma. But no matter what, philosophy must end in dogma. It must end in a clear definition or it has failed. And this I will hold is one of the greatest feats of Christianity in the last two millenia. Christianity gave us a dogma. A dogma that has stood beneath the stars in all those millenia since her founding. Inviolate in all the violent waves of shifting opinion. Christianity has a philosophy and the philosophy gave us a dogma and the dogma is a creed. A creed that was true when it was first penned and will be true until every one of us lies in the earth and our flesh has rotted off our bones. 

Much can be said about the immensity of thought in the ecumenical creeds. Much can be said about the power of the simple creed uniting a truly universal faith. I would only point out that the simple words of the Nicean creed have a way of satisfying all the previous human thought. The simple words, “I believe in God the Father… the Son, Consubstantial with the Father,... and the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father,” stand at a sort of fork in human philosophy. In a way, all the metaphysics of the philosophers are answered and finally settled. Much can still be said about Nicea and the metaphysical implications of its formulation. I only posit here that the conversation is no longer an open question. Orthodoxy has clear definitions. Philosophy has ended in a dogma, and the dogma brings life. 

I believe in one God,

the Father almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God,

born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried,

and rose again on the third day

in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead

and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

- G.K. Chesterton

I once heard of a boy (about 16 or 17) who wanted a motorcycle. But above all, he wanted his father's approval and made the prudent choice of asking his father not only for permission but also for his opinion. The father, being as prudent as his son (prudence being a product of synergy if not hereditary), told him to write out all the ways owning a motorcycle might bring glory to God. The son, seeing the wisdom in such a task, went out and attempted it. Later, he came back and informed his father he decided he didn't want a motorcycle. The exact reason he changed his mind is a bit unclear to me, though I make the reasonable inference the son was unable to see how God might be glorified in his motorcycle and therefore concluded it was not worth having. Both persons in this parable are commendable. Both are prudent and in the end, both did the right thing. However, where my commendation of this story ends is at the moment when the son was unable to find a way God might be glorified in his owning a motorcycle. Though I have no deference to motorcycles in themselves, I do have deference to theology and even the theology of motorcycles. Therefore, I will defend what the son could not. I will defend motorcycles even when they cannot defend themselves and when they seemingly have no one to defend them. 

While the phrase, "theology of motorcycles" seems to serve no other purpose than to amuse (and in some cases offend) pious minds, it in fact has another purpose. If we ask how a motorcycle might glorify God, the grins and sarcasm can begin. But if we ask a synonymous and more serious question, "how can a small thing glorify God?" We cannot grin and chuckle over it. It is a dreadfully serious question. If we ask "how can one small thing glorify such a large thing?" then not only are we apt to drop all forms of insincerity, but we also see how, with regards to the question, we have a lot in common with motorcycles. In fact, in a real sense, a motorcycle is a far holier thing than us. A motorcycle cannot sin. We can, have, and do. It does not take a complicated analysis to see how a sinful thing has more difficulty glorifying God than a thing that cannot sin. A motorcycle can fall over but the human would (and did) fall further than the motorcycle ever could. Nevertheless, it is not my aim to sink humanity lower than motorcycles. It is not even my aim to defend motorcycles in particular. As a mode of transportation, I find them to have a paltry utility. However, if I am to do anything at all, it is to explain how small things glorify big things and show how, if motorcycles do not glorify God, nothing does. 

In the morning of the world, we are told "God saw everything that He made, and behold, it was very good." Why was it good? It was good because God had made it. The birds, the rocks, and the trees were all good. Is there not a discernable sense in which this original goodness was the first way in which God was glorified? It is said that the first created frog exclaimed, "Lord, how you made me jump!" Is not this almost child-like picture of Creation a form of glorification? God made the frog jump and the frog likes jumping. God made the fish swim and the fish likes swimming. God made the birds fly and the birds like flying. God made the first man live, but does this man like living? Before there were temples, churches, idols, and liturgy, God was glorified by the frogs jumping, the fish swimming, and birds flying. He was glorified because these things were good and the simple Creation obeyed the divine imagination. It would be a very odd thing if God gave the birds wings but the birds were too afraid to use them because they couldn't figure out how that honored God. To the birds, he gave the sky, to the fish, he gave the sea, and to man, he gave all these things. In the beginning, God gave man the earth, and is not God glorified when man uses his God-given faculties to esteem as good the things God had already deemed good? We may say that God gave man an imagination so that man could appreciate the divine imagination. In the first picture of the world we see the riddle that laughs from the pages of the Levitical Law first laughed in the Garden of Eden. It's the laugh of the newly formed frog and the laugh of Adam rejoicing in the frog jumping. This is the bliss of Eden that Milton describes and why pure obedient innocence is fundamentally God-glorifying. 

There is some undetected irony in the first five books of the Bible. It is unclear whether the actors and authors were aware of this irony. I have a suspicion that several of them did. If it is not an irony it is at the very least a technical curiosity when God makes rocks and men use rocks to make an altar to worship God. I wonder if the more sensitive actors in the story were aware of this puzzle of cattle God made being sacrificed for God. It is these more sensitive and thoughtful actors we see saying things like, "Sacrifice and burnt offerings thou didst not require." Nevertheless, God still required it, in a sense. God still commanded men to take stones and build an altar. God still commanded His creation to take other parts of His creation and use them to worship His name. This summary will lead to a misunderstanding of my point if the oversimplification is taken too far. The distinction between holy things and unholy things does exist, but the point is, whether holy or unholy, the substance is still God's. "In Him we live and move and have our being," says the Apostle. God commands worship and God provides means of worship. 

This fundamental question of substance is what drives our current inquiry. Is the substance of a motorcycle of a type capable of glorifying God? Does a motorcycle have the substantial properties capable of increasing the glory of God and the furtherance of the gospel? And here we come to a question that lies at the end of a string of more terrible questions. We must be more honest than this. Before asking whether motorcycles glorify God, we must ask if I am glorifying God. Is the substance of my life of a type capable of glorifying God? Is the substance of my schedule of a type capable of glorifying God? Is the substance of my work, relationships, time, energy, possessions, and anything else I come into contact with of a type that can substantially increase the glorification of God? Any man serious about the glory of God must ask himself these things. Any one who has ever sought to do something big for God must stand up under the wind of these blistering questions. And within this howling wilderness we are faced within only two options, either nothing glorifies God, or everything does. 

There are two wrong ways of thinking about the world. The first is to think it is divine. The second is to think it isn't divine. The sin of paganism was worshipping the earth. The sin of Gnosticism was thinking the earth wasn't something worth worshiping. You can either take the world so seriously you worship it, or you can despise it so much you hate it. You can either see under every leaf the face of a god to be venerated or a demon to be expurgated. It is exactly this horrible dichotomy that the Incarnation of Our Lord cured. The Incarnation of Christ positively asserts that flesh is flesh and flesh is good. Food is food and food is good. Ordinary things, bread, wine, mustard seeds, pennies, and yes, even mundane means of transportation like donkeys are things in which the Kingdom of God is advanced. It is within these horribly common images of a supper with friends or a mother, a father, and an infant that the image of God comes to us. And I sometimes fancy that if Christ had come to an age such as ours, with all our foibles and misguided pieties, palm leaves and shouts of hosanna might be offered up to a man, a single man, humble and mounted on a Yamaha TTR 230. 

If the reader will bear with me in a little more foolishness, I'd like to underscore the practical points of my thesis. The glory of God is in humble things. There is nothing more humble than an infant and nothing more small than a mustard seed. Yet in these things is salvation. Perhaps next time when we come to ask ourselves "will this increase the glory of God?" we must humbly assent that only through God can we glorify God. And then, like little children, laugh at being alive, free from carrying the crippling weight of glory. 

Republicans and Democrats each have their problems with Mamdani. Mainstream Democrats remain, for the most part, leery of so openly tearing down the comfort of our free-market system, along with the alienation of important wealthy donors that accompanies it. More pragmatically, Democrats, with an anxious eye towards 2026 and 2028, are desperately trying to shed themselves of the more extremist wings of the left that the nation clearly rejected in the 2024 election. Republicans, on the other hand, have resorted to somewhat less thoughtful criticisms. Florida Representative Randy Fine publicly called for Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, to be deported to Uganda. Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles' comment, posted from his official grey-check account, was even more reprehensible. Notable Republicans have endorsed Cuomo, the former Democratic governor of New York now running as an independent, over the actual Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa. Perhaps surprisingly, this notably included President Donald Trump, for whom Cuomo's unsavory history was so compelling as to warrant an endorsement with a Republican candidate still in the field.  

But we shouldn't be freaking out over the impending communist takeover of NYC. Why not? This is how our system is supposed to work. 

The voters in NYC democratically chose Mr. Mamdani to be their mayor. He was clear about his positions and beliefs (he ran possibly one of the most public-facing campaigns in recent memory, certainly for a mayoral election). He is a citizen of the US and a resident of NYC, and he convinced his fellow NYC residents to elect him mayor. If our American system is going to work (as it has, successfully, for over two centuries) we have to be able to trust the denizens of NYC to vote for their own mayor. And if not? They will face the consequences of their own actions. 

Two points about Mamdani's economically progressive agenda: first, he's unable to enact these sweeping reforms by himself. He's going to have to work together with the city Council and state government, especially when it comes to issues like raising taxes. Again, this is the system functioning as intended: NYC's system of checks and balances protects it from radical table-upending change, while allowing the people to elect representatives they wish. Mamdani's revolutionary effect is likely to be more muted than some might expect. Second, this is what NYC voted for. They wanted a socialist mayor, and that's what they're going to get. If (and when) some of his policies backfire, they can blame no one but themselves. He certainly wasn't reticent about his plans for the city. If it's a disaster, NYC can correct its mistake four years from now. But it follows from the concept of "government by the people" that if the people want socialism, they should be able to try it. 

There's one final point I believe bears discussion. When you vote for a politician, you are choosing a person, not a policy platform. You are choosing someone to represent you.  Usually, you're going to want someone with whom you agree on major policy points, but that's not the only qualification for an elected official. It's undeniable that you also want quality people -- people you can trust -- running your government, even if that often seems unrealistically optimistic. Mamdani has at least two steps on Cuomo in the Decent Person department. First, of course, is that he was never forced to resign as governor of New York due to having sexually harassed eleven women. (This is tangential to the topic at hand, but I marvel at how disorganized the post-Obama Democratic party remains as to be utterly incapable of running even a decent candidate in crucial elections. The bar is extremely low.) Second, forgive me for being swayed by a talented politician, but it's clear that Mamdani actually cares more about the city than Cuomo. Mamdani has put in the work required to win this election; he has canvassed up and down the city and inspired record voter turnout. It certainly appears that he genuinely wants to make NYC more affordable, even if most of his policies will do exactly the opposite. But here's the thing: he doesn't have to convince you or me. Unless you live and vote in New York City, in which case you get what you vote for. 

Good mayor or not, the point stands: the people of NYC are receiving the American dream: governing themselves. They have no excuses if this goes badly. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. But even if it does: take heart: America is resilient enough to survive it. For the system was not designed to prevent bad people from ever taking office. Goodness knows it hasn't achieved that. But it was designed (and has succeeded) to protect us when it happened. So while it's fair to be cautious about Mamdani's policies, we should, as Curtis Sliwa did, gracious in defeat, wish him good luck as he pilots the largest city in the nation. 

Before we can safely say what conservatism is not, it behooves us to spend a few moments discussing what exactly conservatism is. Conservatism has been defined at great length, by wiser men than I. It's a discussion well worth having, and at length, but not here. In short, it's a strong appreciation for what the past generations of society have built, along with the realization that these foundations cannot be taken for granted and must be defended (conserved), accompanied by the acknowledgments of objective reality, a moral order, and (importantly) that all men are fundamentally flawed. Sowell and Kirk have both pointed out that the fundamental conflict in political thought is whether man is naturally good or capable of becoming good or man is fundamentally, irredeemably flawed. Conservatism flows from the understanding that the latter is the case; hence, limited government as opposed to the welfare state's attempt to create a (deemed impossible) social utopia. Particularly, the conservatism threatened today (the conservatism we must conserve) is uniquely American, commonly referred to as Constitutional conservatism: the recognization that our status as the greatest experiment in democracy is reliant upon the rule of Constitutional law and the rights it grants to all of us (free speech, free assembly, bearing arms, etc) as well as the governmental framework it lays out (especially the separation of powers between the three branches). 

Perhaps no administration has shown as little regard for the law and the Constitution as the current one. Such instances are (truly) too many to list, but consider Trump's every effort to overthrow the 2020 election (capped by telling the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" thousands of votes), wilfully retaining classified documents, and open defiance of the Supreme Court and Congress (including, but not limited to, the TikTok ban, illegal deportations, and illegal tariffs) as obvious examples. Even recently, Trump's FCC has pressured different media networks to remove programming critical of the president. Trump's defense in all these instances has never been that he "may" do these things. It is that he "could". Or, "should". But if we are to retain the Constitutional republic it's our privilege to enjoy, one man's (even several men's) agenda cannot take precedence over the law. Although MAGA can be called many things, "conservative" should certainly not be one of them. 

The common distinction between 'political conservatism' and 'moral' or 'social conservatism' isn't helpful either. If you mean the Christian moral order (or Judeo-Christian, or whatever flavor you prefer), that's a result of personal religious conviction (ideally, of saving faith and the indwelling of the Spirit). The works themselves are meaningless without faith, and the faith isn't something we can conserve, or pass down through generations. If you mean enforcing that morality on others who don't share those beliefs, that's hardly conservative at all. (There are some, I am sure, who decry the American Founding itself as inordinately liberal and who would prefer a return to such a state, but that hardly adheres to any sort of American or Constitutional conservatism.) Venezuela is not somehow more conservative just because it doesn't allow same-sex marriage. Regardless, MAGA is disqualified from having this discussion at all, since their figurehead is a twice-divorced serial adulterer who is on tape revelling in his sexual abuses of young women and swindles his constituents into buying Bibles with his name on them. In other words, MAGA can't claim to still be conservative, despite their Peronist and Schmittian tendencies, just because they lean "right" on hot-button moral issues such as gay marriage or transgenderism. That's not what makes someone conservative.

We're seeing this shift in real time. Progressives, concerned (justifiably) by the abuses of the Trump administration, have stumbled on the realization that unchecked governmental power might sometimes be bad (a conservative reaction!); all this with their support of gay rights unchanged. Conversely, the broader MAGA movement, while thumping the Bible just as much as ever, has left its claimed adherence to limited Constitutional governance far in the rearview mirror. If anything, MAGA has served as the final rebuttal to J.S. Mill's epigram, "Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." People (stupid or not) are not born conservatives, but they are born populist. They like to be flattered. Praised. Coddled. They like their heads scratched; they like watching the keys jingled. Because people (stupid and otherwise) are flawed. Inherently and irreparably. No one defaults to a principled, conservative ideology. Like so many things, conservatism is a privilege, not a right. 

Hence the frustration with the broader culture's use of the term 'conservatism'. The MAGA movement is not conservative. The current Republican administration, with its protectionist economics and openly authoritarian rhetoric, is not conservative. Conservatism, rightly understood, is a label worth claiming and a philosophy worth defending. Let's not dignify the MAGA crowd by calling them "conservative."