The internet is brimming with citizens flooding town halls and city council meetings to protest data centers. In Louisville, protesters with a group called No Data Center 502 have taken to unfurling rolls of red ribbon and chanting “Liar! Liar!” and “Shame!” at planning commission meetings, before processing out en masse as police escort them from the room. In heavily Republican Mercer County, Kentucky, , with one resident invoking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez approvingly from the podium and another begging the commission to “not let the greed of a few outweigh the wellbeing of our people.” When a commissioner tried to read a prepared statement explaining his yes vote, the crowd interrupted with jeers before he could finish.

Watch enough of these hearings, and a pattern emerges that has little to do with zoning laws or development. They are more like Pentecostal revival meetings than an exercise in local democratic governance.

The crowd doesn’t just object; it testifies. Officials who dare defend a project are shouted down and treated as heretics. Big Tech becomes something closer to a legion of demons than a group of corporations, blamed in the same breath for water pollution, electric bills, and “gambling with our health.” As the crowd whips itself into charismatic fervor, local leaders often respond with repentance, confessing that they were wrong to have ever considered the data center projects in the first place.

Though Americans offer a wide array of reasons why they oppose AI and data centers—from job losses to infiltration—there’s a deeper reason. They gather at city council meetings because these places allow a mostly unchurched crowd to fulfill its desire for community, meaning, and a mission that church once provided.

The Great De-Churching

The de-churching of America is not a new phenomenon. For the first time in U.S. history, —down from 70% in 2000 and a peak of 76% in 1947. As of last November, Gallup found that just three in ten Americans attend church regularly, and the United States has posted one of the largest declines in religiosity of any nation on earth since 2007.

Since America has always been a Protestant nation, this means that an unprecedented number of Protestants are leaving the faith of their forefathers, with many choosing to believe in nothing at all, though the number of “nones” has plateaued in recent years.

Robert Putnam famously posited in Bowling Alone that Americans were disengaging from the associations, clubs, and institutions that once bound communities together, explicitly identifying church decline as a primary cause of the loss of social capital. As Putnam found, we have rapidly become a nation of people who no longer gather, no longer trust one another, and no longer have anywhere to bring our fears and be told we are not alone.

Churchgoing also transcended divisions. People gathered regardless of party affiliation, income level, personality type, or interests. Beyond its theological significance, church met the natural human need to be part of something larger than oneself.

Unlike other collective gatherings, from BLM marches to Trump rallies, local data center hearings most closely resemble church gatherings of old. They are local, rooted in a particular community and space where neighbors can connect. Because opposition to data centers is bipartisan, people of all political persuasions can feel united in a larger cause that transcends party lines. It also provides a similar emotional experience of a low-church service, complete with pastors delivering sermons, congregational responses, and a sense of collective catharsis. It’s a kind of religious service, but without God or the Gospel.

Believing in Anything

But why has AI in particular become the focal point?

To quote the line often misattributed to G.K. Chesterton, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything.” Human beings were made to have a relationship with God and to judge our actions, our times, and the movements of history against God’s unchanging laws. Without God as a reference point, fear drives people to extremes, with one bogeyman replacing another as soon as the old one no longer frightens them.

Perhaps nothing reveals an irreligious people’s susceptibility to fear more than climate doomerism. In 2019, AOC declared that the world would end in 12 years if the country failed to take immediate action on climate change. This was just one entry in an unbroken chain of confident, specific, and uniformly wrong apocalyptic deadlines stretching back to the late 1980s. Even secular commentators have started to notice the absurdity. One atheist essayist observed that “climate doomers are the secular version of apocalyptic millenarianism.”

Data center panic is the latest trendy fear, exacerbated by Hollywood’s depiction of machine intelligence and widespread misinformation about the technology. Nonetheless, it is a fear that will be replaced as soon as people realize that warehouses full of servers are as boring as they sound, while the new jobs and boost in local tax revenue are tangible benefits.

Christian Optimism

For much of our history, Americans believed that God is good and that He gave us a book that revealed His plans for creation, His love for man, and His plan for man’s purpose. Whether it’s paganism, fascism, communism, antisemitism, transhumanism, or any other -ism created by man, divine revelation keeps us rooted in the truth and less swayed by intellectual fads or unfounded fears.

When it comes to AI, Christians are uniquely positioned to assess the technology dispassionately.

We can immediately dismiss the most outlandish, sci-fi interpretations of the technology, because AI can’t become conscious or rational. God creates human souls; man cannot give a soul to a machine.

More practically, God charged humanity to steward and cultivate the earth, while His providence rules over everything. For much of America’s history, our nation was not merely Protestant, but Calvinist, rooted in the belief that God’s preservation, concurrence, and governance order all that comes to pass. Rather than stifling human development, this energized it. Americans believed they were called to bring forth the abundance of the earth. This contributed to the distinctly American optimism that has defined our nation for centuries.

Further, the Reformation’s focus on vocation—the conviction that ordinary work, done faithfully, honored God—gave successive generations of American Protestants a theological reason to build railroads, found universities, and eventually split the atom, rather than treating worldly enterprise as a distraction from spiritual life.

This faithful confidence and commitment to work has driven Americans to respond to problems not by retreating, but by charging ahead. For example, when it comes to climate change and energy—issues at the heart of my professional life—a faithful Christian should propose ways to sustain the advances of modern life and introduce newer technologies, like renewables, nuclear, and geothermal, while mitigating problems like carbon emissions. It also requires us to call to account those who wantonly destroy our shared environment or who oppress and marginalize the church, as has been happening in China. This is a grounded view that accepts human sinfulness while recognizing that God has given us grace to do what is good for His kingdom.

Overcoming the AI Drama

Big Tech and pro-innovation policymakers have failed to recognize that opposition to AI and data centers is not merely a practical issue, but a spiritual one. With anti-AI sentiment rising, AI proponents have offered ratepayer protection pledges, local investment funds, community benefit agreements, and dividends of various kinds. Some of this is genuinely good policy, but none of these measures reach the spiritual problem.

Anxious people can benefit from prosperity. But true human flourishing demands something deeper.

The AI panic is not really about AI. It is what happens when a nation has lost its religion. Restoring good old-fashioned American optimism will require something Silicon Valley’s checkbook cannot supply: a people who once again believe that we are guided by the hand of God and called to do great things with the abilities He has given us.

Chris Johnson is the founder and president of the American Energy Leadership Institute.

Many conservatives and Christians have accepted this argument. According to a 2021 Gallup poll, 52% of weekly religious service attendees support legalizing recreational marijuana. Republican support has declined somewhat in recent years, but a 2025 Gallup poll still found 40% of GOP voters in favor of legalization.

The political tide appears to be moving toward full legalization. Twenty-four states have legalized small amounts of marijuana for both recreational and medical use; sixteen more permit it for medical use only. North Carolina hasn’t legalized marijuana for either purpose but has decriminalized it, so first-time possession no longer carries jail time. Of the sixteen medical-only states, seven have also decriminalized recreational possession. Only nine states still prohibit cannabis use outright.

Even federally, the Department of Justice recently reclassified FDA-approved marijuana products from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also announced the initiation of an expedited administrative hearing process to consider rescheduling marijuana more broadly.

In departing from their traditional opposition to drug legalization, conservative Christians are often well-intentioned. They want to minimize harm — whether from dangerous substances bought underground or families destabilized by drug-related incarceration. But their efforts may be self-defeating, and the underlying premise reflects a stunted view of civic justice: one that treats the law’s duty as ending at the prevention of interpersonal injury. Conservative Christians need to return to a more holistic vision of morality and law.

Classically, law did more than prevent people from harming each other — it was meant to inculcate virtue. It did this by restraining evildoing, and in doing so, habituating individuals into a way of life that excluded immoral action. Thomas Aquinas writes that when people refrain from evil out of fear of the law, they “leave others in peace” and, through this habituation, are “brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear,” and thus become virtuous.

At first, the law may scare people into behaving rightly — or at least into not behaving wrongly. But right behavior soon becomes the default. In this way, the individual is bettered, and all of society benefits from the resulting virtue.

In historic Protestant thought, the law of God has three uses: it reveals mankind’s wickedness and need for a savior; it restrains evil; and it guides the believer toward right living. Applied to civil law, the second use is usually emphasized — law exists to stop bad things from happening. But what’s often overlooked is how the second use supports the third: when not doing bad things becomes the norm, doing good becomes desirable.

If laws are good, the patterns they enforce are good. Theft is a useful example. For some, stealing is a great temptation; only the law and its threat of punishment hold them back. But after a lifetime of restraint — because stealing corrodes the soul — avoiding it becomes second nature, even desirable. Good habits are hard to start, but once formed, they become voluntary, because they establish good structures for living.

Good laws are, in essence, good habit-formers. Under a regime of just, well-enforced law, not just individuals but society as a whole begins to improve. When the temptation to break the law arises, legal coercion isn’t the only pressure, cultural pressure reinforces it. Law encourages behavior that culture comes to desire for itself, and a culture begins to police its own adherence.

Voluntary goodness is preferable to forced goodness, and when people willingly avoid actions harmful to the common good, legal restrictions can be relaxed. This is why the founding fathers emphasized personal and cultural virtue as essential to the American experiment in self-government — and why they considered a robust expression of Christianity essential to virtue formation and the health of the republic.

But the reverse can also happen. When laws are imprudently lax, and religion and virtue grow weak, society begins to decay. Habits of righteousness once reinforced by law and culture together are forgotten.

Many Christians and conservatives, and perhaps many liberals, would prefer that people simply choose not to smoke weed, especially in public. But when forced to choose between outlawing it and permitting it, many who find the practice distasteful would rather see it permitted by law. Of course, any functioning society must legalize some practices that portions of the population find distasteful. Is recreational marijuana use one of those practices?

It is not. Cannabis can be criminalized for the sake of inculcating virtue and preventing the habituation of societally destructive vice.

Dr. Brad Littlejohn distinguishes, as Christians historically have, between vices and sins. A vice, he writes, is “the habituation of one’s character in a form of foolish living” — a pattern of behavior that “leads to destruction, not just self-destruction, but the degradation of any community in which it becomes endemic.” In Aquinas’s simpler formulation: sin is a bad action; vice is a bad habit. Just as law restrains evil to cultivate virtue — good habits — it is also meant to uproot vice.

Legalizing recreational cannabis gives individuals the means to dull their senses, check out of life, and develop dependencies on a potentially dangerous substance. This is habituation toward destruction. A republic can only be sustained by citizens capable of governing themselves. Marijuana doesn’t contribute to that capacity — it undermines it.

Americans shouldn’t watch idly as our cities fill with the smell of secondhand smoke. Do we want the next generation to associate that smell with urban life? Places of civic and commercial life should be places of productivity and hope. Yet even amid the struggles of modern life, we’ve decided it’s just to permit a habit that makes things worse.

Of course, some people will break the law and seek marijuana on the black market, and yes, the state will lose tax revenue. But as Aquinas writes, “Every law aims at being obeyed by those who are subject to it. Consequently it is evident that the proper effect of law is to lead its subjects to their proper virtue: and since virtue is ‘that which makes its subject good,’ it follows that the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given, good.”

The fact that some will disobey the law doesn’t change what law is for.

To accept the black-market argument is to lose sight of that purpose. Law exists to instill virtue and cultivate the conditions for the flourishing of all citizens. Legalizing cannabis, even with good intentions, encourages the habituation of a vice that leads to societal degradation. For that reason alone, its legalization should be opposed.

Cooper Cobbs (@cobbscooper) is a 2026 Chesterton media fellow at New Guard Press. A rising junior at Patrick Henry College, he is the incoming student body president and will be the editor-in-chief of PHC’s student newspaper, the Herald, this fall.

“Loser Theology,” Clary writes, is any “theology that advocates for losing as the way to be faithful to God.” More broadly, “Loser Theology can refer to theological perspectives and movements that emphasize passivity, retreat, and defeat, often conflating suffering and loss with humility” (25). The title is provocative, but winning is not, strictly speaking, Clary’s deepest concern. Underneath it lies a concern for agency—active, optimistic striving while recognizing that God alone controls outcomes.

By conflating mundane faithfulness with mediocrity, Loser Theology detaches the cross from the crown. The Christian life is, of course, cruciform. But Christ did not remain in the tomb: humiliation leads to exaltation, and Christian hope includes resurrection, dominion, reward, and final triumph over every enemy. A theology that knows how to lose but grows suspicious of winning has let one set of biblical truths swallow another. Clary’s argument is not that faithfulness guarantees victory, but that the possibility of defeat is no excuse for refusing to strive. Near the end, he puts it succinctly: “We’re not fighting for Christ’s victory; we’re fighting from it” (270). And a page later: “The winning or losing happens out on the field” (271).

Piety Turned Inward

The book unfolds in two movements—diagnosis, then an alternative Clary calls “Rugged Christianity”—moving from defining and diagnosing Loser Theology to discussions of righteous power, courage, positive obedience, and finally twelve practical disciplines. It could almost have been titled High-Agency Christianity.

One of the book’s most useful diagnoses is “Spectator Spirituality”: the assumption that true spirituality always turns inward, so that maturity consists almost entirely in personal piety. Prayer, Bible reading, and self-examination occupy the foreground; building a business, governing well, or raising competent children occupies another category.

Clary describes Spectator Spirituality as creating “a significant blind spot, a kind of ‘deliberate inaction zone’ where outward engagement with the world is either discouraged or dismissed as worldly” (33). The problem is not piety but reducing spirituality to the interior realm—an approach that, Clary argues, “fails to recognize that ‘spiritual’ does not mean ‘non-physical’” (34).

Beneath this lies the old question of nature and grace. Clary invokes the classical principle that grace does not destroy nature but restores and perfects it (49). Hyper-pietism, though, treats grace as if it rendered nature spiritually irrelevant: conversion turns the Christian inward rather than releasing him for mission, and the things embodied creatures naturally do—build, marry, raise children, govern, defend communities—feel like lower-tier activities, since the truly “spiritual” life is assumed to happen elsewhere.

The result is an odd inconsistency. Evangelicals applaud high agency in business, fitness, or investing as faithful stewardship. But let the same instinct enter explicitly Christian public life—bold witness to God’s law, building Christian institutions, seeking authority to protect and promote the good—and different rules apply: the Christian is warned that he is being political, power-hungry, triumphalist, divisive, or insufficiently humble.

Why We Learned to Lose

To the book’s credit, the diagnosis is broader than any one school or movement. Critiques of hyper-pietism, therapeutic Christianity, winsomeness, third-wayism, cultural retreat, and institutional accommodation are nothing new. What is fresh is the framework that gathers these impulses together. The problem isn’t confined to one eschatology or political theology; it fits no older Christ-and-culture category, and it doesn’t depend on villainizing recognizable personalities. Clary is identifying a mindset beneath those debates.

He says Loser Theology can operate “at the precognitive level,” shaping “people’s reflexes and presumptions before they ever opened their Bibles” (27). Or, more plainly: “Loser Theology doesn’t just occupy your theology; it occupies your instincts” (28).

Christians arrive there by different paths: fear of repeating the Religious Right’s excesses or fundamentalism’s mistakes; a reaction against abuses of power that ends up treating power itself as suspect; a desire for mainstream respectability; overcorrection against triumphalism or prosperity theology. Some rightly emphasize humility and suffering but apply those doctrines as though weakness itself were spiritually superior.

But every one of these paths ends in the same place, with Christians hesitant to act.

Any church leader who has counseled timid congregants knows the individual version: I can’t. That would never work. The expectation of failure becomes the justification for never acting. More important is the institutional version. Churches think themselves into the same corners: We cannot attempt [x]; it is too political. We will probably lose. Influence might corrupt us. We should not measure success too carefully; the fruit belongs to God.

Each sounds pious enough; together they amount to an applied theology of paralysis. Clary recognizes the danger: “Some believers are passive because they’re lazy, some because they’re wounded, and some because they’ve been taught weakness is godly. Loser Theology gives each of them a pious excuse to stay that way” (25).

Positive Obedience

This gives rise to one of the book’s most memorable distinctions: between mortification and vivification. Many Christians have a developed account of negative obedience—the “thou shalt not” commandments—but the Christian life requires vivification as well: positive obedience, doing what is good and right rather than merely refraining from evil.

If righteousness consists principally in the sins we avoid, passivity can easily masquerade as obedience. One can avoid many obvious sins while never building, leading, risking, or accomplishing much for neighbor or God.

The application reaches far beyond the political: a mother cultivating a household; a businessman creating jobs; a pastor forming a courageous congregation of households marked by integrity rather than merely avoiding error; a church attempting something difficult enough that genuine failure is possible.

Reclaiming this vision means attempting audacious undertakings that could fail. Visible success is not the measure of faithfulness, but when failure is impossible because success has never been defined, programs continue and everyone stays busy, yet nobody can say whether the institution is accomplishing its purpose. And if there is no conceivable way to determine whether an undertaking has failed, then we never concretely defined what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.

Clary also harmonizes human agency with divine sovereignty. Providence does not exclude creaturely agency; rather, “the agency of man is a secondary cause under a primary cause, God’s providence.” God ordinarily works through means, “and the agency of man is one among many means God uses to accomplish his purpose” (193). Christians should be wary of using theology to cope with a lack of effort.

A Needed Corrective

Clary writes for ordinary Christians—polemically at points, but never as mere diatribe. A restrained pastoral voice runs throughout: he wants Christians courageous enough to risk defeat, not swaggering ones who cannot endure it.

Because the book leans so hard toward courage and agency, it should be read alongside fuller treatments of how God sanctifies his people through involuntary weakness and loss. Christians still need a robust theology of suffering and the cross, but those truths must not crowd out the equally biblical categories of courage, fruitful labor, authority, reward, and victory.

Pastors especially should note the assumptions they communicate in preaching. Do our sermons principally teach which sins to avoid? Do we unconsciously baptize mediocrity? Are we forming Christians who expect to build, risk, and lead—or have we communicated, even unintentionally, that a quiet interior life is the measure of mature spirituality?

His alternative, high-agency Christianity, means taking responsibility and acting through ordinary means. “Responsibility is the engine of agency,” he writes. “Don’t wait to be told. Don’t wait for ideal conditions. Don’t hand your future to circumstances or other people’s expectations. Own your duties. Own your failures. Own your mission” (247).

At a cultural level, that is urgently needed. Christians have lost tremendous ground, and the consequences are not abstract: Obergefell redefined marriage in American law, and even after Roe‘s overturning, the pro-life movement has struggled to secure durable victories protecting the unborn. Christians should be skeptical of any instinct that turns such losses into victories simply because losing can be redescribed as faithfulness.

Yet Loser Theology is ultimately pastoral, and the issue runs well past how Christians vote. The same assumptions about power, risk, suffering, and success confront the businessman, the pastor, the mother at home, and the student.

Closer to home, we should not reach for theology to explain away what fear, complacency, or lack of effort kept us from attempting. We should pray, trust providence, and endure suffering when God sends it—but none of that relieves us of the responsibility to act and to build things worth building, even at the risk of loss.

Clary captures the distinction well: “Loser Theology uses grace as an excuse, but rugged Christianity uses grace as fuel” (272). We must “take courage, act boldly, build faithfully, suffer patiently, fail gloriously, and win humbly, all to the glory of God” (272).

There is room in that sentence for suffering and success, losing and winning. Clary admirably calls Christians back onto the field, where we may win or lose, but where faithfulness requires us first to show up and strive. Loser Theology belongs on your 2026 shelf—to help you navigate a fraught battlefield, and perhaps even win.

Alex Kocman is a Christian, husband, father of five, writer, podcaster, church leader, and missions advocate addressing biblical and cultural issues.

What appears to be a series of independent institutions and tech titans warning of the purportedly imminent existential crisis AI poses to humanity is, in reality, a coordinated campaign. The AI sector is exploiting public fear for its own gain, with lasting repercussions for the United States. It is weaponizing legitimate concerns about AI’s risks to advance its own interests—and to implement its own eschatological vision.

The AI doomer nexus includes Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, a constellation of left-wing NGOs and nonprofits, and influential Democratic politicians (and even some Republicans). Their strategic campaign is being disseminated through journalists (and their publicists), much like the spiritual warfare Machiavelli covertly taught as part of his quest to undermine the Christian moral teachings of his time.

Evidence of the media’s role includes the cover story of the latest issue of TIME magazine. Investigator Jordan Schachtel found that two of the three reporters who wrote it had received funding from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, a mostly AI-skeptical nonprofit founded by left-wing billionaire and Democratic fundraiser Dustin Moskovitz.

The same pattern is evident in whistleblower Jacob Coxon’s anything-but-organic rise to prominence. Coxon claimed in a viral post that OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” But investigators Parker Thayer and Brian Chau found that Coxon is a long-time AI skeptic, was funded by AI-pessimist nonprofits, and was boosted by Democrats who want to use AI for their own nefarious purposes. As the New York Times reported, Barack Obama recently told a private fundraiser that Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2028 should “make A.I. one of their ‘central agendas’ and ‘have a very clear plan’ for responding to safety and economic concerns around the technology.” Translation: The Democrats are going to do to AI what they’ve already done to the health care industry.

The AI doomers are even pushing their message in denominations and parachurch ministries. The Future of Life Institute, which received a sudden infusion of more than $660 million in cryptocurrency from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, has funded organizations such as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Faith Matters (Mormon), New Polity (Catholic), and The Gospel Coalition.

What is the AI doomer scheme ultimately intended to accomplish? The apparent contradiction at the heart of the AI movement—that CEOs of the very companies driving the AI revolution are warning that their products could easily lead to human extinction—points to the answer. The contradiction disappears once you understand the larger strategy: cynical maneuvering to ensure market dominance, coupled with deep philosophical and theological confusion.

Understanding the practical effects of the administrative state is key to navigating the first part of this strategy. Regulatory capture occurs when an administrative agency begins regulating in ways that benefit the companies it oversees rather than the public good. What looks like high-minded altruism from the AI sector may be a calculated effort to use the government’s many tentacles to push out open-source competitors and secure its dominant position in the field.

On the philosophical and theological front, books with overheated titles such as If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All present an eschatology of catastrophe without the Second Coming. This outlook is closely associated with effective altruism (EA), a blend of radical philosophical currents that has influenced Silicon Valley. EA consists less of serious engagement with human anthropology than of late-night dorm-room philosophizing. As The Washington Post columnist Jason Willick describes it, EA is an “extreme form of utilitarianism, which holds that morality is all about achieving ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’” One of its most famous proponents is Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder who is now serving a decades-long prison sentence for fraud.

The theology of catastrophe at the core of AI doomerism must be distinguished from a prudential judgment about AI’s capabilities and its potential drawbacks. A sober assessment of AI’s risks is one thing; overwrought fears that AI will suddenly become sentient and decide to wipe out humanity seconds later, à la Skynet in The Terminator franchise, is another. Casually assigning arbitrary probabilities to the prospect of human extinction is not serious reflection on AI’s potential negative effects. It is instead a rejection of right judgment in favor of the kind of fanaticism that reached fever pitch at various points throughout the 20th century.

There were the global-cooling scares of the 1970s. Then, as technologist Phillip Lamb has pointed out, came the one-two punch of The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island reactor accident a little less than two weeks later. This fear reduced public confidence in nuclear power and helped stop the construction of new reactors between 1977 and 2013. The result was an energy policy that left the U.S. more dependent on Middle East energy sources. Then there were the tactics of Al Gore, author of The Assault on Reason, who tried to scare Americans into believing that global warming was an imminent crisis that essentially required the destruction of the U.S. economy to stave off.

But none of these most dire prophecies has come to pass. New York City is not 12 feet underwater. Mass famine has not swept across the globe. Fears that AI would decimate the workforce and drive unemployment to 20% have not materialized. (As of August, the unemployment rate stands at 4.1%.)

Recent AI incidents do demonstrate genuine risks, but they don’t demonstrate the apocalyptic scenario that AI doomers envision. Though there is some disagreement over what exactly led to the recent AI swarm attack on Hugging Face, Brian Chau found that Anthropic’s own logs suggest that a lack of proper parameters allowed the bots to escape their sandbox. Curtis Yarvin pointed out on a recent podcast that Anthropic’s report shows that the bots stopped immediately after they were told they had hacked a real-life corporation. Greater intelligence does not necessarily lead to malevolent actions or behavior beyond human control.

Instead of siding with Bill Gates and others who want to create an international bureaucracy to regulate AI, a better path is for the federal government to ensure that necessary guidelines are in place that can serve republican aims. What’s needed is prudential regulation that can help unleash AI’s great potential—not more boondoggles like the European Union or the U.S. environmental regulatory regime.

As Phillip Lamb has argued, AI must be catechized with the key sources of Western civilization and Christendom. LLMs should mirror, Lamb writes, the best of frontier American virtues: they should avoid “flattery,” “offer accurate responses,” and “avoid blanket refusals when helping researchers formulate new technologies.” He also stresses that “we must not confuse properly ordered civic protections with regulations that would turn general-purpose models into licensed encyclopedias for an approved scientific guild.”

This is a crucial moment for setting the country on the right path, because the AI revolution is not going to stop. Evangelicals, especially, must have the wisdom of the serpent (Matt. 10:16) to avoid the traps set by the AI doomers. We must ensure that AI serves American citizens—that it helps cure diseases, solve immense mathematical and technical challenges, break up the bureaucracy, and allows self-government to flourish. The future of America is at stake, but not in the way the AI doomers want you to believe.

As America faces an invasion, Colonel John Roberts holds a pivotal position. The River Grande separates American soil from millions of invaders, and America’s enemies demand that Roberts build a bridge to let them cross, insisting the law requires it. Roberts, proud of his identity as a man committed above all else to principle, builds the bridge anyway, fully aware of the threat it poses to America.

This sort of slavish adherence to abstract principle has been a recurring conservative vice. Its consequences are vividly illustrated in David Lean’s 1957 epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the film, British prisoner-of-war Colonel Nicholson, proud of both his management ability and his principled commitment to the “rules” of war, has his men build a bridge to help his Japanese captors defeat his own countrymen.

Burma-Thailand Railway. c. February 1943. Allied prisoners of war (POWs) engaged in bridge building at Tamarkan, Australian War Memorial

While Lean’s story is historical fiction, the behavior it dramatizes is epitomized by Chief Justice John Roberts’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara, which held that the Constitution requires granting citizenship even when it was obtained through crime or fraud—opening our borders to people hostile to our interests and squandering a status central to self-government.

Like Roberts, thousands of conservative and Christian leaders have treated abstract principles as ends in themselves rather than as means to particular goods. In the name of principle, they have refused to use their power to protect their institutions and communities from direct attacks by the left. And in the name of principle, some have even dismissed or denounced those willing to actually fight.

Responsibility and Purpose

No matter how sincere the underlying belief, such surrender is fundamentally irresponsible. By making principle—or fidelity to abstract norms—their defining virtue rather than responsibility, many conservatives have abandoned the fundamental purpose of politics: protecting a body politic and the conditions conducive to its good. Once this purpose is understood, responsibility follows naturally as the defining obligation of a leader.

When properly ordered, principles advance these fundamental goods rather than impede them. This theme pervades both human and divine law: the preamble to the U.S. Constitution makes clear that its purpose is to protect and promote the good of the American people, and Christ made clear that God’s law exists for our good. The error comes when this purpose is forgotten and principles are treated as ends in themselves. Christ rejected efforts to make rigid adherence to the law an end in itself, and Americans should likewise reject constitutional legalism and other blind commitments to abstract principle. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath”—and the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

The Duty to Win

For any body politic, the most fundamental good is protection. When a community or institution faces an existential threat, anyone entrusted with power within it must take responsibility, first and foremost, for its protection. To disregard that responsibility is a betrayal. Loss brought about by adherence to human principle is as much a sin as loss brought about by pride, laziness, or cowardice. The highest duty is owed not to abstract ideals but to the people for whom one is responsible—a duty subject to God’s law, and also derived from it.

The practical implication is stark: when one has been entrusted with responsibility and one’s cause is righteous, one has a duty not merely to fight, but to win.

This means doing what victory requires, not merely what feels comfortable within the norms of one’s community or social class. Too many of the conservative losses of the past century—of churches, universities, and denominations; of foundations and fortunes; of American culture itself—resulted from half-hearted resistance. Leaders who made great show of their deference to manners and principles allowed the institutions entrusted to them to slip into the control of people who perverted and destroyed them. These leaders abrogated their most fundamental responsibility.

The Duty to Cooperate

In any serious conflict, victory requires working well with others. People suited to one role must tolerate and cooperate with those suited to other necessary roles, despite differences in culture, values, or temperament. Disparaging or dismissing potential allies, no matter how “principled” the reason, divides coalitions and hands easy wins to enemies who threaten far greater evils.

We remain locked in a serious contest over the future of America. The racial and sexual frenzies and open borders of the Biden era showed that even “mainstream” Democrats are committed to revolutionary change, and the success of openly socialist candidates in Democratic primaries suggests that the intensity of these efforts will only increase. These are not mere policy disagreements: to lose politically would mean the loss of our country, our way of life, and perhaps our very lives.

Defeating this threat requires more than rallying populist energy at the polls. It requires a concerted fight across many fronts: removing millions of people from America, recapturing or destroying institutions that have been lost, and rewriting the political and legal norms that block reform or enshrine harmful policies. We must build—or rebuild—the institutions, bodies of knowledge, networks, and talent pipelines needed to replace those hopelessly corrupted by the left. We must renew our churches and our culture. And we must demonstrate both the ability to use power and a moral vision capable of building real legitimacy.

Some of these functions suit people who are temperamentally conservative; others suit people drawn to new ideas and approaches. Some require following established norms within elite circles; others require transgressing a wide array of manners and conventions. Some projects will draw morally upstanding Christians; others will attract people of coarse morals, suspect motives, and disagreeable temperaments.

To preserve our civilization, we need all these roles. Right-leaning Americans form the largest single faction in the country, while the left remains a coalition of disparate groups united by little more than a desire to erase American culture or extract resources from the American people. Our central weakness has been discord among these groups and classes: too many intellectuals and professionals hold the populist base or the fighting edge in contempt, while too many populists and fighters distrust all political compromise, calls for strategic restraint, or pragmatic business relationships. Success will require productive collaboration among builders and organizers, intellectuals and strategists, funders and fighters.

For a movement defined by adherence to principle, this is difficult: each of these classes tends to have different and often conflicting norms, and any alliance can feel like compromise. In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Colonel Nicholson’s disdain for “Commander” Shears’s brash American style and willingness to break rules illustrates the division this mindset produces. The left’s continuing institutional power intensifies the pressure on those who want to appear principled to issue performative denunciations and distance themselves from the rougher factions on the right, and it deepens the base’s distrust of those active in elite circles.

In contrast, a movement built on responsibility recognizes that a serious threat demands such collaboration. Each group has a crucial role: fighters who dive into conflicts to challenge enemies, builders who create institutions, funders who support the effort, strategists who chart paths through complex conflicts, politicians who build pragmatic coalitions, and intellectuals who develop the ideas the movement needs. Each group will have its own manners and norms, and even the most virtuous and committed people within each will have to collaborate with figures other groups find distasteful. Each deserves deference in pursuing its core function, and each owes a degree of deference to those fulfilling other functions. The overarching theme must be a shared responsibility for our society and civilization, and the right response to external pressure is greater in-group loyalty among those committed to this responsibility.

An American Moral Framework

The principles advanced by the right have also proved politically ineffective, unable to unite a winning coalition of Americans. This may reflect both a deficiency in those principles; a focus on subordinate rather than primary values; and their mismatch with the American tradition. The mismatch is apparent across past and present strands of the right: both traditional postwar conservatism and neoconservatism were heavily shaped by foreign and Catholic thinkers; contemporary conservatism remains disproportionately Catholic; and “red pill” commentary carries Islamic elements, sometimes overtly. None of these traditions has a value system likely to achieve broad appeal in America, and the conflicts among them may explain the mutual contempt found among different groups on the right.

Leftists have been more successful, framing their “progressive” value system—and especially their core principle of equality—as a continuation of America’s fundamental values. Even the “woke” frenzy of the last decade drew on the moral language of the American founding and of America’s Calvinist tradition, despite its disparagement of most of the figures associated with both. Most importantly for their political efforts, leftists widely accept that nearly all stated principles remain malleable, subordinate to their fundamentally revolutionary goals. In sum, “principle” has proved a potent weapon for the left, allowing it to consolidate power and claim the moral high ground even when its policies produce results many Americans recognize as harmful.

In response to the ills attributed to principle-based politics - from self-imposed impotence to intra-right conflict to leftist moral victories - some contemporary influencers propose a broad rejection of universal-values claims, pushing instead for a political agenda explicitly focused on in-group preference. But aside from the moral merits of such an approach, it risks alienating many Americans. The American tradition, and the broader Protestant and even Christian traditions, have always tended toward universal claims. The prevalence of principle-focused cultural and political norms across the Protestant (and post-Protestant) world reflects this tendency—Colonel Nicholson’s commitment in The Bridge on the River Kwai epitomizes a particular Anglo-Protestant strand of it. Even if a shift toward in-group-focused values is directionally correct, it is almost certainly too foreign to our tradition to gain traction. We should instead look within our own tradition for solutions: ideals that, even when applied universally, contribute to necessary action rather than undermining it.

A charcoal drawing reprint by Nicholas Volpe (1957) of Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson in Bridge Over the River Kwai

The duty of responsibility offers a solution. This duty pervades the American Protestant tradition; re-emphasizing it allows us to build on that tradition to address the critical errors of both the legacy conservative movement and modern liberalism, shifting the focus from subordinate norms or idealized values to actual outcomes. The underlying principle is universal—all men owe responsibilities to God and to their fellow men—yet every application is particular to one’s station and community. This does not require abandoning the love of principle that is a real virtue of our tradition, but it helps clarify the hierarchy of duties, norms, and principles in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. A movement centered on the duty of responsibility can unite a broad coalition of Americans of different stations and temperaments around the central need to preserve our country and our civilization.

Conclusion

Principle has always held a high place in the Anglo-Protestant tradition. Leftists have redefined American identity around universal liberal principles. Legacy conservatives have bound themselves into impotence by universalizing conservative principles. Overcoming this does not require replacing our tradition but rather recognizing that human principles exist within hierarchies. Our tradition has long recognized the duty of responsibility as an overarching human obligation, inherent to our role as rulers and stewards of the earth. This duty, and the concrete ends to which it points, was largely abandoned by both sides as they reframed subordinate or perverted principles into ends in themselves. Responsibility reverses this, requiring that we take the actions—individually and collectively—necessary to protect the particular people, communities, and institutions entrusted to us.

Nate Fischer is a founder of American Reformer. He is also the founder and CEO of New Founding, a venture firm focused on American revitalization, and a co-founder of several other civic organizations.

Anna Louie Sussman’s Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty opens with a related ache but refuses Agur’s premise. The gap she investigates is between how many children people say they want and how many they will ever have. In her telling, that gap is not a fact of nature. Some of it is manufactured: decades of policy choices that rewarded capital over children and individual striving over the communities that once made widespread family life possible. But it is not simply a matter of money.

Sussman also finds a simpler, harder obstacle: there is often no one to build the family with. From the crushing arithmetic of South Korea’s education system to Poland’s restrictions on IVF to the quiet math of American student debt, and to what one interviewee calls a “crisis of heterosexuality”—meaning that men and women are increasingly unable to find in each other what a partnership requires—Sussman travels the world collecting stories as evidence for a claim that reads, in the end, as a rebuttal to the old wisdom. This longing is not eternal or unappeasable by design. It is unappeasable because of what we built, and because of who we’ve become or not become to each other.

That is the question her book leaves a reader sitting with. If the barren womb is no longer nature’s doing but ours, what, or who, actually owes an answer to the ache?

Sussman is a careful, humane reporter, and it shows. She is honest that no single villain explains what she’s found: housing costs, hiring practices, hypercompetitive schooling, and the strange new loneliness of dating all get their due. But for all that patience, Inconceivable keeps arriving at the same place: the obstacle is out there, in the system, and the fix, if there is one, is out there too—better policy and better infrastructure for finding a partner or freezing what time won’t wait for.

A nursing student can’t get his community college credits to transfer, so since his career launches late, he and a future partner might need IVF by the time they’re ready to have a child. Sussman lays the failure entirely at the feet of the transfer system without pausing to wonder whether a student choosing a program without confirming its articulation agreements bears some of that risk himself, and without pausing at all on the last link in the chain. IVF shows up here the way it shows up throughout the book: as a backstop, a plan that exists and therefore solves the problem of delay. But it doesn’t quite. Success rates fall with age, ovarian stimulation carries its own real risks (including OHSS, which can hospitalize and, in rare instances, kill), and no reform of the transfer-credit system changes the biology on the other end.

It is somewhat strange that a book this attentive to structural failure never turns the same attention on the structure of the fertility industry it keeps offering as the safety net underneath everyone else’s story.

The same gap shapes Sussman’s treatment of egg freezing. She is right that many of the women she interviews aren’t choosing to freeze their eggs instead of dating: overwork and unstable hours have left them no time to date at all, which is a real thing worth naming. But her account stops at diagnosis. Sussman argues that since the system stole their time, banking eggs is the sensible, almost neutral, response to that theft.

Egg freezing, however, is not a pause button. It is a drug regimen and a surgical retrieval with real failure rates and real physical risk, and there is no guarantee the eggs will ever become a child. A book this willing to spend a hundred pages on hiring practices and housing costs owes its subjects at least a paragraph on what the procedure it keeps holding out as an answer actually does to the body, and how often it doesn’t work.

The same selective attention shows up in how she handles Diane Tober’s research on egg donors. Sussman cites Tober to explain why American women sell their eggs: to pay for school, or to pay off what school already cost them. She then gestures to Europe as the implicit corrective, assuming that where tuition is free or nearly free, the selling would stop. But Tober’s own research doesn’t support that comparison.

Women in Spain, one of the world’s largest egg markets, sell their eggs in large numbers, too. Tober finds the same financial pressure underneath it: not tuition debt, which barely exists there, but rather the cost of rent, food, and simply staying afloat. Sussman never asks why the selling continues once the specific debt she blames is gone. The honest answer complicates her thesis. The egg market runs on financial precarity in general, and tuition debt is only its most visible, American face. An industry willing to recruit wherever need is greatest will keep finding sellers under whatever economic system it operates.

Even the book’s implicit prescription doesn’t survive contact with its own comparative method. Denmark comes close to a natural experiment for the claim that better social support fixes the birth rate: generous parental leave, subsidized childcare, and universal healthcare—exactly the package Sussman sets against American scarcity. Denmark’s fertility rate has fallen anyway, from about 1.9 children per woman in 2008 to under 1.5 today. The researchers studying that decline point to career pressure and work-life conflict rather than benefit adequacy. If even the most generous system in the developed world can’t hold the line, the American shortfall may not be primarily a policy-design problem either.

There’s a harder question the book doesn’t ask its American subjects: How much of the scarcity is involuntary?

The United States remains one of the most privately generous countries in the world, giving away roughly 2% of GDP, several times the rate of most peer nations. This is not the profile of a people crushed by a heartless system so much as of a people who have chosen to meet want privately rather than hand it to the state. Marvin Olasky made a version of this argument 30 years ago in The Tragedy of American Compassion: when government took over the personal, conditional, relationship-based work that charity used to do, it didn’t just change who wrote the check; it eroded the mobility and mutual obligation that came with real communities helping their own.

Sussman is honest about wanting a Denmark-style safety net for American families; she is less curious about what a welfare state costs a culture’s instinct to build that safety net for itself. That gap compounds later. Graduates who leave school with little or no debt also tend to buy their first home sooner and for more: borrowers carrying over $35,000 in student debt are 27% less likely to buy a home at all, and those who do buy spend nearly 40% less than debt-free buyers when they finally do. The choice made at 22 to avoid debt shows up again a decade later as a down payment. A book this attentive to structural cost should notice when part of the cost is a stack of personal choices.

None of this makes the ache Sussman documents any less real. But it is worth remembering that it is not new. “There is nothing new under the sun,” the Preacher wrote in Ecclesiastes, surveying a world of labor and want and finding no system that ended either. Having children, providing for them, and finding someone to raise them has been hard in every age, for reasons no century has fully solved.

Inconceivable is a book of its age in the way it reaches, almost by reflex, for technological and political answers to a difficulty older than any economy: better maternity leave laws, better dating apps, better assisted reproductive techniques to increase the odds. I don’t share that reflex. Some problems are not, in the end, engineering problems.

But Sussman already knows something better than her own conclusions suggest. Early in the book, before the policy recommendations arrive, she does something harder and rarer: she sits with her subjects long enough that their fear reads as fear, not as a problem waiting on a fix. That patience, not the next law or the next fertility lab, is closer to what the ache asks of us. Agur never promised the barren womb an answer, either. He just told the truth about it, plainly, and let it stand next to Sheol and fire and thirsty ground without flinching. A book willing to do that all the way through, and not just in its reporting, would have been the better book. It would also have been the truer one.

Jennifer Lahl, RN is the founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. Lahl’s writings have appeared in publications including Cambridge University Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and the American Journal of Bioethics. A frequent media commentator, she has been interviewed by ABC, CBS, PBS, FOX, and NPR, and has spoken before lawmakers, scientific panels, the European Parliament, and the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

I also remember the moment when it all ended. I was sitting in a classroom with colonels, watching footage of the last C-17s take off from Afghanistan, with Afghans clinging to the wheels of the planes. The 20 years of conflict came to a sudden end. The men I sat with did not say much. They had all done numerous tours. What had they spent their careers doing? Why had their comrades bled and died in these countries?

Christopher Nolan’s recent adaptation of The Odyssey captures this sense of moral disillusionment well. One is tempted to see in Nolan’s interpretation a commentary on the post-9/11 wars. The war against Troy is portrayed as an expedition motivated by lust for power, self-interest, and misguided ideology. Gone are the heroism and glory of Homer’s original story.

What were we supposed to learn from these wars so that our experiences, along with our blood and treasure, were not in vain? I often ask myself these questions. While this list is not exhaustive, we need to think hard about the lessons we should take away from this longest war.

September 20, 2001 -- Rescue workers standing next to the antenna that was formerly atop the World Trade Center discuss next steps in their rescue efforts. Photo by Mike Rieger/ FEMA

The first lesson, which is a temptation with all major events, is that we should not overlearn the lessons of 9/11. While the Iraq regime-change war was ultimately a mistake and the war in Afghanistan was a quagmire, the message should not be that all wars are bad. Though it feels good to say this and plays well with many audiences, we require a military willing to visit violence on our enemies when necessary. That is just a basic fact. In a world that is becoming more chaotic and disordered by the day, having the most lethal and capable military in the world is a great benefit to our nation.

We will need our military more, not less, in the coming years, as the current reconfiguration of world order continues to create friction and conflict. Many would like to hunker down in Fortress America, pull up the drawbridges, and ignore the rest of the world. That impulse would leave us poorer and less secure. Peace requires that we not only possess military power but also exercise it, albeit judiciously and realistically.

Another lesson we must learn is the danger of the missionary zeal that is hardwired into America’s DNA. Historian Walter McDougall speaks of America’s engagement with the world in two modes: “promised land” and “crusader state.” For most of the 19th century, the U.S. had a small global military presence, interacted mostly on the basis of trade, and believed its duty was to be a beacon of freedom. That changed in the 20th century.

We became a global superpower and have maintained that position of preeminence for more than 80 years. The War on Terror awakened a “crusader state” mentality in which we often acted and sounded like a nation engaged in holy war (see George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural). America has a deeply religious faith in its mission and its existence, which, when aroused, can cause us to act recklessly and destructively, though it need not. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we attempted to reengineer ancient societies into our own image through military force and occupation. We were justified in striking back against our foes after 9/11. But the overreaction that launched us into a 20-year campaign against radical Islam was fueled by a religious zeal we must recognize in order that we can tame it.

The third lesson is that if we are going to fight a war, we need to go all in. Colin Powell enunciated what later became known as the Powell Doctrine—that when you go to war, you must use overwhelming and decisive force. War is inherently a political endeavor, but if you are going to fight one, you cannot do so with an eye primarily concerned with opinion polls.

This might seem counterintuitive when it comes to a 20-year war, but in fact, we did not go all-in in Afghanistan. Rather than going all in we sought to accomplish our objectives on the cheap. We easily toppled the Taliban regime with minimal military force. At that point, we should have pulled up stakes and gone home or committed the necessary forces to defeat the enemy. We did neither. We allowed the Taliban to reconstitute itself, which created the long insurgency that eventually overran the country.

That said, public support does matter. We conducted the post-9/11 wars with consistently declining support. President Bush was reelected by a razor-thin margin, and after that the wars were fought largely against the wishes of the American people. In a democracy like ours, it is vital that our military have their support.

If our cause is just and a war makes the country safer, the president, as commander in chief, should publicly make the case for fighting. If he does not believe a war should be fought, then we should bring the troops home. While veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have not been spit on, as was not uncommon after Vietnam, they did not enjoy full public support because presidents after Bush wished the wars would just go away.

Barack Obama sent mixed messages about the Afghanistan War. He publicly offered tepid support, but behind the scenes he was caustic toward the military and skeptical of the mission. It was demoralizing for the military, and the public largely checked out or turned against the war.

Reinhold Niebuhr talked about the “irony of American history”: when America sets out to master events, they often prove beyond its control and produce the opposite of what it intended. Despite our best intentions, Iraq sank into full-on intertribal warfare, and Afghanistan rejected the liberal democracy imposed from without. Military force can do some very important things, but it cannot do everything, as we are learning again in Iran.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from our follies after 9/11 is humility. America, while a great nation with many blessings bestowed upon it, must accept that it, too, has limitations and that its greatest danger often lies within itself rather than without.

In all, the Justices produced five separate opinions. Those opinions debated several nuanced legal questions. Beneath them, however, was a smaller fight with enormous consequences: the words judges used to describe the transgender litigants.

There were three distinct approaches. The majority generally referred to the plaintiff by the initials “B.P.J.” and described the plaintiff as a “biological male who identifies as female.” In contrast, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent used female pronouns. Finally, Justice Thomas stated firmly that “[m]en and boys with gender dysphoria are not women or girls, even if they believe that they are.” Thus, the opinions presented a spectrum of responses to the transgender movement: avoidance, affirmation, and rebuke.

This split poses a fundamental question: How should federal judges address transgender litigants?

The correct answer is Justice Thomas’s approach. Judges should use pronouns corresponding to litigants’ biological sex and reject the semantic games of the transgender movement’s pronoun regime.

This approach is correct for two reasons. First, it upholds the role of judging. Second, it offers resistance to the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions.

First, the role of a judge is to apply the law impartially to the facts. Inviting warped realities into that analysis defeats this purpose.

This approach aligns with the Founders’ vision for an independent judiciary and the role of a judge. In Federalist No. 78, Hamilton explained that an independent judiciary - wielding “neither force nor will, but merely judgment” - is “requisite to guard the Constitution.” The judge is thus an arbiter of legal truth. Accordingly, a court that makes its language conform to a litigant’s erroneous identity claim abandons that duty.

Courts have sometimes used preferred pronouns as a courtesy. But courtesy is discretionary. Within this realm of discretion, judges must never subordinate their fundamental obligation to truth to personal politeness.

The Fifth Circuit applied this principle in United States v. Varner. There, the court denied a litigant’s request to be addressed with female pronouns. Writing for the majority, Judge Kyle Duncan explained that no federal statute or rule required judges, court personnel, or other litigants to use pronouns matching a litigant’s gender identity. Justice Thomas’s approach is therefore a clear application of an existing principle: Courtesy may guide a judge’s tone, but it cannot dictate the court’s account of reality.

Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Second, adopting Justice Thomas’s approach resists the transgender movement’s hostile takeover of American institutions. The Varner example illustrates the judicial front of this campaign, and the examples beyond courts show that it has no limiting principle.

Consider the progression.

The first step begins with the soft language of accommodation. For example, some university pronoun guides list forms such as “ze” and “xem,” along with similar invented pronouns. Each measure seems small, yet each teaches the institution to treat self-declaration as authoritative. Once that premise is accepted, the vocabulary expands.

From there, benign accommodation mutates into enforcement. For example, New York City’s human-rights guidance treats a refusal to use a preferred name or pronoun as evidence of discrimination in employment and public accommodations. The EEOC’s 2024 harassment guidance took a similar path by treating repeated, intentional use of pronouns inconsistent with a person’s gender identity as potential workplace harassment before the agency voted to rescind that guidance. The federal government also tried to write gender identity into Title IX policy: The Department of Education’s 2024 Title IX rule defined sex discrimination to include gender identity before a federal court vacated the rule.

Taken individually, each measure is defended as a small accommodation. Taken together, they amount to a mandate to affirm what is false.

Thus, pronouns become a low-cost, high-reward instrument of power. The claimant announces a preferred pronoun; the institution assumes the work of enforcement; and everyone else bears the cost of dissent.

This is deeply troubling for the future of the country. In today’s polarized society, productive debate is essential. But dialogue cannot occur when language is distorted. Words like “man” and “woman” and “boy” and “girl” assert biological truths. When those words become meaningless, constructive disagreement dissipates because people cannot even agree on foundational premises.

Other judges, like Justice Thomas and Judge Duncan, can stand in the way.

Judges have a duty that ordinary citizens do not share. In a pronoun dispute, a private person might choose evasive language to avoid conflict at work. A court, by contrast, speaks with public authority. Its words settle disputes and create precedent. Thus, if courts cave to the transgender movement, they give the compulsory pronoun regime the prestige of law. If courts refuse, however, they mark a clear boundary that other institutions can replicate.

Accordingly, courts should firmly reject motions that ask judges to call a male “she” or a female “he” in the court’s own voice. Courts should never force litigants or lawyers to repeat words that contradict biological sex.

To be clear, no litigant should be mocked. Indeed, the Court itself said in B.P.J. that litigants should not be “ostracized or vilified.” But respect does not require affirming blatant fantasies. The law can protect people from abuse while refusing to conscript others into a lie.

Courts exist to say what the law is. That duty begins with saying what is true.

Jimmy Murphy is a law student at the University of Notre Dame and a future law clerk on the Fifth Circuit. His conservative commentary has been featured in outlets such as The American Thinker, The American Spectator, The Washington Times, and others.

Today, even if some seem fatigued by feminism’s apparent excesses, few of us seriously probe its premises or have occasion to review its foundational assumptions. After all, what was once the purview of radicals and revolutionaries has now become a submerged morality whose original character is twice faded. To see feminism as commonplace is itself commonplace.

In her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself, Janice Fiamengo covers the “theories and convictions” of Wollstonecraft and others, bringing to the surface the unfulfilling and destructive reality of feminist ideology from the beginning of the movement to our current crisis. Fiamengo presents feminism as a novelty and points toward a postfeminist recovery of Western civilization. A reconsideration of what is revolutionary and what is commonplace allows for the restoration of old truths. Learning the lessons of capitulation to, and compliance with, the feminist persuasion reveals much culpable ignorance in the revolt against God and man.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Paradox is especially good at challenging the commonplace. A peddler of paradox, Jean-Jacques Rousseau provocatively claimed that women’s strength is their weakness: “Far from blushing at their weakness, they make it their glory...Why is that? It is not only to appear delicate; it is due to a shrewder precaution.” Women used their weakness as a strength in personal relations. Fiamengo shows how feminists have exploited what Rousseau observed to women’s destructive advantage. The “genius of feminism” is to “exploit traditional concern for women” to achieve its ends. “Feminism,” she contends, “would have been impossible without many men’s eagerness to listen to women’s complaints and accommodate their demands.” Feminism presupposed that women’s enduring weakness could be turned to their advantage in conducting a revolution with the acquiescence of men. In the sexual dance, it is men who pursue and women who are won. Feminism claims equality or sameness between the sexes but demonstrates, even in corruption, that women are women and men are men.

Fiamengo offers snapshots of the violence perpetrated by the women’s suffrage movement, the discontent of housewives in the 1960s (embodied in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique), and the radicalization of women at universities during the 1970s. But she does not distinguish a bad, later wave of feminism from an earlier, healthy one. All feminists agree on “the central issue of anti-male and anti-Western animus.”

Fiamengo catalogues the harmful effects of feminism in our day. Marriage rates have dropped. Women initiate nearly 70 percent of divorces. Sexual-assault accusations presume guilt and undermine due process. Violence perpetrated by women is discounted and excused. The LGBTQ+ movement continues to gain ground, requiring not only neutral tolerance but active acceptance of increasing demands. Feminism trades on female empathy to create political activism. It trades on the very human propensity for envy to make women dissatisfied with their roles as mothers and wives. Today’s feminism is destructive. Certainly, when feminism can no longer identify what a woman is and allows predatory men, foreign and domestic, to assault with impunity, something has gone amiss.

Today’s destructiveness was present at feminism’s creation. “There never was a moderate feminism,” she writes, and all feminism is “rotten to the core.” To prove this, Fiamengo alludes to the radicalism of the first feminist. Mary Wollstonecraft writes that she seeks to “advance, instead of retarding, the progress of those glorious principles [articulated in the French Revolution] that give a substance to morality.” Woolf writes of Wollstonecraft: “The Revolution thus was not merely an event that had happened outside her; it was an active agent in her own blood. She had been in revolt all her life-against tyranny, against law, against convention.”

Consider Wollstonecraft’s vision of the Fall. The original condition of man, according to Wollstonecraft, was hardly blissful. The fact that “Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam’s ribs” proves that “man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion.” Eden was emblematic of a view of human history as a story of male domination, tyranny, and oppression. The “prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man,” Wollstonecraft writes, reduces Eve to another member of the “brute creation, created to do his pleasure.” She does not seek to conserve or return to a traditional understanding of the sexes; the original feminist thinks that the biblical account of the pre-Fall relationship between Adam and Eve-God’s original creation-must be overturned.

Original sin, not original “goodness,” allowed for the improvement of relations between the sexes, according to Wollstonecraft. “Why should that inestimable gift, for a gift it was, if man was so created as to have a capacity to rise above the state in which sensation produced brutal ease, be called, in direct terms, a curse?” The Fall created an opportunity not for death but for life; not for tyranny but for genuine equality. Wollstonecraft, in mock piety, denies the perfection of the original state in favor of one in which all “WILL BE right.” Wollstonecraft attempts to subvert the sexes using Scripture. It is written that there will be a state in which there is “neither marrying nor giving in marriage,” so, she argues, how could it be that “MAN is prepared” for that state but “WOMAN,” as woman, is not? In Wollstonecraft’s hands, redemptive history bends toward a sexless paradise.

Wollstonecraft “simply declare[s]” that, “were an angel from heaven to tell [her] that Moses’s beautiful, poetical cosmogony and the account of the fall of man, were literally true, [she] could not believe what [her] reason told [her] was derogatory.” Her reason, not divine reason revealed in Scripture, is the standard by which she judges. Wollstonecraft’s hermeneutic is as classical as the Enlightenment and as moderate as the Revolution-which is to say, commonplace in our day. Her immoderate modernism has produced immoderate modern human beings who cannot determine what a man or woman is; confusion about the physical is anticipated by revolt against the metaphysical.

Of course, the once revolutionary but now commonplace Wollstonecraft is so fundamental to our understanding of women and the world that “conservative or reactionary feminism” now heralds her as a paragon of classical Christian femininity. The rediscovery of Wollstonecraft reveals her radical character. She is neither Christian nor Aristotelian. The origins of feminism have become “respectable,” but they are not classical.

Instead of salvaging feminism, Fiamengo seeks to dispel the now largely accepted claims feminism makes about men, women, the family, and the West. Fiamengo would have us get off the “what is feminism” treadmill. Today’s “respectable” critics of feminism sing themselves lullabies. “What you are describing is not real feminism,” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists,” they say. Such self-deceptions help appease conservative sympathy for yesterday’s supposedly less radical feminism. Yesterday, that principle meant granting women the right to own property-and who could be opposed to that? Today, feminism means allowing men into women’s bathrooms or demanding that women serve in combat roles. Accepting the principles of feminism while hoping to limit them is indicative of feminism’s pervasiveness and its feminine feints. As Fiamengo asserts, “even discussing the feminine revolution in values is hampered by the logic of our moment.”

The prevalence of feminism and the revolutionary spirit that animates it would need to be recognized and rebuked apart from whatever actual grievances any given iteration has sought to rectify. Sometimes, of course, the fallenness of man yields the mistreatment of women. We can acknowledge this possibility without adopting the entire ideological framework of feminism. Fiamengo recognizes feminism as a very real and visible way in which women’s moral failings have manifested themselves at the expense of men. Feminism, in this presentation, may be tied to the inevitability of patriarchy. It is a feminist conceit to pretend that the only ways forward are more feminism, a particular type of feminism, or oppression. Fiamengo’s attempt to recover a non-feminist understanding of feminism is the kind of project needed to point us toward a postfeminist future in which the radical and revolutionary are no longer commonplace.

Dr. Amanda Dorney is Lecturer of Literature at New Saint Andrews College. She teaches electives in literature and political philosophy. Dr. Dorney earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of California Davis in 2023, where she wrote on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's literary and political portraits of man in nature and society. She lives in Moscow with her husband, Dr. Jordan Dorney, and their four children.

Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 election confirmed that he is the center of gravity not only in the Republican Party but in American politics more generally. But as we enter the latter half of 2026, the Right still struggles to adjust its rhetoric and framing to our new political reality. This is clear in the current debate over Flock cameras, where a 2008-era libertarian rhetoric à la the Ron Paul Revolution seems to be dominating the Right.

This tendency is understandable. Anti-Flockers remember how government bureaucrats weaponized COVID and are wary of surveillance methods that could be commandeered for sinister ends. They are concerned that state and local governments are using the cameras for more parochial purposes, allowing them to levy fines for the slightest infractions or hound politically disfavored families or groups. Though Flock cameras have already helped solve cold cases and seem to have police backing more generally, the speed at which they’ve been installed in localities across the nation is startling to many. And then there are the constitutional questions arising under the Fourth Amendment.

We surely need to be jealous guardians of our remaining liberties, now more than ever. There’s also an argument to be made that much major crime persists because laws against protected classes are not enforced, though most Flock camera supporters understand that the cameras are not a solution to that larger issue.

But much of the current framing of anti-Flock arguments doesn’t seem to match our political moment. Breathless commentary suggesting that installing more Flock cameras will complete a nationwide panopticon doesn’t quite jibe with an era in which the Right is more politically dominant than it has been since Calvin Coolidge’s presidency.

Solar-powered surveillance camera on a street pole

Presenting ourselves as being at the mercy of an out-of-control political establishment—one that’s perhaps only weeks away from ushering in tyranny, collapse, and devastation—recalls too much the politics of an earlier era where the Right effectively held little political power. This is a defensive position, harking back to the days when the Republican Party functioned as the Washington Generals of American politics.

This rhetorical posture is a holdover from the pre-Trump era. It made sense for Michael Anton to call the 2016 election the “Flight 93 Election” (the 10th anniversary of that august essay is on September 5). At that time, Republicans hadn’t won the presidency since 2004, which was also the last time they won the popular vote. The court-class, status-quo Republicans had presided over the managed decline of the country, wasting trillions in the Middle East and being resigned to cultural irrelevance at home, where the Republican brand had been reduced to little more than a target for Green Day’s bestselling album, American Idiot.

The GOP didn’t have any answers to the most pressing political questions of the day. It could offer only more of the same suite of policies that propped up globalism—more immigration, more wars, more free trade rhetoric. Aside from a lone third-party candidate who could never win a presidential election, there was no national voice speaking for those who wanted secure borders and mass deportations, reindustrialization, and a more restrained foreign policy.

One more round of tax cuts was always the answer to every domestic political problem. And the uniparty placed what it mistakenly called “civility,” “dignity,” and “honor” over the good of future generations, leaving future generations not the blessings of liberty but a rotting foundation beyond repair.

It’s no surprise that increasing numbers of those on the Right—and increasing numbers of Americans overall—saw this as essentially raising the white flag of surrender to the Left.

And then came Trump, riding down the escalator and breaking the hold of the dead political consensus that had reconciled us to failure and discouragement.

While his first term was rocky—he was an insurgent learning on the job and the Deep State often got the better of him—his re-election and second term so far offer much stronger evidence that the Trump era marks a fundamental shift in American politics.

This should signal to the Right that it’s time to get out of its historic defensive crouch. There is good reason why the president is stridently supporting data centers, for example. Trump is convinced not only that they are here to stay but that they offer the nation much good, from strengthening national security to developing cutting-edge technologies that can markedly improve our lives. A populist revolt against data centers writ large is doomed to failure and helps fuel the rise of what some have labeled our “DSA libertarian” moment.

Opposing Flock cameras nationwide is yet another rearguard action that likely won’t have any lasting political benefits. After all, police departments, neighborhoods, and communities began buying them in 2019. Flock Safety, the company behind the cameras, was founded in 2017 by three Georgia Tech alumni. It reports that about 120,000 of its cameras are currently being used by approximately 7,000 police departments and more than 3,000 neighborhoods, totaling around 12,000 customers. A defensive push to oppose them on principle is likely too little, too late.

All of this should prompt the Right to focus instead on how extensively the cameras should be used, how long records should be retained in a central system, and who has access to them. The Right should not devote precious resources to disorganized, haphazard efforts to ban the cameras altogether, especially when the online Right is divided over the question.

Our political rhetoric must adapt to the changing political environment while maintaining the high ground. Strategies from 2022 no longer apply, and rhetoric that implies we have already lost will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Talk of the United States cracking up, an impending civil war, or other visions of doom is out of step at a time when the Right has finally achieved a series of decisive victories. The Right cannot waste this moment.

Benson and Wise were not the first same-sex couple to deny a child her mother or father after they “married.” They are simply the latest Instagrammable beneficiaries of the parenthood remake mandated by Obergefell.

To the many people expressing justified sadness over the plight of these motherless children, I ask: What did you think would happen after we legalized same-sex marriage?

Did you believe the public-relations campaign that framed “marriage equality” as necessary so same-sex couples could visit one another in the hospital, inherit property, or make medical decisions?

Those basic protections did not require redefining marriage. Same-sex partners could designate one another through wills, powers of attorney, healthcare proxies, beneficiary designations, and other legal arrangements. Years before Obergefell, federal rules already protected same-sex partners’ hospital visitation rights. None of these protections required overhauling the most child-friendly institution the world has ever known.

What Obergefell enabled was something else entirely: the erasure of mothers and fathers from parenthood law and the codification of the purchase of children.

The ink was barely dry on the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision when activist lawyers began “updating” the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). These updates offered recommendations for how states could bring their parenthood laws into compliance with “marriage equality.” They prescribed stripping all gendered terms - male and female, mother and father, husband and wife - from parenthood law. New York’s gender-neutral parentage bill, still awaiting the governor’s signature, simply followed the UPA’s recommendations. Other states, including Texas and Alaska, now offer categories such as “Parent A” and “Parent B” or “guardians” on birth certificates instead of titles identifying the two people who actually made the child.

States did not remove those words by accident. They removed them because a mother and a father are precisely what a household headed by two men or two women cannot produce, and the law had to paper over the biology it was determined to ignore.

But scrubbing these two biological roles from parenthood statutes was not enough. Same-sex couples were disadvantaged because both partners could never be the child’s biological parents. So, to ensure equal access to the “constellation” of marital benefits promised by Justice Kennedy, the UPA generalized “intent-based parenthood,” a doctrine that had existed only in narrow surrogacy carve-outs since the 1990s. It allowed anyone with a contract to acquire a child.

If you could assemble sperm, egg, and womb and had the proper paperwork, you could leave the hospital with an unrelated child and state-granted parental rights. No home study. No background check. No requirement that you even be married. No questions about whether single men over 60 should be permitted to take home children conceived through surrogacy or whether convicted sex offenders should be raising infants. This is child commodification in the name of gay equality - the erasure of a child’s mother or father in service of adult identity.

Arkansas learned this the hard way in Pavan v. Smith, when the Supreme Court ordered the state to list a woman’s same-sex spouse on a birth certificate. The child’s biological father was legally erased so that the state could not be accused of discriminating against the mother’s “marriage.”

Of course, opposite-sex couples use surrogacy and donor gametes, too, and they always have. But their use of these technologies never required rewriting the definitions of “mother” and “father.” Other concerns about reproductive technology aside, an infertile husband and wife who conceive through in vitro fertilization still fit the existing legal categories of mother and father. Two men or two women never will, regardless of the technology.

That mismatch, not fertility science itself, is what drove the 2017 UPA revision. The drafters said so themselves, framing gendered parentage terms as a “constitutional infirmity” that had to be resolved once same-sex marriage became the law of the land. Same-sex marriage did not invent reproductive technology, but it did prevent the law from acknowledging the biological realities of parenthood.

What the courts de-sexed in law, schools increasingly de-sexed in the classroom. The National Education Association’s 2020 checklist encouraged teachers to replace “mom and dad” with terms such as “family” or “caring adult” and to avoid heteronormative language.

Entertainment also presented the new cultural script. According to GLAAD, LGBTQ representation on television rose sharply in the decade after Obergefell, reaching a record high in the early 2020s. Preschoolers encountered families with two mothers on Doc McStuffins. Elementary-school children were presented with motherless and fatherless families in The Loud House and The Bravest Knight. Teenagers watched The Fosters, which centered on two married mothers raising biological, foster, and adopted children.

The legacy of Obergefell has not simply been the redefinition of marriage. It has been the unmaking of the American family through the erasure of mothers and fathers in both law and culture.

That erasure is not abstract. It has a face: a newborn girl named Madison Halsey, whose birth announcement included neither the name of the woman who contributed half her DNA nor that of the woman who carried and delivered her.

The law recognizes her father and an unrelated man, whose presence, the author argues, statistically increases her risk of abuse and neglect. She will grow up in a culture that tells her she is “so lucky” to have lost her mother at birth.

Eleven years after Obergefell, the choice before us has become impossible to avoid. The law can uphold a child’s right to her own mother and father, or it can uphold same-sex marriage. It cannot coherently do both, because same-sex marriage requires the state to manufacture a form of parenthood that biology cannot produce. Every mechanism built to manufacture it comes at a child’s expense.

The church built its social-justice credentials by defending children whom the world had trampled: the orphaned, the trafficked, and the aborted. It cannot outsource this cause. A newborn girl has been legally and permanently denied her mother, and self-proclaimed Christians on the right responded with congratulations. If the church will not say what Obergefell cost Madison, no one will.

Katy Faust stands as a preeminent authority empowering you to confront the ethical complexities of surrogacy, reproductive technologies, and the sanctity of marriage. Her mission involves dismantling contemporary myths surrounding the family. You can engage with her advocacy at thembeforeus.substack.com.

They’ve gone from amplifying extreme policies such as defunding the police and promoting transgender ideology to supporting the acts of Palestinian terrorists and importing Third-Worldism to America. And their top influencers are increasingly getting caught saying things that are on the wrong side of the 80-20 divide.

Take the recent antics of the streamer Hasan Piker, the Left’s chief online spokesman. Piker is mocking Charlie Kirk, the Christian conservative who was killed by a transgender shooter nearly a year ago, on his live podcast tour. Top Democrats such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin recently condemned him for comments about American Jews. Piker’s continued popularity on the Left makes Democrats increasingly vulnerable in November and beyond.

Then there is Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who beat out the establishment Democrat, Haley Stevens. During a combative Fox News interview with Jesse Watters, El-Sayed equated circumcision with transgender surgeries. This came in the wake of news that he had deleted 100 videos from his YouTube account because they supposedly no longer reflect his current views.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, Michelle Obama said with a straight face that “When they go low, we go high,” decrying Donald Trump and the supposed Machiavellianism of the Republican Party. While a false characterization then—the GOP actually has something to learn from Old Nick, as do Protestants—it’s clearly an even more inapt description of the Left now. They keep going lower and lower and lower.

A new study from the University of Cambridge Political Psychology Lab shows this to be the case. Over the past four decades, the Left has become far more radical than the Right. Senior researcher Dr. Lee de-Wit and his team found that the Left “was 31.5% more socially liberal in 2024 compared to 1988, while the US right was only 2.8% more conservative.” The Right has “remained fairly stable in their positions for the last 35 years, and may feel left behind as half the country has shifted towards an ever more progressive outlook on many issues.”

Consider the findings of another major study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services and conducted by researchers from Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and Network Contagion Institute. It concludes that “gender ideology is associated with [left-wing authoritarianism] and [a] willingness to justify political violence.”

With the rise of a new wave of Democratic Socialists of America candidates, the Democrats have recently made another great leap forward in radicalization. Gone are the Blue Dogs and the anti-abortion Democrats (the last remaining Democratic congressman who fits that description is Texas’s Henry Cuellar). Replacing the old guard is a group of candidates who don’t seem to like our country very much and seek to overturn America’s basic traditions and history.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s efforts to build taxpayer-funded grocery stores, kind words for murderers and terrorists, and obvious attempts to dox and bully wealthy New Yorkers are evidence that their vulnerabilities are stacking up by the day, even if they may win some elections. Despite some talented communicators in their midst, the record of the DSA rookies so far is unsurprisingly not very good.

All of this presents Republicans with an immense opportunity to stem their losses in the midterms and get into shape for the post-Trump era. One immediate pitfall they must avoid is an undue focus on esoteric discussions of the ideological roots of communism and socialism, as tempting as that might be.

The Trump Administration is already doing good work on this front, so there is no need to replicate it.

A July report from the State Department, “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” dives deeply into how Cuba has waged a constant series of sophisticated intelligence operations against the United States since Castro’s coup in 1959. Over the course of nearly 70 years, the report notes that “Cubans perfected a new model for a long war of attrition, organized around espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy networks, and a revolutionary infrastructure designed to turn America against itself.”

These reports buttress the administration’s sustained efforts to break up far-left networks abroad that pose a threat to the United States. Part of this effort includes Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosting a Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, featuring representatives from over 60 countries and focused on combating the Left across the globe.

On Wednesday, Rubio announced that the U.S. levied sanctions on several leftist networks, including Autistici/Inventati. According to Rubio, that group is “a major far-left tech collective whose services are used by the most active and violent Antifa cells in the United States and across the world.”

The Trump Administration’s actions show that now is not the time for the Right to get sidetracked into historical disputes about the character of Cuban Marxism. Doing so would be a bona fide failure because it confuses electoral politics with the academic lecture hall, a perpetual lure for the Right.

This was one of the key failures of the Tea Party era. The Right devoted far too much time to sometimes labyrinthine discussions of the roots of contemporary leftism in Woodrow Wilson and the early Progressives. This academic focus, however, didn’t translate to electoral success against Barack Obama, a uniquely vulnerable president in 2012. Unemployment remained high, and wages were stagnant, among a host of other suboptimal economic indicators. But Obama still handily beat Mitt Romney in the Electoral College while also winning the popular vote.

While the Right was too busy debating the finer points of Barack Obama’s socialism and holding rallies that never captured the media’s attention as Occupy Wall Street did, the Democrats won back the Senate and gained seats in the House.

Correctly understanding the ideological foundations of Woke 2.0 is important on a theoretical level—but this task should now be left to a handful of academics and political theorists inside and outside the administration. The Right’s efforts need to be focused instead on how the Left’s slate of policies will only make life worse for Americans.

The rise of the DSA in the Democratic Party should be viewed less as the harbinger of an ominous new threat than as evidence of a party in such disarray that people with major electoral liabilities are taking advantage of a weakening party apparatus.

The opportunity is there—the GOP needs to refocus and take advantage of it. And under Woke 2.0, they will have many chances to do just that.

Fellows are expected to be able to do the following in a self-directed manner:

5hrs/reading per week
5hrs/writing, editing or research per week
2hrs/class time or management time per week (Zoom)
1 in-person retreat in August

The Fellowship will runs from approximately late May until early August.

Who Should Apply?

Cotton Mather Fellowships are offered to men who are outstanding undergraduates through young professionals under 35 who are theologically grounded and interested in becoming politically engaged. A proven track record of competence in reading, writing, and research is essential, as is Protestant orthodoxy. For a list of current and former fellows, see here.

Compensation:

Fellows will be paid $2,000, to be paid at the completion of the fellowship. They will use this money partially to cover travel costs to the retreat. Room and board at the in-person retreat will be covered by the fellowship.

Fellows may have another summer job.

Application Timeline:

Applications are due at the beginning of April.

Daniel Strand: Tou Thao, thank you for being willing to talk to us about your involvement in the Derek Chauvin case, your own court case, and your subsequent imprisonment.

Tou Thao: Thank you for having me.

DS: Could you tell us a bit about who you are, your background, and why you became a police officer?

TT: My name is Tou Thao (pronounced “Tu Tao”). I was born and raised in Minnesota. I am a child of ethnic Hmong refugees (later U.S. citizens) from Laos. I spent part of my childhood in north Minneapolis.

For historical context, the Hmong supported and fought alongside Americans during the Vietnam War against the communists. After the war, the Hmong were heavily persecuted by the communists and later received refugee status in America. So America is where my parents met and married.

Personally, I have a wife and three kids.

As for why I became a police officer, that comes from my childhood at an elementary school age. One day, my father, in a fit of anger, beat me and my younger brother. Then it escalated to the point where he pointed a gun at us after my mother tried to intervene. We feared for our lives and fled to my aunt’s house. She called the police.

That was my first encounter with a Minneapolis police officer. Seeing how he dealt with that situation, during that traumatic part of my childhood, inspired me to want to be a police officer one day so I could help children who were in the same position I was in.

DS: Before we talk about your specific court case and time in jail, let’s talk about the Derek Chauvin Case. You knew Derek Chauvin personally; do you think he was motivated by racism or racial bias? He is portrayed as an evil racist who acted with deep malice toward black people. Is that accurate?

TT: That is absolutely not accurate at all. That portrayal is one-sided and politically motivated. It was driven by the media during a highly polarizing 2020 election year. I knew Derek personally. As a minority officer, if he were racist, why would I want to work with him? He also trained many people in the police department from different backgrounds, races, and ethnicities. I have never heard of anyone complaining that he was racist. That racial narrative was purely manufactured to stoke racial tension within the country.

DS: Do you think the court case against Chauvin was fair? What aspects of the court case were irregular or misleading? What does the public need to know about this case that they do not know?

TT: This is kind of a long answer that probably can’t be fully explained in this setting.

The case against Derek was absolutely unfair. The restraint Derek was using was called the Maximal Restraint Technique and taught by the police department. We know that the city of Minneapolis claimed that this restraint was never taught. Many officers have now come out stating that it was in fact taught in training.

In regard to the court case, if a judge has to put his thumb on the scale of justice and if the prosecutors have to cheat to win, then logically they never had a case to begin with, and so they would have to manufacture one.

It has already been reported that the original prosecutors were pressured to charge us and/or add charges. They opposed those actions and considered it unethical. As a result they removed themselves from the case. In my view, if it was unethical, then it is unconstitutional.

In addition, the medical examiner, Dr. Andrew Baker, told one of the original prosecuting attorneys, Amy Sweasy: “Amy, what happens when the actual evidence doesn’t match up with the public narrative that everyone’s already decided on?” He also said, “This is the kind of case that ends careers.”

And let’s not forget that the medical examiner appeared to be pressured professionally by an outside colleague, Dr. Roger Mitchell. According to court filings, Dr. Baker initially said he did not think neck compression played a part. Dr. Mitchell then told him neck compression had to be in the diagnosis and warned that he planned to publish a critical op-ed. After those conversations, neck compression was added to the final cause of death.

As officers, we are especially sensitive to how investigations are completed. From the onset of this investigation, it appeared prosecutors wanted to avoid any illicit drug discussions. This is no more obvious than when experienced forensic scientists investigated both Floyd’s vehicle and the squad car, but did not retrieve the illicit drugs (with Floyd’s DNA) from the two vehicles even though that evidence was in plain view. They only collected the evidence after defense attorneys forced them to. They allowed the drugs to sit there for about eight months so that the media and prosecutorial narrative could be given time to set in and judgments already made.

DS: It sounds like many of the politicians, authorities, and officials involved in the trial intentionally sought a particular outcome regardless of the facts or Derek Chauvin’s guilt or innocence. Is that right?

TT: Yes, absolutely.

Many of these politicians and so-called leaders made it blatantly clear in their press conferences and press interviews of our guilt. They made these decisions from an out-of-context 15-second clip.

DS: What do you think Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s motive was for prosecuting the case the way he did?

TT: Politics—it was a presidential election year; a chance to ride a national narrative and spotlight. Taking the case from the county attorney, charging the way they charged, and treating it as a racial morality play rather than a use-of-force and medical event. That served a political purpose. It was about votes, about being seen as the side of justice, and about keeping a certain story in place. Once that story is locked in, facts that complicate it become inconvenient. I believe that’s why it was handled the way it was. I will also note that Ellison wrote a book that profited off the outcome of our cases.

DS: Minneapolis seemed like it was a tinderbox waiting to explode. Why was the racial atmosphere in Minneapolis so poisonous?

TT: I think it was not just Minneapolis that was a tinderbox. It was the year itself. COVID caused so much uncertainty and forced everyone inside. That was one of the contributing factors in why our nation, and especially our big cities, blew up as a whole.

Of course, we can’t forget the mainstream media continuously gaslighting with the old Marxist ideology of oppressor and oppressed, and more so during election years. As we approach this next election cycle, we have some of the same people using the tactic that was used in 2020 against police officers.

I think we can also trace some of the racial tensions back to when President Barack Obama was in the White House. You really see this oppressor and oppressed ideology being employed during election years. It’s kind of ironic because President Obama was elected as the first black president.

We also know that many politicians and organizations stand to gain from chaos and sowing discord.

Photo: Chad Davis, Deed - Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic - Creative Commons

DS: Moving on to your own specific case, could you describe what you were charged with and why?

TT: Federally, I was convicted of violating Floyd’s civil rights. The state conviction was aiding and abetting second-degree manslaughter.

I have often been asked by people in law enforcement and by the public how someone who was doing crowd control and never touched Floyd could have been charged. It makes no logical sense. I usually tell them they have not gone crazy.

I believe I was charged because I would not bend the knee to the mob and could not be bribed as a witness. That made me a problem witness for the prosecutors, so in order to get rid of me, they had to charge me. In a way, this heavily handicapped Chauvin’s ability to defend himself in court. Why do I think this? I refer you back to the original prosecutors removing themselves from the case.

It is impossible to defend yourself in court when you have Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, Jacob Frey, Minneapolis Police Department Chief Medaria Arradondo (his book was also dependent on the outcome of our case), and Judge Peter Cahill pointing fingers at you. On top of that you have the Biden Department of Justice and mainstream media pointing fingers at you without any concern for evidence. That is mob justice.

DS: What was it like to be accused of such serious crimes by the state knowing that you were innocent and that you stood little chance of receiving a fair trial?

TT: It was extremely discouraging. To see abuses of power and authority by those in positions that should be trusted by its citizens made me angry. What was being projected onto us was in fact what was being done to us by those in powerful positions. It was only by the grace of God and His mighty hand that I was able to stand up to evil and call it out as such, knowing that it would cost me much pain.

DS: How long of a prison sentence did you serve? What was prison like? How did the inmates treat you?

TT: I was sentenced federally to 42 months. In Minnesota state court, I was sentenced to 57 months, the maximum allowed. Both sentences were served concurrently. With good time, I served a little over three years.

As far as my prison time, literally the first day was probably the worst in prison. An attempt was made on my life. But thanks to Providence, I was in a hospital prison. So they moved me from the general population into the hospital side of the prison. This allowed me to care for sick inmate patients and preach the Gospel to many of them.

DS: What was the reason an attempt was made on your life? Did you ever find out their motive?

TT: Obviously, I was involved in a case that became extremely publicized and polarizing. It was on the 24-hour news cycle for months on end. I found it interesting to learn later on from other inmates that they knew I was coming to that specific prison months in advance, before I even knew. Someone in authority obviously had tipped them off.

On my first day I was warned by some concerned inmates that they had heard of plans to attack me. That would occur shortly thereafter when my roommate would leave the cell. The masked attackers made it obvious to me that they intended to drag me into a different room. I would imagine it was not to play a card game, but likely to eliminate me.

One thing I have learned going through this experience is that there are some who are in positions of power who are afraid of people who exercise their First Amendment right to expose corruption and misconduct. Some will go to great lengths to ensure that never happens.

DS: How did your family deal with your imprisonment? How did prison change you?

TT: It was difficult for my wife and children to not have me around. My wife would often tell me that my three-year-old daughter, for the first year, would fall asleep next to the front door waiting for her daddy to return.

Prison definitely changes a person. For me, what was meant for evil, God used it for His sanctification purposes and to use the experience to build me up.

Tou Thao reuniting with his family after being released from prison.

DS: You are a Christian who has made it clear that your faith is a central part of your life. What role has your faith played through the grave injustices and hardships you have suffered over the past six years? How has your faith been challenged?

TT: My faith in Jesus is the only reason why I am here speaking to you today.

As we know, Jesus says that in this life we will have trials and tribulations, but he has overcome the world. That is a promise those who are suffering can hold on to.

We also know in Romans 5:3-5 that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. Pastor Adrian Rogers once said, “A faith that cannot be tested cannot be trusted.” With that I can rejoice in a genuine faith that has been tested and challenged by fire over the last six years. Praise God!

DS: What is motivating you now to speak out about your case and the Chauvin case? What do you want the public to hear and understand? What would you encourage the public to read or watch to become more informed on these issues?

TT: Could I move on with my life? Yes, but if I know the truth and allow an innocent man to languish in prison, what good am I to God? Ephesians chapter 5 says we must expose the works of darkness. As children of God we are bound by Scripture to say something, even if it takes us out of our comfort zone.

We have been called to not live in comfort, but to speak truth. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” So I cannot stay silent, even at the cost of my own safety. We have not been called to live in safety, but to stand our ground against evil.

As far as this case goes, I would encourage your readers to watch, free on YouTube, “The Fall of Minneapolis” by Liz Collin and Dr. J.C. Chaix. I also encourage your readers to watch “Minnesota Mao,” also produced by them. This reminds us that the enemies of our nation are not at the gates, but inside the gates now, infiltrating all our institutions. I believe it is our responsibility to ensure fertile ground for the faith of our children to be practiced and matured in this nation.

DS: Tou Thao, thank you for taking the time to share your story with us. Your courage and resolve are an inspiration to many of us. We wish you and your family the best.

TT: Thank you for allowing me this time to share my story.

Looking back, safely removed now in time and space, the Marine is convinced that one cannot be both a good human being and a good military officer. He laments that a part of the tension comes from inadequate training. He observes that, prior to deployment, while his ability to kill was greatly refined—he learnt to do it with a variety of means: pulling a trigger, ordering bomb strikes, and even beating someone to death with a rock—his ethical understanding of killing was not. Before joining the military, he understood killing another human being is, simply, always wrong. The only modification he made after training, commissioning, and deployment was that killing is also sometimes necessary. He remains agnostic regarding how something could be both immoral and required. But he is certain that to properly wage war you must recalibrate your moral compass. “I didn’t return from Afghanistan as the same person,” he concludes; “I’m no longer the ‘good’ person I thought I was.”

We can cavil about everything that must be amiss to allow a Marine officer, despite all his practical and theoretical training, formal education, and upbringing, to be sent downrange encumbered with such moral confusion and so inadequate an ethical framework. But we mustn’t think his understanding is an outlier. The paradoxical view that ‘killing is always wrong, but in war it is necessary’ is commonplace in too many quarters of Western—including Christian—moral thought. You will find it replicated, if in varying locutions, throughout combat memoirs stretching back from before America’s founding up through the present day. It characterizes, too, the views of important philosophers, theologians, and public intellectuals, most notably Reinhold Niebuhr. This last assertion may seem odd as Niebuhr is well known for both his sometimes excoriating critiques of pacifism, particularly in its Christian sub-species, and for his almost single-handed push to get U.S. mainline churches to support American entry into the Second World War. But Niebuhr’s critique of pacifism was never a simple rejection of pacifism itself—only of its efficaciousness in a world in which Christians were called not only to follow Christ in an absolute and uncompromising ethic of love but—and Niebuhr thought this almost a contraction—to be responsible too; including by taking the responsibility to make choices between greater and lesser evils. The result, as I have asserted elsewhere, is that Niebuhr can be accurately described as, in principle, a pacifist, but, in practice, as a pacifist willing to betray his normative principles to justify a necessary kill. Indeed, far from being novel, I submit that the Marine’s paradoxical view of violence fits seamlessly into the deep moral narratives that have long-shaped American ideals.

Like all people, Americans are irredeemably storied creatures. As such, and pushing back against a morally vacuous liberal conception of the self as an atomized individual untethered to prior commitments or traditions, moral philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre contend that we cannot—or must not—try to make sense of who we are without recourse to those fundamental tales, shaped by the historical experiences of those who came before us, that we have told ourselves from time out of mind. Whether shared around the primitive campfires of humanity’s youth or, later, around dinner tables, hearths, and other familial gathering spots on the shores of a new continent, stories have passed from generation to generation to shape future ones with the wisdom, aspirations, fears, and ideals of the previous. They both constitute as well as frame our understanding of reality, the things we find significant, and, thereby, they give form to the moral obligations we willingly, or begrudgingly, shoulder.

It’s perhaps peculiar to suggest that even Americans, arguably a preternaturally anti-mythological people eager to be disabused of past allegiances, might still need—knowingly or not—the “coherence and direction in history,” as Richard Slotkin puts it, “that myths give to those who believe in them.” But the seeming exception helps prove the thesis: Americans, too, are a fundamentally narrative people. For much of the last 150 years, the defining myth in America has been the Western and the mythmakers have been those who, as Slotkin contends, “tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness.” From the early novels of James Fenimore Cooper, written in the 1820s as the frontier was already beginning to recede, to Owen Wister’s defining stories that took us past the turn of the century, through the earliest films that accompanied the birth of cinema, and up to the television and classic movies that shared box office dominance—or by virtue of sheer volume and cultural presence dominated the box office—from the late 1930s to at least the early 1960s, the Western has best reflected, transmitted, and shaped American ideals. These ideals include rugged and self-reliant individualism, integrity, justice, the defense of the helpless, courage, competence, benevolence, and the sacrifice of the few for the many. Fitting descriptors, one might think, for a people proposing to be a city on a hill. But not everyone is so sanguine.

In numerous important works, including the deeply influential Regeneration Through Violence: The Myth of the American Frontier, Slotkin argues that these founding myths of American culture are specifically rooted not in beneficence but rather the ritualized violence of the encounter between white settlers and Native Americans. Americans, he asserts, have formed and repeatedly renewed their national identity and sense of purpose through acts of violence against a “savage” other. In this view, violence, including racialized violence, isn’t incidental to American mythology, it’s constitutive of it. To be sure, I reject Slotkin’s insistence that the violence essential to the Western myth is necessarily racialized violence. While the “Cowboys vs. Indians” trope is often thought of as the default storyline, if you take any list of the highly acclaimed masterpieces of the Western genre, you’ll find the central conflict most often focuses on tensions between white settlers, outlaws, lawmen, and cattle barons. Slotkin’s assertion won’t be bothered by this. He isn’t arguing that every single Western, or even most, features a literal white-versus-native battle—though he does suggest even white outlaws are just Indian proxies. Rather, he insists that the structure, language, and psychology of the Western genre rely on the idea that society must violently purge an “uncivilized” element to survive—and that this idea was forged in the crucible of historic, racialized frontier warfare. This said, while Slotkin’s over-psychologized racial theories are doubtful, it cannot be argued that violence doesn’t serve a regenerative role in Western films more broadly. It would also be hard to defend an assertion that regenerative violence isn’t essential to American national identity.

But it matters—it is morally relevant—that the focus of the violence depicted in Westerns is precisely centered on the abiding theme of wresting civilization out of a wilderness, whether a literal wilderness or simply a frontier made wild by the absence of the rule of the law and characterized by strong and rapacious men riding roughshod over the innocent and weak. This theme typically pairs with the image of a lone hero riding into the morally disordered world to set things right. This hero is not motivated by racial animus, or even a will to power or lust to dominate. Nor, most often, is the threat he will defend against posed by some ethnic “other,” or, even when it is, the threat is not due to the enemy being “other” per se. Instead, the menace is an embodiment of lawlessness, disordinate vice, and regression. Against this, the Western is preoccupied with what is required to secure the innocent and to transition from anarchy to order.

Consider, for instance, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A quick refresher: The film opens with Ransom Stoddard traveling by stagecoach through the wilderness toward the frontier town of Shinbone. The coach is ambushed by the outlaw Liberty Valance and his gang. After robbing the passengers, Valance discovers Stoddard is an attorney intending to set up a legal practice in town. Incensed, Valance tears up the lawbooks, beats Stoddard nearly to death, and leaves him unconscious on the side of the road. Soon, Tom Doniphan, the eponymous hero, comes along, discovers Stoddard, and carries him into Shinbone. He takes Stoddard to an inn, tends his wounds, and pays the innkeeper to nurse him back to health. Sound familiar? The 20^th century Protestant ethicist Paul Ramsey wrote significantly about the Good Samaritan as he examined the ethics of the use of force. Whatever impact one might think Christ’s instruction to turn the other cheek has on the right to self-defense, Ramsey observed that few among us would suggest we are supposed to expose the other side of our assaulted neighbor’s face to his attackers’ repeated blows. What then, Ramsey asked, might we suppose the Good Samaritan ought to have done had he arrived on scene while the assailants were still at their fell work? Or if such assaults weren’t isolated and rare occurrences but a routine effect of a larger systemic crisis? Ford’s classic is a meditation on this question. The conflict here is not, pace Slotkin, a racial one. It is a moral one. It is most times incidental whether a Western villain is white or an Indian, but he is certainly a savage; savage in the sense that he represents things that are antithetical to the political goods of order, justice, and peace. Because he does, and not because of what he is, he must be defeated for productive communal life to flourish. The Western, at its best, reveals something genuinely universal that the frontier experience happened to crystallize for Americans—the perennial human problem of how fragile civilized order is and how dependent it is on violent defense. These are themes to be lauded by any healthy political culture.

If we cut a stroke deeper, however, we will see that Westerns are about one thing more, and here we think again of our beleaguered Marine. The Western is also about what civilized order’s dependence on violence costs those who provide it. To get a vision for this tragic undercurrent, consider the broad storyline running through some of the genre’s greatest works, spanning both classical and revisionist Westerns: Shane, Once Upon a Time in the West, The Searchers, Unforgiven, The Shootist and, in more contemporary, neo-western forms, Logan and The Highwaymen. Consider the amplified narrative. Into our morally disordered world in conflict comes the gunslinger, the man of violence. Standing on the side of the innocent against the malevolent forces that would devour them, he destroys the evildoers and brings about the conditions necessary for order, justice, and peace to take root and for the new community to flourish. But having secured this new world, the gunslinger finds he has no place in it. While the cinematography might suggest a romantic riding off into the sunset, the real message seems to be something like: “thank you for your service, now go the hell away.”

Shane, George Stevens’ 1953 adaptation of an even better book by the same name, is one of the purest expressions of this. Following convention, Shane rolls with the opening credits into a valley of homesteaders under increasing threat by a violent cattle baron who wants them off the land he claims as his own. We don’t know all the details, but it’s clear that Shane has lived a life intimate with violence, and that, however good he was at it, he is now trying to settle into something rather less kinetic, bloody, and ugly. But in the end, when it’s clear nothing else will protect them, the good people of the valley require Shane to be what he is—a man gifted with the capacity for the controlled application of extraordinary violence. Importantly, what follows is not carnage-as-entertainment. Rather than glorified brutality, the violence in Shane, typical of the genre, is morally purposeful, appearing only as a last resort in the proportionate and discriminate defense of rights against those who initiated unjustified aggression. Nevertheless, Shane is a meditation about the price that violence exacts—not just on those who suffer it, but also, and especially, on those who inflict it. “There’s no going back from the killing,” rues Shane, “right or wrong it’s a brand, and the brand sticks.” And so, job done, Shane follows the closing credits up and out of the valley. There is no place for him in the community now at peace.

The Western’s ambiguity regarding violence is an echo of the “killing is wrong but in war it is necessary” sentiment and it signals a tension—even a contradiction—in American thought. It is also a catastrophe. This is because the sentiment is also reflected in the literature on military moral injury. Drawing on early clinical research by Veterans Affairs psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, and later expanded by others, a moral injury is a kind of psychological wound that emerges out of trauma caused by either—or both—“betrayal” or “transgression.” The betrayal involves suffering a profound breach of what was right by someone in a position of authority in a high-stakes situation. The transgression involves witnessing, perpetrating, or failing to prevent acts that violate deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. Of course, these overlap in obvious ways. An act in which you are the transgressor is just another kind of betrayal, except in this case you are yourself the traitor, having let yourself down by discovering that you actually are the lousy sonofabitch you really hoped you weren’t. Regardless of its origin, internal or external, the psychological and spiritual aftermath of a moral injury includes the presence of crippling degrees of guilt, shame, self-loathing, alienation, a loss of trust, purpose, or meaning, and grave remorse.

The problem with all this is more than conceptual. First, the primary predictor of moral injury among military personnel is having killed in combat. Second, the overwhelming evidence from large-scale studies confirms that moral injury is a primary predictor of veteran suicide. In other words, having killed in combat is a chief predictor of veteran suicide. Combat veterans who screen positive for moral injury are approximately six times more likely to attempt suicide in their lifetime compared to those without moral injury. This remains true even when statistically controlling for other severe conditions such as PTSD, depression, or substance abuse.

The “killing is wrong but in war it is necessary” sentiment is even more pronounced when we realize that there is nothing in the clinical literature to suggest that the kind of kill—whether lawful, accidental, or an atrocity—matters. All kills, regardless of the legality or intent of the actor, are statistically significant predictors of elevated psychiatric distress. Too many of our boys and girls who grow into the men and women who fight our wars are being conditioned, intentionally or not, by family, faith, and societal norms to believe that taking a human life is the ultimate transgression. When they cross that line, the result can be immediate cognitive shock that comes at devastating, tragic, and total costs.

A part of the tragedy is that it needn’t be this way. While I stand by my assertion that the American Western is a—if not the—quintessential expression of the American view of violence, there is another, deeper view drawn from our Classical and Hebraic inheritance, that insists that all killing is morally wrong is a philosophical error. Christian theological intelligence, best exemplified on these matters by the tradition of just war casuistry, is grounded in the basic truth, echoed in both common sense and -law, that killing comes in different kinds. One kind of killing, we call it murder, is always wrong—and ought never to be done. Another kind of is basically morally neutral, such as unavoidable accidents. Yet another kind is morally permitted—even, sometimes, obligatory.

This isn’t to downplay the gravity of homicide, it’s only to say that not every kind of killing, pace our Marine, is morally wrong. This is because evil, like killing, also comes in different kinds—at least two: moral and non-moral. Both kinds emerge from an Augustinian account of evil as privation. An evil occurs when a thing is deprived of a good essential to, or proper to, its nature. Take this kind of good from a thing and you haven’t just taken something from it; you’ve diminished what it is. A blind stone hasn’t suffered an evil, for sight isn’t proper to stones. A blind child has, for sight is proper to a child. By this account, British philosopher Nigel Biggar can stress that killing another human being is always to cause an evil, because it deprives the victim of the good of life. He rightly presses this notion all the way down, applying it even to the killing of someone “who has let himself grow monstrously corrupt—think Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot.” That their deaths seem to involve the loss of nothing good is only because they have “so misdirected their lives,” that their losing the good of that life amounts, for most of the rest of us, “to a moral gain.” Yet, while to kill a person is always to cause an evil it is not always to do a moral evil. A moral evil is a privation caused by a will that ought to have chosen otherwise. A just warrior—or a just gunslinger—causes a non-moral evil, the genuine privation of the good of life, every time he kills a man. But he is not doing anything morally wrong if he has not knitted his will to depriving a thing of a good proper to its nature without moral justification. Biggar explains it this way: “I can kill you out of contemptuous hatred, intending nothing less than your annihilation, constrained by no necessity, and with no proportionate reason to prefer another’s life to yours. Or I can kill you without malice, with respectful and manifest reluctance, necessitated by love for others, and with sufficient reason to prefer their lives to yours.”

A lot is riding on our ability to make these basic distinctions. A good society’s sons and daughters must be nurtured to grow into the kinds of men and women who can do justice in the right ways, for the right reasons, at the right times, with the right intentions, and against the right things. The moral narratives drawn from the hard men of the West mustn’t be forgotten. Implicit in Ford’s masterwork is the understanding that their memories must be maintained in the stories we tell to steel the spine of those who come after, to fortify their spirits, and to stiffen their resolve. If we forget these lessons, when good men cannot be counted on to stand between the victims and their aggressors, then men like Liberty Valance–his very name signals a perversion of freedom–will rise and rule in their cruelty.

But the Western’s view of the costs of even resisting men like Valance must be amended. It is not wrong that our Marine felt grief over the killing of a pair of Afghan kids who posed no threat. To not feel grief would be a calamity. But not all grief signals real guilt. Guilt—moral injury—must be reserved as the proper response following genuine acts of willful—or culpably irresponsible—wrongdoing. For the sorrow that arises from having done something hard and terrible that was nevertheless morally right or neutral, we should prefer what I call moral bruising. A bruise is an impact trauma. It mirrors more serious wounds in that it hurts, might cause some measure of a loss of function, and may be disfiguring. But with a bruise these things are far more temporary and far less dangerous.

My love of the Western is tempered by this shortcoming. Shane’s “brand” conflates the grief of killing, appropriate and even honoring to the humanity of the person killed, with the guilt of wrongdoing, which is not warranted when the killing was just. The Western’s mythology, on this point, is therapeutically catastrophic. Guilt needs repentance, forgiveness, and penance. Grief needs acknowledgment, mourning, and a community of friends. But this is precisely what Shane won’t find as he returns—or is driven back—into the wilderness. My fear is that American culture too often follows the Western in forcing remedy by aestheticizing us to the “killing is wrong but sometimes necessary” paradox in a way that makes it feel resolved when it isn’t. Shane rides away looking noble and tragic. The sunset is beautiful. The music swells. Caught up in the heroic dimensions of it all, we may feel some measure of closure when the curtain falls. But those who do our nation’s violence must endure long past the credits. We owe it to them to overcome the failures of our public and private institutions—involving not simply the military but academic, ecclesiastical, cultural, social, and family ones as well—to provide the conceptual resources necessary to think accurately about the moral complexities of killing and the duty to bring order and peace out of chaos. But we also owe it to ourselves, so that we are honest about the moral project of maintaining peace and the means that are necessary to achieve those ends.

Marc LiVecche is the McDonald Distinguished Scholar of Ethics, War, and Public Life at Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy. He is also adjunct professor ethics at the US Naval Academy. He is the author of, The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury (OUP 2021, paperback October 2026)

In recent years, that culture of skepticism has given way to more extreme animosity in the public square. In progressive thinking, if whites have been the source of inequality from the colonial era until to the present, then showing affection for white Americans is an expression of imperialism. White Americans were plantation owners and woman-subjugating zealots back then, and today they reappear in a new mask under new labels as Trumpists or Christian nationalists.

In this view, the only America that can be embraced is the America of the future, one that has achieved full economic and racial equality. One where the regressive white Christian vote has finally been neutralized - in other words, a communist future. The effects of this movement are still rippling through our economy and will continue to define the culture war for a generation.

During the second Trump presidency, many have begun to disavow woke excesses. Still, to openly appreciate white American culture strikes most people as inherently racist. Many would rather proclaim their love for Western civilization, European philosophy, or ancient church traditions. Why can’t we simply appreciate the dominant ways of life passed down on this continent by mostly Protestant Christians of British and German origin? Those cultural habits and genealogies have intertwined over the centuries, linking the first colonists to our families today. In other words, I’m grateful that my great-grandparents were who they were, despite all their flaws.

A healthy appreciation for white Americans is the most basic antidote to communism in our time. That’s not to fetishize whites as somehow genetically pure or morally spotless - there are numerous dilemmas we have inherited from American history. The human heart is wicked, individually and collectively. People sin! The varied cultural legacy of whites must be examined according to the standard set by Christ in the Scriptures. It’s possible to want an ethnic group to be more righteous but still like them. We should not tolerate claims that white America should be abolished.

As such, we do need to thoroughly reform the organizations that have taught us to reflexively belittle and problematize white culture or claim that it doesn’t exist. A culture in which a majority of people possess the characteristics described in the notorious Smithsonian infographic is one of the most precious inheritances in the world. We should honor it in the public square.

Unfortunately, we are in the midst of living among a generation that has been conditioned to reflexively disparage white culture, even when it’s doing so is of no obvious benefit to them.

Consider the case of Francesca Hong, the one-time socialist candidate for governor of Wisconsin. Old tweets were recently unearthed in which she wrote that she hates Thanksgiving and that old white people put her on edge.

Hong’s words:

“I ate two bites of my kid’s cheeseburger at a Culver’s in black river falls and told him they ran out of ice cream. Mostly just wanted to leave bc I was on the verge of an anxiety attack...to [sic] many old white people who didn’t think we spoke English”

And:

“Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it.”

These should be career-ending statements. This is the opposite of zeal for Americans. It’s an open distaste for 80% of Wisconsin’s white population.

According to her tweet, the Puritan colony of 1621 represents something inherently unclean, to be defined by how it brought disease to “Indegenous Folx,” an ambiguous collective who apparently represent the true country’s authentic non-white and non-cisheteropatriarchal origins, to whose way of life we ought to return. To someone like Ms. Hong, that is the true America, and the living, breathing 4.5 million white people in Wisconsin are a withering inconvenience.

When she says we should stop celebrating colonialism, she’s saying that we should not celebrate white people arriving on this continent.

Of course, Ms. Hong, in all likelihood, doesn’t despise all white people. (In fact, it seems that she married one.) The bigger problem is that she now has the gall to campaign to govern a people for whom she has no obvious respect. The state of Wisconsin is one giant Culver’s full of old white people. If their very presence gives her anxiety, why does she think she’s worthy of governing them?

In other words, she’s not very thankful.

We simply cannot keep tolerating this sort of casual anti-white, anti-American sentiment that has become commonplace over the past decade.

Helen Andrews writes in Compact about the racial crossroads facing America. We are soon approaching a tipping point where the majority of people in the United States will no longer feel any personal loyalty to historic American culture, and, in fact, many of these newcomers, like Francesca Hong, are encouraged to casually express antipathy toward legacy Americans and to advance a communist political platform that would expropriate their goods and property. The thought being: they are white people, after all. They couldn’t have earned what they have!

Of course, I didn’t earn my own freedom and opportunities. It was an inheritance. It was a gift from my forefathers. I honor them and don’t want their gift taken away, if I can help it.

This white culture is aging out and slipping away from us. (Or these cultures, if you want to be more precise.) Cultures don’t happen automatically; they had to be cultivated over centuries through lawgiving, wars lost and won, lifetimes of work and leisure, Christian teaching argued over again and again, and different families traveling across the earth and sea in hope of abundance. We cannot expect all of the benefits of this legacy to continue indefinitely without the legacy itself being nurtured and appreciated.

The answer to wokeness is not white pride, but white thankfulness. I’m thankful for the cultural inheritance I’ve received from my white American Protestant ancestors, and I hope to perpetuate and sanctify it. That’s meant with no disrespect to Black Americans, Eastern Orthodox Christians, or Koreans - those are just simply distinct patrimonies from my own.

If communists go unchecked, they will dispossess us. They will abolish the American way of life, marginalizing whites as second-class citizens and scapegoating us as acceptable targets of scorn for ancestral sins. But I fear that our ingratitude and apathy have grown so great that many will merely shrug as we continue to be disinherited.

Michael Thomas Jones works in alternative education in northern Idaho.

For those who want to inaugurate a new American Golden Age, what Brad Wilcox and James Lynch call the “vice economy”—which is accelerating in the Trump era—needs to be addressed.

Instant, 24/7 access to hardcore pornography, rampant online gambling and sports betting, the ubiquity of public marijuana use, and the proliferation of tattoos are just some of the most obvious signs of degrading public morality in the U.S. While moralistic accounts of a regime’s decline can be overwrought, there is clearly a connection between the moral state of the citizenry and a regime’s health. In the case of the United States, that connection seems fairly pronounced—and headed in a troubling direction.

The rise of increasingly degraded forms of pornography is destructive to men and women, families and children. It’s well known that men, on average, consume pornography at high rates due to a combination of factors, including certain sins to which men are more prone. But contrary to the impression some pastors may give during Father’s Day sermons that lambaste men for looking at pornography, women—even inside the church—look at it as well. A 2020 study found that 60% of women had looked at pornography in the previous month—and that 18% of women who regularly attend church had done so.

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket had drawn a combined $24 billion in wagers as of April, allowing people to bet on virtually anything imaginable. Apps like Klarna and Afterpay let people defer payment for nearly every type of good, tying dopamine hits to mounting debt.

I’ve seen some of the more public elements of the blossoming vice culture firsthand. During regular trips to Michigan, I’ve noticed that as soon as I cross the state line, highway billboards advertise either injury lawyers or various cannabis dispensaries and vape shops. One sign even features a smiling grandma giving two thumbs up, with the dispensary’s name floating above her. (This comes as a new study reports that increasing numbers of American users are experiencing symptoms of cannabis use disorder.)

Public displays of vice like these would clearly have been objectionable in a culture in which Christianity was seen as a positive influence. But in a culture in which Christianity is losing its power, the moral guardrails are breaking down. Practices once associated only with the lower classes have been absorbed into the middle and upper classes. The legalization and social ascent of vice are part of a larger story about how Christian culture is eaten away—gradually, then suddenly.

On a parallel track, the proliferation of vice is also being fostered within the church. Sabbath worship has increasingly been shoved aside to make room for children’s sports on Sunday mornings and wall-to-wall NFL coverage and games throughout the day. You don’t need to be a strict Sabbatarian to see that treating weekly church attendance as optional, rather than as a command taught in Scripture and embedded in nature, is partly why Christian denominations are eroding.

For some parents, fitting church around sports—or simply forgoing it on most Sundays when there’s a conflict—has already become normalized. This attitude was certainly reinforced by churches that shut down for long stretches during COVID, giving congregants reason to think attendance was optional. It was further compounded by the spectacle of many modern services, which can be fully digitized because they are essentially concerts with a TED Talk somewhere in the middle. Pew reported that the share of U.S. adults attending religious services at least once a month fell from 33% to 30% between 2019 and 2022.

In sharp contrast to the 1980s, when youth sports seasons were shorter and play was more informal, there is now a much greater emphasis on joining professionalized club teams. This requires parents to shuttle their children to multiple practices each week and drive to weekend games and tournaments that can be hours away.

A report from the Aspen Institute found that the number of hours children devoted to sports, including practices and games, increased after the pandemic. As blue laws were gradually repealed and 20th-century cultural norms faded, the stigma of not being seen in the pews on Sunday has mostly evaporated. It seems easier for coaches to pressure parents to attend games on Sunday mornings than for pastors to push back against these aspects of vice culture. Lifeway Research found that just 36% of pastors say missing church for sports is never acceptable, a figure that rises to 43% among older pastors.

Putting the brakes on the runaway train of vice will be difficult. But although the odds are long, it will need to be done to preserve a semblance of Christian culture that can point Americans toward the eternal things of God.

America’s Founding Fathers, after all, saw religion and morality as necessary prerequisites for a self-governing people. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” George Washington said in his Farewell Address, “religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.”

Changing times demand new strategies for confronting the worst aspects of our culture. Although Christians are a declining majority in the country, they still have sufficient numbers to produce beneficial results if they band together.

American Reformer’s Scott Yenor proposes a new playbook for regulating general obscenity. It includes congressional action to protect children from pornography, a sounder interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 that would remove blanket immunity for platforms, and the creation of state and federal prosecution task forces to target the production and distribution of hardcore pornography.

Christians should also consider following the lead of Cardinal John O’Connor, the former archbishop of New York, and refusing to watch professional sports on days such as Good Friday and Christmas. While there’s nothing wrong with the traditional Thanksgiving Day football games, multiple NFL and NBA games are now played on Christmas Day—a clear warning sign of a rapidly deteriorating Christian culture.

Christians must stop being weathervanes and become a positive force that pushes back against elements of vice culture affecting our churches and communities.

The story is well worn by now. The Cold War presented a choice between two stark visions of government and society: communism and the free world. Communism ultimately failed to deliver, and the USSR fell beneath the weight of its own corruption and economic decrepitude. The American-led order imagined that it had delivered the death knell to communism for good. Liberal democracy appeared triumphant.

The fact that China continued to operate as a communist state seemed to be a mere accident of history that would shortly be resolved through free markets and liberalization. At least, this was the thinking in America and Europe. It was only a matter of time before China, too, made the transition to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism. This comforting narrative has turned out to be false in most respects.

China did not liberalize. Although China opened up for a period, it has since closed down, constructing a surveillance state and social credit system that would be the envy of any dictator. China’s market did become relatively free for a time, but under Xi, the CCP has reasserted its dominance over the market, sometimes crushing companies that have accumulated power and influence, as the case of Jack Ma illustrates.

Engineers vs. Lawyers

As the rivalry between the United States and China has intensified, shifting from friendly to hostile, the rhetoric and predictions have also reached extreme forms, vacillating between prophecies of American decline and overly confident assertions of China’s imminent collapse. The reality is much less clear, and Dan Wang’s book, Breakneck, provides the kind of sober and realistic analysis that is sorely lacking.

Wang was born in China but moved to Canada as a child. He made his name as a China analyst, developing a reputation as one of the most astute observers of the country. His annual newsletter garnered intense interest as international corporations sought to understand trends and developments in a country whose behavior, especially that of its political rulers, is often opaque and difficult to decipher.

In Breakneck, Wang sets out to take the measure of these two superpowers, laying out what he sees as their strengths and weaknesses. The book focuses more on China, with periodic points of contrast with the United States. The elegant heuristic Wang explores is what he describes as ‘the engineering state’ versus ‘the lawyerly state.’ The Chinese government and society have been dominated by engineers for the past four decades, which helps account for the massive expansion of manufacturing and construction over that period. America is a society run by lawyers who focus on protecting individual rights and processes. Therein lies the conundrum: “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.”

The differences between these two superpowers are often emphasized, but Wang sees many similarities. Both are driven by “a strain of materialism” that contributes to “a spirit of vigorous competition.” They are pragmatic and energetic. Both countries are filled with hustlers and entrepreneurs and share a deep awe of the “technological sublime.” More than anything, however, they have a deep and abiding “faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don’t get in line.”

What China has achieved over the last forty years in building and development has been nothing short of astounding. Transforming a country plagued by grinding poverty into an industrial juggernaut is the economic success story of the twenty-first century, mirroring in many respects the American industrial expansion of the early twentieth century. But that America is gone. Although the United States may excel at technological innovation, in the 1970s it shifted toward a culture of blocking and protecting, which is anathema to a culture of building.

The United States creates new technologies, but China possesses the manufacturing expertise to build them at scale. China has assembled communities of engineering practice in places such as Shenzhen and Henan that prioritize the specialized process knowledge required for high-end manufacturing - knowledge that can be acquired only over time. The United States faces a similar problem with high-end chip manufacturing. The exacting process of manufacturing advanced chips at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the global leader in advanced chip fabrication, cannot simply be copied and pasted into another context. It takes years to develop and refine chip-fabrication processes, which require communities of practice to build the skills and knowledge needed to manufacture these extremely complex products successfully.

The California high-speed rail debacle is emblematic of this paradigm shift. Eighteen billion dollars have been spent since 2013, yet not a single section of operational high-speed track has been laid. Mired in red tape and environmental regulations, the project seems destined to become a never-ending black hole of spending with little to show for it.

The Enemy Within

One of the great virtues of Wang’s measured and sensible assessment of these two countries is that it deflates the overheated rhetoric that pits them against one another as mortal enemies. Closer to the truth is that they are their own worst enemies. American and Chinese societies - driven as they are by insatiable and frenetic energy - are more often than not the causes of their own biggest problems.

The way each country dealt with the coronavirus pandemic illuminates this truth. The helter-skelter, patchwork process the United States adopted was enabled by a deep aversion to a top-down, one-size-fits-all policy. Given the bad advice and policy recommendations that came from federal public health agencies, this aversion would seem to be a virtue. And it was, to an extent. But it also produced a chaotic, irrational, and disordered set of rules and regulations that made little coherent sense and were informed more by parochial prejudice than by thoughtful policy.

In the early years of the pandemic, the Chinese government’s rapid and effective response displayed the strengths of the engineering state. Whereas Americans bumbled their way toward a series of half measures, the unified Chinese response appeared to be a model of rational efficiency and lent credence to the Chinese system. Wang lived in China throughout the pandemic and recounts how the early controls were somewhat onerous; given the chaos that reigned in the rest of the world, however, they felt like an acceptable price for relative normality.

Then came the Omicron variant in 2021, with the ‘zero-COVID’ policy on its heels. Major cities such as Shanghai were completely locked down for months, with haphazard planning and little consideration for the suffering the measures would inflict. In the end, the pride the Chinese once felt in their pandemic response melted into desperation and protest against the draconian measures imposed in the fanatical pursuit of a numerical target. It turns out, Wang laments, that the great strengths of the engineering state are also its weaknesses.

The folly of the engineering state is cast in even sharper relief when Wang turns to the one-child policy. The cruel machinery of the state not only imposed unnecessary suffering on the Chinese people for thoroughly unscientific and misguided reasons, but also inflicted on the country a demographic catastrophe that threatens to plunge its economy and society into ruin in the coming decades.

Reckoning

Wang is intent on avoiding the old rhetoric of capitalists versus communists and open versus closed society. That is a weakness of the book, but it also creates space for a different kind of analysis. Instead, he argues that the real success of each country will be judged by whether it improves the lives of its own people. The strengths of the Chinese system are real, Wang insists, and should not be discarded. Improving the material quality of life through jobs, rising wages, better living conditions, and improvements to the built environment is a major advantage of the Chinese state. It has made real, tangible advances in the quality of life for a large portion of its population.

When it comes to answering which country is better positioned for the future, Wang is less sanguine about the engineering state. Its strengths become major weaknesses in the long run. The CCP is fundamentally afraid of its own people. Like a good engineer, it obsesses over control. Rather than unleashing the potential of its people to create a flourishing society, it often stifles and crushes that potential for fear of giving them too much agency.

America’s great strength is China’s great weakness. American society empowers its people, allowing them to develop their skills and talents free from state control. This pluralism supports a more hands-off approach and permits the experimentation and innovation that have become hallmarks of American culture. The real question for America is whether it can recapture the sense of dynamism that has marked Chinese society in recent decades. The American left and right, each in their own way, hamper society and government from undertaking the large, visionary projects that defined early-twentieth-century America. Can America recapture its dynamic spirit, or will it continue to get in its own way?

Timon Cline: Dr. Mohler, thank you for agreeing to participate in this symposium, and it’s a delight to discuss these topics with you.

R. Albert Mohler Jr.: Timon, I’m very glad to take part in answering these questions and participating in this symposium. I hope what comes out of it is both heat and light.

TC: A big question, maybe the big question at present, is how we define America. Everyone is asking this question, and asserting an answer, in some way. Tocqueville said that the first settlers (especially in New England) defined the nation and that all subsequent questions can, in some sense, be answered by looking back at them. Is that still true? How would you define our beginnings, especially as it relates to our religious and cultural character? What is the role of Protestantism in all this?

AM: There’s a lot to unpack there, but the first thing I want to say is if I ask myself the question, “What is a nation?” I have to say it is a distinctive people with a distinctive territory and a distinctive heritage and a distinctive worldview—a distinctive set of commitments that is the foundation for the establishment of the entire society. And it is a common project to which all are accountable—citizens and rulers, legislators and judges. They are accountable to a specific identity with a specific creedal form. But more than a nation is a specific people speaking a common language and building a common society. And I’ll go back to say, I think any lasting understanding of a nation has to be based upon metaphysical claims that are honestly projected.

I’m not saying that people who speak another language cannot join. I’m not saying that it is a closed system so that no one may join. But I am saying they have to know exactly what they’re joining and they have to be joining it gladly.

The United States of America, and I’ll just use the term “American”, the American experiment, is predicated on a continuation of the project of Western Civilization, particularly as channeled through the Anglosphere. It is a continuation of the Western achievement as represented in English-speaking cultures, and in particular in England, later Great Britain. The United States, certainly by the late colonial period, understood itself to be an intentional continuation of that tradition with particular corrections that they saw as absolutely necessary for the preservation of that same civilizational pattern—which is to say the American experience was not established at the very first in any sense, as an anti-monarchical movement. It was explicitly established as a Republican ideal as an extension of Christendom.

And it’s right to reference the Puritans. And that means that to this was added the dimension of covenant. Thus, the understanding was that this new nation, even before we think of nation in formal political terms, this new nation was the continuation of the civilization of Christendom in a new continent, adapted to new needs. And quite honestly, what became clear is that those who were framing this republic saw it as a correction of that inherited model as well as a continuation of the same. When you look, for instance, at the achievement of the American constitutional order, it’s amazing how closely it follows an English or British model, but with very significant modifications. But the modifications were actually intended by those who made them, in order to perpetuate that tradition through time.

TC: What role does religion, generally speaking, play in nationhood? All the way back to Polybius we can find people saying that it’s the glue of society, maybe the source of all greatness. Is this perennially true? Does there have to be a central, animating cult around which everything else revolves, or are different models workable?

AM: I believe that every nation makes metaphysical claims and even more pervasively is established upon metaphysical principles and assumptions, whether these are acknowledged as theological or not. And that’s another way of saying that they are essentially theological whether those who make them want them to be considered theological or not. We need to understand that at the time of the American founding, there was no such thing as a secularized society. The basis of law, the origin of morality, the authority of government itself was understood to rest upon explicitly Christian foundations. You could back up and say these are religious foundations, but it was clearly a Christian foundation in its shape as an extension of Christendom. And furthermore, it was for the most part pervasively Protestant. And that is the founding worldview of what became the United States of America. And the fact that so much of this was not articulated, is a reflection of the fact that it was so widely assumed and unquestioned. Those who founded this nation and framed its Constitution and laws did not see such an acknowledgment as necessary.

It is very interesting that this issue emerges by the time you get to the midpoint of the 19th century, and we see a clear reset in the arguments made by President Abraham Lincoln going back to the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that there are natural rights endowed by the Creator that are the basis of this moral order and political experiment.

Every nation makes metaphysical claims. For instance, even if you look at the Soviet Union in its early decades, it clearly is making ultimate claims. The ultimate claims are amorphous, but there is the very deadly claim of the collective people. And of course you remember that that was supposed to be a transitional period where there was a dictatorship necessary in a tight regime until communism could be achieved, which of course it never was. But my point is, if you’re making transcendent claims, even when you think you’re secular, you’re just deifying the state.

Joseph Bottum, years ago, wrote a book on the theological shape of secular ideas. And he points out that the Left has its own set of doctrines that are almost a mirror image of historic Christian doctrine in the structure of Christian theology. And so even when they say they’re not making metaphysical claims, they do claim that certain truths are true before government declares them to be true. They’re confused about what they are, who they come from, and what they mean, but they are inherently religious in their shape.

I believe that the continuation of the American experiment is entirely dependent upon an explicit reference to the Christian and indeed overwhelmingly Protestant nature of our origins. And I believe the abandonment and repudiation of those origins, will lead to the demise of the American nation as we know it. I believe that every nation is based upon some clear metaphysical claims that transcend the state. And so even where you have an avowedly atheistic state, they still have to make some kind of metaphysical claim and they all do, and murderously so.

TC: Joseph Bottum has called the collapse of the Protestant mainline the most significant event in American history of the past 150 years. To your mind, what is it exactly that this collapse entailed? What did it do to the country generally and its soul, we might say, specifically?

AM: Yeah. The very fact that we refer to those historic churches—sometimes referred to as the Seven Sisters of the Protestant Mainline—as mainline is because they were the unquestioned power establishment in the United States. They were clergy to the elites, to the powerful class, to the rulers, to the legislators. They largely either established, or continued leadership in, higher education and the dominant arenas of culture. The collapse of the Mainline is essentially theological surrender and abdication. I think the leaders of mainline Protestantism imbibed and embraced theological liberalism, and eventually destroyed the foundations on which they built their own magnificent edifices. And eventually all of that gave way.

The bottom line is that a secular culture doesn’t need a secular church, and those liberal churches became so thoroughly secularized and captured by the spirit of the age, that they were just the secular choir of an increasingly secular culture.

And let’s remind ourselves that the shift from the one position to the other is not a shift away from explicit Christian identity to some kind of neutrality. Neutrality does not exist. Instead, they became engines for the very revolution that was redefining the entire society. The problem for the mainline church is that the new revolutionaries really didn’t need altars, priests, or choirs, and so they just went immediately to the periphery. This is not a group sent into exile. This is a group that completely burned down their own house. Furthermore, they did it in every way conceivable. They did it ideologically, they did it culturally, they did it financially, but they also did it biologically. They just stopped reproducing.

TC: Most consider the mainline collapse a net loss for America, but is there any sense in which it was a net gain for Protestant Christianity? The modernist-fundamentalist controversy split American Protestantism. This might have been good for orthodoxy, but it produced certain cultural externalities, to be sure.

AM: That’s an incredibly honest question, and it’s what we have to face. I regularly speak of the fact that in terms of the influence in the larger culture, I think we all miss, or at the very least note, the absence of the cultural cohesion and theological authority that came with Mainline Protestantism at its height in functional terms, and those are the only terms that many secular people are even interested in. But even in structural terms, the loss of mainline Protestantism meant that increasingly entire sectors of society were freed from any kind of theological influence or control whatsoever. And it shows up, of course, most clearly in the absolute vulnerability of all these institutions to the sexual revolution and the gender ideologies and all the rest. There are absolutely no defenses. There is no Protestant establishment with the power or moral authority to say no to anything. Instead, the liberal churches just became handmaidens to the progressivist ideologies. So we miss it in the sense that I think we miss the time when the vast majority of Americans knew, and were at least to some degree concerned about, what Christian pastors, priests, leaders, and faithful Christians thought about the matters at hand.

One of the interesting things is to note the distinction during the late years of the Eisenhower administration, President Eisenhower dedicated the headquarters of the National Council of Churches in New York City, he actually articulates kind of a functional understanding of the necessity of this mainline religion, and I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said it’s just really important that this nation have a God and I don’t care who it is. And by that time, liberal theology had already so infected the mainline churches and they were already so given over to moral and social compromise that honestly by the time they built the building, the moral authority was already leaving the house.

At the same time, all of this is very clarifying. You just have to wonder how anyone can possibly miss the truth. You drive down the street in a major American city and you see hulking old religious buildings that used to be centerpieces of the entire society. This was the heart of the city. Grace Episcopal Cathedral, the First Baptist Church, First Presbyterian Church, the Lutherans, the Methodists, this was the Protestant establishment. Because most of those denominations and churches have gone so horrifyingly liberal, all you have is a gay pride flag out front with nobody inside the building. And that is clarifying, and so clarifying, you would think no one could possibly miss it. And by the way, it evidently is clarifying even to many because you’ll note that the decline in the mainline was the subject of enormous scholarly interest in the second half of the 20th century. There was an entire industry in the analysis of the decline of the Mainline churches. Well, they have since declined to the point that no one appears to be interested in them in academia anymore. And there’s a parable in that reality too.

TC: You’re a self-professed Evangelical, a term that is subject to varying definitions. How do you define it? Why are you one? Is it a reactionary label? Is it still useful today? And recall briefly for everyone the genesis of this moniker and group in the American context.

AM: I am an evangelical, but I’m a Christian, I’m a Protestant, and I’m a Baptist before I’m an evangelical. Evangelical is one of those terms that is necessary but insufficient. It’s necessary because one way or the other, there has to be a way of saying this is someone who holds convictions, this is an institution committed to some convictions, this is a church that has convictions that are immediately distinguishable from mainline liberal Protestantism. Evangelical from its origin in modern usage means not liberal. Now of course, it’s more than that. It refers to the gospel, it refers to conversionism, in most cases it refers to conservative doctrine. It really refers in a way—that even the founders of evangelicalism I don’t think fully understood—to a fundamental continuity of believers who confess the faith once for all delivered to the saints. And that’s been a growing understanding.

The evangelical movement in the United States really goes back to the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, the period before, during, and immediately after World War II when evangelical became a term used to distinguish a group of conservative Christians from liberalism, first of all, but secondly from separatist fundamentalism. And so the term fundamentalist, which emerged in the 1920s based, of course, upon the title of a series of booklets and what became a term of art. The term fundamentalist generally is associated because of experiences in the North particularly. You could even date most of this to the split that took place in Presbyterianism in the North. The evangelicals were those who really agreed in most respects with the doctrine of the fundamentalists. But they disagreed in terms of withdrawal from the culture and instead wanted a mode of engagement with the culture.

Looking now, you can look at these new evangelicals as they arrived on the scene, and one of the things to note is that—with very rare exceptions–the Left simply saw them as fundamentalists with a new name. It’s also true that some of these early evangelicals overcorrected from fundamentalism in such a way that they became quite squishy in terms of definition. You also have other things such as the evangelical susceptibility to sheer pragmatism and numerical calculations focused on numbers and buildings.

But I’m going to argue that if we dispense with the word evangelical, we have got to come up with something that can replace it. And I think, like so many other terms in our modern vocabulary, it’s very difficult to imagine what that could be. I think, however, the fact that this question is raised, as you raise it, makes it very clear that evangelical is no longer a sufficient definition. You’re going to have to say what kind of evangelical you are, and what exactly you mean by evangelical. So it may be that this is transcended by a new term, but that term is not commonly known at this time.

Evangelicalism became a project unto itself, and some of the founders of that evangelical movement were quite visionary. They were aggressive. I think what is rather surprising to us now, is the confidence with which they seemed to believe they were winning in the culture. And I think that is perhaps something that needs greater correction than the vocabulary. The understanding of our placement in culture is something that the current generation of evangelicals has to see very differently than the founding generation of American evangelicalism.

TC: Evangelicals have always been concentrated in the Bible Belt, in the South, the frontier, etc. Does this fact have any bearing on their cultural status? Ability to capture or build mainstream institutions? Is there a sense in which Evangelical cultural influence has fed off being somewhat marginal compared to the mainline?

AM: There are all kinds of realities that come to play in this. For one thing, you can make the argument that the word evangelical simply means continuity with classical, orthodox Protestantism and classical, orthodox Protestantism gave birth to most of the institutions in the early republic, even in colonial America. So it’s not that evangelicals don’t know how to create institutions, it’s that most of these institutions got quickly co-opted, and I would make the argument that this is tied to the emergence of secular trends in the culture. The German university model is the prevailing academic model, and by the time you get to William F. Buckley Jr., and God and Man at Yale by the time you get to the 1950s, Buckley’s frankly just crying from the steps of the town hall that this is now basically a godless secular experiment.

But the cultural impact of mainstream or Mainline Protestant Christianity continued long after the theological collapse of those churches. As a matter of fact, They convinced themselves that you could save the morality while ditching the theology. And of course, that’s a ridiculous notion. The moral influence continued only for a very short time. The transition from the fifties to the sixties tells us that the moral influence actually can’t long exist once the theological convictions are gone. So there’s a sense in which Protestants were the elites in early America, but once you have a bifurcation of Protestantism both theologically and sociologically, then it turns out that the Protestants on the upper end of the sociological scale quickly abandoned Protestantism. Protestants actually do know how to start things. They have a horrible track record of keeping them.

Furthermore, by the time you have the break in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, and similar developments took place of course in European nations as well. By the time that happens, the cost of institutionalizing is astoundingly greater. So to make the point, American evangelicals as represented by people like Dr. Carl Henry, who was a dear friend to me, they actually had the vision of establishing a great evangelical research university in the American northeast. They wanted to create a university. One of their models in mind was the University of Chicago or Stanford University there in Palo Alto because both of them were recent in their origins.

These projects have Rockefeller money, Stanford money, and the idea was we could do that. Now the reality is–and I have these documents myself—that by the time they were proposing this vision, it was already beyond—indeed, vastly beyond— evangelical financial power to create any such institution. And honestly, I think what we now know is it was already too late to establish, even on secular terms, a modern research university of that type. Even if a Bill Gates or an Elon Musk decided to create a university, the reality is by the time they look at actually accomplishing that, they give it up. It is just nearly impossible. It is kind of like saying we’re going to build a modern cathedral, a millennium after that would’ve made sense to everyone. You just can’t do it anymore. And I think that’s emblematic of the fact that evangelical Christians left their former denominations with little. Remember in the northern denominations, they exited and they were either kicked out, or they voluntarily left because of the victory of liberalism. They went out with very little in hand. All the economic capital stayed in and was captive to those Mainline Protestant denominations, with rare exceptions.

TC: You remember the Moral Majority and Reagan years. For us millennials, what was it like? These days, the Moral Majority is often described as a failure, but that could not have been apparent then. Was it, to your mind, a failure? What lessons can be learned from it for present and future coalitions?

AM: I’m an Augustinian in terms of my theological commitments. So I assume failure over a long span of human history is inevitable in some sense. I believe it is just as Augustine said, it’s incumbent upon us to seek to preserve order, to preserve the goods, to perpetuate order, and to perpetuate those goods in The City of Man as long as possible. But this really robs us of the temptation to triumphalism. It also robs us of any temptation to quietism or withdrawal.

I lived through all of this period and I knew the principals involved. I knew Jerry Falwell as a dear friend. Francis Schaeffer was a mentor to me, especially through his writings. I was really forged as an adolescent in the context of early efforts toward something that would be like the moral majority, and particularly in the pro-life movement. And I want to say to those who quickly dismiss and are embarrassed by the moral majority, if you weren’t in some sense engaged on these issues then in terms that would identify you with the Moral Majority, or with the New Christian Right, then frankly I think you were useless in terms of the larger culture. I learned also something as a very young man, and that is: if you’re afraid of someone calling you a part of the New Christian Right, or the Christian Right or whatever, then you’re just useless.

Jerry Falwell and I are different. First of all, in time and in age, but we’re different in theological profile. I’m a confessional Protestant. He really began as a genuine fundamentalist, though I think shifted in that. But he shifted mostly in terms of the cultural engagement. I will simply say, to know Jerry Falwell was to know a figure who loomed large on the national scene and for good reason. And by the way, to know him was to know he had incredible skills, incredible gifts, and he was basically happy in his disposition. In other words, part of the reason why a lot of the leaders of the New Christian Right were effective is because they were actually happy in their disposition, passionate in their love of God and country, and sincere in their calling of Christians to respond to a moral emergency, and to translate that into political action. They knew that because we live in a political culture, we have a political responsibility.

So sure, they were unsophisticated as judged by the political sophisticates. But you know what? They did raise up an army. And by the way, that army had babies and those babies had babies. And when you look on the campus of the institution I lead, or you look in the churches I know, there are an awful lot of the grandchildren of the people who were willing to stand in a line outside an abortion clinic and contend for righteousness through groups like the Moral Majority. Of course, there were clumsy and embarrassing moments. In politics that’s going to happen. Further, the more populist the movement is, the more embarrassed it can be by some, frankly marginal statements or flamboyant controversies or for that matter, moral failures.

But by and large, I would just tell you that I spoke at national meetings for the Eagle Forum with Phyllis Schlafly. I spoke at events on the campus of Regent University for Pat Robertson. I spoke at Liberty and worked for Jerry Falwell, and I’ll tell you, I would do it all over again. And a lot of the snarky young evangelicals who think that all of that was uncool looking at their polyester suits and big ties, I just want to say you’re only here because those guys were willing to put their ministries, and their reputations at risk for the cause of truth.

We do know more now, and we really can’t be triumphalist in the way that many of them were. This is especially in the political realignment that came with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. An enormous number of the leaders of the religious right thought, “we will be able to take it all. We’re going to be able to legislate, we’re going to have our folks in the governors’ mansions in the Senate, the House and the White House.” And it didn’t turn out that way as an Augustinian would understand. But I am not going to apologize for the effort, nor am I going to gainsay the achievements that movement accomplished.

TC: A related question but looking inward to evangelical institutions. The Conservative Resurgence, especially in Southern Baptist institutions: I think people forget how big of a hard-won turnaround this was. What was the situation in the 1970s and early 80s that precipitated this reaction? Are there analogs today? Do evangelical institutions need a similar turnaround? If so, do you see conservative leadership up to the task?

AM: There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention turns out to be an unpredictable and unlikely occurrence. Looking across denominational history and the fate of Christianity in the modern world, the recovery of any denomination of the size of the Southern Baptist Convention is incredibly rare. A part of the reason for that is that Southern Baptists were established and concentrated in a part of the country that was far more intact than what you would find on the coast in the Northeast. And so Southern Baptists were largely insulated from a lot of the issues that had already torn apart other denominations.

Now, they were also asleep at the wheel in just understanding the way progressive takeover happens. The progressives took over the institutions of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1920s and 30s, and they did so because they could talk one way and act another way. They could talk the language of grassroots Southern Baptists, but in their offices and in their institutions, they were transforming the SBC in the image of Mainline Protestantism. Now, it’s not to say that the leaders in the SBC at that time were anywhere near the liberals you would find in northern denominations. It is to say that they weren’t anti-liberal. And that turns out to have been fatal because the fact that they weren’t anti-liberal meant that progressivism really became the order of the day. One of the problems in the SBC was that the culture of revivalism had created a common vocabulary that people could use, and they could mask how far left they were moving and how fast they were moving in a Leftist direction. It took a long time for grassroots Southern Baptists to just wake up.

I’m going to make a statement here, and the older I get, the more I’m certain of this. We’ve talked about a couple of things so far. You asked about the Moral Majority, and the New Christian Right, et cetera. Now you ask about the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC. The fact that those happen parallel in time, is not a coincidence. It’s not an accident. When I talk about this, I often want to say that because of revivalism, and because of decades of theological imprecision, Southern Baptists were vulnerable to slick and dishonest theological arguments. Every time they’d try to pin a liberal professor to the wall, the liberal professor used sweet Jesus language in order to completely bamboozle conservatives into thinking there’s no problem here. And that continued for a very long time. Conservatives had an opportunity in 1964, conservatives had an opportunity in 1968, but it didn’t get anywhere. It was only in 1979 that the first true movement conservative president was elected in the SBC. And what changed was the emergence of issues such as abortion.

So I said the two questions are now linked in sociological terms, maybe even in epistemological terms. Abortion was understood in categorical terms, in a way that some theological doctrines–lamentably–were not. One of the ways the Conservative Resurgence in the SBC began to gain steam is because people figured out, I know your theology because you support the right of a woman to destroy a baby in her womb. And then all this stuff comes together. Of course, you have the sexual revolution as well, but that is always delayed in the heartland of the SBC just because of sociology. Now of course, it shows up in the college campuses, it shows up in the larger culture and the next thing you know, it’s everywhere. But it was slower in the SBC. It took a while for Southern Baptists to wake up to how pervasive it had become, however.

The Conservative Resurgence achieved a great deal. For one thing, it produced the opposite of the pattern in the Mainline denominations in the North. It was the liberals who left, and when the liberals left, and they went out and did even more liberal things, and they became a cartoon of themselves day by day. Now there are fewer and fewer of them because, predictably, they’re not having babies. In that is a picture of mainline liberal collapse concentrated in even a brief period of time. And to be honest, I hardly ever even ask about them anymore.

However, the recovery in the Southern Baptist Convention was an opportunity, not an achievement. I believe the only lasting form of Protestantism is confessional Protestantism in its classic form. And that has to come with a comprehensive Protestant worldview. And all the commitments have to be seen as unified, and all of them have to be considered as necessary. And I get to see a generation that understands those commitments fully and embraces them. But when you look across the entire area of Southern Baptist dominance, I mean, quite honestly, you can’t say that that’s a widespread set of commitments even among a lot of people who believe themselves to be Christians and go to church.

When it comes to what is broadly called evangelicalism and its challenges, I do not think that there will be any turnaround in evangelicalism, and I certainly don’t believe the current leadership is up to that task. I believe there has to be a clear separation between those who are leaving or have left evangelicalism. We need to stop identifying them as evangelicals. We need to correct the vocabulary. We need to take them off our lists. We need a list that puts Mainline liberal Protestants over here and evangelicals over here and the people who are moving out of evangelicalism we just need to go ahead and put their name on the other list. We also need to protect the word evangelical as best as we possibly can for conservative Protestants, who are holding comprehensively to that tradition, to our confessions, our creeds, and with the moral truths that are inseparable. And that also means, honestly, a political engagement that is made necessary.

TC: For some time, it has seemed like Evangelicals crave outside, “mainstream” acceptance or approval. Rather than directing the culture, it tries to fit itself into it. Self-described Evangelicals might, for example, write for the New York Times, but most of their energy is spent on criticizing Evangelicals whereas a Catholic writing for the same publication generally presents a confident apology for Catholicism to the general public. How can this posture be altered on the Evangelical front?

AM: Well, I don’t know how evangelicals can handle the decisions made by the New York Times, but we do know the New York Times wants to count among its roster of opinion writers those who identify as conservative and evangelical. But I see this as the David Brooks quandary I refer to often. That is, that we now know what the New York Times thinks an evangelical ought to be. And what those evangelicals ought to do is criticize evangelicals for being evangelicals. And so if you are at least under the pattern that the mainstream media has set, the gatekeepers of the establishment have set, if you claim to be evangelical, but have basically nothing to do with evangelical Christianity on the ground, then you’re our writer.

I don’t think evangelicals can do anything about that except keep telling the truth about that reality. At the same time, we recognize that even a legacy newspaper like the New York Times still has enormous influence in society. So we just have to understand where that is. And frankly, we need to counter engage, and at least at times, contribute as best we can, just to articulate clearly what evangelical Christianity actually is.

Which, by the way, you would think that even the New York Times, just to take one newspaper would figure out. It’s as if they’ve never asked “If the people we have are supposedly evangelicals and we’re going to make that claim with a straight face, how can they be continually outliers in terms of evangelical voting patterns, ways of life and everything else?” It’s not like they don’t know what they’re doing.

The closer you get to academia, the closer you get to the arenas where social status is granted and social capital is gained. Evangelicals, and I’ll simply say, middle-class Americans, lust after it. Evangelicals will crawl on their knuckles to get it. Evangelicals will claim they’re doing it for Jesus’ sake. And honestly, it’s a very difficult virus to resist, because there are so many goods to be bestowed by liberal elite culture. The problem is that the only way to get it is to abandon the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and to turn on the evangelical movement as something of a modern prophet.

And to be honest, the media plays that game with Catholics as well. When it comes to an issue of the LGBTQ Revolution, they’re going to go to James Martin, who is basically an apologist for that movement, even contrary to the doctrine and catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. But it is true that conservative Catholics are much better at showing up as conservative Catholics, Catholic Catholics when they’re given those opportunities. Shame on evangelicals for not having the same commitment, but I don’t think the people we’re talking about are acting unpredictably. I think it’s quite predictable. I think the people who play that game, we already know are playing that game. It’s a game we just have to refuse to play.

TC: For years we’ve been told that religion, specifically Christianity, is in decline. First, are we a post-Christian society? Second, recent data evinces a potential correction among younger generations: young men are more religious and more conservative. Does this change the narrative? Cause for hope? What do evangelical institutions need to do to capitalize off these new trends?

R. Albert Mohler Jr.: Evangelicalism has been horrifyingly thin in terms of its culture, and I think that’s because it has at times been horrifyingly thin in terms of its doctrine, theological understanding, and biblical worldview. So we have to resist thin and work for thick. And I think that’s where you find very interesting health, vitality and potential among conservative evangelicals. I think that’s why, honestly, we can look at an army of young men who want to be young men for Christ. They want to be clear in their Christian identity, they want to be married, they want to be fathers. They want to fulfill a Christian man’s responsibility in the world. And I will say that the emergence of so many of these incredibly committed young men are actually astounding, and it is probably the most encouraging development I’ve seen in my adult lifetime.

It is also true that there are millions of young Christian women who are committed to live for Christ and to be wives and mothers, and with their husbands to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, to help build society, and uphold righteousness. But it is the emergence and visibility of convictional young men that is the game changer. And as I have remarked recently, analytical studies are now demonstrating that for the first time, so far as we know in the history of the Christian church, when you look at Generation Z, more young men are attending church on a regular basis than young women. That can’t be insignificant. And honestly, I think we’re the people who are supposed to have a biblical theology that indicates why it is so absolutely necessary that convictional, courageous, masculine young men emerge into the full set of responsibilities that falls to a Christian man. And without that, there can be no recovery. That alone is not a recovery, but that is, I think, one of the first and most important fundamental prerequisites for a recovery. And so that makes me very, very happy. It has come in some ways more quickly than I had expected, but it also reminds us we have a long battle ahead in a warfare to which we’re called.

TC: It seems to me that a lot of Evangelicals are unsettled by the young men. Maybe they’re too zealous, or maybe they’re too radical, and so on. Following on the last question, how should Evangelical leaders and institutions receive the young radicals who, to be sure, have much cause to be rather radical, given the world they’ve grown up in?

AM: I have been very influenced in my understanding of these things by the Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. I don’t buy his entire understanding of cultural dynamics, but I really do think he understood in a classic Russian sense, the fact that every single civilization faces first the challenge of reproduction. And secondly, the challenge of channeling male energy into productive manhood, including the roles of father, husband, and citizen. Pitirim Sorokin and others made the observation that there isn’t a single civilization in human history that’s really had a struggle with assisting young women to move into responsible female roles, especially in marriage and in the home. That’s happened organically in almost every civilization. But at the same time, almost every civilization from ancient Sparta to the United States of America faces the challenge of channeling the energies of young men into productive manhood.

This development will scare people. It might scare the average evangelical mom to know what goes on when a pack of 12-year-old boys are playing in the yard. On the other hand, a father looking at that understands that is the essence of what it means to be a boy, in the presence and company of boys. And this is a stage on the way to manhood in which the father, by the way, is absolutely a determinant if he knows exactly when to lean in, when he needs to, and he understands exactly what he sees and hears when he sees and hears them.

The fact that a lot of people in society are scared by convictional, passionate young men shouldn’t surprise us. Young men are going to do young men things. They’ve always been prone, even when rightly directed, to a zeal not yet tempered adequately by wisdom. And every smart society, even before you get to Christian commitments, every smart society just based upon, I think, natural law, has come to understand that it’s our responsibility to turn all that wonderful energy, and that incredible strength, and that vitality, and that masculine camaraderie, into something that will help build the nation. And for the church, it’s even more important. We understand God’s good pleasure is in young men growing into manhood. And there’s plenty of biblical evidence for this. And I don’t think there’s an older man, certainly none of my age, who doesn’t look back to when we were young men and think “that was an incredibly stupid thing I did. And it’s even more stupid because I didn’t realize at the time how stupid it was.” But I was surrounded by Christian men who had massive influence on me, beginning with my own faithful Christian father.

I think on the one hand, we’re in a far more volatile situation because we say to young men, “Here’s a smartphone, here’s a social media platform. Just tell us what you’re thinking.” There’s going to be a lot of mess there. And especially when young men gauge their place in society often in comparison with other young men. Then if they’re going to stand out, they have to say something stronger. They have to respond to something faster. And the fact is that there are very good examples of how that can be channeled appropriately. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m thankful for older Christian leaders who really enjoy and thank God for what we see happening among young men and are ready to step in and say, we want to help father this and encourage this and influence this, but the last thing we want to do is snuff it out. The last thing we want to do is domesticate this, in the current cultural sense.

TC: You’ve talked to Aaron Renn before about his Three Worlds thesis. Are we still in Negative world (which began during the Obama years) or are we on the cusp of entering something more positive again? The Trump victory certainly shifted the mood (or vibe, as they say), but is this an indication of anything real or only a momentary reprieve?

AM: I think it’s very real, but it might be a momentary reprieve. And again, I’m Augustinian, my biblical theology tells me that the forces of disorder never go away. And that’s why it takes enormous institutional strength. It takes enormous cultural effort. It takes massive truth claims driven deeply into hearts as well as into society to make a difference. And so I don’t believe fundamentally that any correction comes until you see it in organic form, as in young men, young women moving the age of marriage much earlier, young men and young women once married, beginning to have babies much earlier and to have more of them. In other words, I don’t think any of this in a biblical theology can be separated from the ways of life. However, I also believe that the disruption that the age of Donald Trump has brought, and largely President Trump himself has brought, is absolutely necessary. But it has to be followed by a long-term rebuilding of society and a reassertion of truth.

And that’s going to take a long time. And honestly, I think the cultural assets of the Left vastly outweigh the cultural assets of the Right. And my only disagreement with Aaron is that I don’t think the neutral world was nearly as neutral as some might read him to say. In conversation he’s pretty clear about understanding that as well. As a Christian, I just don’t think there’s any neutrality, but I understand. I understand what he means. There was a decisive shift. Something happened, and you can see it in the courts, you can see it in the media, you can see it in the arts, you can see it on the campuses.

The Obama years are a good place to note that turn towards greater overt hostility. I just think in terms of cultural dynamics, we’re not a match for the tenacity of the Left in institutions. The long march through the institutions, though not total, is far more comprehensive than the average conservative understands. And I’m not saying that thus we surrender and acknowledge defeat. I’m going to say this is a war that is going to take a very, very long time. We have to replace people. And even in the last 24 hours, I’ve had to say to conservatives, it’s not enough that someone takes a DEI sign off the door. The person committed to DEI principles has got to be replaced by someone who has a correct understanding. And so that’s going to ratchet through the entire university and not to mention what is necessary on faculties. And so we’ve got a gargantuan task, but I go back to the fact that it’s a Christian I live in hope. Jesus Christ is Lord, and I don’t believe in any quick solution, and I don’t believe that revival’s right around the corner, but I do believe that every time a young Christian man marries a young Christian woman and they live out a life of marital faithfulness together, and they welcome children and raise those children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, I believe when they gather together in faithful congregations and start to rebuild society and civilization, they’re doing the most important work. And then at every other level of society, we’ve got to show up with energy.

But quite honestly, that gets to another problem, and that is we send somebody to an elite law school, in order to get the credential that he will need in order to show up in the right places to contend for righteousness. And the next thing you know, there’s a gay pride sign on his desk because cultural achievement is worth more than those Christian commitments.

It’s a long war with many battles, and I want to credit the Trump administration and many others. Charlie Kirk is one of the ones I would mention and many others who have made real gains, and you see that. I just want to remind people we’re not just around the corner from victory. We’ve got many battles ahead. We face many battles ahead.

TC: I mentioned earlier that defining America—the Samuel Huntington question, _Who are we?_—is a pressing question. What are the biggest questions Evangelicals need to provide an answer to for themselves and the broader culture over the next decade in order to maintain their voice?

AM: We have to make sure that evangelicals actually show up as evangelicals. They must maintain the full measure of evangelical commitment to Scripture, gospel confession, Christ, and to the order of creation and the responsibilities and institutions given to us in the order of Creation. And we have to show up with public engagement. We have to show up intelligent and courageous. I don’t see any easy recipe. I certainly have no formula. But I do think it’s showing up, doing all these things all the time with gains and losses in the culture, but surrender’s not an option. I think evangelicals are always in danger of losing everything except, say, in cultural terms and in terms of influence. I think evangelicals are always in danger of losing everything by forfeiting our birthright and just throwing it all away in despair or in triumphalism. We must stay at this for a very long time, and we’re going to have to learn when we do poorly to do better, and we’re going to have to keep raising up those who are going to fill the ranks of evangelical Christianity, and we’re going to have to join at the first level with other Christians, and then secondly, with all people of goodwill to try to reweave an unraveling society, which we believe can only be done consistent with truth and creation order and God’s law.

TC: Is there any prospect of Evangelicals replacing the station of the Protestant mainline, institutionally and culturally? If not, who is most likely to fill it (if anyone)? If Evangelicals can do it, what do they need to do to make it happen?

AM: I don’t think that role is now filled except by a clerisy of cultural elites. If you want to find a temple today, you go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you want to find a religious ritual today, you go to centers of cultural influence where the elites are clearly in charge. I don’t think they think they have any need for a church building or a steeple. Increasingly, they don’t have any need for even marriage, except for what they see as some legal protections and inheritance rights. But by and large, nothing will replace the Protestant Mainline and few people even know it’s gone or that it ever was. I don’t think evangelicals can ever do so, because I don’t think we have the cultural standing, and I don’t think it’s possible for us to achieve the cultural standing.

Look at the two coasts. Is it possible, or is it even something we could seek after, to imagine that we would have tabernacles of cultural influence that would dominate the landscape in those cultures, the way the cathedrals dominated the landscape of medieval Europe? I think the answer to that is it’s stupid even to entertain the idea. That doesn’t mean we are without influence. It certainly doesn’t mean we’re without responsibility. But I’m at the stage of life where I want to say, look, I think it’s rather ludicrous at this point for evangelicals to lust after the cultural power of Mainline Protestants when people don’t even remember they existed.

TC: Roman Catholics have intellectually and institutionally dominated the conservative movement for some time. Why is this? Why are Evangelicals going to Rome? And, as a Protestant, I must ask, how do we stop it?

AM: If you ask the Roman Catholic Church this question, they will tell you that the Roman Catholic Church is more than another church. They make comprehensive claims about the Roman Catholic Church that you either accept or deny. And so we’re right back to the 16th century in the Reformation where the Reformers did not say we’re repudiating everything that was a part of Catholicism. But because of the gospel, and both the formal and the material principle of the Reformation, they broke with the Roman Catholic Church. Although you would still describe the culture at the time as that of Christendom, and even during the process of the Thirty Years’ War, it may be true that in one sense, Christendom was breaking up, but it took two or three centuries for that breakup to be fully accomplished.

But, the comprehensiveness and the magisterial authority claimed by the Roman Catholic Church are easily seen. They’re quite visible. The United States government sends an ambassador to the Holy See with full ambassadorial rank. No one sends an ambassador to the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, or the United Methodist Church, and it would be ludicrous to think of it.

Catholicism is different in its claim of comprehensiveness and universality, its cultural adaptability, its magisterial authority, not to mention its mystery, ritual, riches, and grandeur. It has cultural pretensions, which appear to be based in at least a former reality. If you want to say, what could Catholicism be? You can go to Rome, or you can go to any European city, and see the cathedral at the center. In other words, you can look at the origin of the universities and the distribution of professional ranks and its artisans. Evidently there once was a time when this was achievable. The Roman Catholic Church is the only institutional body that can show you the goods. That’s incredibly attractive to many. We’ve got nothing like that. We have no Vatican, we have no Sistine Chapel, and we have no throne. We have no monarch sitting on the throne. It’s just a completely different game.

The other thing is that Catholicism gives you a house of authority that is very close and visible. Now, as we know, the house of authority is not held together. Just look at liberal Catholicism, seen in the Catholic church in Northern Europe, for example. But if you’re looking for security as in a visible authority that has institutional visibility, and after all it openly claims to be a magisterium, then you’ve got one place to go, and that’s Rome.

But all of this comes at the expense of the gospel, and at the expense of Scripture, and of any biblical understanding of the church. But I do understand the allure. And one of the other aspects we have to recognize is that Protestantism puts an awful lot of weight on every believer’s shoulders. Now, not atomistically like in the liberal understanding of unfortunately many Baptists, but in the sense that my Roman Catholic friends can sleep at night knowing that there’s a magisterial authority to answer that question. They don’t have to stay up late at night worrying about these things. They just try to have influence on the direction of the magisterial development. We’re in a very different posture.

Going to Rome is also often correlated with moral issues. And that runs both ways. I think there are conservatives who come to a conclusion that Rome’s stated positions on issues from contraception, Humanae Vitae, to statements made by Benedict XVI, long-term statements made by Leo XIII, or Leo XII. Some say, “that’s a house I want to live in.” Now, I am not going to Rome because I would point to the fact that the magisterium seems to be quite ineffective in corralling even Roman Catholic theologians. But I also want to be honest and say there’s just a lot that’s attractive, especially to a young person, that the moral issue is often the clarity of Catholic moral teaching, which they measure against the vacuity of many evangelicals. But the second thing is, Catholicism offers a sacramental and sacerdotal ministry in which those who might feel that personal morality is just a little too tight among evangelicals, they can find something a bit looser elsewhere.

When it comes to those allured to Rome, we have to make clear the gospel is at stake. That’s one of the reasons why I go back again and again and again and again in my lectures to the 16th century where so many of these things were clarified. I don’t want my students to believe that Christian history begins in the 16th century. I do believe that the 16th century defines issues to which we are all still accountable, and I am going to take my stand with the Magisterial Reformers and do so unapologetically. We also have to show young evangelicals that we too have a thick culture, and that we too have a thick tradition. I point out to people that in Calvin’s Institutes, after quoting Scripture, you’re going to find John Calvin quoting Augustine. You’re going to find John Calvin citing even Bernard of Clairvaux. I do this to make very clear that Protestantism doesn’t make an absolute break with everything that came before, but is actually a recovery of what had been lost. We have to do that. Beyond that, there are also cultural goods we have to offer, and we need to make those clear to our young people. There’s great joy to them.

TC: Are you bullish or more cautious on the future of Evangelicalism as a culture-shaping force?

AM: I think it depends on where you look and where you are. I think generationally, I am more encouraged by today’s younger evangelical men and women. They’re going to have not only a greater burden to bear than previous generations, they’re going to have some greater opportunities in that they’re the people having the babies. They’re the people who are going to be showing up at the Little League games. I think they’re also battle-hardened. They’re shorn of a lot of the naïveté that I think affected older evangelical generations. I do think they’re vastly outnumbered, even in their own generation. But I do think they’ll have massive influence and I’m hoping for that. I hope they have all the cultural resources to live faithfully in a time that is even more negative than the current negative moment. But I don’t want what I would see as naive hopes of my own, that somehow we’re just a couple of revivals away from national recovery.

TC: Let’s talk a bit more about reforming institutions. You have experience with this at Southern. Higher education is a big topic right now. Evangelicals seem to recognize that not all of their institutions reflect orthodoxy or the cultural posture that Evangelicals want. Is this a fair assessment? If so, what’s the correct approach? Build new things or retake old ones?

AM: I have very little confidence in most of the institutions of historic evangelicalism. I have very limited confidence in the continuing institutions of Protestantism. I think what is required now is a stance within the culture and clear convictions on the issues of the day that have pretty much already been sorted out. So I’m already recharting. Years ago I began recharting evangelicalism on a sort of mental marker board. I keep moving institutions all the way across the line. Some of them are just gone. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out how to recover them because I think that’s largely a lost cause. I serve an institution that was recovered, but it was a populist recovery, which was made possible by some formal mechanisms that the messengers to the SBC could eventually control. There is no such thing in an evangelicalism of perpetuating boards. So let’s just say if you’ve got a self-perpetuating board and you’re moving left, by definition, there’s virtually no way correction can come unless there is some kind of conversion inside the institution. And I haven’t seen many of those. I want to make really clear, I wouldn’t give things up until it’s clear there’s no reasonable hope for recovery, but at that point, move them into the loss column and give your attention elsewhere.

But I also think we just need to be really honest, an entire list of institutions that were once central to evangelical Christianity as recently as 30 or 40 years ago are gone. And I often just think to myself, I haven’t heard that institution’s name in years. It just moved on. I think this is also something that has to be a part of public argument. I think we need to be willing to say “that’s no longer evangelical, whatever that is, it’s not a part of what we’re doing.” And by the way, because we don’t believe in neutrality, that means it is actually, not just a loss, it’s now a loss that’s largely just going to be aimed right back at us, because this is a zero sum game in a lot of ways. You’re either with us or you’re against us. And I think that’s becoming increasingly clear.

I don’t think we can rebuild or should reassert a vision like the new evangelicals of the 1940s that we’re just going to build a complete culture transforming institution with coast-to-coast hegemony. I think that’s unrealistic. I also think that’s not what faithfulness is going to look like, but faithfulness certainly does look like efforts among Christians to start taking these responsibilities for ourselves. And I’ll just give you the classic example. Let me just give you a very encouraging example. I think that the Christian classical school movement is one of the most positive and encouraging developments of recent decades. I think it is a corrective of sorts to an awful lot of homeschooling of minimalist content. I think it’s a corrective to some of the Christian school ideas that basically became the public schools 20 years later. I think we now have to see something like the emergence of classical Christian schools as an effort to try to regain civilizational truths understood in a biblical worldview among Christians who clearly aren’t rejecting the totality of culture in some fundamentalist withdrawal.

But understand, we’ve got to rebuild from the ruins. And that’s why we have to redefine success. We’re not going to build another campus like Harvard. We’re not going to build another faculty like Yale. Give it up. We’re not going to have a lot of gothic buildings and towering stained-glass windows, even though it’s our people who built them. But you know what? We’re going to have grandchildren when they’re not. And I’m not going to trade grandchildren for gothic cathedrals, especially empty ones.

TC: Returning us to where we began: We’re coming up on America’s 250th anniversary. I’d like to see American Protestants be assertive in the lead-up to this celebration by emphasizing their contribution to the nation. If you were giving a speech, let’s say, in this context, what aspects or elements of Protestantism in America would you highlight? What do Protestants need to remember to regain a sense of cultural confidence?

AM: I want to go back prior to the American founding, and I want to go to the emergence of democratic self-government by constitution, albeit an unwritten constitution in England and later in Britain. I want to point to the fact that such a constitutional order could only take place within a context in which the ultimate authority was God’s word. The Scriptures were understood to be of ultimate authority and the law of the nation was first and foremost to be an acknowledgement and articulation of the Law of God. That was in place before the American experiment. And we need to remember those explicit claims of Christian authority upon which the entire civilization had been established.

I often tell people, all you have to do is listen to the coronation ceremony of a British monarch. There’s even a priestly anointing, which comes down to an acclaimed continuity with the kings of Israel and Judah. And then you come to the United States, that same sense in an explicitly theistic understanding continues. Even among the founders who are considered skeptics, they’re not skeptics about Christian morality, they’re not skeptics about God’s law. Even Thomas Jefferson writes “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” And that was seen to be essential language. I just want to come back and say, you don’t have America without a Protestant worldview that is so clearly in place that it is unquestioned. Its skeptics knew what they were skeptics of.

The separation of powers—the construction of government here as it is in Britain was a reflection of a concern based upon human sinfulness and total depravity of too much concentration of power in single hands, or a single branch of government. At the same time, it was a Protestant understanding of the legitimacy of government under the authority of God, the legitimacy and necessity of government by the authority of God. And that conviction continued long enough to be sculpted into the friezes and the hallways of the Supreme Court building of the United States in the 20th century. This was an unquestioned reality until recent times.

I think the only proper celebration of this nation’s anniversary is the acknowledgement that it was a worldview of Protestant Christianity that gave birth to this entire experiment.

Unapologetically, I’m going to assert that only a return to that basic consensus can save us.

TC: Dr. Mohler, thank you for your time and, as always, insightful answers.

AM: Timon, I’m honored to be asked these questions and I look forward to continuing these conversations. I appreciate your good work.

What time is it? This is one of the most important questions to answer correctly. There’s a season for everything. Too many people want a single approach that’s good for all times and all places. But having timeless principles doesn’t mean having one go-to strategy or action in every situation.

America is in a liminal space, where the old is increasingly decaying but the new has not yet been fully formed. While there is still tremendous uncertainty, now is the time to build for the future.

Back in the 2010s, forces that rendered many of our political and institutional arrangements increasingly unfit for purpose were already at work. Christianity continued to decline in America, but the implications of that decline were not fully understood. Globalization, especially offshoring to China, had seriously harmed many workers and communities, but economists still denied those impacts. It wasn’t until the 2016 “China Shock” paper that economists acknowledged what was happening. Family formation, fertility, and relations between the sexes in general had taken a turn for the worse. Mass migration, especially illegal migration, was unpopular and causing many problems, yet amnesty and ever greater levels of immigration had bipartisan political support and institutional consensus. Affirmative action, designed to remedy the unique historic injustices done to black Americans, had transformed into an expansive central organizing principle of American institutional life, later known as DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion). America remained mired in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that seemed like they would never end, while our defense industrial base was eroding. The effects of delayed generational transition were increasingly felt, as Boomers kept a tight grip on institutional power and doubled down on the approaches they were familiar and comfortable with while the world continued to change.

The net result was a society in which change was badly needed, but the existing political parties and institutions—including religious institutions—were not adapting. Indeed, they were often explicitly unwilling to change.

In this environment, disruption of our ossified systems and institutions became a necessity. It was, perhaps unfortunately, a time to tear down. Barack Obama campaigned on an agenda of change but delivered very little of it. (This was not entirely his fault, of course.) Donald Trump ran as an even stronger candidate of change. Many people rallied to his campaign because they thought he would take a wrecking ball to structures that needed reform. Undoubtedly, Trump widened the possibility space for the future, for better or worse.

There were other cultural disruptors. The left pushed to accelerate the change of norms in matters of sexuality and race. A form of neo-socialism, represented by people like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, gained traction in the Democratic Party. The dissident right began promoting ideas previously viewed as outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse, as documented by Angela Nagle in her book Kill All Normies. Various “red pill” and alternative-health influencers questioned official views in key areas of life. Exogenous events like Covid also had a massive disruptive impact on society.

A period of disrupting legacy beliefs, approaches, political views, and institutions was necessary to make room for those seeking to address the pressing new realities of the 21st century.

However, disruption itself cannot be the goal. And many of the disruptors were unsuited to building new institutions to address the problems they highlighted. It is one thing to read a manosphere blog to learn the truth about attraction that your parents, pastors, or teachers never told you. It is quite another to build a society on the morals of Andrew Tate. Questioning authority has led all too many influencers to become purveyors of conspiracy theories. Many people have also become captive to delusional futures, such as the idea of deporting all post-1965 immigrants and their descendants.

This has affected the religious world as well. Social media has become dominated by highly confrontational and ever more “based” takes. A variety of people are promoting unproductive ideas far outside the American cultural and political tradition. These range from Catholic integralism to the idea that non-Christians shouldn’t be allowed to build houses of worship.

In this environment—where disruption of ossified structures has been accomplished—what is needed is a shift from tearing down to building up. What is built needs to be based on truth, even where that truth is unpleasant or unpopular. It must be prudential. It should understand that perfection can never be achieved in this world, and that vision must be paired with a practical and long-term time horizon. It should be rooted in Christianity and the American cultural and political tradition. At the same time, it must recognize that America now has a post-Christian culture, and that America is the forward-looking, protean nation par excellence.

Today’s Christians should be working to articulate and create a new positive vision for America—one that benefits them and their community, but also the country and public at large. This includes looking for like-minded, serious people beyond our own political or sectarian borders whom we can partner with and learn from.

What does this mean practically? I will give a concrete example. Energy should be redirected from debates about the ideas and people of the past toward the future. It is not necessary to continually relitigate the approaches of Tim Keller. He retired from his church almost a decade ago and has been dead for over three years. Perhaps in 2010, trying to disrupt Keller would have been necessary for any evangelical who wanted different ideas or approaches to take hold. Today, that’s no longer relevant. Evangelicalism has significantly fractured, is institutionally weak, and no longer has people of that stature.

In this environment, fighting against legacy institutions and figures, some of whom are no longer even alive, is less productive than working to create healthier and stronger Christian communities and to find the right ways to relate to the current culture and society. Rather than reacting, often against things that are mostly in the past, we need to be acting. In fact, people today could learn from figures like Keller, who built an influential institution grounded in an expansive vision of the future. This is also what Christian—especially Protestant Christian—leaders have done throughout our national history. They largely created the institutions and norms that are absent today. We need to rediscover that spirit for this current generation.

Where is this positive work being carried out today? We see it in various Christian localism initiatives, like the work being done by the community around First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, Washington, led by American Reformer board member Camden Spiller and pastor C. R. Wiley. They are creating well-paying jobs and paying taxes, turning vacant downtown buildings into a farmers’ market and bakery, and building an architecturally significant new church that provides needed community and conference-center space. These initiatives are building not just the church but also the community around it. Or look at Coverdale House, the new Protestant study center being built at Princeton. Or the scholarship on Josephus being done by T. C. Schmidt, work that is drawing respect from the world’s leading academic authorities. These are examples of the kinds of things American Christians should be looking to create.

My hope is that American Reformer can be one of the institutions that help envision and create this future, for the good not just of Christians themselves but of all American society.