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The film’s subject is the infamous Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. Once hailed as one of the youngest “self-made” female billionaires ever, she was later convicted of defrauding investors over a blood-testing device that never worked as promised. She owes her investors $452 million and was sentenced to 11 years in prison. The drama of the documentary comes from her complete denial that she wronged anyone.

In fact, she insists she has never deceived anyone in her entire adult life, and that the testing device works. Believing the media narrative against her is biased, Holmes and her husband, Billy Evans, invite Fielder into their home in the hope that radical transparency will change the public’s opinion of her. The first half of the film takes place at their beachside cottage near San Diego in 2023, the month before she went to prison. The second half picks up two years later, with Holmes behind bars at a federal prison in Texas.

Anthropologists argue over whether it is more methodologically sound to observe from a distance or to immerse yourself in the lives of the people you study. Fielder leans toward immersion. He makes himself a protagonist of the documentary, and much of the film consists of his conversations with Holmes and Evans. Once Holmes is in prison and can no longer be recorded, Fielder recruits Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in The Dropout, to play her in reenactments, and the film begins to follow the seemingly authentic conversations between Fielder and Seyfried as they comment on their dealings with Holmes’ family and try to weigh the truth.

The news media has called Holmes a pathological liar. This film, meanwhile, invites us to spend a few hours with her up close, watching her hold her husband, cry, swim in the ocean, and nurse her infant. She is tenderly humanized. Yet as Fielder doggedly pursues the truth about what actually happened, Holmes moves from staunchly defending her character to growing vague, stalling, claiming ignorance, and seizing on any interruption.

Photo by Tali Mackay, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

“All I know is my truth, and my love for my family,” she says, tearing up as if on cue. She and her husband present themselves as wildly, almost telepathically obsessed with each other. Each claims to hear the other’s voice in their head and to talk with the other when apart, knowing exactly what the other would say. Fielder is shocked that such total love and commitment could apparently exist in a couple who seem so untrustworthy.

Our culture is consistently reluctant to name and confront female wrongdoing; look no further than the Lindsay Clancy controversy. The power of this film is its willingness to hold female duplicity up to the light and demand the truth. It is disquieting to think that so destructive a liar could also be such an apparently wholesome mother. Holmes seems completely convinced that everything she says is true and that she has never committed a crime.

The film does acknowledge ways the media coverage and dramatizations may have misrepresented Holmes. When Seyfried learns that Holmes is being bullied in prison by inmates who know her only from Seyfried’s performance, she gets defensive on behalf of her own acting and of television as a whole. “It’s not our job to teach people,” she says. Fielder seems to disagree. He wants television and film to reveal the absolute truth, and while he knows that may be impossible, he wants to get as close as he can.

Holmes, a husky-voiced blonde with huge, unblinking blue eyes, comes across as so sweet and naive, almost stupid, that you find yourself tempted to believe her. You start to wonder whether she is simply an innocent person victimized by forces beyond her control. Or perhaps she is a schemer shielding herself. Evans invites two readings as well. He may be a controlling, narcissistic hustler. Or he may be a patriotic entrepreneur who loves his wife deeply and wants to protect her from an invasive media complex that has itself been shown to be full of lies.

Holmes never shows aggression or hostility. She nods, smiles, tears up, and is very quick to say “I don’t know” when asked a pointed question. Her husband and her father both firmly defend her honor, insisting that she has been traumatized and has done no wrong. “In decades, the whole story will come out,” her father assures us.

For all the ambiguity, her family on the whole comes across as falsely convinced of its own righteousness. As best we can tell, her persona of extreme innocence is a shield she has built to protect herself from culpability, and the family is committed to keeping it up. Holmes filed a request for commutation in 2025, which is still pending. For whatever reason, psychological or social, they cannot allow themselves to apologize and repent, even after her conviction.

The family shows how well-to-do people lie even to themselves: committed to a certain public image, they buy peace of mind at the cost of their souls. Faced with this, we have to ask ourselves: are we letting our own families buy into lies for the sake of convenience or pride?

In the social media age, everyone builds a persona. We all take part in producing news, photography, cinema, and tribal metanarratives, and we all present a constructed image of ourselves to others. What are we leaving out? What are we misusing? The film reveals that Holmes’ online presence is run by her husband, who posts inflammatory comments in her name and puts out AI models of her for public use, trading on her infamy for more clout.

Social media pushes us toward extreme behavior behind our online personas, and it arguably trains us to be overly compliant back in the “real world.” Perhaps out of fear of being caught on camera, we never want to be recorded being mean, and we are less willing than ever to confront people in public. We become flatterers, too eager to overlook wrongdoing and unwilling to call out sin. This film cuts against that generational habit. There is a time to set aside niceness in the search for truth.

Fielder carries over several narrative techniques he has honed throughout his oeuvre. He dwells on the ambiguity of reenacting conversations that were imperfectly remembered, and he shows us how he edits the script. He also returns to a familiar motif, the suggestion that he is falling in love with the woman he is documenting even as he criticizes her behavior. The film borders on metafiction as a result. Fielder invites us to suspect that he may be withholding information to present a certain narrative, even as he comes across as wholly authentic and takes pains to show the artifice of the documentary project. So much is exposed, from boom mics dropping into frame to Evans’ genitalia in the shower... but is that everything?

All of this might suggest that Fielder is more brutally honest than other documentarians and journalists, to say nothing of reality television producers. Or he is the most masterful manipulator of them all.

We are left certain that the title of the movie is itself a lie. Even in an age of cameras everywhere, there are still so many things we can’t see.

Michael Thomas Jones works in alternative education in northern Idaho.

When the global order was less chaotic and our alliance system more harmonious, we were able to exercise influence with greater effect. It was never perfect, but the system ran about as smoothly as could be hoped.

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That sentence is from chapter 1 of Loser Theology, page 26. Dr. Brian Tabb has stepped up to the plate with a critical review. I’m glad he did.

Dr. Tabb was kind enough to send me a draft before publication and to invite my feedback, for which I am grateful. I appreciate the review itself, too. He took the time to read the book, summarized it, and commended its call for moral clarity and courage.

Thank you, Dr. Tabb, for your review.

Dr. Tabb is the president of Bethlehem College and Seminary and the general editor of Themelios. The Gospel Coalition brought out the big guns on this one. Good. When a man of Tabb’s position and credentials publishes a critical review of my book, that can only mean one thing: Loser Theology is a book that cannot be ignored.

This is a discussion that’s long overdue. There’s too much at stake.

Loser Theology was written to mount a frontal assault on the passivity and weakness in the modern church that have caused so much damage. TGC may be critical of Loser Theology (the book), but it has been a vocal cheerleader for loser theology (the teaching).

Is the title provocative? Well, check out these headlines and decide for yourself.

“Jesus Is for Losers,” TGC, Jared C. Wilson (Feb. 16, 2016)

“All Christians are ‘Losers,’” TGC, Chris Colquitt (Feb. 12, 2021)

Will Sorrell published another article for TGC saying, “Losing is for losers, right?” He goes on to extol the value of losing by saying, “we don’t need to be theologians of glory… we need to be theologians of the cross.”

Over at Christianity Today, they published an article entitled “We Should Be Better Losers.”

So, maybe the title isn’t as provocative as some suggest. Maybe I’m just using the same language these outlets use.

Back to Tabb’s review. He seems to be a thoughtful and reasonable man who engaged my book fairly, despite multiple misreadings at decisive points. Let me explain where.

The central misunderstanding

If a book calls readers to reject something called loser theology, what would you expect the alternative to be? Perhaps “Winner Theology”?

Actually, no.

That’s the central mistake in Tabb’s review. Near the end of the review, he calls my position “Winner Theology.” In the conclusion, he says, “Clary misses the mark by redefining ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ according to conservative American values and optimistic eschatology rather than the priorities of Jesus and the apostles.”

That is not what the book argues.

The alternative to loser theology, the label for the first half of the book, is “High-Agency Christianity,” the label for the second half. I chose these labels on purpose. I avoided building my case around “winning” and “winners” because faithfulness is not measured by outcomes.

Loser theology, as criticized in my book, does measure faithfulness by outcome: “I’m losing, so I must be a faithful Christian.” “Winner Theology” would make the same mistake in the opposite direction.

High-agency Christianity is the active assertion of the Christian faith through good works, whatever comes of it. The book says repeatedly that high-agency Christians may suffer precisely because they assert their faith in the face of opposition. A high-agency Christian may succeed in life or he may lose. Faithfulness is not determined by any particular outcome. It is found in the pursuit.

That said, I do believe winning is preferable to losing. I tell Christians that they should outwork the pagans competing against them. Wanting to win is one thing. Measuring faithfulness by winning is another. The book does only the first.

This should be the least controversial claim in the book. I assume Dr. Tabb wrote his review because he wanted to win the argument. Good for him. I don’t fault him for that. I want to win the argument as well. My position is that Christians should pursue victory, knowing we may suffer defeat and that God is sovereign over which one we get.

Aims too low?

The title of TGC’s review is “‘Loser Theology’ Aims Too Low,” presumably because Tabb believes I’m willing to settle for worldly victories instead of heavenly ones. But that’s false. Tabb’s own definition of true victory answers this charge. He says victory “entails costly faithfulness to Christ and spiritual conquest against sin and evil.”

Yes and amen. I agree. That’s actually the aim of the book. I call Christians to pursue faithfulness in every area of life, even when it is costly. “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). That includes the home, the workplace, the church, and the public square.

That’s the problem with loser theology. It limits our pursuit of costly obedience to explicitly religious duties, such as evangelism and missions. But do we not also have a duty to pursue costly obedience in the public square? Should Christians not be called to risk it all to recover cultural ground that we’ve lost?

That’s why I’d say it is loser theology itself, not my book, that aims too low. A theology that keeps Christ’s Lordship inside the walls of the church aims lower than mine.

The same misunderstanding shapes the eight questions Tabb poses about my project. I’ll limit my comments to the ones that bear most on the argument.

Who are the losers?

Tabb observes that the book bundles together several kinds of critique. There’s a critique of passive, lazy Christians; of Christian leaders pushing a leftist agenda, such as Russell Moore; and of a third group of leaders who hold conservative doctrine but use “white flag” rhetoric in their books and sermons.

He’s right about that. I did it intentionally. Calling out various leaders isn’t “petty name-calling” (p. 25). The difficulty of a project like this is labeling something many Christians feel intuitively even though the error isn’t expressed in a clear doctrinal statement. Loser theology exists more as a vibe than a formal system. It’s a moral impulse people feel even though it may not make sense to them.

For example, some people feel that a pastor shouldn’t speak out about politics, though they have no developed political theology. Why do they feel it’s wrong when they can’t give a biblical rationale for it? Because they’ve learned that Christians “should be better losers” from various voices in the evangelical ecosystem.

Loser theology doesn’t have a single source, a doctrinal statement with affirmations and denials, or an obvious, traceable history. It would be easier to identify and refute if it did. This is also why the men I criticize do not belong in one category. I am blunt with Russell Moore and David Platt because I think the criticism is well deserved.

And then there’s John Piper. Piper is the founder and chancellor of the school Dr. Tabb leads, so I understand why this part of the book drew Tabb’s attention.

What Tabb seems to have overlooked is that I do not put Piper in the same category as the others. Though I have never met him, I’ve long considered Piper something of a spiritual father. I’ve read many of his books, some of them twice. I’m grateful for all I learned from him. Despite our disagreements, I regard Piper as a faithful man of God.

Nevertheless, I have written critically about how his teaching gets misused by those who take it too far. On page 75, I wrote, “Ordinary readers, steeped in Piper’s books, articles, and sermons, might draw logical conclusions from his teaching even he may not personally endorse.” Tabb calls my argument here “imprecise.” After almost two decades of pastoral ministry, I can confidently report that Christians can be notoriously imprecise! I’m citing pastoral evidence that isn’t so easily footnoted. I’ve sat across the table from people who had read Don’t Waste Your Life and felt guilty that they weren’t suffering enough for Jesus.

This is also my answer to Tabb’s sharpest line in the review. He quotes Piper’s statement that “the call of Christ is a call to live a life of sacrifice and loss and suffering.” Tabb speaks as though I’d object to that statement, but I don’t. I agree that Piper is careful to qualify his teaching on suffering in Desiring God. Yet Tabb still calls my account “sloppy scholarship.”

My main issue is the way people have applied Piper’s teaching. His rhetoric is so powerful that they took it too far. I’ve counseled people who absorbed Piper’s emphasis and missed the qualifications.

Many Christians have adopted a kind of “walking-on-eggshells” religion, afraid that any act of courage or boldness might be motivated by pride or selfish ambition. So they do nothing at all, using “an abundance of caution” as a fig leaf for cowardice. They hide their light under a bushel because they fear that letting it shine might be prideful.

Imagine Peter, on the day of Pentecost, hesitating to preach to the crowd because he worried about a prideful motive in his heart.

Tabb says my “animating concern is not commending everyday means of grace but casting a vision for ‘recovering cultural ground, rebuilding institutional courage, and training a generation to engage the world with confidence.’”

First, that’s a false dichotomy. The book assumes the ordinary means of grace. It was written for Christians who sit under preaching, come to the Lord’s Table, and pray, and who then need to know what to do with the strength they receive there.

Second, notice how recovering cultural ground has been set against the means of grace, as though the two were enemies. That is the sort of thing I wrote the book to address. If ordinary Christians hear that, what will they conclude? That faithfulness requires them to stay out of cultural battles.

Ordinary faithfulness is a major theme of the book. In chapter 8, I provide a list of twelve disciplines Christians can pursue. Number six is “Honor the Ordinary,” under which I wrote, “the Christian life is lived in bodies, homes, routines, and commitments, not a vague spiritual fog. Christ has staked his claim over every square inch of the universe, including diapers, deadlines, budgets, chores, study, and work. The man who masters the ordinary becomes useful in the extraordinary” (pp. 248-249).

In what arena do we strive?

Tabb says the “nub of the issue” is that I urge Christians to set their sights on winning in politics and culture. He contrasts my view with the example of the martyrs Polycarp and Perpetua, who died for their faith in the Roman arena.

Polycarp and Perpetua do not refute my point; they make it. They were not executed for being passive and inconsequential. They were martyred because they stood publicly on their Christian convictions and would not back down, whatever it cost. That is exactly the kind of high-agency Christianity I am commending.

By the world’s standards, they lost, and they lost because they were bold. In chapter 7, “Hall of Courage,” I give example after example of high-agency men and women who were bold for Christ. Some lost and some succeeded, but the metric of faithfulness is their obedience, not the outcome.

What power should we seek?

Tabb charges me with equivocation, saying I speak of the power of the Holy Spirit in the same way I speak of power within an institution. I can see how he might conclude that. My intent was to establish a principle about power and then apply it more broadly.

The principle is this: power cannot be an inherently corrupting influence, because God himself gives power to all Christians by the Holy Spirit. Power can be used wickedly or righteously, depending on the character of the man who wields it, a point I make in the book (pp. 180ff.).

There’s a Latin maxim, abusus non tollit usum. In English, that means “misuse does not negate proper use.” The misuse of power does not negate the proper use of power. Tabb cites Jonathan Leeman on the related matter of authority: “Authority is a good and dangerous gift.” So there it is. Authority can be good, and it can be dangerous. I agree.

Now consider this: what has been the prominent messaging from evangelical leaders about authority and power in recent years? From what I’ve seen, it has been almost entirely negative, with scant defense of their positive uses. In the last generation, I’m not aware of any major evangelical leader calling Christians to the righteous pursuit of power. Can you think of any?

So I wrote Loser Theology to make a positive case that Christians can do great and godly things if they pursue power righteously. This doctrine has been greatly neglected. The best antidote to the rampant abuse of power in our society is not for Christians to avoid power but to pursue it, acquire it, and wield it righteously for the glory of God. Running from power to escape its temptations is like a man abandoning his family to avoid abusing them. It leaves all the power to men who feel no such scruple.

What ambition should we rescue?

Tabb worries that “the ambition of ‘High-Agency Christianity’ aligns more with the ideals of this world than with the countercultural values of the kingdom of God.” He notes that I don’t discuss the New Testament’s warnings against selfish ambition (Phil. 2:3).

I address this repeatedly, under different labels. The book speaks of “righteous power” more than a dozen times. It also discusses “Spirit-filled agency” and taking “Spirit-filled risks.” The qualifiers carry the argument. Power must be “righteous.” Risks must be “Spirit-filled.” Selfish ambition is the pursuit of power, influence, or authority for selfish ends. The book opposes it by insisting that these pursuits must always be godly.

This is the point Paul makes in 1 Tim. 3:1 regarding the qualifications for eldership: “If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task.” What’s he saying? First, the office of overseer is an office of great authority. Second, the man who desires it desires a “noble task.” That desire is to be encouraged. Third, the man who seeks it must do so righteously, which is why this text is followed by the list of biblical qualifications for office.

What future hope fuels our mission?

Tabb assumes that I am “at least sympathetic to a version of postmillennialism.”

I knew someone would raise this objection. I’ve been waiting for it.

My publisher, Canon Press, is associated with Doug Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho, project, and Wilson is a thoroughgoing postmillennialist. I also cite the late David Chilton with approval, and he was postmillennial too.

However, I deliberately avoided making an eschatological argument, other than to observe that the loser mindset thrives under a pessimistic eschatology. And I published with Canon because I knew they would be friendly to my argument (even though I’m Southern Baptist!).

But my argument itself rests on the straightforward commands of Scripture. If I’d argued from an eschatological system, it would have been dismissed too quickly by anyone who isn’t already postmillennial. The call to work hard, take responsibility, act with courage and boldness, and assert the Lordship of Christ over all of life is not the exclusive property of postmillennialists. These commands bind a Christian, whatever his millennial view.

As it happens, I’m not yet convinced of postmillennialism, though I’m open to it. That said, many of my closest friends are postmil. I consider myself more of an optimistic amillennialist.

What is true victory?

Tabb closes his review with a study of what “conquering” means in the book of Revelation: the saints conquered the ancient serpent “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev. 12:11).

It’s strange to read things I agree with presented as a rebuttal of my view. Loser Theology is about being strong and courageous, not giving up when it is hard, and asserting the supremacy of Christ over all of life. And if, in that endeavor, we are defeated, may we go down swinging.

Charlie Kirk is one of the central examples of high-agency Christianity in the book. He was not murdered for being a loser for Jesus. He was murdered because he was asserting the Lordship of Christ over all of life. He knew what he was up against, and he chose to stand tall against it, even though it cost him everything. He has received his reward.

Conclusion

I suspect my title did some of the work here. A book called Loser Theology sounds like it must be selling Winner Theology instead. Anyone who picks up the book expecting Winner Theology will likely read with that bias. I’d ask Tabb’s readers to check for themselves.

Dr. Tabb and I agree on more than his review suggests. He says he wants courageous men in his home, his church, and his seminary. He lists my twelve disciplines and grants that many will agree with them, “even some whom Clary accuses of promoting loser theology.” I’ll take that.

We differ on whether the book teaches that faithfulness to Christ requires winning. It doesn’t, and I don’t argue that. I am grateful for his engagement, and I’d encourage his readers to read the book and judge for themselves.

D. Michael Clary serves as pastor of Christ the King Church (SBC) in Fort Thomas, Kentucky (just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio). He has published writings for American Reformer, The Blaze, Christ Over All, Center for Baptist Leadership, The Federalist, Founders Ministries, King’s Domain, Sola Ecclesia, and Truth Script, along with regular writing on his own website at dmichaelclary.com. Michael is the author of two books, God’s Good Design: A Biblical, Theological, and Practical Guide to Human Sexuality (Reformation Zion, 2023), and Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth (Canon Press, 2026). He is a co-author of the forthcoming Nine Questions About Women's Ministry in the Church (Founders Press, 2027).

Editor’s Note: We are reposting William Wolfe’s important NatCon speech here for our readers. We count Yoram Hazony a friend and coalition partner who is seeking to advance many of the policies and goals that Christians advocate. American Reformer does not have a stated position on Israel because we do not think there is only one position for Christians to hold. Historically, evangelicals and conservative Protestants have been strong supporters of Israel for all sorts of reasons. Those views are changing with younger generations across the political spectrum. We think having a serious discussion about the reasons for those changes and the future of the American-Israel alliance are important to have in public. William’s talk is seeking to start that discussion and do so respectfully with our Israeli friends.

Author’s Note: A few months back. Dr. Yoram Hazony, founder of the National Conservatism conference, asked me if I would come speak at the conference on a panel about the future of the American Right and Israel—in Jerusalem. The specific task that Hazony gave to the panelists, myself included, was to “explain why support for Israel is waning on the American Right.” Frankly, I was hesitant to do so, as this topic is monopolized by loud and belligerent actors on either side of the debate. But this issue is not going away, and it deserves a more honest and serious treatment, and one offered from a friendly posture, than what is often offered by either “groypers” on one side or “NeoCons” on the other. I had no control over the schedule (it was set for October 7) and I dutifully executed on the mission assigned. Despite predictable reactions from dishonest, bad faith, or ideologically captured actors with an axe to grind back in America, Hazony and the conference organizers were very pleased with how the panel went. To which I say: Mission accomplished.

So, I am one of those evangelical Christians that my fellow panelist Jonathan Kepperman was talking about. It’s good to be here today.

I want to start with a verse from Proverbs. Proverbs 27:6: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend. Profuse are the kisses of an enemy.” And a second proverb, Proverbs 22:3: “The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.” I think that’s a good summary of the themes that we’re discussing here on this panel.

I want to thank Yoram Hazony for inviting me to be here. I count Yoram as a friend. It’s interesting—in the run-up to this conference, I have been labeled many things, a Nazi, an antisemite, a Zionist shill. And yet here I am in Israel; a weird place for a Nazi to be.

And I do want to do a little bit of personal throat clearing here as well. First of all, Yoram has not seen a single word of these remarks. So my remarks were not screened. Nobody told me what I could or couldn’t say. Nobody obligated me to be here. I’m not here, and this is more to some American friends I have overseas currently in my home country, as any part of a “containment effort on the right.” I’m here because I try to be a good and loyal friend. And loyalty is an important political virtue.

Of course, my loyalties are first and foremost and always with the United States of America and no other country, as it should be. I am a loyal American patriot, a Christian. I can trace my lineage on the continental United States back to those who fought in the Revolutionary War. I am an American. But again, as I said, Yoram is my friend.

I spent about 10 years working behind the scenes in politics as a legislative staffer and then in the first Trump administration in positions where it would have been pretty inappropriate for me to have had a public presence. But after I left Washington DC in 2021, after the first Trump administration, I thought to myself, “well, I have a lot of opinions on things and there’s this app called Twitter. I could start using it.” And shortly after I started using Twitter and writing more publicly and writing particularly on patriotism and nationalism and American nationalism and even on this very scary word sometimes, “Christian nationalism,” it caught the attention of Yoram. I had a chance to speak at NatCon in Miami. I spoke at a NatCon in DC recently and again I’m glad to be here at NatCon in Israel.

I asked a good friend of mine, and I won’t use his name here but he’s a very prominent media figure in the United States of America, a friend of Israel, supporter of Donald Trump and JD Vance (and that’s a very important theme here that I’ll come back to): “What should I say over here?”

And this is what he said to me. Again, I’ll keep it anonymous, but I thought it was good, so I’m just going to quote him:

“We need to talk about why the upcoming generation wants a reassessment of foreign alliances and deserves to have the room to do so without immediately being called the worst names while acknowledging there are some bad actors trying to hijack this conversation for sinister means. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth having constructively. Every culture is permitted to assess what is best for it and its posterity. The same should be true of American culture as well.”

It’s in that spirit that I’m here. I’m going to try to put some things in perspective. Share some numbers—what are we really talking about here? And then give some opinions on what I think is causing this friction on the Right in regards to Israel and the Jews and consider where do we go from here.

Mapping American Jews: Largely on the Left

And so let’s start with who actually are American Jews, right? Israeli Jews and American Jews are kind of two different conversations. I’m an American. I want to consider first and foremost what’s happening on American soil. There are about 7.5 million Jews living in the United States of America. You can get different numbers from different polling places. You know, the only thing worse than lies are statistics, right?

But there’s about 7.5 million Jews in the United States of America. The vast majority of them identify with the Democrat party. Pew asked Jewish adults what party they belong to. 71% identified with the Democrats or leaned that way. 26% identified with Republicans or leaned that way. Half of them described their politics as liberal. The exception is the Orthodox community, but that’s about one in 10 of Jews in the United States.

And after October 7th, this didn’t really change. After October 7th, the rising tide of things that could be legitimately called antisemitism, which not everything is legitimately called that, but we saw legitimate demonstrations of antisemitism on college campuses in America by the Left, by leftists, by radical Marxists, college kids and students and universities captured by essentially communists.

Even in light of that, in light of those protests, when it came time to vote in 2024 for either Donald Trump and JD Vance or Kamala Harris and Tim Walz Minnesota, it didn’t really change that much.

Trump and Vance received 77 million votes. And out of those 77 million votes, they got about a little over one to one to one and a half million Jewish votes.

So when we are talking about American Jews and a conversation about the future of the American Right, there are many people—and in this talk I am going to pivot back and forth between the first and third person, not everything I say here includes me or is my opinion, but here it does—there are many people, and myself included as an American Christian patriot, who wonder why is it that so much of our national political conversation on the American Right is dominated by people who account for essentially one out of 70 or 80 of our voters?

The other 98% of the Republican voting coalition are evangelicals and Protestants, Catholics, veterans, and secular conservative Americans who never set foot in a synagogue and who never have plans of coming to visit Israel. They just care about America and they care about putting, as we’ve said for so many years now, America first.

These numbers are important. The Jewish portion of the Republican coalition is very very small. So here’s an encouragement I would give: every coalition partner needs to know their place. And I don’t mean that in a rude way, but simply as a matter of fact.

One of the projects I’m working on in the American political environment as an evangelical Protestant is the fact that evangelical Protestants have ceded the leadership of the conservative political coalition in America largely to Catholics and Jews. Even though American Protestants are the ones who built our country. There was one Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence. There were no Jewish signers of the Declaration of Independence.

For the first 200 years of our existence, America was a Protestant nation, almost exclusively. Catholics played a large role in our country, yes, but over the last 50 years, evangelical Protestants in particular have sort of receded from leadership. We think that this is concerning. We want to play a bigger coalitional role. And so, every coalitional partner needs to know their role and know their place. Who’s the senior partner? Who’s the junior partner? I think these are things that are driving this conversation.

Favorability towards Israel is dropping. Many of our panelists have mentioned that. I’ll just mention one other sort of interesting survey as I was looking at this. Chicago Council polling from just this fall puts younger Republicans, Gen Z and millennials at 48% on a favorability scale. Again, this is on the right, these are Republicans, 48% of the next generation. That’s probably a higher estimation than some while their grandparents sit at 65. So, we’re looking at close to a 20% drop in support over these recent generations.

Again, one might assume that October 7th would have been the thing that maybe would have brought American Jews rushing to join the coalition on the Right. While there was some movement, and I’m not pretending or saying there was no movement, the vast majority of American Jews when they went to the polls still voted on things like support for democracy and support for abortion access.

Pew has long found that more than eight in 10 American Jews say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while White evangelicals, the backbone of the Republican voting base, say the reverse.

Thus, when I think of American Jews fundamentally, I don’t think of people who I don’t like because of their ethnicity. By no means. I think of people who are my political opponents—because they are. They are people who go to the polls and try to cast votes that cancel out the things that I’m voting for. And a lot of younger Republicans increasingly feel this way.

So that’s the situation we’re in.

Three Further Thoughts on Why Support for Israel Is Waning

What is leading to this? Three brief points.

First, Americans are war-weary.

We are a war-weary nation. Now, you might say to somebody like me, “ join the club.” But the truth is we are not you. We’re not in the situation you’re in. We are not beset on all sides by enemies who wish our destruction. You have a different lot in life than we do.

America enjoys the protection of vast oceans on either side. We have an incredibly anemic country to our north in Canada and a nation to our south in Mexico that, if they’re not flooding us with illegal aliens, we can largely ignore. This is the blessing of providence that God has given to us as an American people.

But over the last 20 to 30 years, we have spent thousands of lives in American blood and trillions of dollars in American treasure in a region that many people ask, “ Why are we over there?”

And I’m not saying there aren’t good answers to that question. But as somebody who knows many global war on terror veterans, I know that they’re deeply disillusioned by what we’ve done in the region. So, when they see America get into yet again another war in the Middle East, as we have here recently with Iran, it is frustrating.

Now, I support Donald Trump. I’ve voted for him three times. I worked for him. I would stand with Matthew Peterson in saying that, if I were in a position to give advice, I would have said maybe we don’t do it this time—but we want to trust the president and the people who are in charge and the American people who voted for him.

Still, none of that changes the fact that Americans are a war-weary country right now and particularly the millennials and the younger generation.

Second, we want our national sovereignty back.

And I don’t just mean that in terms of a relationship between America and Israel, but that’s something that often is brought up. But we see this in other areas as well. We are pulling out of a variety of things in relation to the United Nations. Not the entire United Nations yet, though, if we did, I wouldn’t be mad.

We’re pulling out of the World Health Organization. We are trying to reassess our NATO alliance.

Americans want national sovereignty. The Trump coalition wants national sovereignty.

We want an utter rejection of the vision of George H.W. Bush from his 1990 United Nations speech where he says he envisions a future of open borders and open trade and open hearts and open peoples and an end to nationalism abroad. But then reality came surging back in 2016 with Donald Trump and we said, “Giddy up. Let’s go.”

We want national sovereignty. We want America first to mean America first.

Another piece of the national sovereignty question, one that has been mentioned here, and much of what has been driving support for Israel in America has been a theological view that many of my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters share regarding Israel. I myself do not share it as strongly as they do, or maybe not even at all in the way that they do, depending on what exact eschatological system is in view. But in my work, I try in no way, shape, or form to make that a stumbling block between us working together to beat the Leftists trying to take over our Christian denomination. Which is why coming here was quite a bit of a risk for me. People ask, “What do you get for coming here?” And I say, “I don’t know. Probably grief.”

I love my Southern Baptist brothers and sisters who are dispensationalists. But the reality is that theology is also waning in the United States. And in the light of people who want American national sovereignty back, simply saying that the answer to supporting Israel is “because the Bible says so,” in light of these very difficult and complex conversations isn’t going to work.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a big believer in a lot of things being settled by “because the Bible says so.” And I respect that there are those who make that argument, but the reality is that that argument continues to have less purchase.

Furthermore, there are many people, specifically younger people on the Right, who find some sort of oddness about the fact that we have members of Congress who wave Israeli flags outside of their office year round. I understand if you would do it after an event like October 7th. But coming to our nation’s capital and seeing the flag of another sovereign nation outside of your congressman’s office, to many younger people on the Right, is an odd thing. They say “America first” but then this looks kind of like “America first plus Israel first.” What are we doing here? Those are the questions that they are asking.

Third, there are concerns again on the Right about the treatment of Christians in the Middle East.

Much of this is perception. This is not necessarily reality. Some of it is perception. But I’ll share a personal anecdote. One of the other foreign nations that I’ve had a chance to visit in recent years is the nation of Armenia. Armenia is the oldest Christian nation in the world. They are fighting against the Muslim Azerbaijanis who are attacking them and destroying their holy sites and desecrating their land and killing their people. And the Azerbaijanis are using Israeli drone technology. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is a fact.

If Israelis want Christians to be their allies, then that has to be a two-way street, not just in America, but in the broader Middle Eastern region as well.

More George Washington, Less Nazi Hunting

What I think could help us going forward here is a return to the greatest American who ever lived. His farewell address has been referenced multiple times here, but it is so insightful. It is so enduring. It is the most cited political speech in American history.

And in George Washington’s Farewell Address, he warns that permanent antipathies against particular nations or passionate attachments for others should be forsaken. And this is a line that many people know.

He says, “The nation which indulges towards another, a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty or its interest.”

I love that quote because it gets at both sides. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck here in the middle with you.

There are people on both sides who let their affection for or their hatred of Israel dominate everything they do in the American political scene. I want to talk about what’s best for America. I don’t want to talk about why the “biggest threat” to America is the relationship between America and Israel, or why, no matter what happens, we must always stand with Israel. Instead, I want us to have honest, fair, reasonable debate; “come, let us reason together.”

And the only way we can do that is if we follow the advice offered by George Washington and we let neither antipathy or overweening fondness guide our relationships with foreign nations. So take heed from George Washington.

Lastly, please stop the Nazi hunting. Let’s stop the Nazi hunting. This has been alluded to already, but I want to point out where this is most particularly poignant on the right.

JD Vance is the successor to Donald Trump. JD Vance, not Marco Rubio, not Ted Cruz, not anybody else who can throw their hat in the ring. And this is most particularly where the issue, this Nazi hunting, antisemite hunting issue is being used to actually try to give the NeoCons power back again after a Trump era.

We support JD Vance. MAGA supports JD Vance. JD Vance is not an antisemite. Stop trying to put him and anyone else associated with him through some Leftist struggle session demanding he denounce this, that, or the other person. Just stop listening to those podcasters. Don’t let them live rent-free in your heads.

JD Vance is our guy. And if you want to help strengthen this relationship in any way going forward, the sooner you get on the Vance train, the better.

William Wolfe is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. He previously worked as a legislative staffer for three Republican members of Congress, and as the Director of House Affairs at the State Department and Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for House Affairs at the Department of War in the first Trump Administration. He is alumnus of Cotton Mather Fellowship at American Reformer and the George C. Marshall Fellows program at the Heritage Foundation. He has a BA from Covenant College and an MDiv and ThM from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can follow him on X here.

Democratic man is ever tempted to twist this natural proclivity through an unchecked passion for equality, which produces envy and strife. This can result in unclear thinking and ultimately a rejection of practical politics in favor of utopian schemes and political mythmaking.

Today, this democratic tendency manifests itself in endless purity tests, revisionist rabbit holes, and a massive entertainment complex dominated by influencers. As we move from crashing through the doors in 2016 to laying a solid foundation for generational success, it’s more important than ever to listen to those with real accomplishments and real wisdom. In this environment, Nate Fischer rightly argues that “we should be wary of taking guidance…from people not focused on real achievement.”

We need individuals who display competence and possess a deep understanding of our political and cultural moment. This is one reason Vice President JD Vance is currently leading in the polls for the 2028 Republican presidential primaries, especially as the electorate trends younger. It’s also why there’s still talk of Marco Rubio running for president, though Rubio said he won’t enter the race if (and increasingly when) his good friend Vance does.

Those doing the difficult work of practical politics—those who spend summers going door to door or regularly take part in county or local governments—should be more valued. The same goes for those building institutions and trying to leave a legacy for future generations.

Quality public political commentary, of course, still has a role to play. Productive and courageous speeches that move the needle are needed, like those William Wolfe, Jonathan Keeperman, and Matthew J. Peterson gave at NatCon earlier this week. Part of the New Right’s future success depends on having frank and honest discussions about the third rails in our politics. Pretending that the widening generational divides can be stopped, much less reversed, is a fool’s errand. Our political challenge is to work within this new paradigm rather than retreat to generalizations.

But the tendency toward abstraction that Tocqueville noted keeps cropping up in online political discourse, especially in discussion of the Ohio governor’s race. The “to vote or not to vote for Vivek” debate has been illuminating and sometimes provokes clear thinking about regime-level issues. Good-faith arguments are being made on both sides. Which way Ohio goes will have implications not only for the state but for America more generally. Open debate about citizenship, the meaning of meritocracy, and the religion of our political candidates needs to happen.

What can get lost, however, is that whoever wins the Ohio governor’s race will directly affect the lives of 12 million people for the next four years. It is easy to make theoretical political arguments about a place you may know little about. Ohioans have a history and a way of life, however foggy our understanding of them has become.

Those who rightly attack the idea of hyper-proposition nationhood shouldn’t reduce states themselves to an idea. If the name Matt Huffman doesn’t ring a bell, stop offering authoritative-sounding assessments of Ohio politics until you know more about Ohio and its political circumstances. The same goes for anyone handing out advice about key statewide races elsewhere in the country.

Political strategies as untethered to reality as the Never Trumpers’ wild theories in 2016 need to be rejected. One such idea was to elect Trump and immediately remove him from office so that Mike Pence could become president—with apparently no thought given to the tens of millions of people who had just elected Trump. In a similar vein, there’s been talk of electing Amy Acton as governor with the hope that Governor Mike DeWine will suddenly become like John Adams as the Jefferson administration drew near. But this is a pipe dream.

DeWine and the Ohio GOP would not do what’s needed to limit Acton’s activism. He would need to shift wildly from being the governor who has consistently backed the importation of Haitians into Springfield, Ohio, to a smart and savvy political operator who understands what our times demand. Quite simply, Mike DeWine would not make a “based” turn if Amy Acton wins in November.

Too many overly ideological political consultants and commentators are still working from a framework developed in the pre-Trump era—a framework in which wild theories abounded because the state of politics looked so bleak. The conservative movement was locked into a spiral of permanent defeat. The Republican political establishment showed more thumos in scolding its own voters for picking Trump than they ever did against the Democrats. But over the past 10 years, Donald Trump has begun a revolution that now functions as the new baseline in American politics.

We need to grapple with the realities of politics as it is in 2026, not retreat to utopian models that assert a principle and skip all the difficult parts. This does not mean that shifting the Overton window is not a useful, but that it cannot be done for its own sake.

Abstract political thinking, a fixation on principles, and working within old political paradigms long after their sell-by date are tendencies that will always be with us. But they are not useful for building a new political establishment capable of serving Americans in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Universities like Cornell encourage sexual liberation among their student body (here, here, and here) and then act like Victorian prudes when the students follow their advice and cast off any norms regarding sex or male-female relationships. The thin gruel of consent as the basis of all moral behavior is wholly inadequate as a foundation for governing sexual relations between young men and women. And when the chickens come home to roost, the universities seek only to protect themselves by punishing students for behavior they themselves condone.

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The men who shaped the postwar settlement set out to tear down our founding myths and raise new ones in their place. Their cultural revolution was terribly effective. In most of our history, children would read of larger-than-life men who Christianized the New World and cut civilization out of the wilderness. Today, our legends are recast as tyrants, slave drivers, and colonizers. It seems that some still understand the value of heroes—they just hate ours.

If we are to restore the spirit of America, we must begin by rebuilding our founding mythology from first principles, beginning by explaining why these stories matter.

How Virtue Is Formed

Aristotle argues in his Nicomachean Ethics that virtue is built by habitual action. Man is virtuous because he does virtuous things, as the builder becomes better at his craft by building. It is not enough, however, simply to act habitually; one must order his habits properly. The builder could build poorly for 20 years and be no better than the day he began. The quality of one’s actions is judged according to the mean—avoiding both excess and defect in behavior. True courage, for example, is found somewhere between cowardice and recklessness.

Equally important is the manner in which we act. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the Nicomachean Ethics, states that “after the habit of virtue has been formed, such operations are carried out with delight, because a habit exists as a sort of nature.” Aquinas observes that a virtuous man enjoys the good, and that his habits have become reflexive. Therefore, how one’s habits are formed matters a great deal.

Finally, Aristotle says it is important for a child to be educated early “so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought,” for in doing so we form good habits from our youth.

As helpful as these definitions are, they are least useful to children—the very ones who need them most. How does a young boy determine the mean of courage with the wolf in front of him? Does he stand and fight, or run for help? These choices aren’t always obvious, and there is no simple rule to rely on. Aristotle answers that the mean is whatever the “man of practical wisdom” would judge it to be. But wisdom takes years to develop, and the wolf is here now. So the boy looks for a man with proven judgment and follows his example.

This raises the question: Who is worthy of emulation?

Rockwell Kent’s “Beowulf Fighting the Dragon” (1931)

Mythology as Moral Instruction

The Aristotelian man is most easily found in the stories we tell ourselves. This is most obvious in fiction, where men like Beowulf embody the Anglo-Saxon spirit. But real men are mythologized too, both to honor their memory and to set them before us as examples. We recount tales of great men so that we too can be great.

In these stories, knotty philosophy is boiled down until its meaning is made simple, even to a child. Saint George slays the dragon because he is a knight, and knights protect the innocent from evil beings. We understand the dragon as a great evil, but why? For one, it is dangerous—mankind’s foe since Eden, presented here in its most terrible form. Beyond that, it is greed and malice made flesh, for in its cave lies both treasure and the bones of those who sought it. It must be fought because good men do the right thing, even if it is perilous. The message then becomes something like “you are duty-bound to face the terrible evils of this life, so do it, and let God determine the outcome.”

For a young child, this is enough. Having looked into the face of evil (albeit on the page of a book), he now has a model of courage, honor, and duty. What he does not yet realize is that by playing Saint George, he is also reenacting an ancestral story. He is drawing his virtue from the same source his forefathers did, kings to peasants. George’s story is the story of the West itself, in which virtuous men brought pagan chaos under Christian order.

This is what it means to live historically—to receive what your fathers built, to add to it, and to pass it down to your children. These stories are the sinew that binds us to our fathers and will bind our sons to us.

The American Mythos

Our cultural inheritance goes back to pre-Christian Europe. Sallust recounts that Quintus Fabius Maximus and Scipio Africanus said that when they looked upon the wax masks of their ancestors, “their hearts were violently kindled toward virtue.” Their own battles with Hannibal during the Second Punic War would be immortalized.

Famously, our own Founding Fathers saw themselves as modern Romans. Washington was called the “American Cincinnatus” as a reminder that men should be both citizen and soldier, and that virtue can overcome the base desire for power. It was common to see essays signed Brutus or Fabius during the ratification debates. Nathan Hale, facing the gallows, is remembered as saying, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Hale’s words are a direct reference to the 1713 play Cato: A Tragedy, one of the most popular in the American colonies.

Many American legends have waned in the modern age. Surely, some still remember the Alamo, but the stories of Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett are fading. Not long ago, boys would race through the woods armed with cap guns, hunting outlaws like Wyatt Earp. These stories were torn apart by our supposed cultural betters because they were too useful in forming American men.

The Reformed Case for Mythmaking

The West’s oldest stories are pre-Christian, and the church has long argued over what to do with them. As Alcuin famously asked in 797, “What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”

Scripture offers one answer. Writing to Titus, Paul quotes the pagan poet Epimenides in his indictment against the Cretans, “One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’ This testimony is true” (Titus 1:12-13). John Calvin, commenting on the verse, goes further: those who reject heathen authors are superstitious, since “all truth is from God; and consequently, if wicked men have said anything that is true and just, we ought not to reject it; for it has come from God.”

One might object that Paul has no use for myth. He warns Titus against “Jewish myths” in the very next verse, and the word carries negative connotations across the pastoral epistles. But Paul’s concern is myth passed off as doctrine (commandments of men or quarrels over the law), not storytelling.

In Mythopoeia, Tolkien writes that the art of mythmaking is a reflection of God: “We make still by the law in which we’re made.” Man sub-creates because he was first created in God’s image. Tolkien understood the pagan myths as a refraction of God’s light, an incomplete fragment of a true source. Commenting on Beowulf in particular, he addresses an ancient church debate, “Shall we or shall we not consign the heathen ancestors to perdition?”

Tolkien’s answer is that these stories, pagan though they may be, are still imbued with truth. The Christian Beowulf poet honored his pagan forefathers by treasuring the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past—“Man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned.”

Aristotle himself was well regarded by the Reformers. Peter Martyr Vermigli, for instance, lectured on the Ethics at Strasbourg, and those lectures formed the basis of a commentary—the only one on a non-biblical work in his corpus. Vermigli maintained that grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, and that pagan works, however much truth they contain, are completed only by the Gospel.

To answer Alcuin, Ingeld has this much to do with Christ. There is real virtue in these stories, and it is worth handing them to our children.

Playing the Man

Picture a boy who was raised on stories of brave men—Beowulf in the mere, Saint George battling the dragon, Crockett at the Alamo. He has learned what courage is by hearing stories about his ancestors. Every night he has imagined himself clad in heavy armor, bracing against the blows of a mighty enemy. He has already decided who he is a hundred times over. When the moment comes to face the wolf, he knows how to play the man.

Children will be shaped by the myths they are told. We still have our own stories, three thousand years of them. Whether we tell them is up to us.

Tyler Tittermary is a writer from small-town Pennsylvania whose work unearths once-common views in Reformed political theology. He has written for the Center for Baptist Leadership, American Reformer, and the Standing for Freedom Center.

I don’t mean simply the nudity, the excess, the alternative spiritualities, or the other things Christians might find objectionable. Those things are there, and there are reasons to be critical of them. But they can also distract us from a more interesting question: Why do so many people want something like Burning Man in the first place?

Every year people travel into the Nevada desert and build a temporary city around art, community, ritual, imagination, and shared experience. It would be easy to call it a social experiment, or a peculiar kind of socialism, radical communalism, or artistic self-expression. But I don’t think any of those descriptions quite gets at it.

There is a yearning there, and it is a yearning for something more.

The 2026 Burning Man theme makes this unusually explicit. It is called “Axis Mundi,” after the ancient idea of a point where heaven and earth, or different planes of reality, meet. Burning Man’s own description speaks of connecting with realities greater than ourselves and even invokes Jacob’s Ladder. That is striking language for a supposedly post-Christian age.

Apparently, we are still looking for ladders to heaven.

Perhaps that should not surprise us.

Dramatic fire and fireworks display at Burning Man festival with glowing effigy silhouette.

I have spent much of my academic life thinking and writing about the soul, including in my forthcoming book Why Souls? One of my basic claims is fairly simple: the soul is not an antiquated religious idea added to an otherwise sufficient account of the human being. The soul helps us make sense of the living subject—the someone who thinks, loves, remembers, imagines, suffers, worships, hopes, and experiences the world.

This is part of the argument I make in Why Souls?: the human hunger for transcendence is not incidental to who we are. We are ensouled creatures whose consciousness, imagination, loves, and hopes continually reach beyond the merely material world, ultimately because we were made for communion with God.

Consciousness itself should make us wonder. There is something it is like to be you. You don’t simply process information about your children, your spouse, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, or God. You experience them. You love. You grieve. You imagine. You hope. That rich phenomenal life is part of what I mean when I speak about the soul.

And the soul seems remarkably resistant to the thin world modern materialism has given us.

We want meaning. We create stories. We gather in communities. We make art. We engage in rituals. We contemplate death. We wonder whether there is something beyond what we can presently see. And when the dominant culture tells us that we are sophisticated biological machines inhabiting an accidental universe, we have a difficult time actually living as though that were true.

This is where Burning Man becomes interesting.

At least the longing underneath it is not just about this life. Something about it reaches beyond the ordinary. People leave their ordinary spaces and routines, enter a desert, construct another kind of community, create symbols and enormous works of art, participate rather than merely observe, and then watch the whole thing disappear.

There is something deeply human about that. There is also something deeply religious about it.

That doesn’t make Burning Man Christian. It certainly isn’t. But Christians should be able to recognize a spiritual longing even when we disagree with the form it takes.

The danger is that Christians sometimes respond by offering an even thinner world. We become suspicious of mystery. We are uncomfortable talking about the soul. We reduce worship to information, discipleship to moral instruction, and Christianity to a set of propositions one accepts. Then we are surprised when people go looking elsewhere for wonder, transcendence, community, ritual, and spiritual experience.

Why wouldn’t they? If we don’t give people categories for understanding the deeper dimensions of their lives, somebody else will.

Plato understood something of this. The philosophical life involves turning away from appearances and toward what is ultimately real. But Christianity takes that inward and upward movement somewhere Plato could not finally take it.

Augustine is helpful here. He turns inward, but he does not remain there. In the Confessions, his inward journey leads him beyond himself. He discovers that the soul is not its own explanation: above the mutable self stands the immutable Creator.

That is the crucial Christian move.

Turn inward, yes. Pay attention to consciousness. Attend to desire. Cultivate imagination. Ask why beauty moves you, why love seems to carry a significance far greater than chemistry, why death feels like an offense against something that ought to continue.

But don’t stop with yourself. The soul points beyond itself.

C. S. Lewis put this memorably when he suggested that if we discover within ourselves a desire nothing in this world can satisfy, we should at least consider whether we were made for another world. That is worth taking seriously.

Dante can help us here, too. The Divine Comedy is one enormous exercise of the Christian imagination. It takes us through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, but the point is not simply to give us an imaginative geography of the afterlife. Dante is cultivating the soul. He is teaching us how to see. Hell shows us what disordered love does to us. Purgatory shows desire being healed and reordered. Paradise stretches the imagination toward the vision of God.

In that sense, Dante’s imagination has a destination. And that is one of the important differences between Christian imagination and the spiritual experimentation increasingly characteristic of our age. Christianity doesn’t simply tell us that there is “more.” It tells us what the more is for.

We were made for God.

That doesn’t diminish art, community, embodiment, imagination, or even our fascination with this world. It gives those things their proper depth. The Christian hope is not a final escape from creation. It is resurrection, new creation, and communion with the God who made us.

Burning Man makes the point unintentionally every year. The city rises. People gather. They create. They celebrate. They burn. And then the city disappears.

There is something almost painfully human about that rhythm, because everything we create in this life eventually passes away. Our accomplishments pass away. Our communities change. Our bodies age. People we love die. Eventually we die.

And yet the soul keeps reaching beyond all of it.

Perhaps that reaching is a clue. These are not merely abstract truths about human nature; they are concrete yearnings that show up as actions, motivations, impulses, and longings for transcendence. Perhaps the hunger is not an evolutionary accident after all.

While people at Burning Man are wondering beyond themselves, the wider culture is asking about consciousness again. There is fresh interest in near-death experiences, psychedelics, artificial intelligence, ancient spiritualities, paganism, and the possibility that reality is stranger than modernity told us. Christians should not be afraid of that.

But neither should we simply join the latest search for “enchantment.” Christianity already gives us a remarkably rich world: souls and bodies, heaven and earth, angels and saints, sacrament and resurrection, visible and invisible realities, and ultimately the promise that the pure in heart “shall see God.”

So what does Burning Man offer us? It doesn’t teach us what enchantment is, or what it means to be “re-enchanted” alongside our favorite gurus, though it does put those recent fads on display. It offers an opportunity: to consider our consciousness and our Creator, and to recognize that these deep, concrete, publicly visible longings are pointers to the soul—the center of what it means to be human—and to the Creator and Redeemer of our souls. We were made for more than this life, and Burning Man reminds us of that once again.

Rev. Dr. Joshua Farris, Anglican priest and Kairos University professor, directs Soul Science Ministries and founded Spiritually Driven Leadership. His forthcoming book is Why Souls? He speaks globally on human identity and theology. A former Humboldt Fellow, Farris publishes widely on Christian theism, dualism, and theological anthropology.

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This summer I am reading Augustine’s Confessions with two of my sons. I have assigned the book in my philosophy classes at Arizona State University over the years, but this time we are using Henry Chadwick’s translation in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. I mention the edition because it contains a footnote that summarizes one of the most common mistakes in Christian philosophy. When I read it, I thought “there it is, the whole problem of Athens v. Jerusalem in one tiny footnote.”

The footnote occurs on page 23 at the end of Book I. Augustine writes, “My sin consisted in this, that I sought pleasure, sublimity, and truth not in God but in his creatures, in myself and other created beings.” Chadwick then comments: “Augustine fuses St Paul (Romans 1) with Plotinus (1.6.8).”

That brief note is worth considering because it captures a familiar assumption. Augustine knew Paul and the Platonists, so he must have fused them. The passage is a good starting point for contrasting pagan philosophy with the Bible’s teaching about clear general revelation. Far from fusing biblical theism with Plotinus’ panentheism or emanationism, Augustine teaches Christians how to study philosophy by beginning with these two truths: all humans are created in the image of God, and all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Saint Augustin by Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645

Part One: Paul and Plotinus

Romans 1 is a long chapter, but Chadwick presumably has in mind verses 18–25:

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.”

Paul continues: “Although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” Professing to be wise, they became fools. They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for images of corruptible creatures. Therefore, God gave them up to uncleanness because they “exchanged the truth of God for the lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator.” (Rom. 1:18–25)

Notice three things.

First, the works of God reveal God. Creation is revelation. We know God because he reveals himself to us in both general and special revelation. The world is not religiously neutral material from which the philosopher might construct, by autonomous speculation, a possible deity. The world is made by the true and living God and declares the eternal power and divine nature of God. God is eternal (without beginning) and nothing else is; everything else is creation that had a beginning.

Second, this revelation is inferential. God’s eternal power and divine nature are “understood by the things that are made.” The works of God are known as works. Creation does not merely occasion religious feeling; it shows the Creator by what has been made. The creation was originally very good, is now under the curse of God due to sin, and will be redeemed; all three of those stages reveal something about the glory of God. The Christian, of all persons, should be able to demonstrate this. Creation does not merely show us the need for God because created goods don’t satisfy; it reveals to all that it was created by a perfectly wise, powerful, good, just, holy, and loving Creator.

Third, this revelation is clear to all humanity. It is objectively clear, even when it is not subjectively clear to sinners because of darkened minds. The law on a speed limit sign remains clear even if a driver insists that he cannot discern it. When he tells the officer who pulled him over “I can’t read,” he only makes the consequences worse: he is without excuse. Likewise, the problem in Romans 1 is not insufficient revelation. The problem is suppression. There is a clear revelation of God to all humans and yet they worship idols and use them to suppress the truth.

Now consider Plotinus in Enneads 1.6.8. He asks: “But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?” His answer is withdrawal: “He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away forever from the material beauty that once made his joy.”

Material beauties, Plotinus says, are “copies, vestiges, shadows.” The soul must not pursue them. It must “hasten away towards That they tell of.” Then comes the famous counsel: “Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland.” This flight is not geographical. “This is not a journey for the feet.” One must set aside the visible order, “close the eyes,” and awaken “another vision” within.

Plotinus is a panentheist or emanationist who denies creation ex nihilo. He teaches that being emanates from the One, with matter at the lower end. Matter points a person to the One negatively because it is imperfect and limited. Between matter and the One are various levels of spiritual beings, and the human soul must ascend until reaching perfection in a direct vision (non-cognitive, beyond all thought) of the One in the intelligible realm.

The contrast between the biblical theism in Romans 1 and the Neoplatonism of Plotinus is not minor. Biblical theism teaches that the works of God reveal God and that knowledge of God from his works is part of man’s highest good. Pagan Platonism and Neoplatonism teach the soul to turn away from the material world in order to ascend toward higher being. In Paul, man is guilty because he suppresses the revelation of God in creation. In Plotinus, the visible order is something to be left behind in the soul’s ascent. Some pagan philosophers taught that material existence was actually evil, others that it is neutral, others that it is good but not as good as the climb up the chain of being.

Biblical theism teaches that the world was created very good. It reveals God’s glory. The world is now under the curse of God because of sin, and that too reveals the glory of God’s justice and mercy. In redemption, Christians do not escape material existence. They are raised from the dead with physical bodies to dwell in a renewed creation. By contrast, much Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy taught the soul, perhaps after endless reincarnation, to flee bodily and material attachments in pursuit of a higher intelligible reality.

This also clarifies biblical language about seeing God face to face. Scripture says that God is spirit and that no man has seen or can see him, and also that God spoke to Moses face to face but Moses saw no form. Face-to-face knowledge means intimate friendship and direct divine disclosure (to Moses) rather than knowledge through signs and shadows (to the people of Israel). The Pharisees saw Jesus face to face and it did them no good. Face to face does not mean an immediate supra-rational (non-cognitive) vision of an impersonal highest being beyond thought. Paul and Plotinus are not saying the same thing.

Part Two: Augustine’s Christian Philosophy

“Philosophers have said things that are true, but even them I would think to be no authority for love of you my supremely good Father, beauty of all things beautiful” (3.10).

Augustine gives us a better way than Chadwick ever imagined.

In Book II of the Confessions, Augustine explains that sin is committed when we irrationally give in to an immoderate urge for a lesser good rather than pursuing the highest good. Augustine shows us how the sinner, as one created in the image of God and living in God’s world, is attracted to something real. The world contains truth, beauty, and goodness. The sinner does not simply love his crimes as crimes. He loves something in them that points beyond them. Augustine writes, “No, not even Catiline himself loved his crimes” (2.14).

His own theft of the pears makes the point. Augustine did not steal because he was hungry. He did not steal to feed others. He did not steal because the pears were excellent. In fact, he had better pears available to him. Yet he did steal, and he says that he loved the theft. Still, when he analyzes the sin, he sees that he would not have done it alone. The sin was bound up with companionship. Even this ugly act parasitically attached itself to a created good: friendship. The disorder was not that friendship is evil. The disorder was that Augustine loved fellowship in sin rather than fellowship in God.

This is how Augustine teaches us to study philosophy. When we study pagan philosophers, we can ask: as creatures with minds made in the image of God, what are they noticing? Plato notices that Greek materialists are wrong and that the soul and ideas are immaterial. Aristotle notices that things have natures and that nature is ordered teleologically. Aristotle studies concepts, propositions, and arguments and gives us their anatomy. Philosophers pursue meaning through understanding the world. Since the world is God’s world, they inevitably encounter truths that testify to him. And yet this only deepens their inexcusability for both failing to know God and for promoting a false deity.

The Confessions are full of arguments showing that the material world has not existed from eternity and that the human soul has not existed from eternity. Aristotle taught the eternity of the world. Plato’s Timaeus offers a demiurgic account of cosmic order that later Platonists often read in non-Christian ways. In neither case do we receive the biblical doctrine of creation from nothing by the living God.

For Augustine, the sin of unbelief is not a passive misfortune inflicted on someone by historical circumstances such as having lived in Athens rather than Jerusalem. Humans as sinners are in rebellion against God. The rebellion is expressed in refusing to believe what is clearly revealed in creation. The rebellion is fundamentally irrational: it is grounded in a denial of who God is as Creator and who we are as creatures. Plato and Aristotle are without excuse for the idolatrous deities they promoted and for having suppressed the knowledge of God for millions over centuries.

Philosophy, as the study of general revelation, also points us to our need for redemption. The sin of unbelief cannot be corrected by more lectures and textbooks. After the fall, although general revelation remains clear, the sinful mind is darkened. “For all of this there was a thick mist shutting me off from the brightness of your face, my God” (2.8). For the explanation of how God will redeem sinners, general revelation points us to special revelation (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.1).

Conclusion: A Return to Christian Philosophy

This small footnote in our summer reading launched a discussion with my sons about the deep contrast between pagan philosophy and clear general revelation. That Chadwick thought Augustine, Paul, and Plotinus were teaching the same thing is not merely a mistake. It indicates a significant problem that has plagued Christian philosophy and the Christian academy when it attempts a synthesis with pagan philosophers who deny clear general revelation. Yet Augustine himself provides the solution. And that is what makes this footnote in Augustine’s Confessions both telling and ironic.

Dr Owen Anderson is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University. He is committed to restoring the American University by renewing its pursuit of truth, virtue, and the knowledge of God.

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.