Category: Politics

Be Like the Sons of Issachar Who Understood the Times

The Kingdom of God is among us and it is yet to come

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I recently finished a review of the of history of the blogging on this site: Looking Back at 13 Years of Navigating By Faith. One article stands high above the rest in the sheer number of people who have read/viewed it.

I wrote that article, Who Were the Sons of Issachar? And What Might They Mean for Us Today?, during Donald Trump’s second presidential campaign. Christian support for Donald Trump was characterized by a sense of urgency and high stakes. State COVID restrictions jeopardized religious liberty. BLM aroused woke, liberal, mobs in streets around the country. Christians sounded the alarm that people of faith would be canceled by the most anti-faith Democratic ticket in years if Trump didn’t win.

Prominent Christian leaders like Robert Jeffress and Franklin Graham argued that Trump was a “strongman” needed to protect the nation from “anarchy” and “socialism.” Jeffress excused Trump’s obvious flaws, saying that American Christians didn’t need a “Sunday School teacher” but a “fighter” who would protect Christian interests in a hostile culture. Lance Wallnau framed Trump as a modern King Cyrus—the Persian king used by God to protect His people and restore them to the promised land.

Support for Donald Trump was increasingly framed as a battle against “darkness” and “anti-Christian” forces. While many traditional evangelicals focused on policy, the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) was mobilized by prophecy, spiritual warfare, and the “Seven Mountain Mandate.” Dozens of self-identified prophets in this network insisted that Trump’s re-election was divinely mandated in a cosmic battle between good and evil controlled by a demonically influenced “deep state.” The current was strong, and a large number of Christians were swept along with it.

A conversation with my best friend from college, who I loved more than a brother, and who I trusted implicitly, left me in full spiritual crisis mode. He expressed his continued support of Trump on the basis of those prophetic claims predicting another presidential victory and the belief that God ordained Donald Trump for this time. My friend urged my to be like the sons of Issachar “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.” (1 Chronicles 12:32)

I have a healthy respect for God’s ability to speak through people in what we call prophecy. The Apostle Paul commands us not to despise prophecy, but to test everything, hold fast to what is good, and abstain from every evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:20-22) I resolved to give Donald Trump another look and to reconsider him.

I had written in 2020 about wolves in sheep’s clothing with Donald Trump expressly in mind. Jesus said we would know falsehood by its fruit, and the fruit I saw in Donald Trump belied the claims of God’s providential blessing.

That a president is not a pastor made some sense. God can use anyone, even a donkey, right? Maybe Trump is like the Persian King Cyrus who is divinely appointed to restore the Christian heritage of the United States….

A year earlier, in 2019, I reflected on those claims that Trump is like a King Cyrus, and I came to a different conclusion. Trump seemed to me more like a King Saul, the king God’s people wanted – the king they wanted because they did not trust God. They wanted a king like all the other nations, though the Prophet Samuel warned them against it. God gave them the king His people wanted, even though they were rejecting God to ask for a king:

“[W]hen they said, ‘Give us a king to lead us,’ this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. 7 And the Lord told him: ‘Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.‘”

1 Samuel 8:6-9

God gave them the king they wanted in the same way that God gives people over “to the sinful desires of their heats.” (Romans 1:24) The people were rejecting God as their king, so God gave them over to the king they wanted.

People of that day might have assumed that God was blessing them to give them the king they wanted, but that was not the case. Samuel warned them against it, but they insisted anyway.

King Saul was rebellious, insecure, self-absorbed, and psychotic. He failed to obey God’s commands. He became obsessed with his power and reputation among the people, and he became jealous of David.

Though Saul remained king, God had already rejected him and anointed David to succeed him. Saul tried to take David’s life multiple times in fits of jealous rage, and David escaped into the wilderness.

This is where the Sons of Issachar entered the picture. Though Saul was still king, they “understood the times.” They could see the proverbial writing on the wall. They knew that David was God’s man, and Saul’s reign was ending.

Many people have argued that Donald Trump is like the foreign king, Cyrus, who protected and funded the nation of Israel to return to the Promised Land. I have argued that Donald Trump is not like the foreign king, Cyrus, but like the Israelite King Saul. Donald Trump is the king that God’s people wanted.

Continue reading “Be Like the Sons of Issachar Who Understood the Times” →

When the Church Loses Its Prophetic Voice

Biblical Authority, Political Power, and the Temptations of Influence

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The failure of the German Protestant church to mount a decisive resistance to Nazism has long troubled western Christian conscience. Historians rightly warn against simplistic explanations, but one conclusion has proven difficult to escape: long before Hitler rose to power, the church’s theological confidence had already been weakened. When the state demanded ultimate loyalty, many pastors and congregations lacked the moral clarity and will to refuse.

The nineteenth-century Tübingen School of theology did not cause Nazism. Its scholars were not proto-fascists, nor did they anticipate racial ideology or totalitarian politics. Yet their historical-critical approach to Scripture unintentionally contributed to a Protestant culture in which the Bible increasingly functioned as an object of study rather than a source of commanding authority. When political myth replaced moral truth, the church was unprepared to stand against it because the church had long ago lost its biblical, moral footing.

History does not repeat itself mechanically. The present American situation is not Weimar Germany, and the MAGA movement is not Nazism. Still, history can illuminate how the happenings within the church influence how the church interacts with political culture. That raises a difficult but necessary question for American evangelicals today: what weaknesses in our own theology and habits of thought have made many of us susceptible to the distortions of political power?

The answer is not that evangelicalism has repeated the errors of liberal Protestantism. In many ways, we have made opposite mistakes. But the result—a diminished capacity for prophetic resistance—bears an unsettling resemblance.

Authority Dissolved: The Tübingen Lesson

The Tübingen School, led by Ferdinand Christian Baur in the mid-nineteenth century, treated Scripture primarily as a historical artifact shaped by competing early Christian communities. Biblical texts were analyzed as records of theological conflict rather than as a unified witness to divine revelation. The command and authority of Scripture was diminished, and the sacred became profane. The trajectory of the academy spilled into and watered down the vitality of Christian impact in Protestant Germany.

Clergy trained in historical criticism often hesitated to proclaim Scripture normatively. The Bible remained important, but its authority was qualified, softened, and translated into general ethical ideals compatible with modern culture. Christianity became morally earnest but theologically cautious and politically unimportant.

By the early twentieth century, much of German Protestantism lacked the confidence to say an unambiguous “No” to the state. The problem was not simply fear or cowardice. It was uncertainty—whether God had spoken definitively enough to authorize resistance when power spoke with confidence and force.

Karl Barth saw this clearly. In 1933, as the German church accommodated itself to the Nazi regime, Barth insisted that the church exists only under the authority of God’s self-revelation. Where that authority is weakened, the church becomes vulnerable to captivity by the state.

The lesson is sobering: when Scripture no longer stands above culture, culture will soon stand above the church. Today we can say of Nazi Germany and the church alike, “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.” (Isaiah 40:8) But, the impact was devastating on Germany, Jews, Europe, and the world at that time, and its effects rumble into the present time.

I do not want to suggest that we can equate Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and 1940’s to the United States of America in the 2010’s and 2020’s. Still, there are parallels between the exercise of State power in the vacuum left by weakened theology that bear some attention.

Continue reading “When the Church Loses Its Prophetic Voice” →

The Mother Mirror: How Susie Wiles Became Donald Trump’s Surrogate Matriarch

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by Daniel Wolfe, J.D., Ph.D.

(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any employer, organization, or institution with which the author is affiliated. )

“Trust in God and be true to yourself.” — Donald Trump (attributed to his mother)


In a career defined by glitz, volatility, and domination, Donald Trump has rarely ceded power or emotional intimacy to anyone—especially not to women. And yet, two women stand apart from the parade of advisers, media figures, and family members who have passed through his orbit: Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, his late mother; and Susie Wiles, his current White House Chief of Staff and perhaps the most enduring political influence in his life.

From a psychodynamic standpoint, their connection is more than incidental. Wiles’s quiet dominance, maternal distance, and unflappable loyalty appear to mirror key psychological traits that Trump associated with his mother—a woman he revered, idealized, and never fully reached. As Trump now enters what may be the final chapter of his public life, Wiles is not merely a staffer. She is, in many respects, a surrogate matriarch—a stabilizing figure who satisfies his need for emotional containment, maternal loyalty, and internal order.

The Queen from Tong: Mary Anne MacLeod Trump’s Silent Influence

Born in 1912 in the Village of Tong on Scotland’s windswept Isle of Lewis, Mary Anne MacLeod was the tenth of ten children in a Gaelic-speaking, deeply Presbyterian household. The family home had no indoor plumbing, and her childhood was shaped by poverty, discipline, and religious rigor. At 18, she boarded the SS Transylvania and sailed to New York City, alone, with $50 to her name and a stated intention to become a domestic servant.

What followed was a dramatic social ascent. Mary Anne met Fred Trump, a rising real estate developer, at a party. They married in 1936 and had five children. Though she never shed her Scottish accent, she fully embraced American prosperity and Protestant respectability. She became active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, volunteered in hospitals, and dressed with regal precision.

As reported by journalist Mary Pilon in The New Yorker, friends and family members remembered Mary Anne MacLeod Trump as “tight-lipped,” “polished,” “proper,” “unassuming,” “friendly,” and “pleasant”—a reserved woman of dignity and discipline, but not demonstratively affectionate. Trump himself noted her deep reverence for public ceremony, stating, “Her loyalty to Scotland was incredible. She respected and loved the Queen.” He also credited her with influencing his “sense of showmanship.” (Pilon, 2016).

In her memoir Too Much and Never Enough, Mary Trump—herself a clinical psychologist—describes how her grandmother’s illness and retreat from family caregiving duties created emotional voids. Mary and her siblings took on caretaking roles in her absence, leading to feelings of abandonment and shaping Donald Trump’s later emotional defenses. She further details how Fred Trump Sr.’s emotional detachment and controlling behavior created insecurity in the family and contributed to Donald Trump’s narcissistic tendencies.

And yet Donald idolized his mother. “Part of her disinterest was, I believe, interpreted by Donald as exclusivity,” Mary Trump writes. “She was mysterious. The less she said, the more he needed to earn her attention.” From a psychodynamic perspective, this creates a powerful early template: a mother who is emotionally withheld but idealized—instilling in the child a lifelong yearning to gain her approval, or to replicate her presence through proxies.

In object relations theory, such a mother becomes an internalized object—a kind of psychic icon. She represents containment, elegance, structure—but also loss and emotional distance. The boy grows into a man who seeks out women who resemble her not in warmth, but in silence, dignity, and control.

The Strategist in the Shadows: Who Is Susie Wiles?

Susie Wiles is no stranger to male power. The daughter of legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall, she grew up surrounded by high-stakes masculinity. But unlike many women in Trump’s orbit—Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, Kayleigh McEnany, Karoline Leavitt—Wiles is not a media figure. She is a tactician. Her professional life has been spent in the background, managing Republican campaigns with ruthless efficiency, from Jack Kemp to Rick Scott to Ron DeSantis—and finally to Donald Trump.

She first joined the Trump campaign in 2016 to oversee Florida, and her work was credited as critical to his win. She returned in 2020 and again in 2024. In the chaos of Trump’s third presidential campaign, Wiles outlasted and outmaneuvered more combative or flamboyant aides. By 2025, she was named Chief of Staff—the first woman to ever hold the role under Trump. And perhaps the only one who truly commands his respect.

What makes Susie Wiles unique is not charisma or ideological purity but emotional restraint. She doesn’t grovel. She doesn’t scold. She doesn’t leak to the press. According to Politico Magazine and West Wing Playbook, Wiles is a discreet, disciplined strategist. She rarely seeks publicity and is consistently portrayed as a “steady hand” who effectively manages Trump’s impulses and internal chaos.

From a psychological standpoint, this demeanor taps directly into the mother archetype that Trump internalized: a woman who offers structure without intrusion, loyalty without dependence. She doesn’t try to be his friend or surrogate daughter. She is, psychologically, his mother in political form: elegant, efficient, and emotionally self-contained.

Recent reporting in Vanity Fair highlights the candid nature of Wiles’s own reflections on President Trump and members of his Cabinet, revealing an unusually frank assessment of internal dynamics, including comments on Trump’s personality and other senior officials—remarks that drew swift criticism from within the administration as being misrepresented or taken out of context. Vanity Fair journalist Chris Whipple, who conducted months of on-the-record interviews with Wiles, subsequently defended the accuracy of his piece, noting that all conversations were recorded and verified.

The Vanity Fair profile also underscores Wiles’s complex role: though she offered unusually candid characterizations of Trump and others in his orbit—comments that were later disputed as being selectively framed—she remained publicly loyal, reiterating her defense of Trump’s leadership and the administration’s accomplishments. This juxtaposition further illustrates the delicate psychological balance Wiles maintains: revealing enough about internal pressures to demonstrate credibility, yet steadfast in her alignment with Trump’s public persona.

The Vanity Fair interviews portray Wiles as central to both decision-making and narrative control inside the West Wing, a portrayal that has attracted debate not only about the content of her remarks but also about the media framing of her role—revealing once again how Wiles both shapes and buffers Trump’s inner circle.

A Psychodynamic Reading: Maternal Transference in Power Relationships

In classical Freudian terms, Wiles may represent a maternal transference object—a figure onto whom Trump projects unresolved feelings and unmet needs from childhood. Where Mary Anne withheld affection, Wiles withholds emotion. Where Mary Anne offered structured approval, Wiles offers structured control. And unlike Trump’s past advisers, Wiles never threatens his fragile ego. She doesn’t seek glory. She simply stays—a feat few others have achieved.


Psychological profiles consistently depict Donald Trump as a grandiose, high-energy, low-agreeableness figure—a volatile combination described by Dr. Dan McAdams as “sky-high extraversion … rock-bottom agreeableness … and grandiose narcissism” (McAdams, 2016). Indirect diagnostic work (Immelman & Griebie, 2020) places him squarely in narcissistic, dominant, and impulsive personality patterns. Mental health experts in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump warn of malignant narcissism—a severe form characterized by interpersonal cruelty and paranoia (Lee, 2019). Clinicians like Craig Malkin and theorists such as Kohut and Bosson also point to the deeper emotional void underlying Trump’s persona—one that maternal transference figures may uniquely address. Therapists such as Wendy Behary similarly argue for a behavioral-based understanding of his narcissistic structure.

Nancy McWilliams (2011) describes narcissistic personality organization as marked by internal fragility, frequent use of idealization and devaluation, and a reliance on external validation. She explains that analysts working with this type often become unconscious “containers” for projected emotions, experiencing emotional obliteration, boredom, or invisibility.

As interpreted from McWilliams, transference figures often exert their power not through what they do, but through how they resonate. They become stand-ins for an early internal object—particularly in individuals who, like Trump, display signs of narcissistic personality structure: grandiosity, need for adulation, fear of shame, and an unconscious desire for omnipotent control.

What narcissistic individuals crave, McWilliams notes, is not just admiration—but a “containing other”: someone who does not collapse in the face of their outbursts, and who does not betray them by seeking autonomy. Wiles plays that role impeccably. She withstands Trump’s rage, channels it, and survives it. She offers maternal containment, not romantic or filial rivalry. That is what keeps her in his orbit.

Other advisers have challenged Trump (John Kelly), manipulated him (Steve Bannon), or infantilized him (Rudy Giuliani). Wiles does none of that. Instead, she mirrors back the qualities Trump yearned to see in his mother: discretion, loyalty, restraint, and elegance.

The Politics of Maternal Containment

This is not just a psychological curiosity. It is a political reality. Wiles has arguably had more sustained influence over Trump than any adviser since the beginning of his political career. She shaped the tone of his 2024 campaign—more disciplined, less erratic. She consolidated staffing, minimized legal exposure, and even managed access to the President.

Unlike previous chiefs of staff, Wiles does not appear to negotiate with Trump’s narcissism. She regulates it. That regulation—the ability to soothe without submitting—represents a maternal function in psychodynamic theory. And in Wiles, Trump may have finally found the mother he idealized but never emotionally possessed.

It also explains why he hasn’t turned on her. Trump, infamous for discarding aides with theatrical vengeance, has remained steadfastly loyal to Wiles. Even when others within his inner circle reportedly questioned her influence, he resisted. Just as a child resists separating from a “good enough” mother (in Winnicottian terms), Trump clings to Wiles not just as a strategist, but as a psychic anchor. In effect, Wiles might stabilize Trump not by commanding him, but by quietly containing him, as a good-enough mother does for an emotionally vulnerable child.

A Closing Reflection: The Boy and the Queen

As Donald Trump enters the final act of his storied and polarizing career, it is Susie Wiles—not his children, not his ideological acolytes—who quietly holds the reins. She does so not by reflecting Trump’s aggression, but by embodying his mother’s mystery: a woman whose silence commands, whose order contains, whose loyalty never fully soothes the ache it addresses.

In Wiles, Trump may see a second chance to earn the approval he never quite captured from Mary Anne. And in his loyalty to her, one glimpses the enduring truth of psychodynamic theory: that the past is never past. It is alive, enacted, and dressed in new clothes—this time, in a red blazer, seated quietly in the West Wing, holding the world’s most unmanageable man in the palm of her maternal hand.

References:

A Review of Principalities Powers and Allegiances: Submission in Enemy Territory

Untangling submission to authority and allegiance to God

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A friend posted an glowing endorsement of the book, Principalities Powers and Allegiances, by Matt Mouzakis & Will Ryan, that intrigues me because the subject is a topic I have spent some time considering and writing about. The book is an exegesis of biblical passages that have posed challenges to modern Christians like myself: Romans 13:1-7 and 1 Peter 2:11-17.

These passages instruct Christians to submit to earthly authorities “for the Lord’s sake” (1 Peter 2:13). Mouzakis and Ryan provide background and Scriptural insight that sheds some fresh light on these passages. It is not new light. In fact, it is ancient light that was likely understood by the original readers of those words, but which has been lost in the centuries since that time.

I do not have the book, but I was curious because of my own interest in the tension between faithful adherence to the Gospel and submission to governing authorities, so I asked Google Gemini for a summary of the book. More specifically, I asked for a summary of the exegesis of Romans 13:1-7 for comparison to my own exegesis. (How Should the Church Act Regarding Authority? and more recently Submitting to Authority For the Lord’s Sake Like Peter, Paul, and Jesus Did)

The exegesis of Romans 13:1-7 offered by Mouzakis and Ryan is a departure from modern reading that views government as God’s benevolent institution for all time. They argue that the passage must be read through the lens of the Deuteronomy 32 worldview and the larger narrative of sin and God’s judgment in the book of Romans.

The Deuteronomy 32 worldview, in a nutshell, is that Yahweh, is the sole supreme Deity, and that the gods of the other nations are lesser, created spiritual beings (“sons of God” or elohim). It pulls from the judgment following the Tower of Babel that included the scattering of the people:

“When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
    when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
    according to the number of the sons of God.”

(Deut. 32:8)(ESV)

The “sons of God” are sometimes translated “sons of Israel”, but Israel was not yet a nation at that time. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (whose name was changed to Israel) from which God formed His people were not yet born. God called Abraham out from among the nations and formed a people of God, the nation of Israel, separate and apart from the nations. Thus, Jews identified only two sets of people: the Jews and the Gentiles.

The Deuteronomy 32 worldview notes that the “sons of God” (the elohim) rebelled. They demanded the worship that belonged only to Yahweh, and they lead the nations into idolatry and violence. They are the principalities and powers that Paul speaks of who rule the “world system.” Jesus defeated those principalities and powers by his life, death, and resurrection (Colossians 2:15), broke down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:14), and established his Church for the purpose of reclaiming the nations for the Kingdom of God.

Romans 13 needs to be read in the context of the sweep and arc of the story of God and what He is doing in space and time. Here are the key points of their specific interpretation of Romans 13:

1. The Context:

From Handing Over to Submission

The authors connect Romans 13 directly to Romans 1:21-23, where Paul describes God “handing over” (paradidomi) humanity to the consequences of their idolatry. In the Deuteronomy 32 worldview, this “handing over” included disinheriting the nations and appointing elohim (spiritual beings) to govern them.

The Problematic Authorities:

By the time of the New Testament, these spiritual beings—the principalities and powers—had fallen, becoming demonic forces that oppose God. When humanity rejects God, they are handed over to the “world” and to these spiritual powers, which are associated with the consequences of “sin and death.”

The Assertion:

The Roman government (specifically the Empire under Nero in the 1st Century) is viewed as aligned with these demonic forces. Paul’s message is that because Christians serve KING JESUS, they are no longer slaves to these demonic forces, even while living under their political rule.

2. The Nature of “The Authorities”

The Greek word used for “authorities” in Romans 13:1 is exousiai, which refers both to human governing authorities and spiritual powers (seen in Ephesians 6:12). Mouzakis and Ryan contend that Paul is deliberately using this ambiguous term to encompass the reality that earthly governments are influenced by unseen spiritual powers.

When Paul says the authorities are “instituted by God,” he does not mean God approves or blesses their actions. Rather, God established them as the temporary framework of consequences and judgment that the world is subjected to—a framework that God ultimately controls in his sovereignly.

3. The Ruler as “God’s Servant”

The authors evaluate the terms used for the governing official: leitourgos (minister/servant, v. 6) and diakonos (servant/minister, v. 4).

A Tool of Wrath:

The ruler is called both “God’s servant for good” and an “avenger who carries out God’s wrath” (v.4)(ESV). This wrath is seen not necessarily as God’s positive blessing on good governance, but as the execution of the consequences already outlined in Romans 1—the judgment of being “handed over” to a system that operates by the sword. the “good” is the carrying out of God’s purposes. The government’s function is to maintain basic civic order and punish wrongdoers, which is a necessary restraint in a fallen world, but the government itself is not necessarily acting righteously.

Consistent with this, we can find multiple times in Scripture where unjust nations are identified as servants of God. Isaiah identifies Assyria as the “the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath!” even as Isaiah pronounces, Woe to the Assyrian!” (Is. 10:5-6) Jeremiah called the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, God’s servant. (Jer.25:9 & 27:6) to bring God’s judgment.

The Non-Endorsement:

The term leitourgos neutral. It refers to public servants, generally. It means a tool or agent of God, like Assyria and Babylon were to accomplish God’s purposes in exiling his people. It is not an endorsement of them as God’s representative.

4. Allegiance vs. Submission

The most crucial distinction is between submission and allegiance:

Allegiance is to Christ:

The Christian’s primary and ultimate loyalty is to Jesus and the Kingdom of God. Our allegiance (our citizenship in the kingdom of God) made the Christian community a rival kingdom to the Roman Empire. That is why Christians were viewed with suspicion and called “atheists” (because they didn’t bow to Caesar and they didn’t worship the Roman pantheon of gods). Jesus was crucified, in part, because he was perceived to claim to be the King of the Jews, though his kingdom is not of this world.

Submission is Tactical:

The command to “be subject” (hypotassō) is a call for voluntary, orderly yielding to maintain peace, prevent anarchy, and avoid creating unnecessary offense that would hinder the spread of the Gospel. Peter says to submit “for the Lord’s sake”, so that the Gospel message is not hindered. It is an act of discipleship lived out in enemy territory.

Taxes and Honor:

Paul’s only specific instruction about submitting to the governing authorities is to “pay to all what is owed them” (v.7), including taxes. He echoed Jesus in this who told us to pay unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to his disciples to pay the Temple tax. It is a call to fulfill one’s basic civic duty (giving to Caesar what bears Caesar’s image). However, the ultimate message is a remez (a subtle link or hint) to Jesus’s teaching to give yourself wholly to God because you bear His image.

In summary, for Mouzakis and Ryan, Romans 13 is not a command for blind obedience to the state, but a strategic directive for Kingdom citizens to live non-violently and orderly in a world ruled by lesser, fallen powers, while reserving ultimate worship and allegiance for King Jesus.

If you are interested in what the authors have to say about the book, this video features Dr. Matt Mouzakis discussing the process of writing the book and exploring its underlying theological themes in a conversation about writing worship music. Write Biblically Accurate Songs For The Church with Dr. Matt Mouzakis

If you want to read what I have written about the tension between submission to authority and allegiance to God, see How Should the Church Act Regarding Authority? and more recently Submitting to Authority For the Lord’s Sake Like Peter, Paul, and Jesus Did.

Did AI do a good job summarizing the book? I have added to the AI summary I obtained. Did “we” do a good job? If you have read the book, please let me know.

If this helped you, made you curious, or even if you disagree, please feel free to start a conversation in the comments.

Why I Am Speaking Out Now

Why I have not spoken out like this before

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People ask me why I didn’t speak out negatively against the Biden Administration. It’s true, I didn’t speak out (as much) against the Biden administration as I do now against the Trump administration.

To be clear, I did not vote for Joe Biden. I also did not vote for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I am a lifelong conservative and I have voted Republican most of the time throughout most of my life, with few exceptions, mostly on a local level.

I would be classified as a compassionate conservative. On some scales, I come out as a “classic liberal.” I believe in the freedom of speech, individual rights, and basic constitutional protections for all people, but I am not a Democrat, and I never have been.

As a conservative, and as a human being, I have some of the same concerns that Democrats do. We just approach things differently. For the most part, I am not confident in large government. I have seen too much bureaucracy, waste, and abuse in state governments and large municipalities to have much confidence in large government.

At the same time, I recognize weaknesses in my conservative position that have become accentuated over the years. For instance, large business is not any better than large government, and could be even worse.

A problem for the political system as a whole is the amount of money that pours into the political process. It has grown exponentially over my lifetime. Money begets greed, self-interest, and corruption in ways that are not healthy for our politics.

The amount of money accessible to politicians has a strong negative effect on our political system. If you look at the data of the wealth of politicians when they begin as “public servants” and retire, the amount of wealth that politicians accumulate is staggering and indicative of a major problem in American politics. I believe that the love of money is the root of all evil, as the Bible says, and the amount of money in the political system is a corrupting influence.

But , I digress. None of that explains why I have spoken out more over the last year against the Trump administration than I did against the Biden administration. I thought the Biden administration was inept. It seemed clear that Biden was being propped up and pushed forward, but he was not controlling what was going on. The disparate interest groups in the Biden administration and the Democratic Party as a whole that push extreme agendas that much of the country is uncomfortable with were problematic. But political processes still operated. There was a strong Republican Party, albeit with its own issues.

I did speak out about the fact that Congress has become a lame duck branch of government. Over many years, beginning at least with the Clinton administration going forward, presidents have wielded more and more executive power, issuing executive orders to make sweeping changes that were never intended to be part of the power of the executive branch.

I believe one reason for that is that Congress is often unable to reach a consensus that will pass both houses of Congress. We are more polarized now than we were 50 years ago. There is no middle ground. Politicians in the middle get taken out by their own party. So we have no consensus-building block that is essential to allow Congress to adopt laws and overhaul laws like our immigration law when needed. Therefore, presidents rule by the stroke of a pen with an executive order, and that has become the norm. I have been talking about that for many years.

What we are seeing now is the fallout of those many years of allowing Congress to languish in passivity while we became accustomed to presidents creating law with the stroke of a pen. Executive orders were never intended to be the way our system operates, but it is the present reality. The Trump administration is the natural result of that failure.

Donald Trump is taking the momentum of decades of American political processes and stretching them to their inevitable conclusions, which is a king-like authority in the executive branch, where the president can do just about whatever the president wants to do with impunity, including ignoring legal precedent and law and becoming a law unto himself.

Speaking of legal precedent, our Supreme Court process, our process for appointing Supreme Court justices and lower court justices has become more and more political over the years. Things took a turn for the worse with the Bork confirmation hearings, which was an absolute political circus. I have been speaking out against that for years, because it undermines the integrity of the judicial branch of government. It was never meant to be hyper-politicized. Justices were meant to be appointed because of their judicial reputation and acumen. Judges were not meant to be political hacks or political puppets. They were meant to be truly independent, the best and the brightest.

Of course, human nature being what it is, conservative presidents would tend to appoint conservative justices, and liberal presidents would tend to appoint liberal justices. But the history of American jurisprudence shows that merit, judicial acumen, and proven judicial ability were at the top of the list of qualifications. That is no longer the case. Presidents and parties make no bones about who they want as their judicial candidates. They want people who are going to decide cases according to the party line, and that is coming home to roost now also.

Donald Trump thinks that he can tell justices how to rule and how to apply the law, or, in some cases, how to ignore the law. Donald Trump just fired hundreds of immigration judges so that he can replace them with immigration judges who will rule exactly as he wants them to.

That is not how the executive branch and judicial branch should be interacting with each other. The judicial branch is specifically meant to be a foil to the executive branch. The judicial branch is meant to stand independently so that it can be a check and balance on the other branches of government.

What we are seeing today is the complete erosion of this check and balance system that was established in our Constitution. It is completely breaking down and devolving into supreme authority in the executive branch.

I don’t blame Donald Trump for the erosion of the check and balance system in our government. It’s been happening for a long time.

I do blame him for being an opportunistic extremist. He is an opportunist who sees the reality, and he has no qualms about exploiting and taking advantage of it. He is a bad actor, in my opinion, who is driving a proverbial truck through a gaping hole in our system.

When I speak out, I am not just speaking out against the Trump administration. I am speaking out as a warning signal about where we are in the history of our country.

We are at a tipping point. Our system is caving in and collapsing. I am afraid it’s already too late, and part of the problem is that we are so focused on our partisan politics, so willing to excuse and defend our own party and our own party line that we cannot see the collapse of our system of government as it is happening in front of our eyes. 

Perhaps, more personally, I have been a lifelong conservative because I thought the Republican Party would protect the rule of law and the integrity of the Constitution. I thought the Republicans would conserve the basic freedoms we have and hold us back from a progressive erosion of the foundational components of Constitution and law.

What alarms me most about the Trump Administration is that he has taken it the other direction and is knocking down whole walls and structural elements of our Constitution to impose his will on the country. He is intentionally pushing every boundary in the direction of expansive executive power, and the Republican party won’t stand up to him.

The Trump Administration is running rough shod over due process protections, ignoring the First Amendment, and actively attempting to reinterpret and rewrite the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, among other things. These are staple protections of our freedom. Trump is undoing fundamental protections at breakneck speed and overwhelming the court system, and I see an immediate threat to the seams of our democracy that are ready to burst and break open. These actions betray every conservative nerve in my body, and that is why I am speaking out now.

Where are the conservative stalwarts standing up to him? Most conservatives are cheering or at least looking the other way as Trump and his motely crew of hacks dismantle the fabric of our law.

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So, stepping down from my soapbox, let me know where I am coming unhinged. Give me some hope. Disagree me if you see it differently. I am not unable to listen to contrary voices, and (in fact) need some fresh perspective at times to balance me out. Thank you ahead of time.