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Education
January 29, 2025
Not everyone is built to be a leader. Not everyone can bear both the weight of privilege and the pressure to wield it for the good of others. Many desire a crown but lack the competence to wield both the sword and the shovel. They long for victory without the battle, for the city without the grind. Everyone wants to be a leader, but not everyone is capable. Leadership is more than lofty titles and polished appearances—it demands grit, sacrifice, and the substance to shape a world worth following.
Leadership development, now an industrial-scale enterprise, churns out mindless platitudes by the billion, each volume jostling for a slice of a market glutted with “wisdom.” And yet, amid this deluge of instruction, the cultures these same leaders dwell in are synonymous with cowardice, complacency, complicity, and corruption. Ironically, despite their extensive libraries, most leaders lack both the vision to address the challenges before them and the courage to confront the ones that linger beneath the surface.
Much of this leadership literature lacks true substance, often churning out mindless conformists who, at best, become frontline activists for an insidious status quo. These faux leaders are exceptional, not because their ethos is bold or defiant against an entrenched establishment, but because they master the art of pandering to a restless crowd—one hungry for motivation, empathy, and a sense of belonging.
Though these figures can stir emotions and move audiences, they are ultimately subjects of a world order that values managers over true leaders, revolutionaries over reformers, and empaths over moral disruptors. They maintain the façade of leadership but remain shackled to a system designed to reward compliance, not conviction nor virtue. They inspire feelings, not principles. They provide sedation, not solutions. Their calling card is winsomeness—measured not by merit but by how many likes, shares, and retweets their polished personas command. And where courage is needed most, they cower beneath the weight of a restless world they are too timid—or too complicit—to confront.
The last four years have been an elaborate parade of smoke and mirrors—a desperate attempt to obscure failed leadership or, more accurately, its glaring absence. While this bitter truth has not escaped notice, its destructive consequences have become alarmingly clear in the light of President Trump’s first week back in office. The contrast is a reckoning: we had grown disturbingly accustomed to a world of dysfunction, coddling an increasingly stifling bureaucracy that masqueraded as governance. Cowardice and incompetence were no longer shunned but normalized, baptized into a secular liturgy of excuses and paralysis.
We allowed ourselves to make peace with mediocrity, whispering half-hearted hopes that the thick fog of absurdity might thin slightly instead of dissipating entirely. Emotionally, we were held hostage by perpetual victims: the unhinged heralding every inconvenience as systemic oppression and the embittered draped in the hollow rhetoric of suffrage and entitlement. Paralyzed in our minds and neutered in our wills, we were free to grumble but far too timid to act. Fear of unpopularity—indeed, of loss itself—rendered us helpless. And in a cruel twist of irony, we trusted the very systems that had consistently betrayed us, seeking salvation in structures designed to ensure a stalemate.
Then came Trump—brash, bold, and unburdened by bureaucratic niceties. In mere hours, the President exemplified what leadership looks like in action. Within his first week, his administration’s achievements stood as a staggering indictment of what passes for ambition in other capitals. Decades of globalist tyranny were dispatched with the flick of a pen. Climate alarmism—rendered impotent by facts—was axed with the fervor of one too weary for half-measures. Abortion, illegal immigration, DEI policies, and bloated bureaucracies found themselves cornered by a man too focused on getting the job done.
Trump’s return is not just a statement; it is a demand for accountability, courage, and the unapologetic pursuit of what is right over what is popular. The question now is whether the people, shocked into awareness, will finally abandon their fatalism—or let the smoke of false progress envelop them once more.
Justice and economics are not dry policies or faceless institutions but deeply moral matters.
Incompetence thrives beneath the stifling cloak of bureaucracy, a smothering blanket designed to obscure ineptitude and mask corruption. For the bureaucrat, the process is both the path and the prize—a means of preserving control while faking the virtues of responsibility and prudence. Bureaucracy loves its facade of complexity. It revels in endless rules and regulations, all under the guise of safety and restraint. But behind this labyrinth lies a deeper agenda: the erosion of liberty and the stifling of human flourishing.
Bureaucrats are risk-averse and allergic to disruption, prizing stagnation over progress. They amplify their own relevance by multiplying layers of rules, rendering decision-making an insufferable theatre of paralysis. While they speak of safeguarding the public, their policies treat those they serve as mere subjects to be taxed, subdued, and stripped of independence. Bureaucracy does not foster flourishing; it creates wards of the state. Like a condescending parent, it infantilizes the public, stripping away their agency while assuring them it’s all for their own good. Worse still, bureaucracy feeds on cowardice. It is the default setting of a world besotted with statism and globalism, a towering edifice of inefficiency masquerading as order. The bureaucrat’s work is a sordid mixture of secrecy, manipulative rhetoric, and aggressive propaganda. Its tools are emotional sabotage and relentless redefinition, all aimed at stifling dissent and normalizing the tyranny of inaction. In such a system, political correctness becomes the enforced lingua franca, a soul-numbing creed that prizes appearances above substance and niceties above truth.
Political correctness is no mere quirk of modern governance; it is an ideological weapon, a dehumanizing flattery that rings loud but hollow. It poisons the well of integrity, corrodes true competence, and undermines genuine care. Beneath its saccharine surface lies a dystopian calculus that breeds mistrust, anxiety, apathy, and death. Bureaucracy thrives on a veneer of order that administers chaos, bringing winter to the world like the chilling curse of Jadis herself.
Yet, while such machinations may rattle nations and cloud the hearts of men, they pose no threat to the sovereignty of the King. Even the dark schemes of the wicked are held within His hand, bent to His ultimate purposes. God raises up rulers—even godless ones—to serve His ends, while His people are called to ready their arms in the spiritual warfare that underlies the visible skirmishes of politics and governance.
For those with eyes to see, justice and economics are not dry policies or faceless institutions but deeply moral matters. The wheels of tyranny turn only so long as the righteous fail to act, shirk responsibility, and surrender to the siren song of security. Bureaucrats breed compliance, but Christians are to kindle rebellion against their darkness, providing the firepower that will bring a winter thaw and usher in the inevitable victory of truth.
Make no mistake: it is the church that has discipled the nations into this chaos—not by bold proclamations of truth, but through its silence, cowardice, complicity, and apathy.
We created our own labyrinths of bureaucracy, extinguishing our ability to offend, confront, and challenge. We abandoned the hard virtues of action for the hollow comfort of saying the “right” things, all while doing little. We embraced the doctrine of niceness, winsomeness, and passivity, dressing them up as wisdom and holiness. In doing so, we forfeited our strength and traded it for red tape and impotent respectability.
Christians, do we not carry an ethos and pathos that far surpass the hollow slogans of godless conservatives? Do we not possess an undying heritage that forged the very foundations of the developed world? Is it not our tradition that has spread freedom and prosperity “as far as the curse is found”? Are we not the stewards of the highest political, economic, and social thought—a framework unparalleled in its wisdom and power? And do we not fight and build under the banner of the King of kings, whose dominion extends over the entire cosmos?
I fear we are still waiting—waiting for permission to authoritatively assert the Christian religion on a world drowning in chaos. We cling to the fantasy that our mediocrity, cushioned by “good intentions,” is enough to change the world. We have mastered thought but left our backbone, teeth, and, virtues of masculine resolve—at the door.
We are entranced by the lie that passivity, effeminacy, and politeness will somehow win the day. We hold ourselves above the fierce religion of Moses the lawgiver, Samson the strong, David the warrior, or Elijah the fire-wielder—mistaking softness for civility and cowardice for wisdom.
While our ethos remains undefeated, we are starved for bold, convicted, and wise leaders who know how to fight and build. Leaders of ambition, grit, and vision. Leaders with an unshakable work ethic who are not only lambs but lions—unafraid of persecution, slander, indictment, or the cost of standing firm.
Where are the leaders ready to wield the axe of Saint Boniface and strike at the immorality rotting our culture? Leaders with guns loaded, gavels swinging, borders high and strong, wives fruitful, children free, churches culturally potent, communities thriving, and economies flourishing?
This is the task before us: to raise such leaders. While we thank God for raising up President Trump and his administration to strike decisive blows against tyranny, we must avoid overdependence. The reconstruction of this great nation is not the work of any one man. Christians built it, and only Christians hold the tools necessary to rebuild, preserve, and make it greater than ever before.
Reformation is not merely a possibility where reformers dwell; it is inevitable.
At New Saint Andrews College, when we speak of cultivating leaders who will shape culture, we are not aiming for mediocrity. Our ambitions are nothing less than world-conquering. We aspire to exercise dominion over every sphere of life for the glory of Christ the King. The students who walk through our halls are expected to emerge as cultural saboteurs to the godless and a living nightmare to the purveyors of evil.
We anticipate graduates who will draw the right kind of trouble—men and women willing to endure suffering and press through pain in order to win. They will be the ones shaping political policy, establishing fruitful economies, and founding culture-shaping institutions. It isn’t enough that our alumni wear the polished respectability that a classical education often affords; we demand more. We insist on a grit, firmness, and competence that transcends academic brilliance, enabling them to engage directly and decisively in cultural warfare.
We don’t aspire to graduate affluent bureaucrats; we are shaping true leaders. Leaders who understand that cultural transformation is neither polite nor clean. Not every institution is like ours, nor can they be. Ours wields the serrated edge of reformation to cut through the decay, shaping the world with precision and purpose.
This ethos—battle-tested and proven—demands boldness, tenacity, and unflinching resolve from leaders. Reformation is not merely a possibility where reformers dwell; it is inevitable.
