Culture and the Necessity of Christian Law

The Spectacle of Politicized Envy

In a world drowning in the cesspool of politicized envy, the virtues of distinction, excellence, and merit are perceived as threats. The new world order seeks to eliminate the very notion of superiority, precisely because its aspiration is to neutralize disparity and erect an androgynous society. Consider, for example, the spectacle of socialism—a system in which the poor are never elevated, and the wealthy are deliberately weakened. In such a system, the norm becomes the bland uniformity of impoverishment, administered by actors of so-called “justice” untethered from morality, who envy and destroy everything good within their reach. Make no mistake: socialism is fundamentally the politicization of envy toward wealth.

Another example is feminism—a system in which men are neutered, and women defeminized toward a sexually androgynous polis. In this theatre, the excellences of beauty and fertility are defaced and discarded in favor of embitterment, minimalism, and voluntary barrenness. Consequently, one of feminism’s most severe byproducts is the erosion of patriotism. Few forces assault patriotism more effectively than the death of beauty.

As women abandon their highest glory—the calling to nurture and cause everyone and everything around them to flourish—womanhood itself becomes a relativized notion, worn like an ornament. As women seek to look, sound, and act more masculine, the civilizational fabric begins to fray: masculine virtues—to protect, provide, and lead—are diminished, and feminine virtues—the graceful work of nurturing and beautifying—are discarded. Feminism has dealt a blow to America’s national security—an insidious insurrection that has yet to prompt a serious hearing. Feminism is fundamentally the politicization of envy toward masculine virtue.

A third example is globalism—a system in which nationhood is diluted and disregarded in favor of a world order that idolizes androgyny through weakened loyalties, erased borders, and socialized economies. Globalism shames prosperity and seeks to redistribute the wealth of the West to the third world. Globalism is fundamentally the politicization of envy toward sovereign nationhood.

What is striking about politicized envy is this: it never acquires what it claims to covet. When the poor envy wealth, they do not become prosperous; they merely burn the prosperous. When embittered women envy masculinity, they do not become men; they eradicate what is noble in men. When globalist elites envy sovereign nations, they do not establish a well-functioning world government; they demolish the covenantal essence of boundaries, borders, and laws.

This is the world we now inhabit—rife with envy and determined to construct an egalitarian order. In such a world, to assert that one thing is superior to another is treated not as an argument to be debated, but as an offense to be neutralized.

Growing Up Between Different Cultures

As a young boy, I grew up with the ability to compare and contrast cultures because I effectively lived within multiple cultural contexts. My upbringing did not permit me the comfort of assuming ordinary cultural categories for myself.

I received a Western upbringing, having been raised in a South African context. That inheritance—combined with significant exposure to the developing world and a theological and philosophical education of substance—has made for an interesting life, to say the least.

This layered exposure compelled me to think deeply about what differentiates one context from another. I began to ask questions. Why is it that in one society, homes are built with an evident sense of beauty and permanence, while in another, they are bland, temporary, and questionably functional? Why is it that in some places traffic ordinances are treated with seriousness, while in others road signs are regarded as little more than suggestions that are often ignored? What accounts for such differences?

In pursuing these questions, one conclusion became unavoidable: cultures are not equal.

The idea that culture is not neutral—that some cultures are, in fact, superior to others—offends the polite sensibilities of those burdened by guilt, shame, or bitterness. Yet the superiority or inferiority of particular cultural expressions is a reality that must be acknowledged if liberty and prosperity are to endure within a civilization.

This raises an important question: Why has the notion of cultural neutrality become such a dominant assumption?

The Myth of Cultural Neutrality

The attempt to impose the idea of neutrality is a strategy employed by secularists. The goal is not to establish a genuinely neutral arena in which disparate cosmologies peacefully coexist. Rather, neutrality functions as a weapon—used to silence and dismiss Christianity from the public square.

Why Christianity in particular? Because Christianity is the truth about all things. It asserts not merely preference, but authority. And it stands in direct opposition to man’s natural proclivity toward vice and self-deception. No other religion is scorned quite like Christianity for this very reason.

This leads to a deeper question: What determines the superiority or inferiority of a culture?

It is the degree to which a culture aligns itself with truth. From a Christian perspective, that truth is revealed in Christ and in His Word. If Christ is the source and center of all that is true, good, and beautiful, then cultures rise or fall in proportion to their embrace of—or departure from—Him.

Every culture is structured upon a moral framework that governs how its people live. What people believe determines what they do. Culture, therefore, is not merely a collection of aesthetic preferences or inherited sentiments. It consists of shared beliefs, laws, values, customs, affections, practices, traditions, and language—those binding realities that shape a people over time.

One way to evaluate whether a culture—or any system—is true, beautiful, and good is to examine whether it produces freedom and fruitfulness. Freedom and fruitfulness are the natural, and even inevitable, outgrowth of truth. Wherever the Scriptures have profoundly shaped a society, that society has historically experienced remarkable expansions of liberty and flourishing. This is because biblical truth orders human life toward what is ultimate and enduring.

Justice is not a social invention; it is rooted in the character of God. Prosperity is not accidental; it flows from rightly ordered living. Freedom is not autonomous self-expression; it is the fruit of moral structure. Justice is God’s idea. Prosperity is God’s idea. Freedom is God’s idea.

The True Definition of Freedom

And on this note, it is important to take this moment to define freedom.

Many define freedom as the ability to do whatever one pleases—to live unrestrained by imposition and governed solely by personal desire

However, in contrast to this common idea, we must underscore that true freedom is found in the person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ, who liberates humanity from the bondage of sin. Freedom is not the license to pursue every whim but the ability to fulfill the purpose for which humanity was created and commissioned by God, which is to glorify and enjoy Him forever. True freedom is exclusively established and realized within the boundaries of God’s holy Law. Freedom does not exist outside the confines of God’s law. Contrary to popular belief, God’s law does not restrict freedom; rather, it enables it. The only thing God’s law forbids is sin, and sin undermines human joy and true freedom. When God created Adam in the garden, He gave man license to fulfill his calling and enjoy the liberties God had endowed him with. God gave Adam just one law to protect that freedom, not to eat of the tree in the middle of the garden. Ultimately, the law God gave to Adam was a command forbidding man from disobeying God. To disobey God and violate His law is to abandon freedom for enslavement and abandon life for death.

With this in mind, we can determine that superior cultures are those that value freedom and understand what it means to be truly prosperous. Superior cultures are those that are governed by God’s law.

Distinct Attributes of Free Nations

Nations that have experienced genuine freedom and flourishing tend to exhibit the following distinct attributes:

1. A recognition that God exists and has spoken authoritatively through His Word.
2. A high regard for truth and beauty.
3. A high regard for human dignity and life.
4. A high regard for moral law, integrity, and order.
5. Strong, responsible, self-restrained, masculine men.
6. Loving and fruitful families.
7. Schools that cultivate a love for wisdom and virtue.
8. Limited and accountable civil government.
9. Faithful churches led by courageous shepherds.
10. A culture in which people build and give more than they consume and take.

Many will inevitably hear these assertions and take offense.

But offense does not invalidate truth. Often, it reveals the idol beneath the reaction—where sentiment is elevated above righteousness and envy eclipses honesty.

Secularism—and the proposed myth of cultural neutrality—is man’s attempt to pry the hand of God from the world. It is a defiant act of idolatry: the creature asserting autonomy against the Creator. This project of self-actualization is inherently intolerant of virtue and hostile to all that is objectively true.

With this in mind, it must be stated plainly: secularism was not the animating force behind the greatness of the West. It was not the engine of Western flourishing. Rather, secularism has sought to appropriate the capital of that greatness while steadily dismantling its foundations.

What Made America and the West Great?

The greatness of the West—and of the cultures shaped by it—has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. When I speak of Christianity’s influence, I am referring to the application of Scripture in shaping and refining the West’s foundational beliefs, values, laws, institutions, customs, and traditions.

What were those formative convictions?

Christian orthodoxy — belief in the Triune God, divine revelation through Scripture, the fallenness of man, redemption in Christ, and the certainty of His return.

A linear view of time and meaningful celebration — history moving with purpose rather than in endless cycles.

Personal responsibility and integrity — moral accountability before God.

Human dignity and the sanctity of life — rooted in the imago Dei.

Vocabulary and literacy — a people shaped by a book became a reading people.

Education — ordered toward wisdom and virtue, not mere utility.

Work and stewardship — labor dignified as service before God.

The family — the centrality of the covenant household rather than the primacy of the collective.

Masculinity and femininity — distinct roles ordered toward responsibility, fruitfulness, and stability.

Aesthetics — beauty understood as objective and reflective of divine order.

Unalienable rights — the conviction that liberty is granted by God, not bestowed by the State.

Justice and governance — civil authority restrained by higher law.

The rule of law — law as objective, predictable, and binding on rulers and citizens alike.

Law as the Imposition of Morality

A common refrain in modern political discourse is that morality ought not to be imposed upon others. And yet, what is law if not the imposition of a moral standard? The question is not whether morality will be imposed; the question is whose morality will be imposed. It therefore matters profoundly what that morality is grounded upon.

Morality does not exist in a vacuum, and law cannot exist in one either. Both are informed by what people regard as ultimate—whether that be God, democratic consensus, or subjective preference. Every legal system rests upon a vision of what is good and what is evil.

Law and legislation are inherently instructive. They do not merely regulate behavior; they shape the moral architecture of a culture. A society rises or falls according to what it codifies as virtue and what it tolerates as vice. When law is rooted in false or purely subjective morality, it becomes a license for disorder, destruction, and eventually a culture of death.

Law assumes an objective standard that transcends time and preference. It reflects principles woven into the fabric of human conscience and into the created order itself.

I submit to you that so long as law and legislation are severed from Christianity, they cannot produce lasting freedom or flourishing. The very concept of law is rooted in the character of God. It is therefore incumbent upon any society seeking justice to reckon seriously with His revealed standard—to embrace it and to apply it with prudence and humility.

What Are Good laws?

Only a legal framework grounded in transcendent moral truth can sustain a social order that rewards virtue, restrains evil, and multiplies what is good.

1. Good laws are those that enable people to live as they were created to live.
2. Good laws promote freedom and flourishing.
3. Good laws value and protect every human life.
4. Good laws protect the freedom to speak the truth.
5. Good laws recognize and defend private property.
6. Good laws affirm the centrality of the household and the necessity of fathers.
7. Good laws protect marriage and children.
8. Good laws acknowledge that the State is not the architect of morality, but its minister.
9. Good laws reflect enduring standards of justice rather than shifting political winds.
10. Good laws tend to be few, clear, and memorable.
    As G.K. Chesterton once warned, “If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.” When a society refuses transcendent moral restraint, it does not escape law; it multiplies it. The rejection of higher law inevitably leads to the tyranny of countless regulations and ever-expanding crimes.
11. Good laws protect citizens from tyranny.
12. Good laws instruct a populace in the fear and admonition of the Lord.

The History of Morality and Law in the West

In my study of Western thought, it is apparent that morality and the Christian religion are the bedrock of the West’s greatness.

Consider the words of notable men in political and legal thought,

“...the moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery, and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.” -Noah Webster, “Advice to the Young,” History of the United States

“…as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker’s will. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature...This law of nature...dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority...from this original.” -William Blackstone, “Commentaries on the Law” 1723-1780

“Human law must rest its authority ultimately upon the authority of that law which is Divine…Far from being rivals or enemies, religion and law are twin sisters, friends, and mutual assistants.” -James Wilson, “Of the General Principles of Law and Obligation.” U.S. Supreme Court Justic and Signer of the U.S. Constitution

America’s founding was neither religiously indifferent nor philosophically agnostic. It emerged from a moral and cosmological vision shaped decisively by Christianity. The men who framed this republic—whether orthodox believers or religious deists—operated within a shared conviction: that God exists, that He governs the world, and that civic law is accountable to His written order. In such a framework, the understanding that Law is King was a bold statement, given that much of the world believed the king was the law.

Biblical Christianity liberated America and made it the greatest nation and republic in history.

From the New England Confederation’s explicit aim to advance Christ’s kingdom, to the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, the public language of the founding era assumed God’s authority as the ground of liberty.

The Constitution, perhaps the greatest legal document since the Mosaic Law and the Magna Carta, presupposes a moral people capable of governing themselves fruitfully—a point John Adams made plain when he warned that it was “wholly inadequate” for any people ungoverned by religion and morality.

These convictions were woven into public life. Early state constitutions required professions of Christian faith for civic office, treating governance as a sacred trust rather than a mere administrative function. America’s art and architecture proclaimed the same theology in stone and image: pilgrims kneeling in prayer, Scripture engraved in marble, Moses standing foremost among lawgivers, visually testifying that law descends from God before it is administered by men.

Taken together, these witnesses reveal a nation founded not upon the autonomy of man, but upon the sovereignty of God—a republic ordered toward liberty precisely because it understood itself to be accountable to heaven. In this vision, freedom was not emancipation from God, but liberty secured under His rule.

America has been under attack through the insidious rot of immorality and religious indifference, and this has prompted the death of beauty, the death of patriotism, the death of lawfulness, the weakening of borders, the weakening of economic vibrance, and the silencing of truth.

Without morality and true religion, there can be no freedom. There can be no justice. There can be no prosperity. Only the moral and religious can truly be free and prosperous.

What of Law and Culture?

With all this in view, how should we understand the relationship between law and culture? How, then, should we govern and legislate?

Flowing downstream from the lie that culture is neutral is the assumption that culture is merely something to be observed, appreciated, and consumed—never critiqued, shaped, or intentionally constructed. But culture is always being formed. The only question is by what standard.

Man is called to build culture under the banner of what is true, beautiful, and good. Law is one of the primary instruments by which a people’s thoughts, affections, and actions are shaped. Law is then a culture-making tool with the potency to establish or destroy civilization. It matters profoundly what kind of men wield such authority.

In order to build cultures of excellence, to establish a people of righteousness, its leaders must have the foundational categories to discern the world rightly, the essential character to withstand temptation, and the robust competence to fight and build with virtue. And I say this to you, my esteemed and honorable gentlemen: Your own morality and relationship with God is the primary determinant of your ability to legislate in order with that which is true, beautiful, and good. Your standing before God is the ultimate determinant of whether you will be a force for freedom or enslavement, a force for prosperity or persistent destitution. If you do not love what God loves, you cannot instruct a culture toward order. If you do not hate what God hates, you cannot protect your constituents from evil in all its forms.

While we all as men fall short of the standards God establishes, He has given us a redeemer, who lived a perfect life under God’s Law, who died a perfect death in fulfillment of God’s justice, and who defeated both sin and death when He rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of His Father. He reigns victorious over all things, and all the nations of earth belong to Him alone. By placing our faith in the person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ, we are made free men, unburdened by guilt and shame, transformed to love what is good, equipped to build great cultures, and enabled to lead others toward true liberation.

And so, as we look to establish free cultures, or recover the resounding greatness of this republic, as we have been so called, we must lead with religion and worship. That’s inescapable. We always live in light of what we worship. Law flows from this worship. Law is the liturgy of religion that establishes the mores of a culture. However, it also serves as the mirror through which we can determine a dysfunctional and degenerate culture.

When confronting a culture steeped in idolatry, diplomatic overtures and genteel appeasement merely pave the way for syncretism—and with it, deeper bondage. In such a context, righteous disruption is not optional; it is essential. Reform demands the courage to shatter the polite fictions of a godless society.

A failure to relinquish cultural traditions when they conflict with truth is, at heart, a crisis of identity. Too many see themselves first as members of an ethnic tribe rather than as citizens of the Kingdom of God—called to serve as ambassadors in the nations where Providence has placed them. The Christian’s first and highest allegiance is to God, not to ancestry, tribe, or inherited custom. The fear of dishonoring Him should far outweigh any anxiety over the loss of culture.

We must trust that full submission to Christ is not only faithful but ultimately best for the societies to which we belong. The mandate is clear: to exalt His name and advance His Kingdom. When the choice is between preserving cultural heritage and obeying Christ, only obedience leads to enduring human flourishing; preservation detached from truth leads to decline. The finest cultural heritage is that which is rooted in Christian faith. To the degree that this is so, it is a culture worthy of preservation and renewal.

The uncomfortable truth is that some cultural expressions must pass away. This may sound alarming to those who conflate ethnicity with culture. I am not proposing the eradication of peoples, but the abandonment of traditions that defy what is true, good, and beautiful. No culture is neutral; it either honors God or resists Him. We are not called to be curators of compromised traditions, but architects of cultures that glorify God.

This does not entail the erasure of distinction—quite the contrary. Distinction is not destroyed by truth; it is refined by it. In such a world, Africa does not become Asia, nor Europe America. Yet where truth reigns, there will be meaningful moral convergence across nations.

Those who worship the living God in spirit and in truth will inevitably cultivate cultures that differ from those who do not. Indeed, believers across nations will often share deeper commonality with one another than with unbelieving members of their own kin. The Christian’s ultimate petition is not merely for cultural preservation, but for God’s Kingdom to come and His will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

And to you, as lawmakers, I say this with sobriety and respect: yours is a high and weighty calling. You bear responsibility not merely to draft statutes, but to shape the moral climate of a people. You shape culture. You shape communities. You shape this state and, in your measure, this nation. The authority entrusted to you is not trivial—it is a stewardship.

Exercise it with reverence.

Exercise it with diligence.

Exercise it with courage.

And exercise it with eternal perspective.

Christ the King rules and reigns over the nations. We owe Him our unwavering faith and allegiance.

May God bless this great state of Idaho, and may He bless these United States of America.