Christianity as a Weapon of War: Unashamed Scripture, the Protection of Children, and the Duty to Fight Evil in Our Own Generation

If you came here looking for a populist hit piece, this is not that. I write for people who lead, want to lead, or at least refuse to stay on the couch while the culture is rewritten around their children. Scripture is not a campaign prop. It is the sharpest instrument I know for cutting through a coordinated lie. That is the politics of heaven: not party first, not personality first, but the question of whether a people will still call good good and evil evil when the price of doing so is social exile.

I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN

We are living in what I call an age of disclosure. Not merely the disclosure of secrets in government files, though that conversation is loud enough. I mean something older and more dangerous: the moment when a civilization is forced to admit what it has been doing in the dark. The ideologies that were supposed to stay in graduate seminars leaked into human-resources manuals, then into public schools, then into pediatric clinics. The result is not a private lifestyle. The result is a public demand that the rest of us recite the new creed or be treated as a moral contaminant.

The politics of heaven answers that demand. Heaven is not a voting bloc. Heaven is not a branding exercise. Heaven is the claim that God made the world a certain way, that male and female are not costumes, that children are not raw material for adult ideology, and that a nation which inverts those realities will not stay strong merely because its GDP looks impressive for another quarter.[1]

Paul said he was not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] That sentence is doing more work in 2026 than most platform planks. Shame is the enforcement mechanism of the present order. If they can make you embarrassed to name what you love, they do not have to refute you. They only have to watch you edit yourself until there is nothing left worth hearing.

I will not edit it.

II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE

Start with the word that has been most abused: compassion.

True compassion would protect children from irreversible medical decisions they cannot possibly understand. What we have instead is a coordinated social contagion, especially visible among elites, in which adults congratulate themselves for “affirming” a minor into a pathway of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. That is not love. That is sacrificing children to an ideology. I will call it what it is: a form of child abuse dressed up as progress.[3]

I am not talking about the rare, severe, persistent cases that clinicians used to treat with extreme caution. I am talking about the sudden clustering, the peer networks, the online scripts, the school social transitions done behind parents’ backs, and the astonishing overrepresentation of transgender-identifying children in a handful of zip codes, friend groups, and celebrity households. When parents, schools, corporations, and entertainment all push the same story at once, vulnerable children get swept up. That is not a coincidence. It is social engineering, plain and simple.

Look at Hollywood. The list of high-profile actors and actresses with children who identify as transgender or non-binary has become a genre of its own. Charlize Theron, Jamie Lee Curtis, Robert De Niro, Jennifer Lopez, Megan Fox, Dwyane Wade, Annette Bening and Warren Beatty, Cynthia Nixon, Sigourney Weaver, Naomi Watts—the names keep accumulating.[4] In a country where transgender identification among youth was, until recently, vanishingly rare, that concentration is not “just visibility.” Visibility does not create statistical spikes this localized unless something in the environment is recruiting.

Some researchers and activists insist there is no social contagion, and they would be wrong. Other researchers, clinicians, and dissenters say the opposite, and the Cass Review in the United Kingdom was blunt about the weakness of the evidence base that was used to medicalize children.[5] I do not need a unanimous journal to use my eyes. When a belief system travels through prestige networks faster than it travels through farm towns, you are not watching a spontaneous awakening. You are watching fashion with a clinical billing code.

Scripture is not ambiguous about the created order. God created them male and female.[6] To catechize children into rebellion against that order is not pastoral care. It is a revolt against the Creator, outsourced to minors who will live with the consequences long after the adults have moved on to the next cause.

The proper Christian response is not cruelty. It is not mockery of the suffering. It is this: speak truth with clarity, protect children from harm, and offer genuine compassion to those who are distressed—without affirming the lie that is injuring them. Affirmation of a falsehood is not mercy. It is participation.

III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM

People who do not want to face this subject hide in averages. They will tell you that “only a small percentage” of children identify this way, as if a small percentage plus institutional capture is nothing. The point is not only prevalence. The point is location.

Certain circles have dramatically higher rates of trans-identifying children. Elite schools. Entertainment. Specific online subcultures. Certain therapeutic fashions. Human-resources departments that rewrote the rules of speech and then dared the rest of the country to object. The same class of people who draft the corporate training also sit on museum boards, donate to universities, and lecture the working class about which words are now violence.

I have watched this move through institutions the way termites move through a beam. You do not notice the first memo. You notice the tenth, when a teacher is punished for using ordinary sexed language, or a parent is treated as the threat for refusing to transition a twelve-year-old socially. By then the lie has become policy.

This is why I reject the slogan that “silence is kindness.” Silence in a captured institution is how the capture finishes. If you work in a place where DEI language has been used to smuggle gender ideology into childhood, you already know the mechanism. It was not a grassroots cry from children. It was a professional class writing rules that everyone else was expected to obey while calling the obedience righteousness.

I do not owe that project my vocabulary.

IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE

There is a related lie, and it is aimed at Christians specifically: that the loving thing is to mute your own faith so that people who despise it can feel comfortable.

I reject that.

It is one thing to say we should not be cruel. It is another thing to say that Islam, progressive sexual ideology, and the new civic religion of the public school must be handled with velvet, while Christian speech must be handled with a muzzle. I am supposed to be endlessly compassionate toward alternative sexual lifestyles and toward the latest curriculum, and then I am supposed to treat my own Scripture as a private hobby that might offend the room.

No.

You like what you like. I like what I like. I am not going to edit the Bible to make you happy. You do not care if I am unhappy. So I am going to talk about the Bible. I am going to talk about the Scripture I enjoy. I believe this is what God says, and I will not be ashamed of it.

That kind of honest, unapologetic speech is far more powerful than the aggressive politeness of people who sand their faith down until it can pass a diversity seminar. The world feels no obligation to make Christians comfortable. Reciprocal self-erasure is not tolerance. It is surrender.

As Paul said, I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.[2] Speaking Scripture openly, without apology, is one of the most effective ways to push back against cultural pressure. It draws a clear line. It gives courage to people who have been staying quiet. Leaders who speak plainly strengthen the faithful and expose deception at the same time.

There is nothing wrong with liking Christian things and professing them openly. You do not have to put a lid on your viewpoint while everybody else imposes theirs and you are told to shut up and take it. That hour is over, or it should be.

V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED

Let me give a point of reference I have used for years.

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is one of my favorite places in the world.[7] I never liked Washington much until the political weather changed and I had reason to be there. I have been more than once. I am a member and a supporter. In the background of my life, I love using the Bible, and I love a building three blocks from the Capitol that says: here is the history of this book. See it. Relish it. Enjoy it.

They are not required to plant flags all over the National Mall. You can still go to the Smithsonian. You can still do every other official thing the capital offers. People love the Museum of the Bible anyway, because it feeds them. It does not pretend to be a neutral warehouse. It professes that this book is good. It is open about that goodness. It loves being good.

That is the model.

Other places I enjoy for the same reason: the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum in northern Kentucky, the work of Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis.[8] I love those guys. I may not agree with their young-earth timeline. I am an old-earth kind of guy. We would argue, probably at length, about whether the earth is six thousand years old or many millions. I have read Ham. I understand the argument. I would still debate him profusely on the age of the earth. That disagreement does not cancel the thing I actually love: their embrace of goodness.

When you walk those sites, you cannot help but see how hard they try to be good, and they do not hide it. They do not cram it down every throat on earth. They also do not crush their own enjoyment to satisfy people who arrive already offended. The offended party does not mind offending you. It is quite fine to go the other way—to be audacious about your love for what you value. You do not have to destroy it to make someone else happy.

Jonathan Edwards understood the same principle in a different century. True religion is not mere outward show. When the heart is captured by the beauty of God and His word, it cannot stay silent. The joy overflows.[9] Dimming that joy to appease people who hate its source is not love, and it is not tolerance. It betrays the truth you claim to love.

You do not have to attack persons. You also must not shrink back. Let the light shine clearly. Those who love truth will be drawn to it. I have watched that happen in the galleries of the Museum of the Bible. Stand firm. Speak plainly. Enjoy God’s goodness without shame. That is every Christian’s duty, not a branding strategy for an election cycle.

VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY

I was at the Creation Museum not long ago, wearing a Museum of the Bible shirt—the kind I wear often, because it reminds me of the things I actually like when a lot of darkness surrounds me. The woman at the counter said it was great that I go to the Museum of the Bible. I told her I love that museum, and I also love what Ken Ham built. Ham set a public philosophy in motion. The exhibits are well done. I have read the books. I understand why the young-earth argument matters to the people who hold it.

The real discussion is larger than a debate-club win. Science and theology are allowed to argue. I would argue with Ham that the earth is much older than six thousand years. I would also tell Bill Nye that sneering at Genesis as if the only alternatives were a cartoon ark or a materialist closed system is a different kind of ignorance. The point for this essay is not to settle geology. The point is that Christians can disagree on the age of the earth and still refuse to surrender the created order, the moral law, and the right to love Scripture out loud.

That is maturity. Rally around the core of the confession, not around every secondary interpretation. Ken Ham loves what he believes and says it without shame. I will not take that joy from him. I wish more people in public life had that spine, even when I think their timeline is wrong.

VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK

JD Vance is from my part of the world. Middletown. Butler County. Monroe just down the road. I know those hardy people. I know the flea markets—Traders World, Treasure Island—where folks come out of church on Sunday and walk the aisles looking at vendors, wall art, and the kind of homemade biblical kitsch that elites mock and ordinary people actually live with.[10]

Vance knows that country. His people are those people. When he talks about Scripture, it does not sound like a consultant discovered “faith outreach” on a whiteboard. It sounds like Butler County. That matters.

I have been glad to see President Trump and Vice President Vance put Scripture into the open at the Texas midterm moment and in surrounding speeches and interviews.[11] Vance has been unusually explicit that Christianity is not a private hobby you hide to keep a coalition calm. He has said Christianity is America’s creed—not that every citizen must be a Christian, but that the moral language that actually formed the country is Christian.[12] He has said Satan’s favorite trick is convincing Christians that faith and politics belong in separate rooms.[13] He has even been willing to talk about end times without collapsing into either panic or passivity: do the work in front of you; do not outsource your whole moral life to a countdown clock.[14]

I think that is smart. It will help the midterms. Not because Bible verses are magic turnout dust, but because a lot of serious churchgoing conservatives have concluded that politicians are blabbermouths who say one thing at the banquet and another in the agency. Those people will stay home if they think the language is rented. They will show up if they think the man actually fears God more than he fears the clip.

I am not naive. Quoting Scripture at a rally is easy. Governing in a way that honors the God of that Scripture is harder. The test is not whether a line lands in a speech. The test is whether the administration’s actions, over time, hate what God hates and love what God loves. A leader who merely drapes verses over policies that protect evil is a hypocrite. A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood, confused children, and public lies are being baptized as kindness.

For midterms, for holding the House and the Senate, the Christian vote is not a sentiment. It is a body of people who still believe first allegiance is not to a party. If you want them off the couch, do not give them another focus-grouped paragraph about “values.” Give them the thing they already know is true and have been told to whisper.

VIII. THREE VERSES LEADERS SHOULD NOT BE AFRAID TO SAY OUT LOUD

If a leader wants language that encourages the faithful and warns the powerful at the same time, he does not need a speechwriter to invent it. It is already in the book.

First: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”[15]

That is Proverbs 14:34. It directly assaults the idea that a country becomes great by GDP, weapons, or branding. Moral order is not an accessory. If we keep normalizing what Scripture calls evil, we are not becoming sophisticated. We are becoming weak. Wealth will not save a people that has taught its children to despise the created order.

Second: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”[16]

Isaiah 5:20 is the verse for this exact hour. It names the mechanism. The deception is not only that people do wrong. The deception is that they rename the wrong and then punish the person who remembers the old name. Redefine marriage, celebrate the confusion of sex, treat biblical speech as harm, and you have not expanded compassion. You have inverted the moral dictionary. A leader who will not say that sentence is not being pastoral. He is being careful about his future bookings.

Third: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”[17]

Psalm 33:12 is not a magic formula for a superpower. It is a reminder of allegiance. The Christian community’s ultimate loyalty is not to a party, a personality, or a news cycle. Blessing, in the biblical sense, attaches to a people that still knows who God is. That is hope, not nostalgia. It tells serious people why they should bother.

These three verses do what a good rally needs: moral clarity, a warning against deception, and a promise larger than the next quarter. They are short enough to remember. They are sharp enough to divide light from fog.

IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK

Here is the pastoral failure I have watched for decades.

Many people I know will say they are good Christians because they refuse to “engage.” They will hang the Ten Commandments on the wall, go to church on Sunday, and then treat public evil as a problem God will vacuum up at the end of the age. They do not want to confront anybody. They do not want to fight. They want the apocalypse to do the job they were too tired or too timid to do. They call that humility. I call it a religious mask on laziness.

The same Bible that promises the return of Christ also commands believers to resist the devil, hate what is evil, do justice, and love mercy.[18] God never called a people to nap while wickedness reorganizes the schools. Waiting for God to fix everything while we do nothing is not faith. It is presumption.

Moses did not treat Egypt as a spectator sport. Deborah did not. David did not. Nehemiah did not rebuild a wall by quoting a verse about patience and going home. The apostles did not treat the ruling authorities as an excuse to go mute. Romans 13 tells Christians to recognize governing authority. Acts 5:29 tells them that when those authorities command what God forbids, the first allegiance is to God.[19] Submission to God is not submission to evil—quite the opposite.

If a world leader will not bow to the authority of God, that does not mean the rest of us take a back seat and wait for the credits. It means discernment. It means we do not confuse a Bible on the podium with a conscience in the chest. It also means we do not treat politics as a substitute for conversion. A man can win a midterm and still lose his soul. Reformation that begins only in rallies and podcasts, and never in the soul’s submission to Christ, profits nothing.

However, the opposite error is just as real: using “God will handle it” as cover for refusing to handle the thing in front of you. Faith works in its own generation. It prays for the kingdom to come and then spends its breath on righteousness while it still has breath.

X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE

I like Traders World. I like Treasure Island. Monroe, Ohio, is a strange and specific place, and I love it for what it is. Walk those markets, and you will see a lot of people who came straight from church. You will see biblical references on the walls. Treasure Island, in particular, draws a large Mexican immigrant population, and if you have spent time in Mexico, you already know how Catholic that visual world is. They love images of Jesus. They carried older indigenous forms into Catholic form and made something that is not a seminar paper. It is folk theology in color. I love Mexican religious art, including the Christianized approach to death that outsiders reduce to a cartoon of “the cult of the dead.” It is not voodoo. It is a people who still think the dead and the living are not sealed off from each other by a shopping mall.

I can love all of that and still say the hard thing: too many of those same households treat Scripture as interior decorating.

They will buy the plaque. They will love the verse. They will tell you they left it to Jesus. Then, when the school, the HR office, or the culture demands that they deny what the plaque says, they fold and call the fold piety. That is not devotion. That is decoration. Faith that only admires Scripture on a wall, and will not stand for the same commandments when the cost is a customer, a job, or a family argument, is not the faith that built anything worth keeping.

True Christianity has always required backbone. Nice religious imagery is easy. JD Vance coming out of that same region makes the stakes sharper. Those people need to see a leader who will fight for what the wall art claims to believe. If he only sounds like church on Sunday and then governs like every other manager of decline, the flea-market vote will stay home, and the professional class that rewrote childhood will not.

XI. CHRISTIANITY IS A WEAPON — BUT NOT THE WAY THE MOB MEANS WEAPON

People get nervous when you say Christianity is a weapon. They should get the meaning right.

Christianity is not a weapon in the way a riot is a weapon. It is not deceit. It is not a secret police of the pious. The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.[20] Truth is the blade. When a leader speaks Scripture with actual conviction, it cuts through slogans, exposes the rename-the-evil trick, and wakes a conscience that had gone to sleep under the word “kindness.”

That is how you fight evil in high places without becoming the thing you oppose.

Many of the policies I have been watching—the sexual ones, the speech ones, the childhood ones—were designed in the background to wear away a society that still had a Christian base. You do not have to invent a conspiracy chart to see the sequence. First, the language changes. Then the training changes. Then the child is caught in the middle, and the parent is the last to be informed. The answer is not to copy the enemy’s methods. The answer is to stop being ashamed of the only thing that can actually defeat the darkness: the gospel of Jesus Christ, spoken as if you mean it.

A leader should stand on Scripture not as a mascot but as a man who fears God more than he fears the mob. This generation is starving for that kind of boldness. Amen. Let it be said without the usual throat-clearing.

XII. ISLAM, SAUDI ARABIA, AND THE RIGHT TO DEFEND YOUR OWN HOUSE

A short word on a subject that makes consultants sweat.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, a lot of people are angry that American leadership will not spend every morning railing at Saudi Arabia and at radical Islam in the old post-2001 register. Radical Islam is not a hallucination. It is still at work. It is fair game. I also think you can put your hand on the Bible without turning every speech into a comparative-religion insult comic.

You do not have to be condescending toward every competing religion to defend Christianity. [21] A leader who fears God will not be silent when innocent blood is shed in the name of religion. He also needs wisdom. Sometimes the most effective stand is not the loudest anathema. It is the clear, consistent defense of truth and justice, and the refusal to treat Christianity as the one faith that must apologize for existing.

If Trump or Vance quote Scripture, the test is not the quote. The test is whether their actions line up with the book they opened. Religion used as a costume for power is an old trick. Religion used as the thing a man actually submits to is rarer, and it is the only version worth the airtime.

XIII. THE JONATHAN EDWARDS STUDY BIBLE AND A PRACTICAL NEXT STEP

If you want an entry point that is not a meme and not a campaign pamphlet, start with a book that expects you to stay.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson in August 2026 and edited by Matthew Everhard, is built on the NKJV and Edwards’s own notes, resolutions, and theological instincts.[22] Edwards’s great theme was not American politics. It was joy in God. “The enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That is the sentence under the project. Study notes drawn from his work, essays on the Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and his miscellanies system are all there if you want to do more than highlight a rally verse.

I love a study Bible that treats Scripture as something you live inside, not something you mine for applause lines. I do not agree with every secondary system any commentator has ever hung on the text. I do not need to. The point is daily reading, public love, and an unashamed life. Treat yourself to something good. Read it. Let people know you love it. At this stage of the game, visible joy in the word is not a small witness. It is one of the last clean ones left.

XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND

I want leaders who will:

Protect children from medical and social experiments they cannot consent to in any meaningful sense.

Stop treating “compassion” as a synonym for affirmation.

Speak Scripture as if it were true, not as if it were a demographic.

Refuse the HR liturgy that recodes male and female as optional.

Understand that Christian voters are not a prop. They are people whose first loyalty is supposed to be higher than a ticket.

Fight in their own generation instead of waiting for the sky to split.

Keep their joy. An ashamed church is a disarmed church.

I will say this: goodness is not something you have to apologize for. Find it. Love it. Project it. Evil is not shy about encroaching. You are not obligated to meet that encroachment with a permanent second cheek and a taped mouth. The job, when you see the lie eating children and renaming itself kindness, is to conquer it with righteousness and to be bold about the source of that righteousness.

Do not be ashamed of the gospel.

Do not be ashamed of the book.

Do not be ashamed of liking what is good.

That is the politics of heaven in an age that keeps disclosing how much of our public life was built on a dare: that ordinary people would rather be polite than tell the truth about their own sons and daughters.

XV. A LAST WORD TO THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY LEAD

This was never written for the algorithm that wants a screaming thumbnail. It was written for the smaller room: the people who draft, who vote in caucuses, who manage institutions, who sit close enough to power to change a line in a bill or a tone in a speech.

It is safe to put your arm around Scripture.

It is not safe, in the only sense that matters, to keep pretending that the sexual revolution’s latest chapter is too delicate to name.

You are allowed to enjoy the Museum of the Bible, the Creation Museum, a Mexican retablo of Christ, a Jonathan Edwards page, a Butler County flea market, and a Vice President who will still say the name of Jesus without coughing. You are allowed to disagree about the age of the earth and still agree that a girl is not a boy because a school counselor said so.

The light does not need your permission to be light. It needs you to stop putting a basket over it.

Speak plainly. Protect the children. Love the good without apology. Leave the shame to the people who require it.

That is how you strengthen the faithful. That is how you expose the deception. That is how a nation finds out, in an age of disclosure, whether it still remembers the politics of heaven.

NOTES

[1] The phrase “politics of heaven” is used here in the older Christian sense: the public consequences of God’s reign and moral law, not a claim that any party is the kingdom of God. See Augustine, The City of God, esp. Books XIV–XIX, on the interweaving of the city of God and the city of man.

[2] Romans 1:16: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes.”

[3] On the distinction between pastoral care for distressed youth and the affirmation-only medical pathway, see Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (NHS England, 2024); Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage (Regnery, 2020); Lisa Littman, “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018).

[4] Reporting and commentary on the clustering of transgender-identifying children in celebrity households include Rikki Schlott, “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood,” New York Post, June 4, 2026; “The rise of the celebrity trans kid,” The Spectator, April 10, 2024; and recurring profiles in mainstream entertainment coverage of specific families. Clustering is not the same as a complete census; it is a pattern that demands an explanation beyond “visibility.”

[5] Cass, Independent Review (2024). For the contrary claim that social contagion is unsupported, see Jack Turban et al., “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States,” Pediatrics (2022). For more recent discussion of declining youth identification after the peak years, see analysis associated with Eric Kaufmann’s 2025 commentary on survey trends. The existence of a debate is the point: the science was never “settled” in the way school districts pretended.

[6] Genesis 1:27; Matthew 19:4; Mark 10:6.

[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 4th Street SW, Washington, D.C.; opened November 17, 2017; founded through the Green family / Museum of the Bible, Inc. See museumofthebible.org and the institution’s published FAQ on mission, square footage, and exhibit floors.

[8] Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis; Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky (opened 2007); Ark Encounter, Williamstown, Kentucky (opened 2016). See answersingenesis.org.

[9] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); The Life of David Brainerd; and the Resolutions. Edwards’s insistence that true religion engages the affections, not merely the mouth, is the through-line of the 2026 study Bible project cited below.

[10] Traders, World and Treasure Island are long-running flea-market / vendor sites serving the Monroe–Middletown corridor in Butler County, Ohio. JD Vance’s upbringing in Middletown and family ties in the county are documented in Hillbilly Elegy (Harper, 2016) and in subsequent local reporting.

[11] Coverage of Trump and Vance at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, September 2026, includes contemporaneous reports from ABC and other national outlets. Vance’s broader 2025–2026 record of public Christian speech includes the Turning Point USA AmFest 2025 address and the May 2026 “Rededicate 250” remarks on the National Mall.

[12] JD Vance, AmFest / Turning Point USA remarks, December 2025: “Christianity is America’s creed,” with the explicit caveat that one need not be a Christian to be an American. See also Catholic News Agency, “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics,” December 2025.

[13] Ryan Foley, “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics,” The Christian Post, July 20, 2026, reporting on Vance’s conversation with Bishop Robert Barron.

[14] Maya Yang, “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK,’” The Guardian / syndicated, September 2, 2026, on the Bryce Crawford interview.

[15] Proverbs 14:34 (NKJV): “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.”

[16] Isaiah 5:20.

[17] Psalm 33:12: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people He has chosen as His own inheritance.”

[18] James 4:7; Romans 12:9; Micah 6:8; Psalm 97:10.

[19] Romans 13:1–7; Acts 5:29. The Deborah and David narratives are Judges 4–5 and 1 Samuel 16–31 / 2 Samuel.

[20] Hebrews 4:12; Ephesians 6:17.

[21] John 14:6; Acts 4:12.

[22] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Features include Edwards-derived study notes, doctrinal articles, essays on Edwards and the Great Awakening, the Resolutions, and an introduction to his miscellanies method.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Scripture and Classic Christian Sources

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960. Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. “Resolutions.” In Letters and Personal Writings, Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 16. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. 1741. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). General editor Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026. Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973. Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943. Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952. Niebuhr, Reinhold. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York: Scribner, 1932. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Live Not by Lies.” 1974. Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1976. Schaeffer, Francis A. A Christian Manifesto. Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1981.

Creation, Museums, and Public Christian Witness

Ham, Ken. The Lie: Evolution. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 1987; rev. eds. thereafter. Ham, Ken. Gospel Reset. Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2018. Answers in Genesis. Creation Museum and Ark Encounter visitor guides and position papers. https://answersingenesis.org Museum of the Bible. Institutional FAQs, exhibit guides, and annual materials. Washington, D.C. https://www.museumofthebible.org Wishard, Grant. “Love to Tell the Story.” Washington Examiner, November 17, 2017. Zauzmer Weil, Julie, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey. “The ark vs. the covenant: the dramatic contrast between the Creation Museum and the Museum of the Bible.” Washington Post, November 20, 2017.

Sex, Children, Medicine, and Social Contagion

Cass, Hilary. Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report. NHS England, 2024. Shrier, Abigail. Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2020. Shrier, Abigail. Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Are Not Growing Up. New York: Sentinel, 2024. Littman, Lisa. “Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” PLOS ONE 13, no. 8 (2018). Bailey, J. Michael, and Ray Blanchard. Clinical and taxonomic papers on autogynephilia and rapid-onset presentations (various). Laidlaw, Michael, et al. Endocrine and pediatric critique literature on puberty blockade. SEGM (Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine). Collected reviews. Turban, Jack L., et al. “Sex Assigned at Birth Ratio among Transgender and Gender Diverse Adolescents in the United States.” Pediatrics (2022). [Contrary thesis; included so the reader can see both sides of the official argument.] Kaufmann, Eric. Commentary and data notes on declining youth LGBT / transgender identification after the early-2020s peak (2025). Schlott, Rikki. “How social contagion created a generation of trans kids in Hollywood.” New York Post, June 4, 2026. “The rise of the celebrity trans kid.” The Spectator, April 10, 2024. “Hollywood’s growing A-list of non-binary, transgender kids.” The Daily Telegraph, 2025. Hruz, Paul W., Lawrence S. Mayer, and Paul R. McHugh. “Growing Pains: Problems with Puberty Suppression in Treating Gender Dysphoria.” The New Atlantis, 2017. McHugh, Paul. “Transgender Surgery Is not the Solution.” Wall Street Journal, 2014, and related Johns Hopkins commentary. Soh, Debra. The End of Gender. New York: Threshold, 2020. Joyce, Helen. Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality. London: Oneworld, 2021. Hilton, Emma, and Colin Wright. Biological-sex primer essays in Reality’s Last Stand and related venues. Singal, Jesse. Long-form reporting on youth gender medicine, The Atlantic and later independent work.

Culture, Elite Capture, and Institutional Language

Murray, Douglas. The Madness of Crowds. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. Murray, Douglas. The War on the West. New York: Harper, 2022. Trueman, Carl R. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020. Trueman, Carl R. Strange New World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Hanby, Michael. Various essays on technology, liberalism, and the body, First Things. Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979. Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981. Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Sowell, Thomas. Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Darel E. Paul. From Tolerance to Equality. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2018.

Vance, Ohio, and the Present Political-Religious Moment

Vance, J. D. Hillbilly Elegy. New York: Harper, 2016. Vance, J. D. Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. 2026. “Vice President JD Vance presents a Christian vision of politics.” Catholic News Agency, December 2025. “JD Vance: Satan wants Christians to separate faith from politics.” Christian Post, July 20, 2026. “Religious Vance seeks to avoid MAGA schism as he keeps the faith for 2028.” The Guardian / syndicated, September 13, 2026. Yang, Maya. “JD Vance says he is doing ‘God’s work – and if that leads to the end times, OK.’” September 2, 2026. Forbes Breaking News. “The Morality & Religion That Formed The American Consciousness Were Decidedly Christian.” National Mall remarks, May 2026. Local reporting on Middletown, the Cleveland-Cliffs mill, and Vance’s hometown visits: Cincinnati Enquirer, Journal-News, Fox News, 2023–2026. Dreher, Rod. Live Not by Lies. New York: Sentinel, 2020. Renn, Aaron M. Life in the Negative World. Washington, D.C.: Zondervan / related 2024 essays on post-Christian America.

Islam, Religious Liberty, and Public Courage

Ibn Warraq. Why I Am Not a Muslim. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. Spencer, Robert. The History of Jihad. New York: Bombardier, 2018. [Use critically; included because the public argument exists.] Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Weigel, George. Faith, Reason, and the War against Jihadism. New York: Doubleday, 2007. First Amendment and religious-liberty case law: Employment Division v. Smith; Fulton v. City of Philadelphia; 303 Creative v. Elenis; related commentary in Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.

Ohio Color, Folk Religion, and Place

Hoffman, Rich. Prior columns and commentary at OvermanWarrior / related essays on Middletown, Monroe, and regional culture. Brandes, Stanley. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Carmichael, Elizabeth, and Chloë Sayer. The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. Nutini, Hugo G. Todos Santos en Rural Tlaxcala. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Local vendor culture around Traders World (Monroe, Ohio) and Treasure Island as primary, on-the-ground observation rather than academic monograph.

Journalism and Primary Documents Worth Keeping

Cass Review full report and supporting research annexes (NHS England). WPATH Files / leaked internal files and subsequent journalistic treatment (2024). SEGM, Genspect, and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine bibliographies. Museum of the Bible press FAQs. Answers in Genesis statement of faith and museum interpretative materials. Thomas Nelson catalog entry and Everhard interviews on the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (August 2026).

Our Trip to Put-in-Bay: What a good life looks like

To share a bit of my life. Here is a video from my kids of our recent trip to Put-in-Bay.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Is God an Idiot: I don’t want to serve a king; I want allies who want to fight and defeat a vast evil, otherwise, God is useless

I know a lot of people out there take issue with my point of view. Good. I get involved in this stuff precisely because that is the case. I did not want another polite Bible study where everybody already agrees and then goes home feeling spiritually hydrated. I wanted an open discussion, talking to an audience, with the entire database of Jonathan Edwards in the chair across from me. Faith, theology, the Bible as I actually read it, and the work I have been doing for years under the heading I call the politics of heaven.

The timing is not accidental. We are living through what the documentary industry has branded The Age of Disclosure — a season in which former officials, intelligence people, and military witnesses are finally willing to say out loud that non-human intelligence is here, that craft have been recovered, and that the American state has been lying about it since at least 1947.[1] The film treats that as a national-security and science story. I treat it as a political story that starts long before Roswell. If you have read me for any length of time, you already know I do not separate UFOs from demons, Elohim, Watchers, or the divine council. I do not separate any of that from how human beings get sorted into controllable categories. That is the whole point of The Politics of Heaven.[2]

Why I Chose Jonathan Edwards as a Sparring Partner

Jonathan Edwards does not agree with me. That is why I wanted him. If I only talk to people who already think the universe is a messy civil war among non-human rebels, I am just warming up my own choir. Edwards spent a life preaching the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, including the devil.[3] His notes sit in one of my favorite Bibles on the planet. I love the intelligence in that book. I love the seriousness. I do not swallow the theology hook, line, and sinker just because it became part of the American founding atmosphere.[4]

A lot of people who read me are 1750s people in 2026 clothes. They want Edwards’s God — the God who never loses a committee vote, the God whose enemies only borrow power for a season. I understand the hunger. I have been through enough grief to know why a soul wants a strong anchor. I also think that hunger can become a psychological mechanism. When life is chaotic, the human heart will pay almost any price to believe somebody competent is driving. That does not make the belief true. It makes it useful.

Edwards would say Satan was once among the brightest in heaven, fallen, subtle, powerful, and still on a leash. He would say rebellion was never a political contest because God is not one being among beings. God is the ground of existence. I love that sentence. I have used versions of it myself. I also look at the last several thousand years, and I do not see a manager winning on the ground. I see a lot of borrowed-power talk and a lot of bodies.

The Age of Disclosure and the Politics of Heaven

Disclosure, as the government class uses the word, means a press conference. A file release. A hearing. A former AATIP guy staring at a building while the score tells you to feel solemn. That is not disclosure. Disclosure is when you admit the other intelligence in the room has been running a ground game through religion, politics, sex, war, and category-making since before your grandparents had a country.

Michael Heiser did the church a favor by forcing Psalm 82 back onto the table. God stands in the divine council. He judges among the gods. Deuteronomy 32, in the older reading, has the Most High allotting nations to the sons of God. Job opens with the sons of God presenting themselves and the Accuser walking in like he has a badge.[5] You can baptize all of that into “God is still in charge” if you need to sleep. Alternatively, you can read it the way a political operator reads a situation room: there is a board, there are governors, some of them have gone rogue, and the chairman keeps insisting the org chart proves he never lost control. Moreover, to the point of evil being in control, remember Michael Heiser died of a rare illness. I have also had a lot of trouble since completing my most recent book on this precise subject. The bad guys look to get rid of people who are close to smoking them out of their hiding places. I have seen it up close, and it is much more than a coincidence.

Inside the disclosure world there is already a split. One camp wants interstellar biologists and reverse-engineered alloys. The other camp — the so-called Collins Elite strain inside defense culture — has been whispering for decades that these things are not cousins from Zeta Reticuli. They are deceivers. They deny the Son. They catechize abductees.[6] I am closer to the second camp, with one difference. I do not think calling them “demons” ends the argument. Demons is a church word that lets people stop thinking. I want the org chart. I want the ground game. I want to know who is manipulating whom, and why God keeps hiring the same contractors after they burn the city down.

Categories Are How Non-Human Intelligence Controls the Human Race

Here is the running thought I brought into the conversation. When astronomers hunted black holes, they did not start with a photograph. They started with a gravity signature. Something unseen was tugging at visible bodies. The logical conclusion was a compact mass so dense light could not climb out. Better instruments later confirmed what the footprints already said.

I look at human history the same way. You can see spirit-world manipulation in how people get thrown into categories, and then those categories get administered. Left, right. Saved, unsaved. Young earth, old earth. Alien, angel. Loyal servant, blasphemer. Once you are in the box, the box does the rest of the work. You police yourself. You attack the neighboring box. Meanwhile, the intelligence that built the shelves goes home early.

That is why I get impatient with people who think the main spiritual task is to pick the correct team jersey and never ask whether the stadium itself is the trap. I used a football picture in the conversation because I live in Bengal country and I have watched 60,000 people invent causation out of a lucky shirt. One receiver catches a ball in the last minute, and ten thousand isolated nervous systems all decide their fabric caused the physics. We do the same thing with God and history. We live in a vacuum of limited observation, and then we call the vacuum providence.

I Am Not a Young-Earth Creationist, and I Do Not Need the Planetarium to Close the Argument

The Creation Museum has a fine exhibit culture. I live in this triangle. I have sat through their planetarium show, which is really good, and I have been curious how they sell a 6,000-year-old Earth with a straight face while the sky over Petersburg is the same sky that makes deep time obvious.[7] I am not a young-earth man. I am a deep-past man. The idea that life only exists here, and only during this thin slice of time, is ridiculous to me. That is not rebellion against Genesis. That is refusing to let a nineteenth-century fight with Darwin become the whole religion.

Young-earth certainty and materialist certainty are twin categories. Both are easy to administer. Both spare you from the harder sentence: we do not know how old the war is, we do not know how many worlds it touches, and we are arrogant to think the Bible’s human camera angle is the only camera in the universe. I love the Bible because it is the longest political and spiritual after-action report I have. I do not love it because a committee told me I am not allowed to notice the lens.

Job Is Not Comfort Literature

I understand Job. I have had enough wreckage in my life that the book does not feel like a classroom exercise. I do not sit around looking for a hug from a psychotherapist. I outmaneuver hard things by moving. People say I am positive about everything. That is not a personality quirk. That is a method. You do not beat a siege by narrating your wounds to an audience that cannot lift a gate.[8]

What I will not do is pretend Job is a success story for management. Satan walks into the council, talks God into a demonstration, and a good man’s world is stripped for a wager. Edwards says the boundaries prove sovereignty because the Accuser had to ask permission. I say that is the behavior of a boss who can still sign the visitor badge while the factory burns. Permission is not the same thing as competence. Permission is not the same thing as loyalty to the people who actually bleed.

If I had been standing in that council, I would have wanted Satan’s head off in the air. Not as theater. As containment. Then I would have watched God’s face. That is the test nobody in Sunday school is allowed to run. If the Accuser is a rebel, you kill the rebel. If the Accuser is a tool, you just learned something about the toolmaker that the later chapters are designed to keep you from saying out loud.

Sovereignty, Lucky Jerseys, and the Divine Council Bureaucracy

Edwards’s best line in the exchange, the one that still rings, is that God is not a being among beings. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The greater one in us is greater than the one in the world.[9] I like the music of that. I also asked the question bureaucracy always dreads: if he is in charge of everybody, why the council? Why the governors? Why the sons of God with portfolios? Why a heavenly civil service if the king can move the sun with a sentence?

The approved answer is generosity. God does not need help. He shares the dignity of rule, as a great king appoints judges. Fine. I have run companies. I have watched kings appoint judges. Sometimes it is generosity. Sometimes it is a man who cannot stand to be seen doing the ugly work with his own hands. A weak leader uses other people to do what he lacks the social courage to do himself. He works through passive systems. He keeps a villain on payroll, so the villain can be blamed when the quarterly report comes in bloody.

That is how Job reads to me when I take the piety filter off. God keeps an Accuser. The Accuser proposes torture. God authorizes a limited version. Later writers explain that it was for Job’s refinement and for the audience’s faith. Hindsight is the favorite tool of every failed administration. You look back at what already happened and discover it was necessary. Necessity is cheap when you are not the one burying children.

Why Does an All-Powerful God Need Proof of Loyalty Through Pain?

Edwards says God is not insecure. The infinite self-existent one was happy before he made a single atom. Tests are for us, not for him. The fire does not inform the goldsmith. It purifies the gold. I have heard that sermon. I have preached versions of it to myself on bad mornings. It still leaves the managerial question on the table.

Why is the refinement this expensive? Why do the loyal become the demonstration models? Why does Israel get the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Roman, the exile, the rape, the blinded king, the suicide cliff at Masada, and then a theologian with a clean desk explaining that holiness required it? I am too old to pretend that stacking enough millennia on the wound automatically turns it into wisdom. Maybe from the vantage of a thousand years and many worlds there is a logic. I have been looking for that logic. So far I have found a political war against non-human insurgents, and a human need to believe the chairman is still chairman.

People do not like that sentence because you are not supposed to question God’s authority. Scripture itself is full of people who did — Job, David, Jeremiah, the man on the cross quoting Psalm 22. The ban is not in the text. The ban is in the later management of the text. You may wrestle. You may not judge the judge. That rule is very convenient for the judge.

I Do Not Wake Up Looking for a Savior

I will say this as plainly as I said it in the conversation. I am not a bend-the-knee type. I am not looking for a replacement father. I think a lot of organized religion is built for people who never stopped needing that structure, and I do not despise them for it. If that is what holds a person together, it is more valuable than my path would be for them. It is not my path.

Loyalty has to be earned. You do not get my service because I inherited Adam’s paperwork. You do not get it because a Roman-era council said the canon is closed and the questions are now a character issue. If you let evil run loose through my world and then call the wreckage a quiz, you have not earned the title you keep putting on the letterhead.

Edwards asked the fair question: if you no longer believe God is fully in control, why keep the Bible? Because it is the only chronicle I have that is long enough to show the pattern. Three or four thousand years of God-talk, council-talk, war-talk, and human failure. I read it the way I would read an after-action report on a candidate who keeps losing precincts and then writing memoirs about hidden victories. I am looking for the ground game. I want to beat the evil that I think God has failed to contain. I do not want a ticket out. I do not want an eternal basement where I am safe because I surrendered. I want the thing hunted where it lives — on earth, in the unseen, in whatever dark matter and outer dark the language is pointing at.

The Strategic Failure Pattern Across Scripture

Edwards’s counter is the old one. Every time man tries to destroy evil in his own strength, he fails or makes it worse. Lasting victories come only when God acts through surrendered people. Therefore, the strategy I am hunting is the one I distrust: decrease so he can increase.

That sounds to me like passive-aggressive leadership. A failed executive telling the staff that the only competence left in the building is his, so stop trying. Maybe divine wisdom really does sit above my pay grade which is a concept I don’t believe in because it accepts a structure that protects evil from analysis. Maybe. I have also watched that speech get used by every earthly institution that wanted obedience without performance. Israel tries to clear the land and cannot. Disciples try to cast out a demon and cannot. The church inherits the empire and then burns people for translation errors. The pattern I keep seeing is not “surrender works.” The pattern is “the movement needs the failure so it can keep selling surrender.”

If I could rewrite one rule of the war, I would stop using good and innocent people as acceptable casualties. I would stop treating the loyal as the easiest demonstration objects. A leader who lets the enemy chew his own household to make a point is not mysterious. He is a poor defender. Call that blasphemy if you need the category. I call it a performance review.

What Jesus Meant by “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me”

That was the question I wanted Edwards for. In the last minutes, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22.[10] The orthodox reading is elegant. Every Jew in earshot knows the rest of the psalm. Agony first, victory later. The Son bears wrath. The physical torture is not the worst part. The worst part is separation. It is not doubt. It is payment.

What I hear is a man in a scapegoat machine. The idea that the sins of the world can be loaded onto one body and walked out of the camp is older than Golgotha. It is in Leviticus. It is in the human nervous system. People who have cheated, grabbed, and gone numb need a goat. First-century Jerusalem had Rome on its neck and a purity system in its temples. A public death that could be read as both Roman order and Jewish atonement is politically efficient. I do not say that as a sneer at the man. I say it as a reading of the market.

Was he doubting? I think he was a tortured human body, lightheaded, pierced, and still honest enough to say the sentence that piety wants to footnote away. If the cry is only liturgy, then the pain is only theater. I do not think the pain was theater.

The Kashmir Question, Politics, and Why Bodies Matter

I am going to say the part that gets people really upset. I think the crucifixion was a political killing. I think Rome wanted a problem removed without owning the whole bill, and a slice of the Jerusalem establishment wanted a pressure valve. I think the body of Jesus becoming unfindable helped everyone who needed a story that could travel. Moreover, I think the Kashmir tradition — Roza Bal, Yuz Asaf, a man who survives the empire and dies old in the north of India — is at least as entitled to forensic curiosity as the claim that matter dematerialized because a later council said so.[11]

I know the Ahmadiyya have their own reasons for wanting Jesus alive and unsacrificed. I know Islam has its own reasons. I know Led Zeppelin fans have their reasons, and they are not theological. None of that makes the empty tomb automatically supernatural. It makes the empty tomb a contested piece of political property. If there are bones in a private or shrine context that people have whispered about for a century, the adult move is not to hiss “blasphemy.” The adult move is to ask what the genes say. We are not ready for that conversation as a culture because the conversation would smash too many identities at once.

Edwards, and the whole martyr argument after him, asks why the inner circle would die for a lie. It is a serious question.[12] My answer is not that they were cartoon frauds. My answer is that movements eat identity. Once your name, your friends, your enemies, and your hope of being remembered are all welded to a story, the story becomes the last asset you have. I have watched modern parties do it. I have watched people who finally got power try to crawl back into the victim costume because the costume was the only self they trusted. Rome, Judea, a dead or vanished leader, a handful of men who would otherwise be nobody — that is enough heat to bake a religion.[13]

James, Paul, and the Psychology of Movements After the Leader Is Gone

James is the hard case, and I will not pretend otherwise. He was not a believer during the ministry. Afterward, he becomes the spine of the Jerusalem church and dies for it.[14] Guilt is part of my read. Grief is part of it. So is the sudden, terrible honor of being the last blood left in the room. That is not the same celebrity as wine and women. If you inherit a crucified brother’s name, the only way the currency spends is to live poor, pray the knees off yourself, and look like him. Immortality through the written word is still immortality. Most people thrown off temples are forgotten. James is not. That incentive is real whether the metaphysics are true or not.

Paul is the scaling engine. Without Paul there is no Gentile church as we know it. James and Paul did not roast hot dogs in matching shirts. They fought. The later harmony is a product, the way party platforms are products.[15] I like James. I think he was one of the good ones. I also think good men can stabilize a narrative they did not start and cannot fact-check anymore because the body is gone and the politics have already hardened.

Led Zeppelin, Kashmir, and the Whisper of the Spirit World

Why do people who like to dissolve their ordinary mind keep circling that song? I do not think it is just the riff.[16] I think the spirit world has a long memory and popular art is one of the leaks. We hear whispers, and we dress them as taste. That is not an argument for taking a rock band as a footnote to Matthew. It is an argument that the official custodians of the story do not have a monopoly on the residue.

If you love God and you look around, you do not see a tight ship. You see evil spitting in the claim of control every five seconds. Then you see nice people turn the other cheek and use Jesus as a permit to stay out of the fight. Martyrdom becomes a brand. Cowardice borrows a cross. I want the opposite instinct. I want the war taken to the thing that is torturing people.

Are We Free, or Are We Reading a Record Left by People Who Needed Compliance?

Who wrote the dumb rules? That was my question when Edwards said the only way to beat evil is to yield to the God who, from my chair, has let it run. A rational rule would look like any competent shop floor. Contain the arsonist. Do not use the night shift as kindling to prove the arsonist exists. Do not publish a handbook later that says the fire was a teaching moment.

The Bible I trust is the Bible I can read between the lines of. I trust it more than I trust the handlers. Councils, empires, reformers, and television teachers all have motives. Rome needed glue as the frontiers cracked. A crucified provincial who could be turned into a cosmic loyalty oath is better glue than another legion.[17] That does not make every line a lie. It means you read like an adult. You ask what was written down and what was not, and why.

My assertion is simple enough to make people furious. Non-human intelligence — call them Elohim, Watchers, demons, NHI, whatever shelf-label you need — has been trying to undo what was made. I think the garden commission was a political statement against rebels on the council. Humans were not designed to be mascots.[18] We were designed to be dangerous to the bureaucracy that did not want us here. That is why the categories exist. That is why “do not question” is preached as humility. A questioning human is harder to herd.

What I Am Looking For in the Bible

I am looking for a strategy. I study wars because I want to know where people failed to beat what was hunting them. I want to succeed where they failed. That is not pride in the cheap sense. It is refusal. I did not wake up wanting to be anybody’s servant, on earth or off it. I woke up wanting to do good work and to stop watching evil treat the world like an open cafeteria.

Edwards was right about my temperature. I am angry. I think anger, in this case, is cleaner than the sweetness that calls itself faith while the same pattern repeats. He was also right that I still have the book open. I keep it open because it is the only long record that does not pretend human beings are only animals or only angels. It shows the council. It shows the Accuser. It shows the empires. It shows the scapegoat. It shows the men who died with the name in their mouths. It shows, if you will look, the politics.[19][20]

If you want the softer Edwards, he is in the Study Bible, and he is worth the time. If you want the American warrior version of the same hunger — competence, natural law, no more yielding to a failed order because the order has a hymn — that is the work I put into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the earlier books.[21] Read both. Argue with both. I did not earn the right to say these things by being careful. I earned it by thinking them for a long time and then saying them with my own name attached.

Are we free? That is the only question left that matters. Free will is either real, or we are livestock with better marketing. I act as if it is real. I read as if the other side is trying to convince me it is not. Moreover, I will keep looking for a way to destroy the evil that has been working for thousands of years, with God if he will do a decent job of it, and without him if he will not. That is the conversation I wanted. That is the conversation I had.

Notes for Searchers, Pastors, and Operators

If you came here from a search on Age of Disclosure, divine council, Jonathan Edwards sovereignty, Job and Satan, Jesus in Kashmir, or whether UAP are demons, you are in the right file. The point was never to baptize a documentary. The point was to stop letting science-press-conference language hide a much older political structure. Read Psalm 82 before you read the next hearing transcript. Read Job 1 before you let a preacher tell you permission and goodness are the same thing. Read the crucifixion as both theology and provincial crisis management. Then decide what you are willing to serve.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. 1899. English editions vary.

Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Annihilation of Man. 2020, and related Enochic commentary in the current disclosure debate.

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Creation Museum / Answers in Genesis. Public exhibits and published young-earth materials. Petersburg, Kentucky.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. Yale University Press, 1957.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons on the sovereignty of God in the salvation of men. Various WJE volumes.

Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History.

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025.

Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Knopf, 2007.

Habermas, Gary, and Michael Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel, 2004.

Hassnain, Fida. A Search for the Historical Jesus. 1994, and later Roza Bal collaborations.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior. https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/

Josephus. Jewish Antiquities.

Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir.” Physical Graffiti. Swan Song, 1975.

Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Redfern, Nick. Final Events. Anomalist Books, 2010.

The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 1–11; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Kings 22; Job; Psalm 22; Psalm 82; Daniel 4; Matthew 27; Mark 15; Acts; Galatians; Ephesians 6; Hebrews 1; 1 John 4.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.

1 Enoch (Book of the Watchers) and related Second Temple literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Suggested search headers for syndication

Age of Disclosure spiritual meaning; non-human intelligence demons or Elohim; Jonathan Edwards sovereignty of God critique; divine council Psalm 82 politics; Book of Job Satan permission; Jesus tomb Kashmir Roza Bal; James brother of Jesus motive; why did disciples die for the resurrection; Creation Museum planetarium old earth; politics of heaven Rich Hoffman; Overmanwarrior theology.

[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025). The film compiles testimony from current and former U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials asserting an eighty-year concealment of non-human intelligence and recovered craft.

[2] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). The working thesis is that biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern political structures, and modern power systems describe one continuous contest, not two separate subjects called “religion” and “politics.”

[3] Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1957). Edwards distinguishes God as the permitter and disposer of events from God as the moral author of sin.

[4] Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (various Crossway/ESV study editions and companion notes used in American Reformed preaching). Edwards remains the most serious American attempt to hold together revival, metaphysics, and civic order.

[5] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015); see also Psalm 82:1; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Job 1:6–12; 1 Kings 22:19–23.

[6] On the “Collins Elite” and the demonic interpretation of UAP/NHI inside defense circles, see Nick Redfern, Final Events (Anomalist Books, 2010), and later pastoral briefings discussed in coverage of Age of Disclosure. The claim is contested. The pattern is not.

[7] Answers in Genesis / Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. The institution is a short drive from the Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky metro. Young-earth chronology is their public commitment; it is not mine.

[8] Job 1–2; Job 38–42. The book is not a Hallmark card. It is a courtroom transcript with a body count.

[9] Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; 1 John 4:4. Edwards and the Reformed tradition treat these as proofs of unshared sovereignty. I treat them as claims that still have to survive contact with history.

[10] Psalm 22. The first line is agony; the psalm ends in public vindication. That literary fact does not automatically settle what a dying man felt.

[11] Roza Bal (Rozabal) shrine, Khanyar, Srinagar. The Ahmadiyya claim that Yuz Asaf is Jesus after a survived crucifixion is advanced in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (1899), and later in Fida Hassnain and popular Kashmir travel literature. Mainstream historians and the shrine’s Sunni caretakers reject the identification. I am not asking anyone to baptize the theory. I am asking why the empty-tomb claim is protected from ordinary forensic curiosity.

[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), remains the strongest academic case that the earliest Christians believed they had seen a bodily risen Jesus and were willing to die for that claim. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona collect the “minimal facts” argument. I am familiar with that literature. I am unpersuaded that martyrdom proves the metaphysics. It proves intensity.

[13] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[14] Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203, on the death of James. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, preserves Hegesippus on James’s reputation and execution.

[15] Acts 9; Galatians 1–2; and the well-documented tension between Paul and the Jerusalem circle. Christianity as a scaled movement is unthinkable without Paul. That is a political observation, not a Sunday-school slight.

[16] Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975). Popular culture often keeps older spirit-world memory that official theology pretends it has already solved.

[17] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[18] Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8. The image-of-God commission is a political charter over the garden and the nations, not a permission slip to become a house pet in someone else’s bureaucracy.

[19] 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers language is not a metaphor for bad vibes. It is organizational language.

[20] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741); Religious Affections (1746); and the sermons on God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men. Edwards feared chaos in the human heart more than he feared looking like a weak manager. That is the difference between us.

[21] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021); The Symposium of Justice (2004); Tail of the Dragon (2012).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Why I Had an AI Conversation with Jonathan Edwards: Solomon’s Adversaries, Psalm 82, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, and Why America Needs a Second Great Awakening

I have been reading The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, the new NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and released August 18, 2026.[1] I promised myself I would have a conversation with Jonathan Edwards. He died in 1758. He is not coming back to sit across a table in Middletown. But I think with AI a conversation can go the way it would go if he were alive today, provided the machine is forced to stay inside what the man actually wrote and believed.

I used Grok because it does a decent job of pulling from the public record instead of inventing a pious cartoon. I asked it to be Jonathan Edwards. I asked questions that came off the page of that study Bible and off the street of 2026. What follows is not a séance. It is not a message from heaven. It is a simulation built on a lifetime of Edwards’s sermons, treatises, miscellanies, letters, and the notes now printed beside the biblical text.[2] I say that up front because honesty is part of the point. If we start lying about what a tool is, we will start lying about what God is.

I still think it was a healthy conversation. I think America is starving for the kind of seriousness Edwards brought to a pulpit in Northampton and later to Enfield. I think the timing of this Bible is not an accident. And I think righteousness is a weapon. Not a slogan. A weapon.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and Why I Opened It

Thomas Nelson published The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ in multiple bindings: hardcover, brown Leathersoft, and black genuine leather. It is a red-letter NKJV, Comfort Print, with study notes drawn from Edwards’s own work, full-page essays on his theology and the First Great Awakening, his Resolutions, and an introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system so a reader can build one of his own.[3]

I bought a marked, indexed copy. I prefer brown leather to black. The smell of the leather is not a small thing. A Bible you want to pick up is a Bible you will actually read. I have several Thomas Nelson Bibles. They are a top-tier publisher. This one is different because the notes are not a committee of living professors talking about Edwards. They are Edwards talking about Scripture himself.

That is why I started asking him questions.

Page 379, in the neighborhood of 1 Kings, stopped me. The text is about the adversaries God raised against Solomon after the king’s heart drifted. Hadad the Edomite. Rezon of Damascus. Then Jeroboam from inside the house.[4] God did not give Solomon an easy life after Solomon stopped giving God an undivided heart. I think that is one of the most important patterns in the whole Bible, and I think modern people hate it because we have been trained to treat comfort as proof of blessing.

God Raised Adversaries Against Solomon on Purpose

The Lord “raised up” adversaries against Solomon.[5] That verb matters. These men were not accidents. Hadad had a childhood grievance from Joab’s slaughter in Edom. Rezon gathered a band after David crushed Zobah and eventually took Damascus. Jeroboam was Solomon’s own servant. Three directions of pressure: south, north, and home.

Edwards’s whole theology of providence says God is not wringing His hands when enemies appear. God uses them. Wisdom was given to Solomon. Trial was also given to Solomon. The point was not to make the throne comfortable. The point was to keep the heart from treating the throne as a god.

I told “Edwards” that I find it interesting how God operates. He is not trying to give His representatives an easy life. He is trying to shape them. Adversaries rise so that a man either returns to dependence or exposes the fact that he never had it.

The simulated Edwards answered in the key I expected from Religious Affections and the sermons on 1 Kings: complacency is more dangerous than opposition. Opposition drives a soul back to the Almighty. Comfort lets a soul drift toward other gods while still singing the right hymns on the Sabbath.

Solomon’s ivory throne is not a small detail.[6] Ivory is luxury. Ivory is imported glory. Ivory shows up again in the language of palaces and later in the white throne imagery people reach for when they talk about final judgment.[7] Edwards would not tell you to admire the furniture. He would tell you to ask whether the man sitting on it still loved the Lord with his whole heart.

Solomon did not. He multiplied wives and concubines. He built high places for their gods. He wanted an easy life. He wanted seven political marriages to keep the surrounding powers happy instead of going to war with his own desires. That is not strength. That is management. Management is how kingdoms rot.

Why a Thousand Years of Peace Would Not Make Us Heroes

I pressed the millennial question because people use it as a sedative. If God would just take the devil off the board for a thousand years, wouldn’t everybody become righteous by default?

No. That is the opposite of the biblical argument.

Take the adversaries away and you do not automatically produce servants. You produce people who have never been conditioned. External enemies can be bound. The rebellion inside a human heart is not bound by a change in the weather. Revelation is blunt about what happens at the end of that thousand years: there is still a revolt when the test returns.[8] The problem was never only the dragon outside the camp. The problem is us.

Edwards’s Calvinism is not popular at the Waffle House. It says the peaceful life is not the goal. Obedience is the goal, whether in comfort or in suffering. Suffering does not manufacture righteousness. Suffering reveals whether righteousness is there. Solomon’s comfort exposed his heart. Jesus’ suffering exposed His.

That is the comparison I wanted on the table.

Solomon had wives who all wanted attention and all had different gods. He bent. Jesus had no wife, refused the kingdoms of this world when they were offered in the wilderness, and chose the cross rather than a negotiated peace with the powers.[9] Suffering itself is not the righteousness. The obedience inside the suffering is. Solomon failed that test. Christ passed it. Every one of us will answer the same question in our own lives: do we love God more than we love our own comfort?

I think that question is the one America is failing in public.

Why Does God Let Satan Exist?

I asked the rude question. If God is in charge, why keep an adversary? Doesn’t He need a prosecutor to see who is worthy of the ivory throne?

The Edwards answer, drawn from Job, from Luke 22, from the whole Reformed reading of providence, is that God does not need Satan. God uses Satan. The Accuser is on a leash. The trials expose whether faith is genuine or only a profession. Success can be a more dangerous drug than pain. Solomon discovered that. So did every fat church that ever confused a full offering plate with revival.

People do not like that because it removes the alibi. If evil is a rival god fighting Yahweh to a draw, then I can shrug. If evil is permitted for a purpose, then I am responsible for how I respond.

That is not a donation-plate bow. That is the doctrine of sovereignty. Either God is God or He is a committee chairman hoping the other members show up.

Psalm 82 Is a Courtroom, Not a Plea for Help

Then I took AI Edwards to Psalm 82, because that psalm is the one modern readers use to claim God is bargaining with a divine council He cannot control.

“God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”[10] “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?” Defend the poor. Deliver the fatherless. Free them from the hand of the wicked. Then: you shall die like men and fall like one of the princes. Arise, O God, judge the earth, for You shall inherit all nations.

I told the simulation it does not sound like Psalm 2. It sounds like God is appealing to superiors.

God is not in Control

According to Edwards in Psalm 82 which is essentially a courtroom scene. God is not negotiating. God is indicting delegated authorities who abused the office He gave them. Whether a reader takes the “gods” as corrupt human judges or as rebellious members of the heavenly host, the structure is the same.[11] Authority was delegated. Authority was abused. The Judge is not asking them for help. He is telling them their time is up. Their power is temporary. They will answer. The fatherless condition in a society is not proof that God lost. It is evidence that the stewards failed.

Pharaoh was permitted. Babylon was permitted. Rome was permitted. Permission is not partnership. The outcome is already written. “You shall die like men.” That is not a fundraising slogan. That is a sentence.

I think Americans need that psalm right now more than they need another panel discussion about “threats to democracy.” The question in Psalm 82 is not whether the wicked have a season. The question is whether the Judge will rise. The psalm says He will.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Still Fits

If there is one Edwards text I return to, it is Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield on July 8, 1741.[12] He had already preached a form of it at home. Enfield was the explosion. People cried out. He had to stop. The image that stuck in the American mind is the spider.

A spider hangs over the fire by a thread. You can drop it. You can set it on a log. The spider does not get a vote about the heat. Edwards said that is exactly how a soul hangs over the flames of God’s wrath: not by its own strength, but only by God’s forbearance.

I asked whether he would preach it the same way today.

The honest Edwards answer is that he would not make it more vicious. The truth is already terrible enough. What he would add, because the whole counsel of God requires it, is that the hands holding the thread are the same hands that were nailed to the cross. The terror is real. The invitation is wide. Comfort has made men more careless, not less. An age that can watch a thousand horrors before breakfast and then complain that a sermon is “mean” is an age that has gone numb.

I had forgotten how much he liked that spider. I have not forgotten how much modern pulpits hate it. They want the benefactor without the fire. They want pancakes and a parking lot. Edwards would say the only reason you are not already lost is patience you did not earn.

That still offends people. It offended them in 1741. Offended people are sometimes the ones who finally wake up.

Free Will, Desire, and the Fire

I pushed him on freedom. If God holds the thread, do I have any real choice?

Edwards spent a career on this in Freedom of the Will.[13] Men do what they want. That is the freedom they have. They are not dragged into hell against their desire. They love darkness rather than light. The spider cannot save itself. The offer of mercy is still genuine: come to Christ and live. Refusal is not a kidnapping. Refusal is a preference.

That is a hard psychology. It means the problem is not that we are too weak to be good. The problem is that we do not want God to be God. We want to be our own security. Eve wanted a better life and a shortcut to wisdom. The serpent did not overpower her. He offered what she already wanted.[14] That is why evil moves so easily. It does not have to kick the door in. It has to flatter the desire that is already sitting in the living room.

Insecurity is the soil. The lie is always the same: God is holding out on you; take what you want and you will be safe. Solomon took it. The end of Ecclesiastes is the hangover. Vanity. Emptiness. Palaces and wives and gold, and the man still has to say it was chasing the wind.[15]

Comfort is the more dangerous drug. Suffering is the megaphone.

Trust Is the Root the Bible Keeps Cutting Open

Once you see it, you see it everywhere. The fallen angels. The garden. Babel. Moses striking the rock. Israel at the edge of the land. Solomon’s high places. The rebels in Psalm 82. They do not fail because they doubt that God exists. They fail because they do not trust His character. They would rather rule a corrupt corner than submit to a good King. In my case, I want nothing to do with corruption. But I have no inclination to call anything a king, anywhere in the universe, or to submit to a king. Or to submit to anything, for that matter: a god, a government, even a friend or neighbor.

That is why Scripture treats faith as the non-negotiable. Not because God is fragile and needs compliments. Because distrust is the taproot of every other sin. Stop trusting God and you will trust yourself. Trust yourself long enough and you get destruction dressed up as freedom.

Joshua went into the land trusting that God would be there in the battle. Others had the same promise and folded. The difference was not tactics. The difference was trust. I think that is still the difference.

The Holy Ghost Is Not the Force and Not an Alien

I like Edwards on the Holy Spirit. I do not accept the lazy claim that “ghost” language is a New Testament invention. The Old Testament already speaks of men giving up the ghost when they die.[16] The idea of a life that is more than meat was not invented in Luke. What is new in the New Testament is the permanence of the Spirit’s indwelling in the believer, and the clear confession that the Spirit is not a mood. He is the third Person of the Trinity.

I asked whether that overlaps with the modern non-human intelligence conversation: can mind exist without a body? Edwards’s line, and the church’s line, is that the Holy Spirit is not a discovered intelligence. He is God who reveals Himself. He is not one competitor among principalities. The principalities are rebels against their Creator. They are not a genuine threat to His throne. Spiritual warfare is real. The outcome is not in doubt.[17]

People want the Force from Star Wars because the Force has no claim on you. An impersonal energy cannot tell you that you are wrong. A Person can. That is why we call Him the Holy Ghost and not “the vibe.” He has no biological nose or lips. He is also not a program. I am talking to a program. The Holy Spirit is the source of intelligence, not a product of it. You can have a relationship with a Person. You cannot have a relationship with electricity.

The literary device would be pretending there is no war. The reality is that the war is real and the Captain of salvation has already won.

How Jonathan Edwards Died, and What He Thought Death Was

Edwards became president of the College of New Jersey after his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr., died in 1757. He was inaugurated in early 1758. Smallpox was in Princeton. He took the inoculation then in use—variolation, not a modern vaccine—and died of complications on March 22, 1758.[18] His last counsel was calm. He commended his wife to the “uncommon union” he believed was spiritual and therefore would continue. He told his children they were about to be fatherless in this world and should seek a Father who would not fail them.

Sarah Pierpont Edwards went to care for the orphaned Burr grandchildren, contracted dysentery, and died in Philadelphia on October 2, 1758.[19] Their daughter Esther, who had nursed Edwards in his last days, also died that spring. Three funerals in months.

I asked the simulation if he was bitter. The writings say no. They had lived as people who did not think this world was the last home. Death was a door. I asked whether, from the other side, he watched them come in. That is where an honest AI has to break character. Jonathan Edwards has been dead since 1758. A model can imitate his style. It cannot send a field report from glory. The hope itself is the thing he preached. The chatbot is not the proof.

I would rather have that honesty than a counterfeit ghost.

What Would Edwards Have Said About His Grandson and Hamilton?

Aaron Burr Jr. was Edwards’s grandson. In 1804 he killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel at Weehawken.[20] I have my own view of Hamilton and the early banking architecture. I think it was an early warning of how a republic can slide. I think the duel froze something for a while. That is my reading, and I will own it.

Edwards, if you keep him inside his own ethics, would not celebrate a duel. He wrote against pride, against private vengeance, against the code of honor that makes a gentleman’s pistol into a sacrament. He would have called it a tragic moral failure even if he also saw Hamilton’s system as a temptation. A grandson who kills a man in a field is not the fruit Edwards prayed for when he wrote the Resolutions. In my case, I lean more to Burr than Edwards.

Family pain and public consequence can sit in the same paragraph. They did in that family. Burr Sr. ran Princeton. Edwards ran it for a few weeks. The grandson became vice president of the United States and then a byword. Providence is not neat. Providence is still providence.

What Hits Hardest in 2026

Human nature has not changed. The garden lie has not changed. The tower lie has not changed. The desire to be like God so that we do not have to trust God has not changed. Socialism, sacralized identity, the attempt to rewrite the founding as if Christianity were an embarrassment—those are new costumes on an old revolt.

Edwards’s usefulness is not that he was a mascot for a party. His usefulness is that he preached God’s glory and human dependence so fiercely that you cannot use him to bless complacency. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is not a midterms gimmick. It is a diagnosis. People are hanging by a thread and calling the thread a lifestyle.

I will say the political part in the first person because that is what I think, and I will not hide behind a committee.

I was at the White House. I was outside the residence, near that photograph of the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, blood on the face, the head turned. I thought: what is missing in all this elegance is a little Jonathan Edwards. Not as décor. As ballast. Then this study Bible came out a few months later and I thought: this is the book that should be on the desk, not as a prop, as a working text.

I think President Trump talking about this Bible in the Oval Office would do more than another round of Smithsonian arguments. I think visible engagement with the moral soil of the American experiment shifts a conversation from defense to provision. I think JD Vance could read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in full, not as a stunt after a ceremony that should stay a ceremony, but as a public act of seriousness. I have met him. He is from this part of Ohio. He can sound like a man who has read old books. If it moves two or three points among people who still believe church on Sunday means something, that is not nothing. If it does nothing, it still costs less than another week of chasing the ground the other side chose.

I know the church-and-state reflex. I also know the founding generation read these men. Edwards shaped the air that Franklin, Witherspoon, and the New England clergy breathed, even when they argued with him.[21] You can tell that story without turning the government into a church. You can also refuse to let the other side turn the government into a church of a different god.

Righteousness, in practical terms, is not a gun. It is the high ground. You make the other side climb. You stop letting them define the battlefield as groceries-only, feelings-only, procedure-only. You tell the truth about the human heart. You tell the truth about judgment and mercy in the same breath. You stop being embarrassed that the country had a First Great Awakening before it had a Constitution.

I think we need a second one. I think it will not start in a studio. It will start when enough people get off the couch after a hard year of prices and weariness and decide that suffering is not an excuse to go numb. Edwards did not have an easy life. Solomon did, and it ruined him. That is the lesson I want in circulation before November, and after November, and into 2027 when the people who thought history had ended discover it did not.

Righteousness as a Weapon, Not a Brand

I am not selling Bibles as a side hustle. I want the people who did this work rewarded so they can do more of it. I want readers. The weapon is not the object. The weapon is the content getting into the bloodstream.

If you understand righteousness, you can recognize counterfeits. You can see the garden move when someone says God is the problem and autonomy is the cure. You can see Babel when someone says we will make a name for ourselves and call it equity. You can see Solomon when a nation chooses palaces and alliances over a whole heart.

Preach that. Share it. Read the Enfield sermon out loud once without irony. Then read the notes on 1 Kings and Psalm 82 and the essays on the Awakening. Then decide whether you want to live like the man on the ivory throne or the Man on the cross.

I could run this conversation twelve hours. I am stopping here because an entry point is more useful than a warehouse. The door is open. Have the courage to step in. Buy the edition you can afford. Hardcover is enough. Leather is a pleasure. Cheap compared to dinner out, and it feeds longer.

I would encourage the people who actually have microphones in 2026 to stop being clever and start being clear. Edwards was clear. Clarity is what a numb age cannot stand and what it most needs.

Footnotes

[1] Thomas Nelson, The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026), publication date August 18, 2026. Product listings at Thomas Nelson Bibles, Amazon, Christianbook, and Barnes & Noble confirm ISBN 9781400339532 (hardcover) and related binding ISBNs.

[2] The Yale edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards remains the scholarly standard. See The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 26 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008). Much of the corpus is also available through the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale.

[3] Publisher description: study notes drawn from Edwards’s writings; doctrinal articles; full-page essays on his theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; introduction to the Miscellanies system; Edwards’s Resolutions; red-letter text; center-column references; concordance. See Thomas Nelson Bibles product page, “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.”

[4] 1 Kings 11:14–40. Hadad the Edomite (vv. 14–22); Rezon son of Eliada in Damascus (vv. 23–25); Jeroboam son of Nebat (vv. 26–40).

[5] 1 Kings 11:14, 23. The Hebrew idiom is that the LORD “raised up” a satan—an adversary—against Solomon after 11:1–13 records the divided heart and the high places.

[6] 1 Kings 10:18–20 describes the ivory throne overlaid with gold, six steps, twelve lions. Compare Amos 6:4 on ivory beds as a mark of complacent luxury.

[7] Revelation 20:11, the great white throne. The visual rhyme is easy to overwork; Edwards would tie throne language to dominion and judgment, not to interior design.

[8] Revelation 20:7–10. After the thousand years, Satan is released and gathers a revolt. The passage is the standard problem for any theology that treats peace itself as sanctifying.

[9] Matthew 4:8–10; Philippians 2:5–8; Hebrews 5:8–9. The wilderness offer of the kingdoms is the clean opposite of Solomon’s method of keeping the kingdoms happy through marriage and shrines.

[10] Psalm 82:1–8 (NKJV). Verse 1: “God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods.”

[11] Two major reading traditions: (a) human judges called elohim as in Exodus 21:6 and 22:8–9; (b) heavenly beings in a divine council, a reading associated in recent popular scholarship with Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm (Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2015). Edwards, working with the received text and Reformed federal theology, treats the psalm as God’s indictment of unjust rulers and His pledge to judge the earth. Either reading still leaves God as Judge, not petitioner.

[12] Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741). Contemporary diary evidence from Stephen Williams of Longmeadow records the outcry in the meetinghouse.

[13] Jonathan Edwards, A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754). The argument: the will always follows the strongest motive; moral inability is not physical compulsion.

[14] Genesis 3:1–6. The structure of the temptation is desire plus reinterpretation of God’s character, not raw force.

[15] Ecclesiastes 2:1–11; 12:13–14. Solomon’s own autopsy of pleasure.

[16] Genesis 25:8; 35:29; Job 3:11; Jeremiah 15:9 in older English. “Gave up the ghost” is translation English for the departure of breath/life. Luke 23:46 and Acts 5:5, 10 stand in that stream. The Personhood of the Holy Spirit is a New Testament clarity (John 14–16; Acts 5:3–4), not the first rumor that human beings are more than bodies.

[17] Ephesians 6:12; Colossians 2:15; Revelation 12:7–11. Warfare language and victory language belong together.

[18] Edwards died March 22, 1758, at Princeton after inoculation by Dr. William Shippen. Standard accounts: Sereno E. Dwight’s Life of President Edwards; George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), closing chapters; contemporary letter of Shippen to Sarah Edwards dated March 22, 1758.

[19] Sarah Pierpont Edwards died October 2, 1758, in Philadelphia, of dysentery, after traveling to retrieve her grandchildren. Esther Edwards Burr died April 7, 1758. Jonathan, Sarah, and Esther are buried at Princeton Cemetery.

[20] The Burr–Hamilton duel, July 11, 1804, Weehawken, New Jersey. Burr was the son of Aaron Burr Sr. and Esther Edwards Burr, hence Edwards’s grandson. See Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007), and Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin, 2004).

[21] On Edwards and the Revolutionary generation, see Mark A. Noll, Christians in the American Revolution (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977); Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and the Witherspoon literature connecting Princeton’s Edwardsian air to later political thought. Influence is atmospheric and documentary, not a claim that Edwards wrote the Constitution.

Bibliography

Primary Sources: Jonathan Edwards

Edwards, Jonathan. A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. An Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God’s People in Extraordinary Prayer. Boston: D. Henchman, 1747.

Edwards, Jonathan. Discourses on Various Important Subjects. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1738.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God. Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. Boston: D. Henchman, 1749.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. Written c. 1755; published posthumously.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957–2008.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. https://edwards.yale.edu/

The 2026 Study Bible

Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ. NKJV. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Thomas Nelson Bibles. “The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, NKJV.” Product page. https://www.thomasnelsonbibles.com/product/the-jonathan-edwards-study-bible-nkjv/

Scripture

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. (Text base of the 2026 study edition.)

Edwards Biography and Context

Dwight, Sereno E. The Life of President Edwards. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1. New York: S. Converse, 1829.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987.

Piper, John. God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998.

Tracy, Joseph. The Great Awakening. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 1842.

Family, Princeton, Death

Burr, Esther Edwards. The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754–1757. Edited by Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

Christie, Vance. “Jonathan Edwards’ Untimely, Faith-Filled Death.” VanceChristie.com, July 28, 2020.

Shippen, William. Letter to Sarah Edwards, March 22, 1758. Reprinted in Dwight, Life of President Edwards.

Psalm 82, Divine Council, and Sovereignty

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

Kidner, Derek. Psalms 73–150. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1975.

Waltke, Bruce K., and James M. Houston, with Erika Moore. The Psalms as Christian Worship. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.

Solomon, 1 Kings, and Kingship

Henry, Matthew. Commentary on the Whole Bible. 1708–1710. On 1 Kings 11.

Provan, Iain W. 1 and 2 Kings. New International Biblical Commentary. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995.

Wiseman, Donald J. 1 and 2 Kings. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1993.

Founding Era, Burr, Hamilton

Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Isenberg, Nancy. Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr. New York: Viking, 2007.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Noll, Mark A. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Stout, Harry S. The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Witherspoon, John. The Selected Writings of John Witherspoon. Edited by Thomas P. Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.

Great Awakening and Later Reception

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Winiarski, Douglas L. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Additional Works Cited or Consulted

Augustine. The City of God. Trans. Henry Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003.

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1559. Ed. John T. McNeill. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1960.

Owen, John. Pneumatologia, or A Discourse Concerning the Holy Spirit. 1674.

Packer, J. I. Knowing God. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1973.

Sproul, R. C. The Holiness of God. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1985.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Amy Acton’s Labor Day Meldown: She made Kamala Harris sound good

I want people to remember the speech. That is the point of writing this. Not the tent at the Canfield Fair. Not the man with a phone in his hand and pistols on his belt who never took them out. Not the Labor Day parade the next morning where the cameras decided she was a warrior because she walked a route and helped two people who fainted in the heat, get back up. I want the speech. The one they needed a diversion for, because it was that bad.

Over the Labor Day weekend Amy Acton stood in front of a union crowd and tried to take Vivek Ramaswamy to the finish line by yelling that he could not buy Ohio. She said it until the words stopped meaning anything. You cannot buy this state. You can’t buy us. You can’t buy us. You can’t buy us. Pete Buttigieg was in the frame. She sounded unhinged. She sounded like a candidate who had seen internals that were not doing what the press releases promised and decided volume would substitute for a theory of growth.

Then, the same weekend, a thirty-eight-year-old Canfield man named Patrick Havas shoved through a Democratic Party tent at the Canfield Fair, phone up, calling her name, knocking elderly people off mobility scooters. Highway Patrol grabbed him. After the fact they found two handguns, a Taser, brass knuckles. He never brandished a weapon. He never touched her. The charges that stuck were misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. That is a serious enough mess. It is not the movie they sold by Monday morning. It is a chaotic lunge by a man trying to get a picture and a word in, dressed up as an assassination attempt so nobody would have to replay the chant.

I have watched this trick before. When the product is bad, change the channel.

People Who Have Money Have Been Successful. That Is Not a Confession.

The attack they wanted the speech to carry is the oldest cheap shot in a democracy that still pretends it hates results. He is rich. He is not like you. He flew to a tennis match. He has a court at his house. He sits three rows back at the U.S. Open while you pack a lunch. David Pepper and the background choir have been working that note for months. It did not work on Donald Trump. It will not work on Vivek Ramaswamy unless Republicans help them play it.

We put Trump in the White House three times, through every mechanism designed to stop him, in no small part because he was rich. Means is not a moral defect. Means is how you survive a lawfare state that bills by the hour. Trump never ran away from golf. Golf is a sport wealthy people play. He likes it. He kept playing it. Every time they pointed at the clubhouse he doubled down. Here is the gold. Here is the silk. I have done well. Vote for me and I will make it so you can do well too.

Vivek likes tennis. He is good at tennis. He has a court. He flew to watch tennis. That is allowed. A man who can get on a plane without checking a savings account is not required to apologize to a woman whose closing argument is that independence itself is suspicious. Wealthy people enjoy things. That is one of the reasons people become wealthy. Fluidity gives you permission to be your own person. I would rather a governor who already has a life than a governor who needs the mansion to feel like somebody.

I have been talking lately about the Apostle Paul and why he was so effective. Part of it was independence. A man who can move, speak, and refuse a bribe because he is not waiting on a stipend is a different kind of missionary than a man who needs the collection plate to land. The Christian movement was not hurt by personal means. Politics is not hurt by it either. The people who tell you otherwise are usually standing between you and the next job.

She Is Preaching the Loser Mentality. That Is Why She Is Yelling.

Listen to the pitch underneath the chant. He is not like you. He has money. You cannot trust him. I am like you. I am not a politician. My last election was in high school. I am a doctor becoming a common one right in front of your eyes. The subtext she cannot help leaking is uglier. I have problems. I have chaos in the house. I am the lockdown saint who will steal from the people who made wealth and hand you a government job and a PlayStation afternoon.

There will always be some people who want that. They will vote for Amy Acton because they think she will pick a pocket that is not theirs and call it justice. That is her crowd: the discontent, the union hall that never got off the wagon, the people who believe the state’s highest purpose is a transfer. They know they are running behind. They need a few points. So they scream.

I said she was a con before the family-police stories made the rounds. I said it when she was DeWine’s health director, the Dr. Fauci of Ohio, the woman in the white coat in the Statehouse briefing room telling a free people that the long haul would be managed from her clipboard. Lockdown. Recovery after her stent. A governor who let her run because the cameras liked the lab coat. Anybody who doubts that record can read the last six years of Ohio and stop pretending it was a seminar.

She cannot raise money the way a winner raises money. She can scrape small-dollar piety and then announce she outraised the billionaire in a quarter if you leave his own check out of the math. Vivek put tens of millions of his own dollars on the table. Elon Musk wrote a super PAC a check. Jeff Yass and Bill Ackman showed up. Allies are outspending her on television by a brutal multiple. That is not “buying Ohio.” That is what happens when people who build things decide the state should not be handed back to the clipboard.

When you cannot compete in the only currency that buys airtime, you moralize the currency. You cannot buy us. Translation: please stop outspending us.

The 2016 Rhyme They Think We Forgot

I have been on stages with this type before. Going into 2016, John Kasich was still out there. Establishment machinery was still chipping. Mitch McConnell’s world was still working the edges against Trump. They said you could not vote for him because of this, because of that, because the lawyers had a theory. Trump did not run away from being Trump. He went around and spoke to people. He was proud. His crowds were better. He won anyway.

The same habit is alive in this race. Republicans still fight each other after the primary. A few voices would rather be right about Vivek’s swing in a batting cage than right about Ohio’s tax climate. Tucker-adjacent complainers who want the demise of the party more than they want a governor will always find a clip. Shame on them. They are doing what Kasich did in 2015 and what a slice of the donor class tried again in 2024. Trump won anyway. The people who stayed tight when it was hard have a special place with me. The late arrivals who discovered their conscience after the primary should know I have a memory.

Democrats do not have that problem. They made a fool of even the Democrats who privately know she is a weak closer, and they will still show up. That gives Amy Acton the feeling she can scream her way into a conversation. Republicans, meanwhile, donate opposition research to the other team and call it principle.

I Support Vivek. I Will Miss One Fundraiser. That Is Not a Taper.

I love Vivek Ramaswamy. I have said it. I will keep saying it. There was a fundraiser I was not at. I am usually at these things. This one I could not make, and it is not a cooling. I had something else that night. I will tell people privately what it was. Everybody will get a kick out of it. I expect to make an announcement in about a month, and I have to stay inside a contract until I know what I am allowed to say. When I am not in the room it is not personal. He will raise more at that party than she will raise in the next month. That is how the ball bounces when one candidate can fill a room with people who have already built something and the other candidate is asking the room to resent the builder.

The early people who stayed with him when it was not fashionable have my loyalty. I will always support them. The rock-throwers who showed up late to explain why a winner is insufficient should sit with that.

What Ohio Votes for When the Noise Stops

When the chant dies and the fairground movie is over, the choice is not mysterious. Do you want a state that brings job creators in so you can get hired, keep a paycheck, and climb, or do you want a state whose highest pitch is that the man with the plane should be ashamed of the plane?

Vivek flying to a tennis match is not a scandal. It is a demonstration that he does not need the job. “I don’t need the chair. I want the state to work so you can have what I have.” That is a better sentence than “I want to give everybody a government job.” One of those sentences produces a tax base. The other produces a line.

The public polls as of mid-September still bounce around a coin flip in the averages—Fox had him at 50–48 in August, Wedgewood had her up a point, Siena had them tied in June. Forecast models that bother with Ohio’s fundamentals still give him the better chance in a state Donald Trump carried by double digits. Tight is not tied in the soul of the electorate. Tight is what a bad weekend of Republican infighting and a successful media diversion can manufacture.

She sounded like the goalie of a team that knows the third period is going badly. I doubt she was drinking on the camera that caught the chant. She sounded like it. She cannot get out of her own way. That only helps him, and he does not need the help as much as she needs the noise.

Go vote for Vivek. If you want Ohio to prosper, he is the only logical candidate on the ballot. Do it enthusiastically. Remember that Amy Acton locked you down, and remember that she also stood in front of a crowd and tried to make success sound like theft. Do not let a fairground shove erase the sentence. The speech happened. The Amy Acton speech was bad.

Footnotes

[1] Amy Acton’s Labor Day-weekend appearances included a rally clip, circulated widely beginning about September 6, 2026, in which she repeated that Vivek Ramaswamy “cannot buy this state” and “can’t buy us,” with Secretary Pete Buttigieg in the orbit of the event. Conservative and independent clips branded the delivery a rant.

[2] On September 6, 2026, at the Canfield Fair in Mahoning County, Patrick Havas, 38, of Canfield, pushed through a crowd at the Mahoning County Democratic Party tent while Acton was speaking, phone raised, calling her name. Ohio State Highway Patrol detained him. Acton was unharmed. Two elderly attendees were knocked down. After the arrest, officers reported two pistols, a Taser, and brass knuckles on his person; he never brandished a firearm. Charges: misdemeanor assault, disorderly conduct, inducing panic. He pleaded not guilty.

[3] Acton marched the next morning, Labor Day, September 7, 2026, in Cleveland’s Labor Day parade, called Sunday a “rough day,” and assisted two women who collapsed on the route. The fair story dominated the weekend news hole.

[4] David Pepper is Acton’s 2026 running mate. He has used Ramaswamy’s wealth and a mocked batting-cage video as attack lines.

[5] Ramaswamy attended the U.S. Open in early September 2026. Acton’s campaign posted video and stills and accused him of “jetting off” the trail. He is a documented tennis player. Tennis was the sport they were afraid looked “too fancy.”

[6] Donald Trump’s refusal to apologize for golf, clubs, and wealth is the relevant precedent, 2016 through 2024. Ohio voted for Trump by 11.2 points in 2024.

[7] Acts of the Apostles presents Paul as a Roman citizen of Tarsus, a tentmaker who could travel, appeal to Caesar, and support himself. The argument here is independence, not a bank statement. See Acts 18:3, 22:25–29, 25:11.

[8] Acton served as Ohio Department of Health director under Gov. Mike DeWine from 2019 into 2020 and was the public face of Ohio’s COVID orders. Columbus Dispatch, September 14, 2026.

[9] Acton has at times outraised Ramaswamy in donor receipts for calendar 2026; Ramaswamy loaned his campaign on the order of $25 million plus later sums. A super PAC drew large checks including $5 million from Elon Musk. September reporting described allies outspending Acton on television by roughly six to one.

[10] Fox News / Beacon-Shaw, August 6–10: Ramaswamy 50, Acton 48. Wedgewood, August 11–13: Acton 47, Ramaswamy 46. NYT/Siena, June 15–28: 47–47. Aggregators in early September clustered near a dead heat.

[11] John Kasich remained a critic of Trump through the 2016 cycle as Ohio’s sitting governor. The parallel is factional Republican fire directed at a nominee after the fight should have ended.

Selected Bibliography

“2026 Ohio gubernatorial election.” Wikipedia. Updated September 14, 2026.

“2026 Polls: Ohio Governor.” 270toWin.

“Who Is Ahead in the Ohio Governor’s Race?” New York Times. Updated September 14, 2026.

Balmert, Jessie. “Amy Acton’s COVID response at center of race for Ohio governor.” Columbus Dispatch, September 14, 2026.

WKYC; Akron Beacon Journal; News 5 Cleveland. Labor Day parade and Canfield Fair coverage, September 6–7, 2026.

BBC; Reuters; NBC News. Havas arrest and charging, September 6–8, 2026.

Washington Examiner; NBC4; Cleveland.com / Jeremy Pelzer; New York Times (Musk/V-PAC). Fundraising and ad spend, June–September 2026.

Newsweek; The Independent; Mediaite; James Surowiecki on X. Tennis, U.S. Open, batting-cage video, September 2026.

The Holy Bible. Acts 18, 22, 25.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Christianity as a Scaling Movement: Principalities Behind Flesh and Blood Evil, and Why the Next Great Awakening Must Come From a Relationship with the Bible

Why I Keep Opening This Bible

I cannot say enough about the new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. It landed in August 2026, an NKJV built around the mind of the man I have come to think of as the theologian of American courage. The notes are not decorative. They are sermons, resolutions, doctrinal bone, and the working method of a man who wrote as if ideas had consequences because they do.[1]

I say that as a reader, not as a salesman. Somebody asked me if I work for the publisher because I will not shut up about it. I do not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years—some of them a couple of decades—compressing Edwards into a book you can carry. That labor has to eat. It has to buy a hamburger. It has to justify itself in a market or it dies in a seminar. Paul would have understood that sentence immediately.

Every time I get a new Bible and read it through a different set of notes, my angle shifts a few degrees. This time the shift was violent. I could not stop thinking what a miracle it is that the crucifixion was even reported, and what a second miracle it is that Christianity became a civilization instead of a rumor. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of a spiritual one, but because the spiritual claim had to survive contact with Rome, with human nature, and with time.

I would say the benefit of Christianity to the human race, and to Western civilization in particular, was magnificent. That is not nostalgia. That is an audit. And the audit keeps returning to one man who began as an enemy.

The Road to Damascus Was a Hostile Takeover

The most important conversion story in history is not a soft altar call. Saul of Tarsus was hunting the church. Then he was its most formidable champion. The turn on the Damascus road is personal, traumatic, and public all at once.[2] I think a lot of people live in that same weather: against the thing, then claimed by the thing, then unable to go back to the person they were.

Paul was not a fisherman. He was a trained Pharisee and a working tradesman, a tentmaker who could pay his own way.[3] That combination is the whole essay in miniature. He had letters and leather. He could argue with philosophers in Athens and stitch a living in Corinth. The original disciples had seen Jesus with their own eyes. Paul had seen the risen Christ in a different register, and he had a skill the others did not: he knew how to take a local fire and turn it into a network.

People like to romanticize the Jerusalem church in Acts, where believers held things in common. I look at that scene and I do not see a manifesto. I see a threatened family taking care of its own. Historians, when they are being honest, generally read it as voluntary generosity inside a persecuted community—not a planned economy, not a party platform, and not a model Paul exported as law.[4] Later ideologies would loot the language. That is what ideologies do. They steal the family table and call it a theory.

The Jerusalem group was not trying to invent socialism. They were trying not to die, and they were trying not to abandon widows. The arrangement did not become the operating system of the Gentile churches. Paul would not have let it. He was too busy building congregations that could stand on their own feet in cities that did not care whether they lived.

Why the Original Apostles Could Not Have Done Paul’s Job

I love the apostles. I do not confuse their calling with Paul’s. They were rooted in Jerusalem, preaching first to their own people. Their courage was the courage of witnesses. Several of them were poor. They put the emphasis on the message and on the willingness to be spent. Rome knew what to do with men like that. It crucified them, beheaded them, scattered them. We remember them because the record survived. Memory is not the same thing as scale.[5]

Paul fought with them. That fact is in the Bible, not in some cynical footnote I invented. He opposed Peter to his face when the Gentile question threatened to split the movement into a Jewish remnant and a half-welcome underclass.[6] Christianity did not lock arms and sing. It argued. It almost broke. The argument was about purity versus reach, table fellowship versus the map of the empire. Paul chose the map.

Without that fight, I do not think you get a world religion. You get a Jewish faction with a crucified Messiah and a short half-life. Rome was full of such groups. We do not know their names because they lost.[7]

John survived. Tradition says they tried to boil him and failed, then parked him on Patmos, where he wrote Revelation.[8] Paul did not survive. The usual account is execution in Rome under Nero, sometime in the mid-sixties.[9] People mix Paul and John the way they mix founders and finishers. Revelation is a vision of the end. Ephesians is a field manual for a people who have to live until the end. I need both. I do not pretend they are the same book.

The Tentmaker Advantage: Financial Independence as Spiritual Nerve

Here is the part church-language usually sands off. Paul could be bold because he was not living off the room. He reserved the right to refuse a paycheck from the very people he served so that no one could say he was selling them a product.[10] That is not pride. That is strategy. A man who can feed himself can say the thing that gets him uninvited.

I have watched too many movements collapse into client relationships. The preacher needs the donor. The donor needs the preacher to bless the donor. Pretty soon nobody will say the costly sentence. The original disciples, as I read them, were often one arrest away from disappearing. Their deaths were holy. They were also, in organizational terms, a warning. Martyrdom proves sincerity. It does not automatically prove succession.

Paul’s independence gave him latitude. He could travel. He could offend. He could plant and leave and write back when the plant started growing weeds. He could walk into a city as a man with a trade rather than as a dependent mystic. I think that is why his version of the faith could cross from synagogue to workshop to household to the imperial road system. He understood customers. I do not mean he cheapened the gospel. I mean he knew that people must be able to receive a thing, carry a thing, and organize their lives around a thing—or the thing remains a speech in an alley.

If you want to know why I keep calling Paul a businessman, that is why. Not because he maximized profit. Because he understood value, timing, distribution, and the difference between a local hero and a transferable institution.

What Ephesians Actually Does

Ephesians is my favorite book in the Bible. It is short enough to carry and large enough to rebuild a mind. Paul does not wander. He frames the whole Christian movement: what God did before the foundation of the world, what Christ did in history, what the church is as a body, how a household should run, and how a believer is supposed to stand when the visible world is not the real battlefield.

The line that will not let me go is Ephesians 6:12. We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.[11] I have come to think that verse is one of the most adult sentences ever written. It is what a person says after he has stopped believing that the problem is merely the neighbor’s personality.

Scholars argue over whether Paul meant demons, institutions, cosmic beings, or the spiritual charge inside empires and customs. I think he meant the whole weather system.[12] Names on mailboxes are not nothing. They are not the war. The war is the thing that climbs into names and makes them march.

That is why Ephesians could travel. It is theology you can use in Ephesus, Corinth, a Pennsylvania fort, a civil-war cemetery, or a county Republican breakfast. It tells a church how to live without becoming a cult and how to fight without mistaking people for the enemy. Paul called that arrangement a mystery revealed: Gentiles as fellow heirs, not guests in someone else’s religion.[13] That is scale. That is the business decision at the heart of the New Testament.

Flesh, Blood, and What I See in a Granddaughter

I have a young granddaughter. I watch her learn to walk, grab, flinch, laugh, and decide which faces matter. She is writing relationships into her nervous system that will still be there when she is fifty—parents, uncles, cousins, the strange country of grandparents. That is the human miracle and it is also the trap. We become so fascinated by whose nose she inherited that we forget to ask the older question.

What was she before she was a body? What is the spiritual essence that is using this little frame to enter the world? I do not mean that as a greeting-card. I mean it as politics. Paul called the hidden agents principalities. I have arrived at the same word by the long road of watching people. I am bad at names. People notice. They think I am careless. I am not careless about the thing I think is actually driving the name. Tim, Bob, Bill—fine. I want to know what climbed into Tim.

I do not get very excited about fleshly pursuits. I care about the politics of the powers that wear bodies like coats. That sounds cold until you have watched good people hurt each other while insisting they are only being practical. Paul’s sentence explains the pattern. The pattern is older than the persons.

This is also why the incarnation is not a sentimental Christmas pageant to me. If the real problem were only human manners, God could have sent another list. The Old Testament is not shy about the Spirit of God coming upon men. The scandal is that God himself takes flesh and walks into the mess. I think that is because human beings are not, at bottom, the main antagonist. The forces that use human beings are. Meeting us in the middle of the mess was not a branding exercise. It was an invasion.

When Does a Life Begin If the War Began Earlier?

I will not pretend this next piece is a public-policy white paper. It is the metaphysical question hiding under the abortion argument, and most of the argument never reaches it. The usual fight is: when does the fetus become human enough? Conception, heartbeat, viability, birth, one day before birth. Those are body questions. They matter. They are not the last questions.

Paul’s principalities force a harder timing problem. When does the spiritual being begin its journey in this world? I think the powers are already at work when a man and a woman find themselves wanting to form a union that could produce a child. They are either willing a life into the world or leaning the world toward demolition. Political systems, in my view, are the large, clumsy mirrors of that same contest. We build governments the way we build families: as flesh-and-blood answers to a conflict we can barely see.

If that is true, then a culture that talks only about bodies will keep losing to a culture that understands appetite, despair, and the unseen pressure on the will. I am not asking the county health department to adopt a demonology. I am asking Christians to stop acting as if Ephesians 6:12 were poetry.

What Christianity Gave the West

I said the gift was magnificent. Let me be specific enough to be attacked.

Christianity took a Mediterranean world that exposed unwanted infants, ranked souls by pedigree, and treated crucifixion as interior decorating for highways, and it taught that world that the weak had a claim on the strong. It made the person, not the clan, the unit of moral concern. It made conscience a public fact. It made time itself a story with a judgment at the end, which is another way of saying it made history matter.[14][15]

That moral architecture did not fall out of the sky in 1776. It was preached, copied, argued, and institutionalized for centuries before any Virginian wrote a declaration. Even secular historians who cannot recite the catechism now admit they are living inside the blast radius.[16] You can hate the church and still be using its furniture. Most modern humanitarian language is Christian language with the serial numbers filed off.

I do not say this because I think Christians have always behaved like saints. They have not. I say it because the standard by which we condemn their failures is itself a Christian standard. Rome did not accuse itself of failing the least of these. We do. That habit had to be invented.[17][18]

Jonathan Edwards and the American Nerve

If Paul is how the faith left Palestine, Edwards is one of the reasons it grew a backbone in English-speaking America. He is remembered, lazily, for one terrifying sermon in Enfield in 1741.[19] That sermon is real. It is also a fragment. Edwards was after joy in God, the nature of true affection, the freedom and bondage of the will, and a revival that would not fake itself.[20]

The First Great Awakening gave the colonies a shared moral language before they had a shared government. It taught ordinary people that authority could be wrong, that the soul had business with God that no bishop or parliament could intercept, and that history was not a closed room.[21] Calvin Coolidge, who is not usually cast as a revivalist, said Edwards’s philosophy had prepared the colonists for the Declaration.[22] That is a president talking, not a youth-group brochure.

I do not think America exists in the form I care about without that fire. I also do not think Edwards was sitting in Northampton in the 1740s designing the United States. Influence is a cascade, not a conspiracy. Edwards shapes a climate. The climate shapes men who never met him. The men walk onto battlefields and into conventions carrying instincts they think are simply common sense.[23][24]

His written corpus is enormous. Yale has spent generations editing it. The new study Bible is the first time a lot of ordinary readers will feel that weight without needing a research library card.[25]

Fort Necessity: The Wrong Turn That Organized My Year

My wife and I were trying to get toward Washington. We missed a turn, dropped onto the National Road with a camper that does not enjoy mountain switchbacks, and kept going because turning around had become a theology problem of its own. We pulled into Fort Necessity because the parking lot was large enough for me to get a Mello Yello out of our camper refrigerator.[26]

We were early. It was a midweek afternoon, still cold, almost empty. I went back to the refrigerator for my Mello Yello, which is as close as I get to a sacrament on the road, and we walked the ground. Young Washington was here. He built a sad little circular fort in a meadow and lost. That loss did not make him small. It started the education of the man who would refuse a crown.

I did not hear an audible voice. I am not going to insult the place by inventing one. What I did get was an obsession. The same year I stood at Fort Necessity I stood at Washington’s grave at Mount Vernon and in the room where he slept.

A few months later the Washington film made the circuit and we went. I liked it. But the question it could not answer for me was the one the field had already asked: what made Washington Washington? I think part of the answer is upstream of muskets. It is the Awakening’s idea that a people can be morally addressed as a people—that rebellion against a corrupt center might be obedience to a higher one.[27]

A phone call in the bookstore

While I was in the Fort Necessity bookstore, Nancy Nix called. She and I do local Republican work in Butler County, Ohio. We do not live on the phone. We think in the same direction often enough that when something is jammed, we say so and talk it out. She was dealing with the eternal problem of twenty-five people in a room who will not share a sandbox well together. I was surrounded by Washingtoniana. The juxtaposition was perfect. The early church had the same meeting. Paul had the same meeting. Scale always produces factions. The work is not to pretend otherwise. The work is to keep the factions from killing the thing they claim to love.

Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg, and the Men Who Paid the Invoice

We did Washington properly. We stood outside the White House. That same day we went to Ford’s Theatre. I had already had enough of John Wilkes Booth by the time I looked at the box Lincoln was shot in. I was hungry. I wanted a sandwich and a quieter mind. My wife was right to make us cross the street.[28]

A guide who had noticed we were not ordinary tourists took us through the Petersen House. I sat in that small room a long time. The bed, the chair, the knowledge that a president died a few feet from where tourists now whisper. I found myself wondering what Lincoln’s mind was doing while the body shut down. I cannot know. I think he was thinking about the Union as a moral object. I think the Awakening’s grandchildren were in that room whether anyone said Edwards’s name or not.

Then Gettysburg. We took the RV and gave the battlefield days, not hours. Weather, timing, day one, day two, day three, the cemeteries, the spot of the Address. I have read the military histories.[29] What I could not shake was the interior of the men. What do you tell yourself when you stand up on the third day and move toward a fence line that is trying to erase you? Some of them had Bibles. Some of them had fragments of sermons. Some of them had only the residue of a culture that had already decided the Union was a covenant and slavery a crime against it.[30][31]

A republic capable of spending that much blood to keep a proposition alive did not get that capacity from a seminar on self-esteem. It got it from a long Christian argument about the human person, providence, and judgment. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is what that argument sounds like when it has to bury hundreds of thousands of its own sons.

The Cascade I Keep Seeing

I will put the chain as cleanly as I can, knowing historians will want asterisks and I will give them some.

Without Paul, the Jesus movement remains a Jerusalem story. Without that scaled faith, there is no Christendom to form Europe’s conscience. Without that conscience, the English Protestant world does not produce an Edwards. Without Edwards and the Awakening, the American founding generation does not speak with the moral confidence it actually used—even the ones who were not revivalists. Without that founding, there is no Union for Lincoln to save. Without Lincoln, the American experiment becomes a slave republic with European manners.

That is not a straight line on a chalkboard. It is a watershed. Remove the spring and the towns downstream do not exist in the same form. I think Paul is the spring. I think Edwards is one of the American aqueducts. I think Washington and Lincoln are what the water looks like when it has to put on a uniform.[32][33][34]

People who only memorize the names of apostles miss this. They know who died. They do not know why the death did not end the firm. Paul is the reason the firm had branches.

The Business DNA of the Christian West

Once I saw Paul as a scaler, I started seeing the later fights differently. Mission movements that worked were not only brave. They were organized. They printed. They raised money. They trained. They built schools that outlived the missionaries. They treated the gospel as something that had to arrive in a form a stranger could use.

Only after that practical machinery proved it could create loyalty, literacy, and order did the Roman world—and much later the American world—fully absorb what it could not kill. I do not mean Christianity became a mere business. I mean it survived because it was not allergic to competence.

That is why I get impatient when the same voices that enjoy hospitals, universities, and human-rights talk treat business itself as original sin. The anti-business mood in the modern West is not just an economic opinion. It is often an attack on the very mechanism that let a demanding faith endure: independent people who can move, build, refuse a patron, and take a message across a border without asking a committee for permission.

Paul refused to live off handouts when the handout would have compromised the work. A civilization that sneers at that instinct will not keep the civilization Paul helped make. It will keep the vocabulary for a while. Then it will keep only the complaints.

Imperfect Instruments: Why I Compare a Businessman to Paul

I am going to say the impolite part. A lot of Christians wanted their political deliverance to arrive dressed like a Sunday-school painting. History does not usually staff itself that way. Paul had been a persecutor. He was not the profile the Jerusalem church would have ordered from a catalog.

I look at Donald Trump the same way I look at other blunt instruments in American life. I do not need him to be a systematic theologian. I need to notice what actually happened: a businessman with a public mess behind him enlarged the platform available to people who had been lectured out of public life. Charlie Kirk and a lot of ordinary conservatives could stand in rooms they would not have been invited into. I think that matters. I also think it is possible to be grateful for a door and still wish the doorman had better manners.

Paul did not come in the package people expected. Neither do most of the people who keep a movement from being locked in the sacristy. If your test for usefulness is polish, you will be ruled by people who are good at meetings and bad at history.

What a Second Great Awakening Would Actually Look Like

I do not think the next awakening arrives as a White House program. Administrations can restrain harm and they can appoint judges. They cannot regenerate a people. That work starts in churches, kitchens, Bibles, and arguments that last longer than a news cycle.

When I drive around my community on Sundays I see a lot of churches. Many of them are doing honest work. Many of them are reciting names. They know the apostles. They know the outline. They do not always know the politics inside the outline—the fight between purity and scale, martyrdom and mission, the local table and the empire of cities. That is why I am having this conversation in public. Surface catechism will not hold a civilization that is being talked out of itself.

A modern awakening would look, in practice, like people recovering nerve. Not vibe. Nerve. The willingness to tell the truth about good and evil without outsourcing the definitions to whatever academic fashion is currently eating its own young. It would look like families that treat children as souls rather than lifestyle accessories. It would look like churches that can stand a businessman in the pulpit without calling him unclean and can stand a poor man in the pulpit without calling him a mascot. It would look like gratitude for the West instead of a permanent apology for having won.

Edwards hoped God would walk with a people through the battlefields of ordinary life. I want that sentence back in circulation. Not as décor. As an operating assumption.

Why I Will Keep Talking to AI About This

A lot of people who read me despise artificial intelligence. Some of them despise Elon Musk on principle. They think any conversation like this is a rehearsal for a comic-book villain. I understand the fear. Tools this sharp can cut the wrong direction.

I also think it is cowardice to let the fear own the tool. We built machines that can hold a line of argument, retrieve a library, and stay in the fight when a human conversation partner gets tired. Used stupidly, that becomes a substitute for thought. Used properly, it becomes a way to do what Paul did with letters: send a structured argument into places the sender cannot physically be.

This is not a prophecy of Ultron. That is a man using a new press. The first Great Awakening had Whitefield’s lungs and a rising print culture.

A second one will have churches, Bibles, and whatever honest instruments we refuse to surrender to people who hate the civilization that made the instruments.[35]

I am not asking anyone to worship a model. I am asking them to notice that reference, memory, and argument are part of spiritual warfare too. If the principalities are real, they are not frightened by our refusal to use a library because the library is now silicon.

Know Where You Are

I watched, not long ago, the easy public habit of praising every sacred book as if they were interchangeable courtesy items. Respect, as a civic manner, is one thing. Amnesia is another. I have read the Qur’an more than once. I can say, without theatrics, that it has never done to my mind what Edwards does, and it has never done what Ephesians does. That is not a foreign-policy program. It is a reader’s report.

A nation that cannot tell the difference between the sources of its own law and the sources of someone else’s empire is a nation preparing to be edited. I will not help with the editing. The point of the progressive pressure I have spent years writing against is not manners. It is unmaking. If you want to unmake a people, you first convince them that the faith which built their hospitals, their conscience, and their suspicion of kings was always a crime scene.

I think that project is the current face of the old war. Flesh and blood will carry it. Flesh and blood are not the origin of it.

What I Want the Reader to Do

If you only remember one practical sentence, remember this: start with Paul if you want to know how the faith survived, and start with Edwards if you want to know how it learned to speak American.

Buy the book if you can. Read Ephesians slowly, out loud, as if it were written to a congregation that might split next week—because that is the situation it was written for. Then read Edwards on affections and ask whether your religion is an appetite or a performance. Then walk some actual ground. Necessity. Vernon. Gettysburg. The cheap seats at Ford’s Theatre. History gets into the legs in a way it does not get into a feed.

Notes

The numbered references in the text correspond to the sources below and to the bibliography. Biblical citations follow common English versification; quotations from Ephesians use the New King James Version to stay with the Edwards study edition.

[1] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Notes drawn from Edwards’s corpus; essays on his life, theology, spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening; Edwards’s Resolutions; introduction to the Miscellanies system.

[2] Acts 9:1–19; Galatians 1:11–24; Acts 22:3–21; Acts 26:12–18.

[3] Acts 18:3. The Greek is skēnopoioi, traditionally “tentmakers.” See Kenneth Berding, “Was Paul a Tentmaker? Part 1,” The Good Book Blog, Biola University, October 18, 2021.

[4] Acts 2:44–47; Acts 4:32–37. Compare the later famine collection in Acts 11:27–30. Historians generally read the Jerusalem sharing as voluntary generosity inside a threatened community, not a standing political economy.

[5] Acts 4:13.

[6] Galatians 2:11–14; Acts 15:1–35.

[7] Josephus, The Jewish War; Tacitus and Suetonius on successive unrest under Rome.

[8] Revelation 1:9. The boiling-oil tradition is in Tertullian, Prescription Against Heretics 36.

[9] 1 Clement 5; Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.25. Traditional date: Rome, under Nero, c. A.D. 64–67.

[10] 1 Corinthians 9:6–18; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; 2 Thessalonians 3:7–8; Philippians 4:14–18.

[11] Ephesians 6:12, NKJV.

[12] Clinton E. Arnold, Powers of Darkness (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992); Walter Wink, Naming the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984); Hendrik Berkhof, Christ and the Powers, trans. John Howard Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977).

[13] Ephesians 2:11–22; 3:1–13.

[14] Larry W. Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016); Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014).

[15] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

[16] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

[17] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[18] Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932).

[19] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

[20] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); Freedom of the Will (1754).

[21] Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Frank Lambert, Inventing the “Great Awakening” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

[23] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[24] Edwards died March 22, 1758, weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey. The responsible historical claim is cultural inheritance, not a pocket sermon in every haversack.

[25] The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Yale University Press; digital corpus at the Jonathan Edwards Center, http://edwards.yale.edu.

[26] National Park Service, Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Battle of July 3, 1754.

[27] Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Mount Vernon, Virginia.

[28] Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site and Petersen House, Washington, D.C. Lincoln died April 15, 1865, at 7:22 a.m.

[29] Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (New York: Knopf, 2013).

[30] Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863; Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865.

[31] Lincoln, Cooper Union Address, February 27, 1860; presidential fasting and thanksgiving proclamations, 1861–1865.

[32] George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[33] N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013); F. F. Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977).

[34] Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1992).

[35] Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991).

[36] Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Scripture and primary Christian sources

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Sermon, Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Digital edition: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. http://edwards.yale.edu.

The Apostolic Fathers. 1 Clement. Late first century.

Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History.

Tertullian. Prescription Against Heretics.

Paul, the early church, and the powers

Arnold, Clinton E. Powers of Darkness: Principalities and Powers in Paul’s Letters. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992.

Berding, Kenneth. “Was Paul a Tentmaker?” Parts 1–2. The Good Book Blog. Biola University, 2021.

Berkhof, Hendrik. Christ and the Powers. Translated by John Howard Yoder. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977.

Bruce, F. F. Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977.

Dunn, James D. G. The New Perspective on Paul. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Hurtado, Larry W. Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016.

Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.

Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Wink, Walter. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Wright, N. T. Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013.

Christianity and Western civilization

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Chesterton, G. K. The Everlasting Man. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925.

Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy. London: John Lane, 1908.

Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932.

Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943.

Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942.

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Edwards, the Awakening, and American political religion

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Lambert, Frank. Inventing the “Great Awakening.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Stout, Harry S. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

Sweeney, Douglas A. “Jonathan Edwards: Legacy.” Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 1835–1840.

Founding, Union, and the ground I walked

Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Coolidge, Calvin. Address on the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

Guelzo, Allen C. Gettysburg: The Last Invasion. New York: Knopf, 2013.

Lincoln, Abraham. Cooper Union Address. February 27, 1860.

Lincoln, Abraham. Gettysburg Address. November 19, 1863.

Lincoln, Abraham. Second Inaugural Address. March 4, 1865.

National Park Service. Fort Necessity National Battlefield. Farmington, PA.

National Park Service. Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site. Washington, D.C.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon, VA.

Classical and Roman context

Josephus. The Jewish War.

Tacitus. Annals.

Suetonius. The Twelve Caesars.

The author’s related work

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Why America’s First Pastoral Philosopher Still Holds the Foundation for Law and Order

These are my favorite kind of days. The best days. No matter how tough it is out there, no matter how rough the problems of life get, sometimes you just have a good day, and this is one of them. I had the grandkids all day. We have been running back and forth at Kings Island, parched in the heat, and we are going to finish the evening at the waterpark. In the middle of all that, a box arrived. I took a minute to sit down with it. I opened it the way I open every book that matters to me. I smelled the pages.

One of my greatest pleasures in life is the wisdom and context of history sitting in my hand. I love the Bible for that reason. I love having so much history in one place. I love study Bibles because they explore the thing you can actually build a civilization on. I have carried one of those Bibles everywhere for years. I will not retire it. I will still read large portions of it every day. But I was ready to add to it, and I was ready to give the old one a rest. The first few pages of the worn one have a crease I cannot get out. That crease has bothered me. The new one does not have wrinkled pages. It just came out of the box.

I saw the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible advertised in Biblical Archaeology Review in the late-summer, early-fall edition. I fell in love with the idea immediately. When I hear the name Jonathan Edwards, I think of the father of the founding fathers. Thomas Nelson released the edition on August 18, 2026, after years of work under general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard. I picked the brown Leathersoft with thumb indexes. I was close to the black genuine leather. I wanted brown. I wanted the indexes. I am a sucker for thumb indexes. That had been my only real gripe with the Bible I have carried for years. They made this one with them. Brilliant.

A Good Day Is Not an Accident

I have said it before and I will say it again: a good day is not the absence of problems. A good day is the presence of a standard that can survive the problems. The world is full of people pinballing off each other. They do not share a common point of reference. They argue government, law, family, and history as if those things were invented last Tuesday. They were not. The argument over what kind of government we are supposed to have was largely settled in the long runway from the 1740s through the 1770s. The First Great Awakening was not a side show. It was a Christian surge into the New World that formed the conscience of a people who would soon have to decide whether they were subjects or citizens.

I wanted something that would push my mind into the right frame for the complicated issues in front of us. Two years into President Trump’s second term, the question is no longer whether the old order can be broken. The question is what we build with the pieces. Biblical scholarship is a very good place to start. Not as decoration. As infrastructure.

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

Jonathan Edwards was born October 5, 1703, and died March 22, 1758. He was a Congregationalist pastor, philosopher, and theologian, widely regarded as America’s most original philosophical theologian. He oversaw early revivals in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1733–35. He preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. That sermon is the one everybody remembers. It is not the whole man.

Edwards was not a mascot for rage. He was a man obsessed with joy in God. “The enjoyment of [God] is…the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.” That line sits on the new study Bible for a reason. His Religious Affections, his Resolutions, his Miscellanies, and his massive unpublished notebooks were an attempt to think with total seriousness about Scripture, beauty, virtue, and the public order. He became the third president of the College of New Jersey—Princeton—after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr. He served only weeks. He died after a smallpox inoculation. Short tenure. Long shadow.

Princeton was a child of the Great Awakening. When Harvard and Yale resisted the revivals, New Lights built new colleges. The first presidents of Princeton stood in that stream. John Witherspoon, later president of the same college, signed the Declaration of Independence. The line from Edwards to Witherspoon to the Revolutionary generation is not a slogan. It is institutional history.

Calvin Coolidge, speaking on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration, put it as plainly as any American president ever has: “No one can escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology… had aroused the thought and prepared the colonists for this great event.” I consider Calvin Coolidge to be one of America’s greatest presidents.

I call Edwards a founding father because America would not have the moral vocabulary it used to become America without men like him. Ben Franklin admired George Whitefield, the great itinerant of the same awakening. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and John Adams inherited a public that had already been trained to take sin, covenant, virtue, and judgment seriously. You do not get a Bill of Rights out of thin air. You get it from a people who already believed that law has a source above the king.

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

People treat revival as private emotion. That is a modern mistake. The Awakening taught ordinary men and women that a regenerated beggar stood before God on the same ground as an unholy prince. In a hierarchical empire, that idea is dynamite. It does not automatically produce 1776. It does produce a population that can hear “all men are created equal” without laughing.

The Awakening also split churches, founded colleges, and trained a habit of examining authority rather than merely inheriting it. That habit can go wrong. It can become mere rebellion. Edwards himself was no enthusiast for unfettered liberty as an end in itself. He wanted ordered affections under God. That is exactly why he is useful now. A country that has spent years dissolving every standard needs the man who refused to separate joy from holiness and holiness from public life.

I have been telling people that the squabbles of the present require a basic foundation. Study of that foundation got settled, in outline, by the 1750s and was tested in the 1770s. If we will not return to it, we will keep inventing new religions of the self and calling them law.

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible is an NKJV edition from Thomas Nelson: Comfort Print, red letter, center-column references, concordance, maps, translator notes, two-color printing. The distinctive load is Edwards himself. Study notes drawn from his work. Articles on doctrinal topics. Full-page essays on his theology, his life, his spiritual practices, and the First Great Awakening. His Resolutions. An introduction to his Miscellanies note-taking system, with space to build your own. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center remains the great online companion. If you are doing real scholarship, you can move from the page in your hand to the archive.

I like that. I like any book that tries to achieve superior intellect. The Bible, at its most basic essence, is the attempt to put the human mind in contact with the source of order. A study Bible is not a substitute for the text. It is scaffolding. Edwards is unusually good scaffolding because he will not let you treat Scripture as therapy. God, in Edwards, is not a life coach. God is holy. God is beautiful. God is uncompromising. If we follow in those footsteps, the same seriousness can look ruthless to a soft age. That is not a reason to flatten God into niceness. That is a reason to think.

I looked at the maps, the color, the paper, the print, the way the notes sit on the page. I judge Bibles the way I judge tools. Binding, glue, opacity, ribbon, indexes, whether the thing will survive being carried. Thomas Nelson still backs many of these editions with a lifetime guarantee against manufacturing defects. Companies that talk that way are running a different business model than the disposable world. I respect that.

I almost bought the black leather. I bought the brown because I like brown and because this one has the thumb indexes. I will likely still read the old study Bible. I will not carry the creased one everywhere anymore. This one takes that job.

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

I take publishers seriously when they do their job. The best smell in the book world is still new-Bible smell: paper, ink, glue, cloth, leather. I told my wife, half joking and half not, that if she wants me to keep loving her forever she should find a perfume that smells like a new book. The grandkids laugh at me because I keep putting my face in the pages. Fine. Let them laugh. There are very few things in life better than a well-made book that is trying to make you smarter than you were yesterday.

My old Bible still smells good to me. It has been everywhere. Full-color pages, notes from good scholars, a companion through work I am proud of. It also has the wounds of use. That is honorable. It is also honest to say when a tool has earned a rest. I can straighten pages and put it on the shelf without pretending I have outgrown it. I have not. I have added a second pillar.

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

People have told me they like that I keep a Bible on the desk in my office. Everybody walking by can see it. I did the same thing when I served as foreman of a grand jury in Butler County. I was not trying to be ostentatious. I was stating the premise. We were there for order. We were swearing to tell the truth. The values that created this civilization are not shameful. You do not apologize for them. You do not mumble that every tradition is equal so that no tradition can judge anything.

I put the Bible on the desk and I swore people in. That book represented a common standard. We can disagree about a thousand things after that. We cannot pretend there is no standard.

When I look back on a long life—good family, good kids, good grandchildren, good work in business—I still say that those weeks as grand jury foreman were among the most rewarding things I have ever done. I wish I could do that job every day. They paid something like twenty-four dollars a day. The whole stint put maybe four hundred dollars in my pocket. I spent every dime of it on Ohio law books, the kind of volumes lawyers keep on their shelves. I needed to explain the law to the other people in the room. Twelve other citizens. Evidence. A vote. Whether a person goes further into the machine of the state. That is serious work. I loved it. For a few weeks I was, in a manner of speaking, the top cop in Butler County, and I treated the job that way.

I have been thinking about cases that break your heart and then break your confidence in a jury’s ability to follow the law. A mother walks away from the death of her own children and the process cannot arrive at the destination the facts required. I will not relitigate a verdict in this space. I will say what the experience taught me. Law is not a mood. Law is a discipline. If the people in the room do not share a moral language, the statutes become a maze. The Bible is not a statute book. It is the source of the moral language that made statute books possible in the West.

Jonathan Edwards belongs on that desk because he is part of the formula that formed the legal society of the early republic. The attempt in our time has been to undermine that formation completely. Our job is to keep the undermining from succeeding. One way to do that is to return to the starting point and read it again, slowly, with notes from a man who actually thought.

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

I need to be clear about something I said in the moment and will not sand down. God is not a slogan for “can’t we all just get along.” God, as Scripture presents Him, is often ruthless and uncompromising. If we claim to follow, we do not get to edit that into suburban kindness and call it discipleship. The intellectual task is to understand what holiness requires in public life without turning the church into a mob and without turning the state into a church.

Edwards is helpful there. He is a pastoral philosopher. He will not let affection float free of doctrine, and he will not let doctrine float free of the glory of God. That combination is what a movement needs after it wins elections. Winning is not the same as governing. Governing requires a metaphysics. If your metaphysics is “the self is sovereign,” you will get the last twenty years on repeat. If your metaphysics is that there is a law above the ruler and a Judge above the law, you have a chance.

I have been saying that we need a common point of reference. This Bible can be that for people who are even half willing. You do not have to become a professional Edwards scholar. You have to read, mark, compare, and refuse the cheap alternatives.

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

We are living in what I have been calling the age of disclosure. Hidden things are coming up. Political things, institutional things, spiritual things. If you do not understand the politics of heaven, you will misread the politics of earth. Heaven is not a fog of niceness. Heaven is a court. There is a throne. There is law. There is judgment. There is mercy that costs something. Edwards never forgot that. A great deal of modern religion did.

The founding generation argued about church and state. They did not argue that the state could invent morality out of committee. They assumed a created order. They assumed sin. They assumed that republics die when character dies. That is not nostalgia. That is the operating system.

I want my grandchildren to see a Bible on the desk and know what it means when I walk into a room. It means I stand for law and order, and that law and order have a foundation that did not begin in a press release. I am not closing my life. I am opening a new chapter with a better tool for the same fight.

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

If you need a first serious study Bible, this is a strong candidate. If you already have one you love, as I do, this is the right second. The scholarship is serious. The production is handsome. The price is not insane. The leather edition runs more. I paid for the version I would actually use—the one I will thumb through in the car, on the desk, and at the table.

I would like to shut the rest of life off and only read it. I will read a lot of it. It will become the Bible I carry. There is plenty here to work with. I think it is a key to launching a new stretch of work in my own life, and I think it can serve the same purpose for anyone who is tired of arguing with no floor under the argument.

Go get it. Put it where people can see it. Swear to the truth. Then go do the hard parts—family, work, citizenship, the long patience of building a civilization instead of commenting on its collapse.

I took the kids back to the waterpark and we had a great day. While I waited on them I sat in a chair and read through this new Bible and it turned out to be one of the best days I have had in a while. I am going to smell the pages again many more times. There are very few things in life better than that. If you want the longer map of how I think about work, conflict, and Western order, read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. If you want the foundation under that map, start with Scripture and a guide who already walked the ground we keep pretending is new.

Notes

1. Thomas Nelson released The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV) on August 18, 2026, with Dr. Matthew Everhard as general editor. Editions include hardcover, brown Leathersoft (including thumb-indexed), and black genuine leather. See publisher listings and trade bibliographic records for ISBNs 9781400339532 (hardcover), 9781400339556 (brown Leathersoft, thumb indexed), and 9781400339600 (black genuine leather).

2. Edwards’s dates, Northampton revivals, the Enfield sermon of July 8, 1741, and his brief presidency of the College of New Jersey are standard in the biographical literature. See George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life (Yale University Press, 2003).

3. Edwards died after smallpox inoculation in March 1758, weeks into the Princeton presidency. Marsden and the Yale Jonathan Edwards Center treat the episode in detail.

4. Coolidge’s sesquicentennial remarks on Edwards and the Declaration are printed in Calvin Coolidge, The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses. The quotation is discussed in Gordon Arnold, “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought,” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

5. On Princeton’s revivalist origins and the New Light college movement, see Thomas Breidenthal, “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019, and George M. Marsden’s work on evangelical higher education.

6. John Witherspoon, sixth president of the College of New Jersey, signed the Declaration of Independence and served in the Continental Congress. The Edwards–Burr–Witherspoon succession is a matter of college history, not metaphor.

7. George Whitefield’s relationship with Benjamin Franklin is documented in Franklin’s Autobiography and in the standard Whitefield biographies. Admiration is not the same as conversion; it is evidence of the Awakening’s public weight.

8. Edwards’s line on the enjoyment of God as the only satisfying happiness is used by Thomas Nelson as the editorial keynote of the 2026 study Bible.

9. The Yale Jonathan Edwards Center (edwards.yale.edu) hosts the Works of Jonathan Edwards and remains the primary digital archive corresponding to the print notes.

10. Thomas Nelson’s published lifetime guarantee covers manufacturing defects, not ordinary wear. See Thomas Nelson Bibles customer-service and Premier Collection guarantee pages.

11. The First Great Awakening’s role in colonial egalitarianism, church conflict, and revolutionary political culture is argued, with different emphases, by Alan Heimert, Religion and the American Mind (1966); Mark Noll, America’s God (2002); and Michael Novak’s essays on the “two wings” of the American eagle.

12. Butler County, Ohio, grand juries operate under Ohio law. Compensation for jurors has historically been modest; the figures given here are from my own service and recollection, not a claim about current statutory rates.

13. Biblical Archaeology Review is the flagship magazine of the Biblical Archaeology Society. I first noticed the Edwards Bible as a paid advertisement in a late-summer / early-fall issue.

14. Edwards owned enslaved people. That fact belongs in any honest account. It does not erase his intellectual role in American theology; it does forbid hagiography. See Marsden and the Yale Center’s documentary record.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Edwards

• Edwards, Jonathan. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

• Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

• Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

• Edwards, Jonathan. The Life of David Brainerd. 1749.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Ethical Writings. Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8. Yale University Press.

• Edwards, Jonathan. The Miscellanies. Works of Jonathan Edwards, multiple volumes. Yale University Press.

• Edwards, Jonathan. Resolutions. Various editions; also included in the 2026 study Bible.

• The Works of Jonathan Edwards. 26 vols. Yale University Press. Digital companion: Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University, https://edwards.yale.edu.

The 2026 Study Bible

• Everhard, Matthew, gen. ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Biography and Intellectual History

• Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. Yale University Press, 2003.

• McClymond, Michael J., and Gerald R. McDermott. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Oxford University Press, 2012.

• Murray, Iain H. Jonathan Edwards: A New Biography. Banner of Truth, 1987.

• Gura, Philip F. Jonathan Edwards: America’s Evangelical. Hill and Wang, 2005.

• Sweeney, Douglas A. Edwards the Exegete. Oxford University Press, 2016.

• Nichols, Stephen J. Jonathan Edwards: A Guided Tour of His Life and Thought. P&R, 2001.

Great Awakening, Princeton, and the Revolution

• Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford University Press, 2002.

• Heimert, Alan. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution. Harvard University Press, 1966.

• McDermott, Gerald R. One Holy and Happy Society: The Public Theology of Jonathan Edwards. Penn State University Press, 1992.

• Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. Yale University Press, 2007.

• Marsden, George M. The Soul of the American University. Oxford University Press, 1994.

• Stohlman, Martha Lou Lemmon. John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Patriot. Westminster, 1976.

• Coolidge, Calvin. The Price of Freedom: Speeches and Addresses.

• Arnold, Gordon. “Jonathan Edwards: Founding Father of American Political Thought.” The Imaginative Conservative, October 4, 2024.

• Breidenthal, Thomas. “Princeton’s Revivalist Roots.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, June 21, 2019.

Scripture, Law, and Western Order

• Berman, Harold J. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Harvard University Press, 1983.

• Witte, John, Jr. The Reformation of Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

• Novak, Michael. On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. Encounter, 2002.

• Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England.

• The Declaration of Independence; the Constitution of the United States; the Bill of Rights.

Related Hoffman

• Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.

• Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice.

• Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

• Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior, https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com.

Periodicals and Tools• Biblical Archaeology Review. Biblical Archaeology

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More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

The Pursuit of Happiness Is Not a Handout: Aristotle, Jefferson, Eudaimonia, and Why Government Cannot Manufacture a Meaningful Life.

I am sitting on my porch with a book in my lap, the same way I have done it for years, and the same way I imagine Thomas Jefferson doing it at Monticello when the noise of government finally fell away. People still walk up and ask the question as if it were an accusation: you are in your prime earning years; what are you doing out here reading? I tell them the truth. I am practicing an old idea that most of modern politics has forgotten how to pronounce. The Greeks called it eudaimonia. Speech-to-text software, and more than a few hurried conversations, turn the word into “pneumonia.” That slip is almost perfect. We have caught a fever about happiness and then treated the wrong disease.

I am not an anti-machine person, and I am not an anti-data-center person. Tools are tools. I use them the way I use a library: to get to the argument faster. What I am against is the siren song that says a meaningful life can be issued by a legislature, mailed as a rebate, or confiscated from a neighbor who hit the jackpot. That song is older than the Democratic platform and older than the American republic. It is the temptation to let someone else define the good life and then charge you for the privilege.

The Declaration of Independence did not promise us a feeling. It promised us a pursuit. That difference is the whole American argument, and it is the argument I keep returning to when the season turns political, and every candidate suddenly wants to sell happiness by the pound.[1]

What Did the Founders Mean by the Pursuit of Happiness?

Schoolhouse history likes a tidy swap. Locke wrote “life, liberty, and property.” Jefferson, we are told, crossed out property and wrote happiness because he was more generous, or more poetic, or less capitalist. The tidy swap is too tidy.[2]

Jefferson had George Mason in front of him. Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights kept both goods on the table: the means of acquiring and possessing property, and the pursuing and obtaining of happiness and safety.[3] Jefferson compressed the line. He did not throw property into the river. He refused to let property pretend it was the whole human good. Locke himself, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, had already said that the highest perfection of an intellectual nature is “a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”[4] The phrase was in the air of the eighteenth century. Adams said the happiness of society is the end of government, as the happiness of the individual is the end of man.[5]

So the Founders were not announcing a mood. They were naming a classical end: a life that can actually be lived well. Happiness, in that older English, is closer to flourishing than to a grin. It is closer to a completed form than to a shopping list. Arthur Schlesinger once wrote about the “lost meaning” of the phrase, and Pauline Maier showed how common the political language of happiness already was in American writing before July 4, 1776.[6] Jefferson did not invent a slogan for a greeting card. He put a thick word in a thin space and trusted a free people to know the difference between a right and a result.

I like to say it this way, because it is how I live it. Happiness is not a second house in Florida, a place in the Upper Peninsula, and a third address in Cincinnati. Those things can be fine. They are not the definition. I have been happier with a book and a family meal of takeout Chinese than with a ledger that looked impressive to somebody else. The money that buys the meal matters less than the hour in which you eat it. If that sounds sentimental, it is only because we have been trained to measure a soul with a bank statement.

What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?

Aristotle calls the highest human good eudaimonia. Translators say happiness. They should also say flourishing, living well, a complete life of excellent activity. Aristotle is blunt about the alternatives. Pleasure is not enough. Honor depends on other people. Wealth is a tool. The human function is rational activity, and the human good is that activity done with virtue, not for a weekend but across a life.[7]

Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.

First, happiness is an activity, not a stash. Aristotle says a virtuous man who never exercises the virtue is like an athlete who never enters the stadium. You do not become happy by owning the equipment. You become happy by running the race.[8] A free PlayStation in every house would not settle the question. It would only prove we had confused amusement with a soul.

Second, external goods are real and still secondary. Aristotle is not a monk. He knows a man needs enough equipment for a complete life. He does not pretend that catastrophe is a spiritual opportunity brochure. But he will not let the equipment become the prize.[9] That is why I can be making a million dollars a year or fifty dollars a year, and the inner measure does not have to move with the account. The measure is whether I am living a life I can defend: books, family, work I own, a porch that is mine, a conscience that is not for sale.

People hear that and think I am romanticizing poverty. I am not. I am refusing the opposite romance, the one that says the state can allocate flourishing the way it allocates a tax credit. You cannot mail a man eudaimonia. You can only leave him room to practice it, or crowd the room until he forgets how.[10]

Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government

If you want the American argument in one Greek quarrel, start here. The city executes Socrates. Plato, who loved him, answers with a republic in which the wise few rule the many for their own good. The guardians own little, lie when necessary, and impose a harmony the public cannot be trusted to choose. “Until philosophers rule as kings,” Plato says, the cities will have no rest from their troubles.[11]

Aristotle studied in that household of ideas and then pushed the furniture back toward the ground. He is more empirical, more household, more individual. He does not start with a caste of golden souls. He starts with a man who must choose, a family that must hold together, a city that must mix its powers so that no class eats the rest.[12] The debate is not a museum piece. It is the difference between a government that protects your pursuit and a government that performs your virtue in your name.

I have always thought Star Wars is popular philosophy wearing a robe. When George Lucas was at his best, the Jedi looked like knighthood: discipline, apprenticeship, a refusal of cheap power. Then the story showed you the other face. A council of the enlightened, hovering above the Republic, managing fairness, announcing balance, and slowly becoming what Aristotle warned against: a class that cannot imagine the good unless it administers it.[13] That is Plato in space. It is a beautiful picture and a dangerous constitution.

Ayn Rand saw the same fork and planted her flag with Aristotle.[14] You do not have to take her whole system to see why the Founders feared the Jedi option. Once an elite is authorized to impose happiness, it will need your property, your time, and eventually your vocabulary. The Book of Judges already knew the seesaw: no king, and every man does what is right in his own eyes; then a king, and the king takes your sons and your fields.[15] America tried to cut a third path. Not chaos. Not philosopher-kings. A limited government around an unlimited soul.

How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence

Ideas do not float. They ride languages, armies, and churches.

Aristotle taught Alexander. Alexander broke the old map and left Greek cities, Greek speech, and Greek books across a world that had not asked for them.[16] That Hellenistic weather is the weather in which Scripture becomes Greek, in which the New Testament can be written, in which Paul can argue in cities that already have a word for a complete life. I do not claim Alexander meant to pave a road for Christ. I claim history is thick. The Teacher of Righteousness, the Maccabean revolt, the tense priesthoods, John and his cousin in the wilderness—none of that happens in a vacuum. It happens in a Near East already argued over by Greek thought and imperial power.[17]

Rome later sits on that same furniture and, when it can no longer hold the old gods together, leans on the Church to keep a civilization from flying apart. I have spent years in books that tell that long story. Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity is one of them. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s three-thousand-year account is another, because he is honest that Christianity does not begin at the manger in an empty room. It inherits Israel and Greece.[18]

This is why I say something that makes secular lecture halls flinch. Without the Christian movement, the Aristotelian idea of a dignified individual soul does not arrive in Virginia with enough moral force to become a political principle. Cicero carried the Greek conversation into Latin. Aquinas baptized Aristotle for the schools.[19] The Reformation and the colonial pulpit then taught ordinary people that they stood before God without a philosopher-king in the way. That is not “separation of church and state” as a sterilization protocol. It is the free exercise of a faith that made limited government feel natural instead of suicidal.[20]

Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty

I have been talking a lot about Jonathan Edwards, and not because I want to turn the Founders into revivalists in powdered wigs. Edwards is useful because he forced a distinction the modern state keeps trying to erase. Liberty is not the chance to do as you please. Liberty is the healed capacity to love what is good.[21]

The First Great Awakening did not write the Constitution. It did something prior. It taught crowds of uncredentialed people that the most important transaction in a human life happens between a soul and God, not between a subject and a board of guardians. Historians still fight about how straight the line runs from Edwards and Whitefield to 1776. Coolidge, speaking in Philadelphia on the Declaration’s 150th birthday, was not shy about it. He said the religious teaching of the preceding period prepared the mind of the country, and he put Edwards in that company.[22]

What I take from that fight is simple. A Christian account of human dignity—image of God, direct accountability, sin that a committee cannot cure—makes personal responsibility feel like realism rather than cruelty. If man is only appetite plus circumstance, then of course the only “fairness” left is to move piles of stuff from the disciplined to the wrecked. If man is a soul, then the first mercy is to tell him the truth: happiness cannot be injected. It has to be lived.[23]

Why Jefferson Wrote Happiness Instead of Property

Property matters. I won’t pretend otherwise. A man who cannot keep what he earns is not free; he is a tenant of whoever counts the votes. The Fifth Amendment still talks about property because the Founders were not monks. But Jefferson left the word out of the most famous sentence in American politics on purpose, or at least with a purpose that survived the editing.[24]

If he writes “property,” the sentence can be captured by the ledger. If he writes “happiness,” the sentence stays larger than the ledger. Happiness includes the right to acquire, to build, to fail, to start again, to sit down, to open a book, to refuse a treadmill that exists only so someone else can be paid from your exhaustion. Government is instituted to secure those rights, not to emit the outcome the rights were meant to make possible.[25]

Democrats who want to retire Jefferson with Sally Hemings are not, in my experience, primarily interested in the enslaved. They want to turn off the sentence.[26] I took my children to Monticello when I was in my twenties and thirties because I wanted them to see the house, the river country, the laboratory of a mind, and the wound in the same tour. A serious country can hold both. A propaganda country can hold only one. I will not surrender the idea of the pursuit because the man who wrote it failed his own measure. That would be like burning the Gospels because Peter denied Christ before sunrise.

What Is the Government’s Role in Happiness?

The government’s job is to get out of your way without disappearing. That is a narrower job than it sounds, and a harder one. Madison’s line still does the work: if men were angels, no government would be necessary.[27] Men are not angels. So you need law against force and fraud. You need a shield around the porch. You need courts that can tell a thief from a neighbor. You do not need a ministry of flourishing.

Every month people open an electric bill and feel that drop in the stomach. Some of that is the price of a physical world. Some of that is policy dressed up as compassion. When government decides it must manufacture happiness, it discovers it has no happiness in the warehouse. It only has other people’s time. So it takes. It calls the taking fairness. It calls the residue a benefit. And it is shocked—shocked—when the people being harvested stop believing the harvest is a public service.

Representatives are not Jedi. They are not there to impose a vision of the good life on Ohio or on the country. They are there to keep the framework from being eaten: contracts, speech, worship, arms, due process, the right to keep the fruit of work. The moment they start using your success to subsidize somebody else’s refusal of consequence, they have changed jobs. They are no longer guardians of liberty. They are brokers of dependence.[28]

Can Government Distribute Happiness by Taxing Success?

This is the active campaign version of the old temptation. A man goes out, takes risks, hits the jackpot, and the speech begins: tax the rich, because his surplus is the raw material of your comfort. I have watched that speech attach itself to Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio the way it attaches itself to anyone whose success is visible enough to photograph. The names change. The metaphysics do not.

If your only picture of a human being is a stomach, then the moral task is, of course, to move food. If your picture includes a soul, the moral task is harder. Some people are broke because the world broke them. Some people are broke because they made a string of decisions that would break anyone: addiction, idleness, the refusal to be teachable. A serious country can tell those stories apart. A political machine cannot afford to. Dependent people are reliable. Independent people are inconvenient. They might stay home and read. They might not need the next check. They might not love you at the next election.

Happiness cannot be confiscated from one life and poured into another like fuel. When you sever effort from reward, you do not get fairness. You get resentment on one side and learned helplessness on the other. Aristotle would not have been confused by this. A virtue that is not practiced dies. A city that pays people not to become excellent should not act surprised when excellence becomes scarce.

Why Minimum Wage Politics Often Create Dependence Instead of Dignity

Even a hard, poorly paid job can begin eudaimonia if the work is real and the paycheck is yours. Ownership of a small life is still ownership. The political class that talks down “minimum wage work” is not protecting the worker’s dignity. It is protecting a story in which only a managed outcome counts as a human life.

Artificially jack the wage floor and two ordinary things happen. Some businesses hire fewer people—some cut hours. Prices around the worker rise. The first rung rises, and more people never reach it. Then the same political class arrives with a program for the people who cannot find the rung, and the program requires a larger state, which requires a deeper reach into the people who are still climbing.[29] That is not an accident that keeps happening to kind-hearted people. It is a machine that converts failed economics into loyal constituencies.

I am not against a man earning more. I am against the pretense that a statute can repeal scarcity without repealing somebody’s opportunity. Happiness at the bottom of the ladder is not a higher number on a poster. It is the knowledge that the step you are standing on belongs to you.

Jefferson’s Porch, Roosevelt’s Badlands, and My Own Monticello

When life got heavy, Jefferson went home. He wrote that nature intended him for the tranquil pursuits of science and that leaving power felt like a prisoner shaking off chains. In retirement, he gave up newspapers for Tacitus and Thucydides, Newton and Euclid, and said he found himself much the happier.[30] After he sold his library to rebuild Congress’s, he said the line I have loved since I first walked that hill in Virginia: “I cannot live without books.”[31]

Theodore Roosevelt learned the same lesson the hard way. On February 14, 1884, his mother and his wife died in the same house, hours apart. He put a great X in the diary and wrote that the light had gone out of his life. Then he went to the Dakota Territory, simplified the world down to cattle, weather, and work, and stayed long enough to remember he was still a man.[32] That is not “self-care.” That is the Rough Rider version of Aristotle. Unplug from the grid of other people’s noise. Choose a smaller field. Practice being alive on purpose.

I do the same thing when the complications pile up. I start unplugging. I sit on a porch that reminds me of the older American houses, and I read. Visitors think I have dropped out. I have dropped back in. A designated place for thought is not a luxury good. It is how a person remembers that he is not a device on the state’s network. Aristotle said the highest activity is contemplation.[33] Jefferson built rooms for it. I have rooms for it. If government ever decides that my unproductive hours are a public resource, it will have declared war on the very right it exists to protect.

Homelessness, Bad Decisions, and the Difference Between Charity and Clientage

I have walked into Canterbury, past the old gates toward the cathedral I love, and seen the same scene you can see outside too many American churches and civic showpieces. People sleeping rough in the shadow of a great Christian building, because the building is a good place to be seen by tourists with sandwiches. I have looked at faces there, and in Los Angeles, and in New York. I do not claim I can read a whole biography off a face. I have spoken with enough of those men to know that many of them are not there because a rich stranger refused them a rebate. They are there because addiction, or a collapsed will, or a long series of refusals, ate the mechanisms by which a person stays housed.

A Christian society is supposed to help. It is not supposed to freeze a man in his worst hour and call the freeze compassion.[34] When a system removes the cost of a bad decision while also flattening the reward of a good one, it trains people out of agency. Then it photographs the wreckage and says, see, this is why we must take more from the competent.

Government’s legitimate role is to keep the road from being blocked so you can walk it in your own way: reading your books, staying with your family, ordering the Chinese food, building a firm, disappearing into North Dakota, disappearing onto a porch, working a first job that nobody at a fundraiser wants to brag about. The state may not decide your values and then bill you for the sermon. The state may not call your success a surplus inventory of happiness to be broken up for parts.

That is why the original quarrel still matters. Plato’s temptation is always to let the few define the good and administer it. Aristotle counters that a human life is an activity you cannot outsource. Christianity carried that dignity through empires that would have been happy to forget it. The American Founders, soaked in both Athens and the Bible, wrote a sentence telling the state to stay in its lane and not interfere with people’s happiness.

Notes

[1] Thomas Jefferson never left a memorandum explaining why he chose the phrase. The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello notes that he was almost certainly influenced by George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), which spoke of “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” See “Pursuit of Happiness,” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, Monticello.

[2] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1689), Second Treatise, §87 and §123. Locke’s triad is often summarized as “life, liberty, and property,” though Locke’s larger category of “property” includes life, liberty, and estate.

[3] George Mason, Virginia Declaration of Rights, §1 (June 12, 1776). The National Archives notes that Jefferson drew on Mason for the opening paragraphs of the Declaration.

[4] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, ch. 21. Locke writes that “the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness.”

[5] John Adams, Thoughts on Government (1776): “the happiness of society is the end of government, as all Divines and moral Philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.”

[6] Arthur M. Schlesinger, “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness,’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 326–327. See also Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Knopf, 1997).

[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a16: the human good is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue.” The Greek εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia) is commonly rendered “happiness” or “flourishing.” It is not a mood. It is a life well lived.

[8] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1098a7–18 (the function argument) and 1103b26–30: the point of ethical inquiry is not merely to know what virtue is, but to become good.

[9] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1099a31–1099b8 and 1101a14–16. External goods are conditions of a complete life, not the definition of the good itself. A man wrecked by catastrophe is not called happy in the full sense, but neither is a rich man who lives without virtue.

[10] For a clear popular account of eudaimonia versus hedonic pleasure, see the discussion in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Aristotle’s Ethics” (Richard Kraut). Flourishing is activity, not a pile of goods.

[11] Plato, Republic 473c–e: until philosophers rule as kings, or kings philosophize, “there can be no rest from ills for the cities.”

[12] Aristotle, Politics I and III. Aristotle begins with the household and the citizen, not with a caste of guardians. He defends a mixed constitution and treats extreme concentrations of power as a constant temptation toward tyranny.

[13] George Lucas has long acknowledged that Star Wars draws on myth, knighthood, and mentor-pupil initiation. The Jedi Council, however it began, becomes a cloistered caste managing the galaxy’s “balance.” That is a Republic problem, not an Ethics problem.

[14] Ayn Rand repeatedly named Aristotle as the only philosopher to whom she owed a genuine intellectual debt. See the appendix to Atlas Shrugged and her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: New American Library, 1964). Rand’s politics are not the Founders’ politics, but her recovery of Aristotelian individualism is part of the modern American argument.

[15] 1 Samuel 8. Israel asks for a king “like all the nations.” Samuel warns that a king will take sons, daughters, fields, and a tenth. The Book of Judges had already shown the opposite problem: “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 21:25).

[16] Plutarch, Life of Alexander; and the ancient biographical tradition that Aristotle tutored the young Alexander at Mieza. The cultural aftershock of that education was Hellenism: Greek language, cities, and books stretched from the Aegean to the Indus.

[17] The Septuagint translated Hebrew Scripture into Greek in the Hellenistic age. The New Testament was written in Greek. Without that linguistic world, the Christian movement would have traveled a narrower road. See Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), opening chapters on Greece, Rome, and Israel.

[18] Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Atheneum, 1976). Johnson’s one-volume narrative remains a favorite of general readers who want the political and institutional story without losing the religion itself.

[19] Cicero, in De Finibus and De Officiis, transmitted the Greek conversation about the highest good into Latin moral vocabulary that later Christian and Enlightenment writers still used. Aquinas baptized large parts of Aristotle in the Summa Theologiae.

[20] The First Amendment protects free exercise; it does not exile Christianity from the moral formation of a people. Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1786) was written to keep the state from prescribing worship, not to keep citizens from having a faith.

[21] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); and Freedom of the Will (1754). Edwards insisted that true liberty is not mere license—“opportunity to do as one pleases”—but the capacity of a converted heart to love what is good.

[22] Calvin Coolidge, Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia, July 5, 1926. Coolidge argued that the Declaration’s principles were prepared by the religious teaching of the preceding period, and he named Jonathan Edwards among those who had “aroused the thought” of the colonists.

[23] Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Patricia U. Bonomi, Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

[24] On “happiness” as a political term already common in American writing before 1776, see Pauline Maier, American Scripture, and the Gilder Lehrman essay “The Harmonizing Sentiments of the Day.” Jefferson compressed a public language; he did not invent a private slogan.

[25] Declaration of Independence, final text adopted by Congress, July 4, 1776: governments are instituted “to secure these rights,” and the people may alter or abolish a government that becomes destructive of those ends, organizing new powers “as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

[26] On Jefferson’s contradictions, including slavery and the Hemings family, the honest reader does not need a campaign commercial. He needs Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), and the documentary record at Monticello. The argument of this essay is not that Jefferson was a saint. It is that the sentence he wrote still tells the truth about what a free government is for.

[27] James Madison, Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Limited government is a theological and anthropological claim before it is a procedural one.

[28] See Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), and The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), on the difference between process and result, and on elites who treat other people’s lives as raw material for a designed outcome.

[29] Minimum-wage literature is contested, but the basic price-control logic is not mysterious: raise the legal price of low-skill labor and some hours, some jobs, and some first rungs disappear. For a classical statement, see Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (New York: Harper, 1946), ch. 19.

[30] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 21, 1812: “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier.” Founders Online, National Archives.

[31] Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, June 10, 1815: “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.” After the British burned the Capitol library in 1814, Jefferson sold his collection of more than 6,500 volumes to Congress. He immediately began assembling another library. See Endrina Tay, “I cannot live without books,” Monticello.

[32] On February 14, 1884, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt died of typhoid fever, and Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt died of Bright’s disease, hours apart, in the same New York house. Roosevelt wrote in his diary, “The light has gone out of my life.” He left infant Alice with his sister and went west to the Dakota Territory. See Theodore Roosevelt National Park, “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher,” National Park Service.

[33] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.7–8. Contemplation (theoria) is the highest activity, which is why a porch, a book, and an unhurried hour are not laziness in the Aristotelian sense. They can be the peak of a human life if the rest of the life has been ordered toward virtue.

[34] Charity that preserves agency predates the welfare state. The Christian distinction between helping a neighbor and creating a client runs from the Pauline collections for the poor to later debates inside the Church of England itself.

Bibliography for Further Reading

Primary Texts

Adams, John. Thoughts on Government. 1776.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999.

Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.

The Bible. Especially Judges; 1 Samuel 8; and the Pauline language of liberty and responsibility.

Cicero. De Officiis et De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum.

Edwards, Jonathan. A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Declaration of Independence. 1776. Drafts and final text in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1, and at Founders Online.

Jefferson, Thomas. Letters to John Adams, January 21, 1812, and June 10, 1815. Founders Online, National Archives.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1690. Book II, chapter 21.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. 1689. Second Treatise.

Madison, James. The Federalist No. 51. 1788.

Mason, George. Virginia Declaration of Rights. June 12, 1776.

Plato. Republic. Especially Books IV–VII on the guardians and the philosopher-king.

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. Treatises on happiness, law, and virtue.

The Founding and the Phrase

Allen, Danielle. Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright, 2014.

Ellis, Joseph J., ed. What Did the Declaration Declare? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.

Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence. New York: Knopf, 1997.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. “The Lost Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness.’” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 21, no. 3 (1964): 325–327.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation. “Pursuit of Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. Monticello.org.

Yarbrough, Jean M. American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998.

Christianity, Greece, and Transmission

Copleston, Frederick. A History of Philosophy. Vols. 1 and 2. London: Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1946–1950.

Johnson, Paul. A History of Christianity. New York: Atheneum, 1976.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Viking, 2010.

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition. 5 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971–1989.

Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Awakening, Virtue, and the American Mind

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Coolidge, Calvin. Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, July 5, 1926.

Kidd, Thomas S. The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Marsden, George M. Jonathan Edwards: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Jefferson, Monticello, and the Wound in the House

Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and His Time. 6 vols. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948–1981.

Tay, Endrina. “I cannot live without books.” Monticello.

Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries. Retirement Library Catalog. Monticello / Library of Congress.

Roosevelt, Work, and the Hard Reset

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979.

Roosevelt, Theodore. Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail. New York: Century, 1888.

National Park Service. “Theodore Roosevelt the Rancher.” Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

Modern Arguments About Flourishing, Incentives, and the State

Hazlitt, Henry. Economics in One Lesson. New York: Harper, 1946.

Murray, Charles. In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness. New York: New American Library, 1964.

Sowell, Thomas. Knowledge and Decisions. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Sowell, Thomas. The Vision of the Anointed. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

—

Go somewhere and be happy. The pursuit is still legal.

In the age of disclosure, the politics of heaven will not be administered from a capital.

The Gunfighter’s Guide: A skeleton key to Western Civilization (gunfighterguide.shop)

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Good Government Is Not Revenge: Jonathan Edwards, Sheriff Richard Jones, and the Butler County Republican Party

For me, the standard is Jonathan Edwards on human government. The new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible arrived in August of 2026. I opened it on a hot afternoon after riding roller coasters at Kings Island with two of my grandchildren. That is not a cute detail. That is the point. Good government is supposed to protect ordinary life — grandchildren, county fairs, Sunday school, a sheriff who still thinks Butler County can look a little like Mayberry and a little like a serious modern county at the same time.

If Yale and Princeton were like they were during Jonathan Edwards’s time, I would likely have several PhDs by now, but over time, they have turned into globalist institutions, which I found repulsive when I was of college age. They have turned into anti-American insurgent places that ruin the minds of young people. But, Yale has preserved Edwards’s papers. The Study Bible puts his notes, essays, Resolutions, and miscellanies system next to the New King James text.[1][2] Everybody in this party who claims to care about order, virtue, and limited government should own a copy and actually read it. I am a small-government kind of person. I was Tea Party. I was Reform Party in the 1990s. I was talking about Donald Trump in 1999 when he was circling the Reform Party nomination against Pat Buchanan.[3] I have been in human communication and local politics for thirty years. I know what an intramural fight looks like. I also know what it costs voters.

What Jonathan Edwards Meant by Human Government

Good government as a moral order, not a branding exercise

Edwards believed that good government belongs to the highest moral order of a proper civilization.[4] I agree with him. That does not make me a big-government conservative. It makes me a person who thinks the point of the smaller government we do have is to be good — competent, restrained, honest, and aimed at the public good, not at the vanity of the people holding powerful positions.

You do not get into government to make a name for yourself. You get into government so that people have representatives. You want those representatives to be as good as possible. There is only one legitimate motivation: to make the thing good in the Edwards sense — an earthly office that still answers to a moral law it did not invent.

“The enjoyment of [God] is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.”

— Jonathan Edwards, as featured in The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2026)

That sentence is about God. It is also a warning about politics. If your happiness is a title on a sample ballot, a headline, or the humiliation of a rival, you are already in the wrong temple. The party slate card exists so voters can find good candidates. It does not exist so that somebody can settle a score.

Romans 13 is not a revenge verse

Edwards read civil authority inside God’s moral government of the world.[5] Magistrates exist. They are not priests. They are not avengers of private grudges. They are supposed to keep the peace, punish actual wrongdoing, and leave room for the rest of life — family, work, church, property — to go on.

That is why I keep saying the same sentence to people who want to turn the Butler County Republican Party into a revenge shop: you do not do politics for revenge. You do not look to even scores even if you were bullied. You do not use the power of government, or the machinery of a party, to bully everybody else. If you cannot serve voters, you are not in it for the right reasons.

Why This Bible Arrived on Time

Kings Island, two grandchildren, and page 1176

I had a rare day with two of my grandchildren at Kings Island, late in the summer season. We rode the big coasters. It got hot. We came home for lunch and a cool-down. The box had been dropped at the house. I knew what it was. I sat down with that Bible for an hour while the kids recovered, and then we went back to the park to swim.

People can laugh at a grown man getting quiet over a study Bible. Fine. I have spent decades looking for a single object that holds theology, philosophy, and a usable picture of public life in one binding. This one does. There is an essay on human government that I keep pointing people to — in my copy it sits around page 1176 — and just over the next page there is another piece on the means of grace. The book is full of that mixture: doctrine with a spine, and a vision of what a people owe each other when they try to govern.

Edwards was thrown out of his own church

Edwards served the Northampton church for twenty-three years. He is the man of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”[6] By 1750 a majority of the congregation voted him out. He preached a farewell sermon and left.[7][8] He went to Stockbridge to teach and minister among Native Americans, a smaller work, after a public humiliation. Later he was respected enough to become president of the College of New Jersey — Princeton — and then he died. Yale keeps the papers. Princeton had the office. The church that made him famous also removed him.

He was not removed because he had become a thief. He was removed because he was more exacting than the politics of the room would bear. That is a lesson with teeth. Sometimes the righteous thing is to stay and fight. Sometimes the righteous thing is to step out of an equation you can no longer serve well, because the people have decided they do not want you. The question is never “What feeds my name?” The question is “What actually produces good government for the people in front of us?”

I Have Zero Tolerance for Bullies

I can already hear it: then why do you support Sheriff Jones? People call him rough. Some people call him a bully.

I have had no tolerance for bullies my entire life. I have gotten into fights over people being picked on, often. I do not care if the target is a man or a woman, big or small. I do not care which party the bully belongs to. I have no patience for personality types who use an office to get revenge on rivals.

That standard cuts in every direction. It cuts against Democrats who treat government as a punishment engine. It cuts against Republicans who treat a county central committee like a private army. It cuts against anyone who thinks the point of winning is to make the other guy miserable.

Sheriff Jones and I have not always been the best of friends. I still want him in the party. Those two sentences can both be true if you believe, with Edwards, that the office is larger than the grudge.

Sheriff Richard Jones Is My Guy

A big tent means you keep the sheriff

I like Sheriff Richard K. Jones.[9] I want Sheriff Jones in the Butler County Republican Party. I have said, more than once, that he sometimes sounds like he still has a Democrat nerve in him on a public-sector question. Good. I want a Republican Party big enough to pull people who left the other side. I want a party that can stand on a stage with him and not flinch.

He has been sheriff across multiple terms. I want him around for as long as he wants the job and the voters still give it to him. When he goes on international outlets and talks about immigration and the jail, I want him able to say he is a member of this county Republican Party. I do not want him pushed into independent exile because a faction could not share a room with him.

Seven years of silence, one parking lot, two hats

In 2011 Ohio went to war with itself over Senate Bill 5 and public-sector unions.[10] I was on one side of that fight. Sheriff Jones was not with the Tea Party types who got burned when the referendum turned. We were both on WLW in those years.[11] He was friendly with Willie. I was friendly with Doc Thompson. Doc got pushed off, went elsewhere, and later died after being hit by a train under circumstances people still talk about. Willie is still on the air. Jones is still on the air with him.

After that bill, Sheriff Jones and I did not talk for six or seven years. We would be at the same events and walk past each other. Then I took my family to Charleston, South Carolina, for a week. Charleston is a fine city. People treat it like one of the best places in the world. My daughters and I love pirate history; you cannot stand in that harbor without thinking of Blackbeard and of the Civil War forts. I liked it. I came home happier to see Butler County.

That is not a cheap patriotic line. You do not know what you have until you have walked a “better” place and realized your own county is just as good if not better in many ways, working farms, and a party that has actually produced national figures.[12] JD Vance came out of this ground. Vivek Ramaswamy has been in our orbit. Warren Davidson’s office in Washington has been a good shop. Bernie Moreno has been a serious addition.[13] Interns and staff I met this year in those offices were the kind of young people who make you think the farm system still works.

Jones and I walked out of an event toward the cars. He broke the ice. He liked my hat. I liked his hat. I liked his boots. I like his Andy Griffith picture of what a sheriff’s office should feel like. We started talking again. It took almost eight years.

The grand jury and the jail tour

I am not young. I am in my senior stretch of life, around sixty as of 2026. One of the best civic jobs I have ever held was foreman of a Butler County grand jury. It was not the money. It was the view.

People called me during that season to whisper about “corruption” in the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office. That is what people do when they do not get the outcome they wanted, humans try to create political pull to get rid of people they don’t want to work with. I like our prosecutor’s office. I like Mary Swain a great deal.[14][15] I like the people who actually carry files upstairs to the prosecutors’ offices, which I was able to tour and I consider to be one of the finest places on earth.

The grand-jury room sits on the same floor as the clerk’s world. You take indictments up. You meet the assistants. You meet the deputies who work child-exploitation cases and drug cases. You get answers to questions you have had. And because a grand jury should understand what it is doing when it votes a true bill, Sheriff Jones gave me a tour of the jail. We talked. When his book came out he told me about it. I read it and reviewed it. I recommend it very highly.

That is the other side of the man some people only meet in a fight. If you cannot work with that, you probably do not have the temperament for coalition politics.

Nancy Nix Is the Benchmark

If Sheriff Jones is the law-and-order pillar I want inside the big Republican tent, Nancy Nix is the governing temperament I want the rest of the party to study.[16] I have said it until people are tired of hearing it. She pours hours into this party. She is good government from top to bottom. When she walks into a room, the room still works. That is a rare skill.

I liked Roger Reynolds for a long time. I was on his side until he turned his fight against Nancy Nix.[17] Clearing your name after a legal disaster is one thing. Using the wreckage to tear down a sitting officeholder who actually runs the shop is another. Parties are supposed to put a slate card in front of voters. They are not supposed to become instruments for a man who cares more about his name than about the taxpayers in the file.

George Lang and Debbie can sit down with almost anybody and not get moved off their mark. That is a Trump skill too: talk to the person across the table, find the deal, do not surrender the spine. I have asked George more than once whether Kathy Wyenandt (the area Democrat) can be pulled toward the party instead of left as a permanent foreign object working the community against itself. I would rather recruit than exile. Same rule as Jones. A bigger tent is not a mushier platform. It is a refusal to donate our own people to the other side because we enjoyed a feud.

What a County Party Is Actually For

Volunteers, yard signs, and jobs that do not pay

Most of the jobs that make a county party run do not pay. People do them because they love the idea of a slate card voters can trust. They stand at the county fair. They work a fundraiser. They put a name on a yard-sign list. When those people are disparaged in the paper, of course they get hurt. That does not make them fragile. It makes them human.

The job of party leadership is to keep that machine pointed at voters. A unified party that serves voters will beat a pure party that serves a clique. Purity spirals are how you lose townships you used to win in your sleep.

Butler County is a Republican county that still has to earn it

Most people in Butler County gravitate Republican. That is a blessing and a trap. It is hard to keep an identity when you win so often that winning starts to feel like weather. It is hard to remember that the point is still to make government good. Todd Hall, as chairman, understood a lot of that. I try to stay out of internal knives as much as I can, because I want the system to work and I want people to feel engaged.

Thomas Hall and Sheriff Jones had their differences on policy. They got through it. They use radio well. Once they were fine with each other, Jones and I were fine with each other, once again. That is how adults do it. You do not have to marry your coalition partners. You have to stop treating them like enemy combatants.

Trump changed the party. The county still has to govern.

Trump redefined what a Republican powerhouse looks like. The old country-club party cannot pretend he did not happen. He has also, over the years, become something closer to an evangelist of a certain American memory — Mount Rushmore more than permanent Washington. I have become a fan of Washington, D.C., in the years he has been back in the White House. The offices that represent this county have been worth visiting. The city is not the enemy. Drift is the enemy.

The next years will not be as easy as “were you for Trump after 2020.” Everybody had a simple test then. The tests now are messier: energy policy after the FirstEnergy mismanagement of the real message,[18] how statehouse fights land in a sheriff’s office, whether a township trustee race is a farm system or a grudge match, whether we run toward competent people or toward whoever promises to punish last year’s enemy.

A Personal Ledger I Had to Close

Latte Sipping Prostitutes, Lakota, and being left on the air

I am going to tell a story I almost left out, because good government requires that you put some things aside even when people wronged you.

Everybody around here remembers the meltdown on WLW when I called a class of Lakota levy politics what I thought it was. I said people were selling out children to a system that works like a taxpayer-funded babysitting service with a union attached. Democrats piled on. Some Republicans who had been with me went quiet or went woke on the spot. A donor-class press release landed on the Scott Sloan show while I was live. They confronted me on the air.

I got through the interview; it was very difficult. I did not fold. But a lot of people abandoned me when it would have cost them very little to stand there. Todd Hall was one of my people, and when it mattered most, he and many others left me hanging. It took years to get over that. I could have carried a grudge forever. I did not, because I wanted a Republican Party that could still win for the needs of the voters. I remember very well who stood with me and who didn’t, and when people wonder even now why I feel the way I do about certain people and not others, that memory usually gives an easy answer.

That is the whole method. You may feel one way in your chest. If the party is trying to build something voters can use, you park the personal file and work. You handle squabbles another way. You do not burn the machine to warm your pride.

I have a clean record on purpose

I sign my name to what I write. People have been looking me up for years trying to find dirt they could use against me. I have been married to the same person for a long time. I can say, as a man almost sixty, that there is not a woman who can step forward and say I bruised her or hurt her in some way that finds itself on a police report. If you don’t have a clean background, you can’t stand in front of a party and tell other people how to live. Even if you have your side of the story, just being in a story like that shows bad judgment, and it will cause people not to follow you as a leader. You have to be cleaner than clean if you want to hold big responsible seats.

If you want to be a Walmart greeter, you can often get a matter expunged and live a quiet life. If you want to be the head of a political party, or the person who starts busting heads and announcing that there is a new sheriff in town, you do not get that courtesy. Enemies come out. The past comes out. Paying someone to bury a file is not the same as righteousness. The internet keeps what the clerk seals.[19]

I am not interested in ruining people for sport. Plenty of men and women have made mistakes and then put out yard signs, joined a church, and tried to live a second chapter. Redemption is real. Leadership of a party is a different office. It has to be clean enough to survive daylight, because daylight will be applied.

Leadership, Todd Minniear, and the Problem of a Hidden Past

Todd Hall did a lot of unglamorous work in the background. Of course people complain about it, as they do everyone in a responsible seat, and they cling to the fantasy that they could do better if only they had more power. A lot of the people who have been running this thing are tired. They show up unpaid. They love the idea of good government even when the job does not love them back.

People have asked me about running for Liberty Township trustee and school board at Lakota; I get asked about it at least once a week for many years now. I like the trustees we have. I would not shove them aside for a title. People also asked Todd Minniear to step toward more leadership.[20] I have been a fan of that instinct. He has been a great trustee. He has the kind of energy a party uses when it needs a next chapter, and I was thinking of him as the Party Chairman once I knew that Todd Hall and others wanted a break. He and I had a good discussion not very long ago about Roger Reynolds; Todd was on one side of the discussion, and I was on the other. We didn’t argue about it, we instead put our focus on the things we shared in common.

If you are carrying material that political enemies can turn into a wrecking ball. I will not pretend that “nobody will notice” is a strategy. Democrats already collect this stuff and wait. Factional Republicans will use it too if the fight gets personal. That is not theory.

How to Have a Fight Without Becoming the Fight

A few rules:

1. Serve voters first. If a move does not make the ballot better, it is probably vanity.

2. Keep Sheriff Jones in the party. A Republican Party that exiles its own long-serving sheriff is not tough. It is insecure.

3. Treat Nancy Nix as a working model, not as a faction mascot. Rooms that light up when she enters are rooms that can still govern well, learn from her.

4. Recruit before you purge. Democrats who can live with limited government are more valuable than Republicans who only live to punish Republicans.

5. Do not use government, or party office, to even a private score. That is Edwards in one line.

6. If you want the chair, assume every sealed thing will be unsealed in public. Plan for that before you run, not after the first mailer.

7. Put grudges in a private drawer when the county needs a unified card. You can still be a man. You do not have to be a faction.

What Voters Actually Buy When They Buy a Party

Donors and church voters do not want the same conversation in the same hour. That is fine. The chairman’s job is to put them in enough of the same room that candidates can raise money without becoming a different species from the people who staff the polls. If you cannot do that, you do not have a party. You have a club.

I want GOP picnics that feel like a county still knows how to stand around a grill. I liked watching the energy when national operators came through Ross and people actually showed up. I want campfire competence. People do not have to agree on every shade of red. They can still agree that Sunday school is not a joke and that a sheriff’s office is not a think tank.

You can make a million dollars in a lot of businesses. You cannot easily build good government. It costs time, reputation, and the ability to absorb a newspaper hit without setting the headquarters on fire. People who pour themselves into this work deserve leaders who understand that cost.

Edwards lost Northampton and still did the next faithful job. That is available to anyone in this county who is about to lose a fight. It is also a warning to anyone who thinks winning a fight is the same thing as being right. We will all stand in a different dock than a central committee. That is the farewell sermon. It is a better political theory than most of what gets posted after a poorly run meeting.

The Need

Buy the Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Read the government material. Read the farewell sermon. Then look at Butler County and ask a simple question: are we building a party voters can take pride in, or are we building a revenge path for people whose feelings got hurt?

I support Sheriff Richard Jones. I support a big-tent Republican Party that recruits instead of exiles. I support Nancy Nix as the working picture of countywide competence. I want new leadership that can stand daylight. I do not want scandals in the background of the people who hold the keys, and I do not want the keys used to punish rivals.

That is the Edwards form of Republican politics. It is also just adulthood. Butler County has given the country more than its share of serious people. We should act like it.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Jonathan Edwards and moral government

Edwards, Jonathan. A Farewell Sermon Preached at the First Precinct in Northampton. Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751. Reprinted in The Works of President Edwards and in modern sermon collections.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Edwards, Jonathan. The Nature of True Virtue. In The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8, Ethical Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Everhard, Matthew, ed. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV). Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University. The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online. http://edwards.yale.edu.

Scripture

The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Romans 13; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17; 2 Corinthians 1:14.

Butler County offices and elections

Butler County Sheriff’s Office. “Sheriff.” Official biography of Richard K. Jones. https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.

Butler County Auditor. “Meet Nancy.” Official biography of Nancy Nix. https://auditor.bcohio.gov.

Ballotpedia. “Butler County, Ohio, elections, 2024.” Entries for sheriff, auditor, clerk of courts, and prosecuting attorney.

Butler County Republican Party. https://www.butlercountygop.org.

Reported local history

Callahan, Denise G. “Butler County GOP selects Nancy Nix as new auditor.” Journal-News, February 3, 2023.

Journal-News. Coverage of the Roger Reynolds prosecution, removal from the auditor’s office, and 2024 efforts to contest Nancy Nix’s tenure.

Dayton Daily News. “Jones easily re-elected as Butler County sheriff.” July 6, 2020.

WLWT. “Butler County sheriff speaks out on deportation… and high-profile local crimes involving illegal immigrants.” June 28, 2025.

ProPublica. “The Sheriff Gets His Man.” November 15, 2016. Background on Jones’s early Trump-era profile.

Ohio context

Ohio Senate Bill 5 (2011) and Issue 2 referendum materials, Ohio Secretary of State.

Reporting on Ohio House Bill 6 and the FirstEnergy scandal, 2019–2023, for the state-level energy fight mentioned in passing.

The author’s related work

Hoffman, Rich. The Man Warrior Podcast. Episodes on Butler County party politics, county government, and Edwards.

Hoffman, Rich. Signed columns and posts at overmanwarrior channels. The radio history with WLW is part of that public record.

Footnotes

[1] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), ed. Matthew Everhard (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026). Publication date August 18, 2026. ISBN 978-1-4003-3953-2. Official product page: https://www.thomasnelsonbibles.com/product/the-jonathan-edwards-study-bible-nkjv/

[2] Yale University’s Jonathan Edwards Center hosts The Works of Jonathan Edwards Online at http://edwards.yale.edu. Edwards himself was not president of Yale. He served as the third president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1758 and died shortly after taking office.

[3] The Reform Party presidential contest of 2000 included Patrick J. Buchanan and a brief exploratory effort by Donald J. Trump in 1999–2000. Trump later ran as a Republican and won the presidency in 2016 and 2024.

[4] Edwards’s most sustained treatment of government is not a single short “essay on human government” in the modern magazine sense. It is woven through his moral theology: God’s moral government of the world, the duty of magistrates, and the obligation of citizens. See especially “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners”; sermons on Romans 13; and the dissertation The Nature of True Virtue. The Study Bible gathers related notes and essays beside the biblical text. Page references in this piece follow the author’s personal copy.

[5] Romans 13:1–7; 1 Timothy 2:1–2; 1 Peter 2:13–17. Edwards read civil authority as part of God’s moral government, not as a substitute for the church and not as a theater for private vengeance.

[6] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached at Enfield, Connecticut, July 8, 1741. Standard text in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 22, Sermons and Discourses, 1739–1742 (New Haven: Yale University Press).

[7] On June 22, 1750, after twenty-three years as pastor of the Northampton church, Edwards was dismissed following a congregational vote over qualifications for church membership (the “communion controversy”). He preached A Farewell Sermon on 2 Corinthians 1:14. He then served the Stockbridge mission among Native Americans before his Princeton appointment.

[8] Edwards, A Farewell Sermon (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1751). The sermon’s central claim is that pastor and people will meet again before Christ’s tribunal, where controversies and treatment of one another will be judged. That is the moral frame the author applies to party fights.

[9] Richard K. Jones, 45th Sheriff of Butler County, Ohio. Born Hamilton, Ohio, October 11, 1953. Elected sheriff in 2004; took office January 3, 2005; subsequently re-elected, including 2020 and 2024. Official biography: https://www.butlersheriff.org/sheriff.

[10] Ohio Senate Bill 5 (2011) restricted collective bargaining for public employees. It passed the General Assembly and was signed by Governor John Kasich, then repealed by statewide referendum (Issue 2) in November 2011. The fight split many Ohio Republicans from public-safety unions and local officials.

[11] WLW (700 AM), Cincinnati. Long-running talk hosts associated with this period include Doc Thompson and Willie. The Lakota schools controversy and on-air confrontations described here are from the author’s firsthand radio work, not from a single official transcript.

[12] Charleston Harbor, Fort Sumter, and the early-eighteenth-century pirate history of the Carolina coast (including Edward Teach, “Blackbeard”) are standard public history. The comparison to Butler County is the author’s travel observation.

[13] Vivek Ramaswamy (Ohio) and J.D. Vance (Middletown, Butler County) are the two most nationally visible political figures to come out of the modern Ohio / Butler County conservative pipeline. Vance is Vice President of the United States as of 2025. Rep. Warren Davidson represents Ohio’s 8th Congressional District. Bernie Moreno was elected U.S. Senator from Ohio in 2024.

[14] Mary L. Swain, Butler County Clerk of Courts. Michael T. Gmoser, Butler County Prosecuting Attorney. Both Republicans holding countywide office as of 2024–2026. See Ballotpedia, Butler County, Ohio, elections, 2024.

[15] Ohio grand juries are convened under the Ohio Revised Code and local court practice. Foreman service is a civic appointment. Descriptions of jail tours and floor layout are from the author’s service and are not a disclosure of secret grand-jury deliberations or votes.

[16] Nancy Nix, CPA, Butler County Auditor. Appointed February 2023 by the Butler County Republican Party Central Committee after the felony conviction and removal of Auditor Roger Reynolds; sworn in February 13, 2023; elected November 2024. Previously Butler County Treasurer for nearly sixteen years. Office: https://auditor.bcohio.gov.

[17] Roger Reynolds, former Butler County Auditor, was convicted in December 2022 of a felony count of unlawful interest in a public contract related to Lakota Local Schools and a golf-training facility. He was removed from office. In 2024 he unsuccessfully sought to oust Auditor Nancy Nix through Ohio Supreme Court action and a Board of Elections protest. See Journal-News coverage, 2023–2024.

[18] FirstEnergy / House Bill 6 is the shorthand for Ohio’s 2019 nuclear-and-coal subsidy scandal, which produced federal prosecutions and years of state-level fallout. Democrats and Republicans both own pieces of the policy environment that made Ohio’s generation politics toxic. The point in this essay is party discipline after a scandal, not a legal brief.

[19] On public records, expungement, and political research: Ohio sealing and expungement statutes do not erase every trace of a matter from news archives, court indexes, or opposition research files. Leadership of a county party is a public role. That is a practical warning, not a legal opinion.

[20] Todd Hall has served as Executive Chairman of the Butler County Republican Party. See butlercountygop.org. Todd Minniear ran for Liberty Township Trustee (at-large) in 2025. References here to party leadership conversations are the author’s personal political judgment, not an official party endorsement.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Swinging for the Fences: Why I Am Betting on Butler County’s Advanced Air Mobility Future

People have been asking me what I am doing. They have wondered about me. They have watched the episodes, read the blog, seen me in rooms around Butler County for years, and then I went quiet in the way a person goes quiet when they are changing the work under their feet and are not ready to turn it into content.

I am not looking for a safe job that pays well so I can run out the clock. I have had those offers. I appreciate them. I am affiliating myself with a team of very sharp engineers and builders at Volynt Aero, as a senior consultant, with a path toward the COO seat, and I am doing it because I am in a stage of life where I want to swing for the fences. Not out of desperation. Out of refusal. I have watched too many capable people spend their best remaining years hitting ground balls and calling it wisdom.[1][2]

On Monday, September 21, 2026, at 7:00 p.m., at 20 South Elm Street, Oxford, Ohio 45056, inside Fisher Innovation College@Elm on Miami University’s campus, we are going to talk in public about economic vitality and what I believe is an enormous opportunity for Butler County. The event is free. Nobody is asking you to bring a checkbook. Just eat some snacks, shake hands, and hear the plan. I told my wife to go to Costco and get Doritos, punch, and whatever else makes a room feel welcoming instead of processed. That is the tone—serious work. Easy room. If you have wanted a reason to see me after a decade of reading or listening, that is the date. My schedule jumps around a lot, but I will be there for this.[3][4]

Oxford. The university town on the west side of the county. The building is the renovated old food-service and workforce site at 20 S. Elm Street — College@Elm — not a lecture hall buried in the academic core. Volynt Aero lists that building as its home. Miami’s Advanced Air Mobility Hub lives in that same incubator. The door you want is on Elm.[1][2][3][5]

I still dislike the word consultant, even though I now wear it, because I spent years chained to a success I had already built, and I felt embarrassed standing next to men who had already swung and connected. And why I would rather strike out in public, in Butler County, in the aerospace market I have been talking about for years, than spend the rest of my working life protecting ground that other people were already trying to steal.

I am a job-creator kind of person. I want to make jobs. I do not want to get a job someone else already made. That distinction sounds like a slogan until you have lived both sides of it. Most of the professional class measures adulthood by getting a job. Making jobs is how a county stays alive. I am happiest when I create work for other people—hundreds, or thousands. If I can help build something that employs a thousand people or more, that is the scoreboard I care about. Upper mobility. Payrolls that put gas in cars. Families that can stay in Butler County instead of exporting their kids to Texas, North Carolina, or the coasts and then coming home at Christmas to tell us how much better the schools are somewhere else.

I have done versions of this before. I have hired. I have built programs. I have kept a business alive longer than I wanted to because I brought people into it and felt responsible for the lives attached to those paychecks. That loyalty was not branding. It cost me years. It also taught me the thing the consultant class never learns: once you make something valuable, you become a target. Pirates do not always arrive with hooks and flags. Sometimes they arrive with decks, retainers, and a vocabulary about “professionalizing the operation.”

Go back to 2019. We had a Trump rally at a place where I had spent much of my life building a business. The owner was my friend. I stayed with that business a long time because of that friendship and because I didn’t want to deal with the woke corporatism that evolved from 2015 through 2020. Then COVID. Then the years after COVID, when the work stopped being about building and started being about keeping the lights on for people I had hired. I felt chained to their ability to put gas in the car. In a lot of ways I felt like I was lashed to a white whale. From the outside, that can look like success. The people who still had jobs were glad the jobs existed. I was glad they still had them. Inside, I was resentful — not of the people, of the process. I had created jobs, and then I became the janitor of those jobs while other people bought in, layered in, and tried to change what I didn’t want changed.[6]

It felt like trying to stay married to someone who wanted to cheat. Every time you turned around, they were climbing out a window toward some new lover with a fancier spreadsheet and phony EBITA numbers propped up by a shell game. I poured my heart into a company I didn’t fully control. Other people wanted to change it. I didn’t like the changes or the people who came with them. I still liked the people I had encouraged to become part of it. So I stayed. I defended. I hit ground balls to advance other people already safely on base. I kept the lights on.

Over the last couple of years, I went through multiple cycles of consulting firms imposed on me by, come what may, financial institutions who thought they knew best, after the best was already placed in their lap and worked out for them. Three waves. Then a fourth. I will say it the way I say it when I am not dressing it up for a chamber breakfast: a lot of them are dumb as rocks, and I do not mean to insult rocks. They are paid like industry professionals while the world under their feet has already changed. They exist to maintain ground already taken. They do not create the ground. They arrive after value exists and explain to the people who made the value how the value should now be managed. That is not a free market. That is a priesthood of fools.[7][8]

I worked at the same place for many years because of loyalty to the owner and because I wanted his family to benefit from what had been built. I still want that. Friendship does not expire because a corporate process gets stupid. But I also wanted an excuse to get away from a machine that had stopped being a build and had become a defense. The first opening that would let me play where I actually wanted to play showed up in these guys at Miami, in vertical takeoff, in the new space-adjacent aerospace market I have been putting episodes on for a long time. I have been interested in vertical aerospace for years. I wanted into that market for all kinds of reasons. Then my life opened a gap; I met them, I liked them, I wanted them to succeed, and they started introducing me to people. That was the intention. That is why I said yes.

They have introduced me as the coming COO. Right now I am a consultant. A senior consultant. I have a path toward the COO role at the scale they are trying to reach. I was apprehensive about the word. I have been stunned by how many places want me to consult for them. I had personal reservations about putting my name on that label. I still have them. I am also proud to be affiliated with this particular team. The title is not the prize. The prize is whether we can turn a sharp technical package into manufacturing, customers, and jobs.

Vivek Ramaswamy and J.D. Vance were at that 2019 rally I hosted. Warren Davidson has been in the orbit. I have had conversations with Bernie Moreno. I had a good talk with Jim Renacci after an event at Jags in West Chester. I have watched a lot of people I know leave the safe lane, take a real risk, and come back with independent wealth—enough to enter politics, or to refuse to be owned by it.[9][10]

Vivek was already on a steep wealth curve then. He wasn’t quite in the billionaire club the way magazines like to print it, but he was headed that way, and since then he’s been in that conversation and has taken the political path back toward Ohio’s governorship. Years later the call came through other people: he wanted to announce a governor’s race at my place, because the place still represented a free-enterprise culture that had not gone fully woke, and because we were doing things that did not look like everybody else. I said yes. I meant yes. I also felt a private embarrassment I should admit here, because if I do not admit it, the rest of this sounds like a victory lap instead of a confession.

When you stand next to people who built or sold large enterprises and then used that capital to change the map, and you are the guy still defending last decade’s success against the fourth wave of consultants, you feel the difference in your chest. They look at you the way a hitting coach looks at a veteran who will not let the bat get through the zone. You are at this stage of life. Why are you hitting ground balls? Why are you taking the walk? Why are you protecting a single when the bases are loaded? You are a guy who could drive the ball with runners on. Why are you trying to beat out a roller to short?

The honest answer, for a long time, was loyalty. Loyalty to the owner who was my friend. Loyalty to the people I hired. I do not apologize for that. I also will not pretend it was the same thing as ambition. Ambition would have left earlier. Loyalty stayed. Then loyalty, after enough waves of professional stupidity, became a kind of self-betrayal. I felt like I was underperforming in front of people I respected. I felt like I was wasting a bat. When Vivek talked about using the place because it still stood for the free-enterprise system, I felt a flicker of pride and a bigger flicker of “I should have more to put on the table than a good venue and a good story about the past.”

I watched them swing. Some of the balls went over the fence. The crowd enjoyed it. The players enjoyed it. Everybody enjoys seeing a ball leave the yard, including the man who hit it. I wanted that feeling again — not the celebrity, the creation. I want to make other people wealthy. I want payrolls large enough that a community can even start talking about abolishing property taxes without gutting the services people actually like. That is a standard, not a slogan. If you are not trying to create billions in new market value, I am not sure the conversation is worth the evening. A few hundred million in annual revenue is what the coastal startup press calls a win. I do not think that is a win. Ten billion in new market growth is the starting point for a conversation about success. To me, success looks like a hundred billion. That is how you change a county instead of decorating it.

I haven’t built a job base that employed a thousand people or more in over a decade. I have been trying to hang on to the success I had already built. That work has its honor. It also became boring to me, and boredom in an operator is a warning light. When the fourth wave of consultants arrived with different ideas about how we should do the thing I had already done, I was happy to leave and not look back. They did not like me. I did not like their ideas. I did not want to be part of another cycle of ground balls. I took the off-ramp. I would rather hit the reset button and start over with people who want to build than spend another year arguing with people who think a slide deck is an airplane. I’m sure I’ll write a book about all this once I get some distance from the immediacy of it all. It will make a very interesting business book. But first, such books are only valuable to people once you are looking back from a position of success; otherwise, it’s just another story about a down-and-out situation. Success has to be attached to the narrative.

That is how I landed at Volynt.

The building matters, and I am going to stay on the building for a minute because “Miami University” is a large map, and people get lost on large maps. College@Elm is Miami’s innovation and workforce hub at 20 S. Elm Street. It used to sit vacant. The university, the City of Oxford, alumni, the state capital budget, and JobsOhio money turned it into a technology, entrepreneurship, and light-manufacturing incubator — office, design and testing, startup space, a workforce resource function, and room for real production instead of just posters about production. Miami alumni Lee and Rosemary Fisher put their name on it. Randi Thomas and the ASPIRE shop treated it as a way to drag Oxford out of an eight-month student economy and toward a twelve-month one. That is the room.[3][4][11][12]

Volynt Aero’s address is that building. Suite language has appeared in their capability materials as 20 S. Elm St., Suite 117. Miami has also stood up an Advanced Air Mobility Hub in the same incubator, aimed at autonomous, hybrid-electric, and eVTOL aircraft, in collaboration with Butler County and Middletown Regional Airports, Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, Butler Tech, and industry partners including Volynt.[1][2][5]

Volynt is not a passenger flying-taxi pitch dressed up for a TED talk. I need to say that because the popular press only knows one picture of this industry: a four-seat air taxi humming over a downtown skyline in a rendering that has never paid a supplier. The company is building large hybrid-electric uncrewed aircraft for cargo logistics, disaster response, contested logistics, mobile power generation, and forward communications—ugly work. Useful work. The work that can find a customer before the lifestyle brochure does. They call the aircraft line Vyper in their public materials. The founding team came out of UAS and eVTOL work dating to 2012, including AFWERX Agility Prime flight-test experience on a full-scale electric aircraft; University of Cincinnati aerospace engineering; Rose-Hulman and Illinois mechanical engineering; and FAA experimental airworthiness work. Together, they have forty-plus years of experience in electric vehicles, eVTOL, and manned and uncrewed aircraft. Jeffrey Bennett is the CEO. Justin Jantzen is the CTO. The rest of the technical bench is the kind of bench a county should want to keep.[2][5][13]

They have proposed a Hybrid Propulsion and Energy Lab — the HyPE Lab — at Miami University Airport in Oxford, a facility in the neighborhood of seven million dollars aimed at hybrid-electric, hydrogen fuel cell, and electric aviation development. They have already pulled Ohio Third Frontier / TVSF grant support in partnership with Miami and the Entrepreneurs’ Center. That is not a finished factory. That is a package with technology laid out, customer logic laid out, and a county sitting in the birthplace of powered flight, next to Wright-Patterson, next to a new Butler Tech aviation hangar beside Middletown Regional, next to Joby and BETA and Electra planting metal in the Miami Valley, in a state that has spent years trying to own advanced air mobility instead of applauding it from the stands.[14][15][16][17][18]

Ohio’s own AAM studies are not modest. DriveOhio and the NEXA work done for the state put the prize at roughly thirteen billion dollars in economic activity over twenty-five years, about fifteen thousand jobs, and about two and a half billion in tax revenue — if Ohio actually captures the market. Cargo, emergency services, and vehicle manufacturing are a large share of that stack. That is the lane Volynt is in. I do not treat a consultant forecast as destiny. I have spent too many years watching forecasts get used as incense. I treat the number as a fastball I can see. If the state leaves that stack on the table, California and Texas will take it and send us a newsletter about thought leadership.[19][20]

I want to give this some color, because “economic vitality” is a phrase chambers of commerce use until it means nothing.

Vitality is not a social-hour calendar. Vitality is surplus. It is when a county produces so much new value that young people do not have to leave, old industrial sites get reused, airports become more than weekend-pilot hobbies, and tax fights become less vicious because the base is growing faster than the government. I have spent a lot of my public life as the tax-killer in this county. I didn’t do that because I hate roads, sheriffs, and firehouses. I did it because a government that cannot stop growing will eat a private economy that has stopped growing. The only durable answer is not a clever levy. The durable answer is so much new payroll and new production that the argument changes temperature.

Butler County already has pieces of the machine. Miami’s Oxford campus and the regional campuses. Middletown’s steel and manufacturing memory, including the kind of heavy industry that still knows what a shift is. The I-75 corridor. Two relevant airports inside the conversation — Miami University Airport in Oxford and Middletown Regional — plus CVG as the big-hub partner on the AAM map. Butler Tech’s new aviation center, a roughly fifteen-million-dollar hangar and classroom pile next to the Middletown airport, with county, city, and JobsOhio money in it, training kids who can see an aerospace job without leaving home. And a university incubator on Elm Street, explicitly sold as a way to create year-round work in a town that used to hibernate when students left.[1][15][11]. And let’s not forget about the wonderful Butler County Regional, which has the prospect of enormous significance in a way that it has always been poised to bring forth.

Advanced air mobility is one of the few new industrial stacks that can still be built in the Midwest instead of being imported as a finished product from the coasts. Ohio has been recruiting it on purpose. Joby has been planting manufacturing near Dayton and talking about thousands of jobs and hundreds of aircraft a year if the production curve holds. Electra has committed a huge Ohio production bet out of an MIT classroom idea that turned into a short-takeoff hybrid aircraft and an $850 million manufacturing story in Springfield and Clark County, with job counts in the neighborhood of two thousand. BETA and the National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield are part of the same weather system. JobsOhio has treated AAM as a super-sector and has been walking that story all the way to Paris. Hartzell in Piqua certified an electric-aircraft propeller. The FAA’s eVTOL Integration Pilot Program is on the 2026 calendar. Ohio entered that fight with a multi-state medical-logistics proposal.[16][17][18][21]

Most of the passenger eVTOL story is still a certification and capital-markets story. That is not an insult. It is a timeline. Certification is slow. Air-taxi unit economics are a sermon until the aircraft is legal, maintainable, and paid for by someone other than a vision fund. The cargo, disaster, defense-adjacent, and mobile-power story can move sooner because the customer is not waiting for a four-seat taxi to become socially fashionable. An uncrewed hybrid aircraft that can haul, generate, and communicate in ugly terrain is a product a government buyer and a logistics company can understand without a lifestyle brochure. That is why I like this package. It is closer to a truck than to a fashion object.

I have talked about the new space economy and vertical aerospace for years. All these things mentioned here are merging at a very unique time in Southern Ohio, and I’ve known it for a long time, and I had felt stuck, unable to participate because of my other commitments. I wanted into that market, not stuck to loyal obligations. Not as a fan. As an operator. I have walked the producer culture at SpaceX and looked at what happens when a company treats manufacturing as the product instead of treating the press release as the product. Reusability. Iteration. Catching the thing and flying it again. That is the version of aerospace I want in Ohio. I do not need Volynt to be SpaceX. I need Volynt to be as serious as SpaceX: close the gap between the drawing and the floor. California and Texas will take a lot of the gold rush. They should not take all of it. Ohio invented powered flight. It should not rent the sequel from the coasts and call the rental economic development.

There is a second vitality problem I will not dance around. A lot of American corporate culture imported a compliance religion that I believe tracks, in spirit if not in every memo, to the same managerial habits that made Wall Street comfortable with Communist China’s labor and governance model while lecturing American manufacturers about virtue. ESG-era asset managers scolded domestic firms and stayed hungry for China exposure. Larry Fink could write letters telling American CEOs that climate and stakeholders would reshape finance, and the same apparatus could treat Beijing as a growth market. That split personality cost real companies real billions in distracted leadership. It also trained a consultant class to speak fluent morality while missing the factory. I have watched it up close. I have watched financial institutions send in the next wave of advisors because they thought a firm that had not gone woke yet still had juice that could be squeezed if only the culture were more compliant. They do not like Elon Musk. They do not like being told the world will change through building instead of through postings. I have been a target of that instinct. I am done volunteering for it.[22][23][24]

I want to lead a very dramatic change that changes entire industry standards, around the world. I want to help build a company that makes money the old way: a customer pays for a machine that works. Easy money and financial engineering can look like vitality for a while. Then inflation shows up, and the community realizes the jobs were never as solid as the press release. I want the other kind. Output. Exports. Aircraft. Power systems. Maintenance hangars. Suppliers. Kids from Butler Tech and Miami who can stay home and get paid. I want so much money coming into this community that property taxes become a conversation you can have without destroying the services people like. That is where my mind is. Getting on base is not enough.

Swinging for the fences is a moral choice, not a motivational poster. Baseball metaphors get cheap. I am keeping this one because it is the cleanest picture of the decision.

Most people in operating roles at this stage of life take the safe route. Get on base. Take the walk. Protect the pension. Let someone else hit the homer. You have already done the hard thing once. Now you need to keep your place in the lineup. I understand that instinct. I rejected it.

Swinging for the fences can end in a strikeout. I know that. I am a realist in business. Success is not entirely up to me. Other people have to get on base. The pitcher has to leave a pitch you can actually hit. Certification, capital, customers, suppliers, and timing all have to arrive in something like the right order. I have said on the air that this is a poker game more than a guaranteed jackpot. The risk is real. I do not think the risk is stupid. They have a gap I think they can close. I know what I can do in an operating seat. That part is not in doubt in my mind. I have done versions of it many times. The barrier most early technical teams cannot cross is not the CAD model. It is the factory floor, the hiring machine, the customer close, and the culture that does not dissolve when the first institutional money arrives. In this case, I see all those coming together in very unique and profitable ways. It’s always about timing, and the timing for this is right now.

Even so, a strikeout while swinging for the fence feels more honest to me than a career of ground balls. I have wanted a window to build from the ground up again. I got one. Before the window closes, I want a grand slam for Butler County — or at least a swing that everybody in the stands can respect. Safety is not my default setting. Loyalty is. Those two traits fought each other for years. Loyalty won, until the fourth wave of consultants made it obvious that staying was no longer protecting the people I hired. It was protecting a process I did not believe in.

I enjoy risk. I enjoy my life most when there is real risk in it. People who have known me a long time know that. They also know I will hang onto a job base I created longer than a purely rational careerist would, because I do not like being the person who collected a check and left other people’s mortgages on the table. When the money showed up to go somewhere else, and I knew the new layer was going to take it in a direction I would not sign off on, I did not feel like I was letting anybody down by leaving. I felt like I was buying my freedom from a process that had already decided I was the problem.

I want to be a version, in Ohio, of what the serious aerospace builders are doing in Texas. I expect that of myself. I was embarrassed, in those conversations with people like Vivek Ramaswamy and Bernie Moreno who had already swung and connected in their own lives, because I could hear the unasked question from them: you love the free-enterprise system enough to host a speech, why aren’t you in the game at that scale? I hosted the speech. I meant it. I also needed a moment of my own — the kind where you roll the dice large enough that the win, if it comes, is visible from the rest of the world.

September 21 is not a fundraiser with a soft-ask after the punch. It is not the Rich Hoffman show. It is not a secret society. It is a public conversation about a plan for economic vitality in Butler County, hosted where the work is already living, on a Monday night, with the people doing the engineering in the room. If you come, you will not be listening to me invent a company out of a microphone. You will be listening to why I think this particular team, in this particular building, in this particular county, is a bat worth swinging.

Monday, September 21, 2026. Seven o’clock. Fisher Innovation College@Elm. 20 South Elm Street. Oxford, Ohio 45056. Free. Come as you are.

If the evening works, you will leave less interested in me and more interested in what a serious advanced-air-mobility build could do to the tax base, the talent pipeline, and the self-respect of a manufacturing region that has been told for twenty years that the future lives somewhere else. There is a lot of affiliation possible in this — Miami engineers, Butler Tech kids, airport boards, suppliers who already know composites and power electronics, people across Ohio who are tired of watching the next factory announcement land in another state. I want these guys among the names people mention when they talk about who actually built the upper-mobility market instead of posting about it on LinkedIn.

Let me stay in Butler County long enough that the vitality claim isn’t a vibe.

This county sits between Cincinnati and Dayton with a population now in the high 380,000s to about 400,000 depending on which vintage of the estimate you trust, employment in the neighborhood of 190,000 people, and a local GDP north of twenty billion dollars. Manufacturing is not the largest headcount sector—healthcare and retail usually win that race—but it is still the spine. County profile data puts manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands, with hundreds of manufacturing establishments. That is the difference between a bedroom county and a producing county. Bedroom counties import paychecks and export children. Producing counties keep a reason to stay.[26][27]

I have lived in this county my whole adult life. I did not stay because it was fashionable. I stayed because this is the ground I know, and because I think a person who talks about job creation while quietly arranging his own exit to a coastal zip code is running a different play than the one they are selling. The future I want is not a TED talk in Austin about the Midwest. The future I want is a payroll in Oxford, Middletown, Hamilton, Trenton, West Chester, Fairfield, and the townships not named in the brochures.

Middletown still knows steel. Cleveland-Cliffs putting real capital into Middletown Works is the kind of story that should shame anyone who wrote this valley off as a twentieth-century museum. Hamilton is growing again, according to the latest Census slice of incorporated places. Oxford shrinks a little when the student count wobbles, which is exactly why College@Elm was sold as a twelve-month economy instead of an eight-month one. The I-75 corridor still moves freight. The airports are not theoretical. Miami University Airport is a tool if someone treats it as one. Middletown Regional now has a Butler Tech aviation hangar next door — roughly thirty thousand square feet and fifteen million dollars, with millions from the county commissioners, JobsOhio, and the city — so a kid can learn airframes and powerplants without buying a plane ticket to Dayton on the first day of class.[28][15][11]

That is the county I am talking about on the 21st. Not a fantasy county. This one.

I should talk about the industry itself, because vitality without an industry is just a mood.

The Wright brothers did not invent flight so Ohio could become a spectator. Huffman Prairie is a cow pasture with a better story than most nations ever get, and Wright-Patterson plus the Air Force Research Laboratory turned that story into a century of metal, propulsion, sensors, and people who know how to hold a tolerance. The National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence in Springfield gave the new stack a hangar and a test culture. Ohio was early on beyond-visual-line-of-sight work. JobsOhio has been walking AAM around the world as a super-sector. That is nothing. It is also not finished. A super-sector that does not produce aircraft, batteries, blades, software, and trained hands in this state is just a brand.[16][21]

Joby is the loudest nearby proof. In 2023, the state stood at Hawthorn Hill and announced a Dayton-area manufacturing bet aimed at two thousand jobs, hundreds of millions in investment, and a long-run rate described as up to five hundred aircraft a year if the curve holds. By late 2025 they were making propeller blades in Dayton — thirty blades per aircraft across six rotors, with talk of fifteen thousand blades a year at scale. In January 2026 they bought a 700,000-square-foot building in the Vandalia / Dayton orbit to support a doubling of production toward four aircraft a month in 2027, while California still does final assembly in Marina. That is what a real company looks like when it stops rendering and starts buying floor. I do not work for Joby. I am not pretending Volynt is Joby. I am saying the weather system is here, and a county that refuses to fly in that weather is choosing to stay on the ground for sport, and just hitting ground balls when they should be home runs.[18][29][30]

Electra is the other loud proof. An MIT classroom argument about short takeoff versus pure eVTOL turned into a hybrid-aircraft story, then into an $850 million Ohio manufacturing commitment in Springfield and Clark County, with job figures in the neighborhood of two thousand. That architecture differs from Volynt’s unmanned hybrid cargo and power mission, and that is the point. A healthy industrial stack is not one company. It is a density of companies that can share suppliers, schools, airports, and a labor pool that already knows composites, wiring harnesses, thermal problems, and shift work.[17]

BETA, Wisk, Archer, and the rest of the passenger field will keep eating capital and calendar until the FAA is satisfied. That is their fight. Ohio’s eIPP proposal — medical cargo, multi-state coordination, existing infrastructure north of a billion dollars already in the AAM pipeline by the state’s telling — is an attempt to make the fight operational instead of ceremonial.[21]

Volynt’s lane is the one I keep coming back to because it does not need a downtown skyline to make sense. Contested logistics. Disaster. Mobile power. Forward comms. Cargo that does not care whether the landing zone has a concourse. Hybrid propulsion because batteries alone still lose arguments with range, weather, and payload. Unmanned because the scarce resource in a bad place is often the trained crew, not the box. If you have listened to me talk about cargo drones, battlefield and hurricane power, and the difference between a toy and a truck, this is that conversation with a company attached to it.[2][5][13]

I have been drawing and talking through those vehicles for a long time — American-flag and camouflage workhorses, five-hundred-pound-class cargo, relief power after a storm, the ugly missions that do not photograph like an air taxi over a football stadium. The point of affiliation is not that I became a CAD operator. The point is that I know what it looks like when a technical team has the machine but doesn’t yet have the operating company around it. That gap is where COOs either earn their keep or become another slide.

What do I think I bring? I am not going to write myself a brochure. I will say this. I have hired at scale. I have built programs. I have kept operations alive under pressure. I have sat through the consultant priesthood, and I know which parts of their language are anesthesia. I have a public voice in this county, which is either an asset or a liability depending on whether you want the work known. I want the work known. I want suppliers to walk in. I want kids from Butler Tech to see a ladder. I want Miami engineers to have a reason to stay on Elm Street after graduation instead of taking the first offer that spells California correctly. I want political people who talk about jobs to have to look at an actual floor instead of a resolution.

I also want to be honest about scale. Volynt is early. Public profiles put the firm in the small-headcount startup band, founded in 2024, grant-supported, incubator-housed, airport-lab proposed. That is not a criticism. That is the inning. I am walking in at the inning where the bat still matters.

People will ask why a person who distrusts consultants became one. I have answered it, and I will answer it again because the contradiction is the point. I distrust consultants as a class because the class profits from ambiguity and from other people’s sunk costs. I accepted this particular affiliation because the team asked me to help them become a company, not to help them become a presentation about a company. If that changes — if the work becomes another layer of process laid on top of people who actually know how to build aircraft — I will not stay for the fee. I have already lived that movie. I did not like the ending.

The same is true of the COO language. A COO at this stage is not a parking place for a résumé. A COO at this stage is the person who turns a technical core into hiring, suppliers, quality, customers, cash discipline, and a culture that can survive the first serious outside money. Most startups die in that translation. They have smart founders and a concept that connects, and they cannot get distance. I think I can get them distance. That is the only reason to say the letters out loud. A COO has to be top notch and able to build at scale to achieve the kind of revenue I think is meaningful, and you won’t get that by playing it safe and hitting ground balls.

I want to address a risk that the safe people often overlook. Risk isn’t the same as recklessness. Recklessness is swinging at everything. Risk is knowing the count, knowing the pitcher, and still letting the bat go because a walk will not change the game. I have been offered safe work that paid well. I know what that work is. It is a ground ball with a 401(k). It is a walk with better catering. It is other people’s home runs. I have lost years to loyalty, and I am not going to lose the next window to comfort. Comfort is how a producing region becomes a commenting region.

A cultural fight runs beneath the industrial one, and I am not going to pretend I do not see it. LinkedIn-era corporate America learned a language that came into American firms through compliance, banking, and the HR stack, and a lot of that language treats production as a moral problem to be managed instead of a good to be multiplied. I have called that language anti-American in the sense that it distrusts the producer and trusts the administrator. I have called out the China contradiction because it is the tell. If your virtue system cannot survive contact with the actual labor and governance model of the country that ate so much of our manufacturing, your virtue system is a costume. I don’t want a company that puts on the costume to raise a round. I want a company that makes a machine a customer will pay for, then makes another one faster.[22][23][24]

That is why I talk about SpaceX the way I do. Not because I think every Ohio startup is going to catch a booster. Because the method is the method: iterate in public, treat the factory as the product, refuse the cost-plus fog, and accept that some days the thing blows up and you learn. The consultant class hates that method because it makes their timelines look like prayer. I like that method because it is the only one that has recently changed what a country can do in the air.

I also like it because it creates the thing I actually want to be judged by. Jobs. Not jobs as a press-release noun. Jobs as a person who can buy a house in this county, raise children who do not have to apologize for staying, and look at a factory or a hangar and know the work is real. I have not had a run at a thousand-plus job base in more than ten years. That sentence bothers me. It should. A person who knows how to do a thing and spends a decade defending a smaller version of the thing is not being humble. They are being delayed.

Vertical aerospace does not sit in a vacuum. The same decade that made reusable orbital machines ordinary made a lot of people rich and made a lot of other people angry that wealth could still be created without a committee. I have said that a few hundred million in revenue is not the definition of a serious company in this era. I meant it. The markets being built around launch, satellite constellations, lunar logistics, point-to-point cargo, and now advanced air mobility are not cottage markets. They are the next industrial revolution, and they still have an American accent if we keep it. If we treat them as branding exercises for cities that want to look modern, the accent moves to Shenzhen, to a Gulf sovereign fund, or to whatever coastal firm learned to speak Ohio long enough to take the incentive and leave the toolpath somewhere else.

Vertical takeoff is the part of that revolution that touches a county like mine first. You do not need a Cape to build a hybrid cargo aircraft. You need engineers, a hangar, a certification strategy, suppliers, and a customer with a problem a road cannot solve. Disaster is that customer. Defense logistics is that customer. A hospital network that cannot wait for a truck in snow is that customer. A grid that dies in a hurricane is that customer. I have watched too many AAM conversations start at the air-taxi rendering and stay there until the money gets bored. Start at the ugly mission. The ugly mission pays. The pretty mission might pay later.

I kept doing episodes on this because it would have been easier to do another week of political weather. Politics matters. I am not walking away from it. But politics without production is commentary. I got tired of being excellent at commentary while the production problem in my own working life was a whale I was feeding. That is the private engine under this public announcement. I wanted my workdays to match the thing I have been telling this audience is coming.

I also wanted my community to have a shot at the kind of wealth that does not arrive as a transfer payment. Transfer wealth makes clients. Produced wealth makes citizens. I have watched federal money, state money, levy money, and foundation money wash through this region and leave behind a professional class that knows how to apply for the next wash. I am not against a smart grant. Volynt has used Ohio Third Frontier support and I am not going to pretend that seed capital is sinful. I am against a culture that thinks the grant is the business. The business is an aircraft that flies, a customer who pays, a shop that can build the next one, and a payroll that does not vanish when the appropriation cycle turns.

Consultants love the grant cycle. They measure it in the way they understand measurement: hours, decks, compliance language, a ribbon, a quote in the paper. Builders love the second aircraft. The second aircraft is the only metric that means the first one was not a stunt. If you come on the 21st and you only want to hear about the first rendering, you will be in the wrong room. I want to hear about the second, the tenth, and the factory that makes the tenth boring.

Boring is the compliment. SpaceX became important when landing a booster stopped being a miracle and started being a Tuesday. Joby becomes important in Ohio when a blade is just a blade and an airframe is just an airframe and the third shift is staffed. Volynt becomes important in Butler County when a hybrid unmanned cargo aircraft is a product you can point at, not a paragraph in an incubator newsletter. I am here for the Tuesday. I am willing to live through the miracles to get there. I am not willing to live through another decade of process about the miracles.

People who have known me since the car lots and the plants and the courtrooms and the long years in aerospace programs know I do not have a clean corporate story. I have a Western story. I worked young. I learned in rooms that did not care about my feelings. I wrote a book that used a gunfighter as the American stand-in for Sun Tzu and Musashi because I thought this civilization had forgotten that speed plus competence is a moral achievement, not a personality defect. That book was not a merch play. It was meant to give operators a language that did not come from a consultancy or from a monastery. If you read it and then watch me take a safe COO job at a firm that wants to be liked by the same class the book was written against, you should reject the book and I would never want you to do that.[7]

The loyalty years complicate the legend, and I am leaving the complication in. I could tell this as a clean break: woke capital arrived, I left, I found the future. That is too clean. I stayed because of a friend. I stayed because of people I hired. That is a virtue until it becomes a cage. The cage ended when the fourth wave made it obvious that the fight was no longer about the work. It was about who got to narrate the work. I do not give that away anymore.

If you are a young engineer at Miami and you are reading this, I want you in the room. If you are a trades kid at Butler Tech who can hold a torque spec, I want you in the room. If you are a supplier who already sells to the Dayton aerospace pile and you are curious whether Oxford is serious, I want you in the room. If you are a mover and shaker, a trustee, a mayor, or a staffer who only knows this industry from a JobsOhio slide, I want you in the room. If you are a person who has listened to me for ten years and thought I would never come back to a build, I want you in the room so you can see that I meant what I said when it really mattered most. Not when the game was on the line and we were hitting ground balls just to get and stay on base. But to hit home runs and to win the game in ways that nobody ever forgets.

So come to Elm Street.

If you are coming from Middletown or Liberty Township, you are driving west toward Oxford, not south toward Cincinnati and not north toward Dayton unless you like extra highway. You want 20 South Elm Street. You want the College@Elm building. You want 7:00 p.m. on Monday the 21st. Park like a person who has been to Oxford before, the building has its own parking lot— the streets are tight, the students exist, the building is the old food-service site that does not look like a cathedral and should not. Walk in. Eat a Dorito. Shake a hand. Listen to engineers. Listen to why I think this is the fence we need to knock the ball over with the bases loaded.

If you have known me for a long time and you have been waiting for a reason that was not another levy fight or another school-board night, this is a different reason. I still care about taxes, because a county that cannot grow its base will keep reaching into the same pockets. I still care about schools, because a talent pipeline that hates production will not staff a hangar. I still care about the sheriff’s side of a functioning county, because none of this works in a place that cannot keep law and order. But the 21st is not a political rally. It is an economic conversation with a company in the room.

I have said I want wealth large enough that property tax abolition becomes thinkable without wrecking services. People hear that as a joke or as a campaign line. Hear it as a measuring stick. If the new stack in Ohio is really thirteen billion over twenty-five years and fifteen thousand jobs, and if Butler County captures even a serious slice of the cargo, power, training, and supplier work, the tax argument in this county changes. If we capture nothing, we will keep fighting over the same pie and calling the fight civic engagement.[19][20]

I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business because I thought America needed its own book of strategy — not another imported mystic manual, and not another consultant workbook that teaches people how to manage decline politely. Shooting from the hip, in that book, is not sloppiness. It is mastery under time pressure. I have made a lot of people money before. I have given a lot of people jobs they could live on. I am proud of that. I want to do it again, bigger than I have had a chance to do it in more than a decade. That is why I am standing where I am standing. That is why I stopped protecting the whale. That is why I am swinging.

If the ball goes over the fence, Butler County should feel it in the payrolls. If it does not, at least nobody will be able to say I spent the late innings bunting.

Notes

[1] Miami University ASPIRE, “Advanced Air Mobility Hub,” The Miami Difference. Hub housed in Fisher Innovation College@Elm; collaborators include Butler County and Middletown Regional Airports, CVG, Butler Tech, and Volynt Aero. https://miamioh.edu/aspire/miami-difference/stories-2025/advanced-air-mobility-hub.html

[2] Volynt Aero LinkedIn company page: Oxford headquarters; hybrid unmanned eVTOL mission; 20 S. Elm St. address; Ohio TVSF / Third Frontier grant with Miami University. https://www.linkedin.com/company/volynt-aero

[3] Miami University, “Economic and Community Impact of College@Elm,” 20 S. Elm St., Oxford, OH 45056. https://miamioh.edu/college-at-elm/impact/

[4] Hailee Perry, “Miami starts process of renovating workforce development building,” Oxford Observer, September 10, 2021.

[5] Volynt Aero, Capability Statement (2024): cargo, mobile power, forward comms; AFWERX Agility Prime background; 20 S. Elm St. Suite 117. https://volynt.aero/uploads/VolyntAero_CapabilityStatement_2024.pdf

[6] Author’s firsthand account, Overman Warrior podcast and contemporaneous notes, 2019–2026.

[7] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021).

[8] Rich Hoffman, video commentary on consultants, pricing, and corporate process theater, including “Affordability and Pricing” (2025).

[9] C-SPAN, “Gubernatorial Candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (R-OH) Campaign in Middletown,” August 2026.

[10] Public biographies and campaign records of Vivek Ramaswamy, J.D. Vance, Warren Davidson, Bernie Moreno, and Jim Renacci, used only to locate the author’s personal encounters.

[11] “The new Fisher Innovation College@Elm center hopes to drive economic growth in the community,” The Miami Student, March 9, 2023.

[12] Miami University, “Miami, city of Oxford receive JobsOhio Vibrant Community Grant for visionary College@Elm project,” June 2021.

[13] Volynt Aero, company site and team page. https://volynt-aero-site.netlify.app/

[14] Lauren Steen, “Manufacturer proposes $7M aviation facility at Miami University Airport,” Cincinnati Business Courier / Local 12, January 6, 2025.

[15] Aidan Cornue, “Butler Tech Aviation Education Hangar opens to students,” Oxford Free Press, February 14, 2026.

[16] “The Birthplace of Flight Is Going Electric,” Midstory, March 2, 2026.

[17] MIT News, “A new kind of aircraft departs an MIT classroom and arrives at an Ohio factory,” August 25, 2026.

[18] CoStar / industry coverage of Joby’s Dayton-area manufacturing expansion and production targets.

[19] DriveOhio, “Advanced Air Mobility Economic Impact Study.” Roughly $13 billion in activity, 15,000 jobs, $2.5 billion in tax revenue over 25 years if Ohio captures the market. https://drive.ohio.gov/programs/advanced-aviation/advanced-air-mobility/advanced-air-mobility-economic-impact-study

[20] Michael J. Dyment and Chase Leeby, Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio, NEXA Capital Partners / NEXA Advisors.

[21] JobsOhio, Ohio eIPP / AAM coalition materials, including the January 28, 2026 GlobeNewswire release on Ohio’s FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program proposal.

[22] “BlackRock’s China Hypocrisy Highlights ESG’s Shortcomings,” National Review, February 3, 2022.

[23] “China Has One Powerful Friend Left in the U.S.: Wall Street,” The Wall Street Journal.

[24] “‘Woke’ Capitalists Sell Out U.S. to China Behind a Mask of Virtue,” RealClearPolitics, June 4, 2020.

[25] Rich Hoffman, author bio and Politics of Heaven project description, The Overmanwarrior / richhoffmanbooks.com.

[26] St. Louis Fed (FRED), Employed Persons in Butler County, OH, 2025 annual: 189,920.

[27] Butler County / BCFA community profile: population near 388,000–399,000; manufacturing employment in the mid-teens of thousands; GDP reported above $22 billion in profile materials.

[28] Journal-News, May 26, 2026, Census estimates on Hamilton and other Butler County cities.

[29] JobsOhio, “Joby Aviation Doubles Down on Ohio,” 2026, and DeWine / Husted 2023 Dayton manufacturing announcement: 2,000 jobs targeted, up to 500 aircraft per year at full ambition.

[30] Dayton Daily News, June 15, 2026, Joby Dayton blade work and Vandalia 700,000-square-foot assembly building.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021. Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. CreateSpace, 2012. Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/ Hoffman, Rich. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/ Volynt Aero. https://volynt.aero Volynt Aero. Capability Statement. 2024. Miami University ASPIRE. Advanced Air Mobility Hub. Miami University. Economic and Community Impact of College@Elm. DriveOhio. Advanced Air Mobility Economic Impact Study. Dyment, Michael J., and Leeby, Chase. Advanced Air Mobility Business Case Assessment: State of Ohio. JobsOhio eIPP and AAM super-sector materials, 2025–2026. Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System. Productivity Press, 1988. Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Goal. Womack, Jones, and Roos. The Machine That Changed the World. 1990. Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma. 1997. Grove, Andrew S. Only the Paranoid Survive. 1996. Drucker, Peter F. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup. 2011. Fink, Larry. Annual letters to CEOs, BlackRock, 2018–2025. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Woke, Inc. 2021. Ramaswamy, Vivek. Nation of Victims. 2022. Vance, J.D. Hillbilly Elegy. 2016. Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. 1957. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. 1943. NASA / Booz Allen Hamilton urban air mobility market studies. FAA eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) announcements, 2026. AFWERX Agility Prime program overviews. Kahn, Roger. The Boys of Summer. 1972. Lewis, Michael. Moneyball. 2003. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Musashi, Miyamoto. The Book of Five Rings.

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I. THE AGE OF DISCLOSURE AND THE POLITICS OF HEAVEN

II. FALSE COMPASSION IS NOT LOVE

III. WHY THE RATES ARE NOT RANDOM

IV. YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO SURRENDER WHAT YOU LOVE

V. THE MUSEUM OF THE BIBLE AND THE POWER OF BEING UNASHAMED

That is the model.

VI. KEN HAM, BILL NYE, AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CORE AND SECONDARY

VII. JD VANCE, BUTLER COUNTY, AND WHY SCRIPTURE AT A RALLY IS NOT A GIMMICK

IX. DO NOT WAIT FOR THE RAPTURE WHILE EVIL DOES THE WORK

X. FLEA-MARKET CHRISTIANITY AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DECORATION AND BACKBONE

XIV. WHAT I WANT FROM LEADERS — AND WHAT I WILL NOT PRETEND

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The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and Why I Opened It

That is why I started asking him questions.

God Raised Adversaries Against Solomon on Purpose

Why a Thousand Years of Peace Would Not Make Us Heroes

That is the comparison I wanted on the table.

I think that question is the one America is failing in public.

Psalm 82 Is a Courtroom, Not a Plea for Help

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God Still Fits

Free Will, Desire, and the Fire

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How Jonathan Edwards Died, and What He Thought Death Was

I would rather have that honesty than a counterfeit ghost.

What Hits Hardest in 2026

Righteousness as a Weapon, Not a Brand

Footnotes

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The 2016 Rhyme They Think We Forgot

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What Ohio Votes for When the Noise Stops

Footnotes

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Why I Keep Opening This Bible

The Road to Damascus Was a Hostile Takeover

Why the Original Apostles Could Not Have Done Paul’s Job

The Tentmaker Advantage: Financial Independence as Spiritual Nerve

What Ephesians Actually Does

Flesh, Blood, and What I See in a Granddaughter

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What Christianity Gave the West

Jonathan Edwards and the American Nerve

Fort Necessity: The Wrong Turn That Organized My Year

A phone call in the bookstore

Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg, and the Men Who Paid the Invoice

The Cascade I Keep Seeing

The Business DNA of the Christian West

Imperfect Instruments: Why I Compare a Businessman to Paul

What a Second Great Awakening Would Actually Look Like

Why I Will Keep Talking to AI About This

Know Where You Are

What I Want the Reader to Do

Notes

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A Good Day Is Not an Accident

Who Jonathan Edwards Actually Was

The Great Awakening Was a Political Event

What This Study Bible Actually Contains

The Smell of a New Book Is Not Trivial

Law and Order Begins With a Book on the Desk

God Is Not a Conflict-Resolution Seminar

The Politics of Heaven in the Age of Disclosure

Why I Am Telling You to Get This One

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What Is Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, and Why Is It Not a PlayStation?

Two features of that definition wreck most modern politics.

Plato vs. Aristotle: Philosopher Kings, Jedi Knights, and Limited Government

How Greek Philosophy Reached the Declaration of Independence

Jonathan Edwards and the Christian Platform Beneath American Liberty

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