Unrestricted Warfare: The Front Line Moved Into the Paycheck: How a 1999 Chinese Military Doctrine Helps Explain Cultural, Corporate, and Cognitive Conflict, if you are against Data Centers and AI, you are helping China win against America

A state can be defeated without a single soldier crossing a border and without a single missile leaving a rail. That sentence used to sound like science fiction. It is now closer to a working description of how power is actually contested. The old picture of war—troops, tanks, flags, and a declared beginning—still exists. It is no longer the whole picture. The more important contest often happens in finance, law, media, software, supply chains, classrooms, and the human-resources office that decides which attitudes are allowed at work.

I have talked about this for years, including when War Room and other outlets treated the subject as strategy rather than slogan. I still own a promotional shirt from the Atlas Shrugged film cycle that advertised in October 2012. The story in those pictures was about producers versus the people who live by controlling producers. This essay’s argument is related, but colder. It is not only about bad policy. It is about a style of conflict designed to make a free country less competitive without looking like an invasion.

What follows is part brief, part review, and part field note. The brief is the 1999 book Unrestricted Warfare, written by two People’s Liberation Army officers. The review is how that book’s logic shows up in gray-zone operations, cyber incidents, sanctions fights, and what NATO now calls cognitive warfare. The field note is personal. After decades in one workplace, I’ve talked to different people, in different rooms, under different rules. The rules often arrive as kindness, inclusion, and “compliance.” The effect is something else: a society trained to police its own energy.

What Clausewitz Said, and What the Colonels Rewrote

Carl von Clausewitz gave the West its most famous definition: war is an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.[1] That definition assumes you can see the force. It assumes a distinction between peace and war, soldier and civilian, battlefield and marketplace. Those distinctions were never perfect. In 1999, two PLA Air Force senior colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, published Chao Xian Zhan—warfare beyond limits—arguing that the distinctions were collapsing on purpose.[2][3]

They were writing after the Gulf War, which had advertised American conventional superiority in brutal high definition. If you cannot beat a superpower on its preferred field, you do not accept the field. You change the game. You use economic pressure, legal process, media, networks, finance, culture, and technology as weapons in combination. You aim at political results, not at a parade of wrecked tanks. In a June 1999 interview, Qiao put the doctrine in one line: the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, and nothing is forbidden.[4]

Using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.

That is still Clausewitz’s object—compulsion of will—with the means blown wide open. The authors were not shy about the catalog. They discussed psychological warfare, media warfare, cultural warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, network warfare, legal warfare, smuggling, resources, and more.[5] They also insisted on combination. One tool is a dispute. A dozen tools timed together are a campaign. If you hit a currency, seed social discord, and probe a power grid in the same season, the target spends its energy arguing about which event “counts” as war. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates.

The most important sentence in the book is not the slogan about rules. It is the claim that the battlefield is everywhere. Ground, sea, air, and space remain battlefields. So do politics, economics, culture, and the psyche.[6] Once you accept that sentence, a lot of modern life stops looking like “politics as usual” and starts looking like low-intensity conflict that never has to declare itself.

Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line

Traditional strategy likes a map with a front. Unrestricted warfare looks like a web. The authors talk about “addition”—stacking methods until the opponent cannot find the line of contact. Later PLA political work formalized a related toolkit as the “Three Warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, written into regulations in 2003.[7] Those three are not a substitute for the 1999 book. They are one way the same instinct was institutionalized: shape what people believe, shake what they are willing to endure, and use law as a weapon rather than a fence.

This is why “hybrid warfare” and “gray zone” became fashionable terms in the West. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine before and after 2014 mixed information operations, energy leverage, proxies, and cyber operations. On December 23, 2015, attackers attributed to the Sandworm group shut off power to roughly 230,000 customers in Ukraine. It was the first widely acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.[8] No tank had to roll for the lights to go out. Plausible deniability did part of the work. If activists, criminals, or “unknown actors” can be blamed, a conventional military reply becomes politically and legally expensive.

International law was built for visible armies. The Geneva tradition assumes you can tell a combatant from a civilian. A server room, a social platform, a ratings agency, or a human-resources policy shop does not wear a uniform. The Tallinn Manuals—first in 2013, then 2.0 in 2017—tried to apply existing law to cyber operations. Most of what unrestricted warfare describes happens below the threshold of an “armed attack.” States like the ambiguity. Clear rules would bind them too.[9]

Economic tools sit in the same gap. Sanctions can wreck a financial system and still fail the legal test of armed attack.[10] That is a feature if your doctrine says the point is political collapse or capitulation, not a formal declaration. The violence, when it comes, may be late. The conference room and the data center get there first.

Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself

NATO and allied research communities now talk openly about cognitive warfare: operations aimed not only at what people know, but at how groups perceive, trust, and decide.[11] Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of volume. You do not need a master propagandist in every town. You need models that can generate tailored narratives, test what spreads, and keep the target public arguing with itself.

This is the frightening part of the 1999 thesis updated for 2026. The original colonels talked about media and psychology. They could not fully describe algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, or automated social engineering. The logic did not need those tools to be valid. The tools made the logic cheaper. If you can degrade collective cognition—attention, memory, trust, and the willingness to pay a cost—you do not have to occupy the capital. You occupy the argument.

Hardware races in the same direction. Autonomy reduces the political cost of using force because fewer of “your” people come home in boxes. That drops the barrier to kinetic conflict even as non-kinetic conflict is already permanent. The two trends reinforce each other. A society that is internally confused is easier to pressure. A society that is internally confident is harder to push around with either drones or narratives.

Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag

Here is where the argument gets personal, and where a serious reader should keep two ideas in the same hand.

First idea: Unrestricted Warfare names cultural warfare as a method. Weaken an adversary from the inside. Make the opponent less cohesive, less fertile, less industrious, less willing to defend its own standards. You do not need every Western fashion to be a Beijing plot for that method to be real. You only need the method to exist, and you need American institutions to be available as terrain.[12]

Second idea: over the last decade, much of American corporate culture has trained people to treat productivity, punctuality, sex differences, and plain speech as moral problems. The memos did not say “this is how you lose a contest with a mercantilist authoritarian state.” They said “values,” “belonging,” and “compliance.” The question worth asking is not whether every diversity officer reports to the PLA. The question is whether a rival who studies cultural warfare would look at the results and smile.

I think the rival would smile. I did not come to that as a theory first. I came to it after watching people obey rules they could not defend. During COVID, I watched institutions in Ohio treat CDC language as liturgy. Court challenges were slow. Social punishment was fast. I put a phone on speaker and called people who were supposed to know the law. That is how I got through it. Plenty of workplaces did not have anyone willing to do that. They complied because compliance had become the local religion. An enemy watching from outside would have learned something useful: large parts of the American professional class will enforce a rule before they will examine it.

That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.

The HR office as terrain

Human resources is where abstract ideology becomes a condition of employment. I have had HR people report to me. When I asked where an idea came from, the face-to-face answer was often some version of “we will do better.” The inbox told a different story. Newsletters and vendor templates arrived with the new values. The people sending them were frequently the age of my children, not villains in a movie. They were following a script that had already been professionalized.

Onboarding at many firms now spends a remarkable share of time on identity rules and sensitivity machinery. Time spent teaching a new hire to be useful—show up, learn the work, look your coworkers in the eye, carry weight—gets crowded out by time spent teaching the new hire which sentences are dangerous. If you are an older man who talks like work is a duty, you can be framed as a climate problem. If you ride a bicycle twenty miles to a job because the car is dead, that used to be called character. In some offices it now reads as “intensity,” which is a polite word for unwanted masculinity.

I am not romantic about every man over fifty. Some of them are tired and rude. I am romantic about the old expectation: if you are sick enough to stay home, stay home; if you are not, go. If it snows, go to work anyway; your co-workers are counting on you. Make yourself useful. That ethic built payrolls. The substitute ethic—work from the living room, treat output as optional, treat feelings as infrastructure—does not build payrolls. It manages them downward.

Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards

Culture is not a side show in this doctrine. It is named terrain. When a commercial sport that sells collision and spectacle starts treating the halftime eye-candy as a seminar in preferences, that is not the end of the republic. It is a tell. Men who paid for front-row seats to watch a game and see women dance are not required to pretend they paid for a lecture. If saying so sends you to an HR office, the office is no longer just administering benefits. It is administering taste.

The same pattern showed up in film. The hard, unsmooth male lead became a problem to be managed. You can call that progress. You can also notice that a civilization in a long contest with a high-discipline mercantilist rival might not want to train its young men to be ashamed of drive. Beards and tattoos on men in their thirties are not a military doctrine. They are sometimes a leftover male signal in a workplace that punished the older signals. The strategic point is simpler: if you flatten the people who like to compete, you flatten the economy that depends on them.

Sexual identity fights belong in the same file. A free country can leave adults alone. A strategic culture that turns every workplace into a referendum on private life is doing something else. It burns attention. It splits coalitions. It makes ordinary competence look like aggression. Unrestricted warfare does not need to invent the fight. It only needs the fight to continue.

COVID as a rehearsal

I keep returning to COVID because it was the week the mask slipped on the machinery. Policy moved faster than evidence in too many rooms. Dissent was treated as dirtiness. The people who said “just follow the rules” were often the same people who could not name who wrote the rules. “We are a culture of compliance” is not a boast in a republic. It is a vulnerability report.

A rival does not have to love the virus to love the data. How quickly did professionals accept workplace punishments for speech? How quickly did schools take over children’s moral education while parents were isolated? How quickly did “expert” language replace judgment? Those are cultural measurements. They tell you how much friction an influence campaign would meet.

Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy

American business is not the Chinese Communist Party. Conflating the two is sloppy. What is not sloppy is noticing that global firms optimize for access, risk reduction, and reputational peace. If the cheapest way to keep markets, banks, campuses, and NGOs quiet is to import a values language that flattens conflict inside the firm, many firms will import it. They will call it best practice. Vendors will sell the templates. LinkedIn will reward the slogans. Smaller companies will copy larger ones because lenders, insurers, and talent pipelines punish deviation.

That is how you get a one-way ratchet without a conspiracy chalkboard. Beijing does not have to draft the memo if the memo already weakens the only large open society that still out-innovates it. United Front work, elite capture, research partnerships, and capital access are the documented channels. Cultural mimicry is the force multiplier—retired Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding and others have argued that if you watch Chinese behavior since 1999 through the lens of the book, the picture snaps into focus.[13] You do not have to accept every page of that popularization to accept the narrower point: connectivity is a weapon as well as a market.

Cashless systems, monitored transactions, and centralized payment rails belong to the same family of tools. They can be convenient. They can also be turned. A society that cannot complete a private exchange without a third-party ledger is a society that can be throttled. Again: not every debit card is an invasion. The doctrine says look at the combination, not the single instrument.

The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way

Qiao and Wang understood something Western liberals are late to admit. A society that lives by open rules can be made to trip over those rules. Lawfare ties up the opponent in his own courts. Media warfare uses the opponent’s platforms. Cultural warfare uses the opponent’s guilt. If the target responds by building a surveillance state to stop the influence, the target has paid in the coin the influence campaign wanted: less freedom. If the target refuses to notice the campaign, the target stays open and stays cut.

That is the lose-lose proposition. Defend badly, and you become the thing you were defending against. Decline to defend, and you are disarmed in the only war that is already underway. Critics of the 1999 doctrine are right that it treats human rights and international law as just another front. That is not a misunderstanding of the text. That is the text.

The Western answer cannot be “no rules, nothing forbidden.” That is how you cease to be the West. The answer is narrower and harder: name the methods, refuse the scripts that make you weaker, keep due process, and rebuild the habits that make a high-trust, high-output society possible. Resilience matters more than the fantasy of blocking every lie. Recovery speed and social trust are the actual defenses. A country that still believes its own people can work, argue, worship, raise children, and laugh at bad art is a hard country to hollow out.

What This Means on the Ground

If the battlefield is the paycheck, then the first duty is not a new missile. It is a refusal to treat the workplace as a reeducation camp. Hire for output. Measure output. Stop confusing moral fashion with risk management. Parents who want children should not have to apologize to a values slide deck. Men and women are not a paperwork error. Speech about all of that should not be a firing offense.

Political leadership matters because only the state can answer state-backed capital, theft of intellectual property, and platform manipulation at scale. Business leadership matters because most Americans meet the new rules at work, not at a Senate hearing. Voters who want people who have signed payrolls are not being crude. They are asking for officials who recognize a negotiation that smiles in public and competes in private.

I have watched firms that still recruit hungry people—SpaceX is the example everyone uses because it is obvious—outperform firms that recruit for the seminar. That gap will widen as the space economy and other fast industries punish delay. A culture that cannot tell a worker to come in when it snows will not beat a culture that can. This is not poetry. It is arithmetic.

Education is the long front. If the schoolhouse becomes the delivery system for political fashion, the family loses the first chance to form character. You do not need foreign infantry in the hallway after that. You need time. Time is what unrestricted warfare buys when it stays below the threshold of open war.

Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board

The authors of Unrestricted Warfare said the winner would be the side that can play on a board that keeps expanding, while the loser keeps staring at the old squares. Missiles still matter. So do grids, ports, chips, and ships. So do birth rates, work rates, attention spans, and whether a man can say he prefers female cheerleaders without being marched into a conference room. The last item sounds small until you notice the method: make the confident people tired, then call the tiredness progress.

I was insulated from a lot of this for a long time: same place, same people, same expectations. Coming back into a wider set of rooms felt like being thawed out of ice. The tools were new. The weakness was not new. It was the old American temptation to believe that because we mean well, the contest must be a seminar. It is not a seminar. It is a continuous campaign against cohesion.

Sun Tzu wanted victory without battle.[14] The 1999 colonels wrote a modern manual for that instinct and published it openly. They could afford to. A book is not dangerous to the side that is already inside the institutions of the other side. The dangerous thing is a public that still thinks war only looks like a landing craft.

Understand the doctrine. Keep the distinction between evidence and suspicion. Then look at your own shop, your own school, your own screen, and ask the only operational question that matters: does this rule make us harder to beat, or easier? If the honest answer is easier, it is not “best practice.” You have donated terrain to someone who is not confused about whether this is a contest.

Selected Bibliography

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. 1832. Book I, Chapter 1.

Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. Unrestricted Warfare (Chao Xian Zhan). Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1999. English selections via FBIS.

Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Schmitt, Michael N., ed. Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Spalding, Robert. War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination. New York: Sentinel, 2022.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War.

Jamestown Foundation. “The PLA’s Latest Strategic Thinking on the Three Warfares.” China Brief, 2016.

NATO Science and Technology Organization. Materials from HFM-361, Mitigating and Responding to Cognitive Warfare (Madrid, November 2023), and related Chief Scientist reporting on cognitive warfare.

MITRE ATT&CK. “2015 Ukraine Electric Power Attack (Campaign C0028).”

Wikipedia and contemporaneous technical reporting on the December 23, 2015 Ukraine power-grid cyberattack attributed to Sandworm.

U.S. Marine Corps University. “To Win without Fighting” and related essays on PRC political warfare and unrestricted warfare.

RSIS Commentary. Nan Li, “Unrestricted Warfare and Chinese Military Strategy,” 2002.

Author’s Note

This essay is written in the first person on purpose. The strategic literature can be cited. The workplace scenes cannot be footnoted like a statute. They are offered as testimony from one American who spent decades in a single shop, then walked into the new rules and recognized the old doctrine. Readers who want only the book should stop at the bibliography. Readers living under the new rules already know why the paycheck is the front line.

Notes

[1] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1: “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”

[2] Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999). English selections circulated by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS).

[3] The original Chinese title is Chao Xian Zhan (超限战), literally “warfare beyond limits” or “warfare beyond bounds.”

[4] Zhongguo Qingnian Bao interview with Qiao Liang, June 28, 1999; FBIS translation OW2807114599. Qiao: “The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”

[5] Qiao and Wang, Unrestricted Warfare. The authors list methods including psychological, media, cultural, financial, trade, network, legal, smuggling, drug, resource, and ecological warfare.

[6] Qiao and Wang write that “spaces in nature including the ground, the seas, the air, and outer space are battlefields, but social spaces such as the military, politics, economics, culture, and the psyche are also battlefields.”

[7] The “Three Warfares”—public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare—were written into PLA Political Work Regulations in 2003 and elaborated in subsequent PLA teaching texts.

[8] On December 23, 2015, attacks attributed to the Russian group Sandworm disrupted electricity for roughly 230,000 customers in western Ukraine. It is widely cited as the first publicly acknowledged successful cyberattack on a power grid.

[9] Michael N. Schmitt, ed., Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Tallinn Manual 2.0 (2017). Legal literature has discussed work toward a third edition through 2025–2026.

[10] U.S. and allied legal analyses generally hold that ordinary economic sanctions, however severe, do not by themselves constitute an “armed attack” under Article 51 of the UN Charter. That legal line is precisely why economic and regulatory pressure is attractive in unrestricted-warfare thinking.

[11] NATO Science and Technology Organization materials from the HFM-361 symposium (Madrid, November 2023) and subsequent Chief Scientist reporting treat cognitive warfare as influence operations aimed at human decision-making, accelerated by AI and digital platforms.

[12] This section states the author’s interpretive thesis. It is not a claim that a single CCP memo authored every Western HR policy. It is a claim about effects, incentives, and the kind of battlefield the 1999 doctrine described.

[13] Robert Spalding, War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination (Sentinel, 2022), popularizes the 1999 text as a standing playbook rather than a one-off essay.

[14] Sun Tzu, The Art of War: the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Qiao and Wang explicitly place their argument in that lineage.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.

Why Christianity Survived as a Scaling Operation, Not a Martyr Cult—and Why the Apostle Paul was the Best One

I have been living inside a new Bible. Not a novelty Bible. Not one of those thin inspirational editions that treat Scripture like a greeting card. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible, New King James Version, edited by Dr. Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson in August of 2026. I cannot say enough about it. The notes are Edwards. The sermons sit next to the text. The Resolutions are there. The miscellany system is explained so a man can actually work the way Edwards worked. Every time I pick up a different Bible, I change perspective a little. This one changed it a lot.

I was going through it, and I couldn’t help thinking about a miracle that doesn’t get preached the way it should. Not only the crucifixion. Not only the empty tomb. The miracle that Christianity emerged at all. That the word got out. That a Jewish movement in a backwater of the Roman Empire became the operating system of Western civilization. I want to talk about Christianity as a military and commercial endeavor—not instead of the spiritual, but as the way the spiritual actually conquered. What benefit did Christianity bring to the race and to civilization? Magnificent. And I keep thinking, reading Edwards, how many movements rose and fell that we will never know about because the writing did not survive, or it is still buried in the desert waiting to be discovered. We know Christianity because it was documented, scaled, and defended by men who understood value.

King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are

I saw King Charles in England talking about the holy book of the Quran, how we have to respect it, all that progressive mantra that is designed to undo Western civilization. You need to know where you are. You need to know your own nation’s history. I have read the Quran for years. I cannot say there is anything in any version I’ve read that has the spiritual and intellectual merit I get from Edwards. Edwards is a good writer. He is a great mind under pressure. He is the kind of intelligence that contemplates large ideas and then puts them into a form a civilization can use. If you want to know what the United States began as—a Christian nation in the serious sense, not the slogan sense—this Bible is the right tool.

Somebody asked me if I was working for the publisher because I have been pushing this volume so hard. I am not. I want them to make money. Scholars spent years, decades of work behind them, putting Edwards next to the text so a man in 2026 can buy it on the open market and think. How do you make a living long enough to produce something intelligent? How do you buy a hamburger and still have thousands of hours left to put a mind like Edwards in one place? That question is not small. It is the same question Paul answered with a needle and goat hair.

Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.

My favorite book in the Bible is Ephesians. Paul wrote it. I think a lot of people confuse Paul with John. John wrote Revelation. John is the one who survived—tradition says they tried to boil him and he lived, and then he wrote. They killed Paul in Rome, most likely sometime between 64 and 67. People mix the two up. They should not. John is the seer. Paul is the scaler.

Paul came in late. He was against Jesus, and then he was for Jesus. Many people in the world might find themselves in that place. He was a Pharisee, educated, and a tentmaker. The original disciples, when they were still following Jesus around Galilee, were mostly fishermen. Dirt poor. I tend to see that first circle as an early form of communal living—they held things in common, lived off shared provision, and took care of their own. Historians generally see the Jerusalem church in Acts as voluntary generosity inside a tight, persecuted community, not a formal communist system. It was “we take care of our own,” not a political ideology. And it did not last as a model. It could not scale.

Paul’s idea came from a businessman. Because of Paul, we still have Christianity today. That is not a slight against Peter or James or John. It is an observation about how movements survive. The dramatic turn—from hunting the church to becoming its biggest champion after the Damascus Road—matters. His background as a tentmaker and an educated Pharisee gave him a different toolkit than the original disciples. He could travel. He could talk to Gentiles. He could write letters that functioned as operating manuals. Without the missionary journeys and without letters like Ephesians, Christianity might have stayed a small Jewish sect. He brought structure, theology, and a scalable vision.

Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.

The part of Paul that made him effective with people initially against the movement is the part churches don’t like to talk about on Sunday. He did not have to live off a handout. He could be bold, even if he went a little over the edge, because he was financially independent enough from his trade to go against the grain and reshape a movement. That personal independence—having a trade, having a bank account from business days—gave him latitude. Everybody else emphasized martyrdom. Martyrdom is remembered. Martyrdom does not stay around long enough, or hold enough social influence, to make people listen after the body is gone. They were easily disposed of, crucified, written into history as a memento. It takes more than that to make a movement work.

Paul knew how to scale ideas. Ephesians is the proof. He supported himself while traveling and preaching, so he wasn’t as vulnerable to local pressure or to needing one house to feed him. That freedom let him be bolder in the message and push boundaries without worrying about immediate survival. The other apostles were deeply rooted in the Jewish context. Paul was building something that could outlast any single leader. The shift from “follow me to death” to “this truth can transform anyone, anywhere” is the difference between a local witness and a civilization.

If Paul had never converted, I think the movement would have fizzled. The Roman world was full of rebellions and religious groups we have never even heard of. Without his organizational skill and his ability to take the message beyond Jewish circles, Christianity likely stays small, localized, and eventually fades like the rest. His conversion and his strategic vision gave him a unique angle on the bigger picture. I wonder how many political efforts to overthrow or outlast Rome rose and fell that we will never know about. Paul would have been one of them if he had stayed Saul.

Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven

My favorite verse is Ephesians 6:12. I love that line because it is a truth revealed to a mind under tremendous pressure, telling the grim reality of the human race. “For 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.” Paul is preaching monotheism against the tides of the day, against a Roman world that had many gods, and he comes up with the idea that the secret rulers of existence are not the men in front of you. Thank goodness he had the creative nerve to write it that way.

I recognize that verse because I’ve learned it the hard way. The true reality of the universe is that good people end up hurting each other while chasing things that don’t matter, and the reason isn’t always the name on the driver’s license. It is the entities behind the people. Our mistake is stopping at Tim or Bob or Bill. I don’t remember names the way other people want me to. I care about the principalities that climb into bodies and drive them. The flesh-and-blood parts—whose nose looks like the father, whose hair color came from the great-grandfather—mean little to me. The politics of the principality does.

I have a granddaughter a few years old. I watch her walk, run, pick things up, touch the world, learn who is important and who is not. Those bonds will go through her entire life—parents, uncles, cousins, grandparents—even when she is forty or fifty. She is writing those meetings into her experience as she learns. We all go through that. But what was the human being before the human being? What is a person’s spiritual essence before it manifests in flesh and blood? What is the politics of that principality? That is the kind of thing I think about. A personality there is not rooted only in genetic material. We are not always what we are as defined by the human experience. We are what we are whether it manifests or not.

When Does the Principality Enter the World?

People want a clean answer on conception, quickening, birth. I think the principalities are already at work when a mother and father find themselves wanting to form a union to produce a child. They either will themselves into the world or wield the world toward its demise. Human beings create political systems that reflect that dependency because we learned to become flesh, and we rarely see the principal active behind the desire. We are stuck seeing the physical side. The human experience starts to feel like actors on a stage, with invisible directors.

That is why the incarnation is such a radical move. God of the universe taking form as a human being, the Spirit moving through people—if you only watch flesh, it looks strange. If you watch principalities, it looks like the only way to break through hidden influences and meet us in the middle of the mess. Human beings are not the whole problem. The forces that drive the human being are. If you measure your value only by how much you sacrifice yourself to other human beings, you can feed the wrong powers and call it virtue. I have an awful lot of friends in that place. To be nice, I will put my wife in that category. She is a person who will sacrifice as a mother, as a wife, as a community member, so that something good can happen. A lot of people judge their value in the world by what they are willing to give up. Hidden power resides behind the efforts of everything we interact with. You have to know what you are serving.

Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.

Christianity did not spread as a locked-arm kumbaya. Paul fought the original apostles. The clashes were open. Peter was vocal. The question of Gentiles, purity, who is in and who is out—those were not polite committee meetings. It is amazing Christianity even made it. The Jerusalem circle wanted purity. Keep the impure out. Paul wanted scale. Include the nations. If the purity party had won clean, there would have been no movement that could leave Judea. There would have been no Edwards. There would have been no Washington. There would have been no Lincoln. Christianity does not break out of being a Jewish sect without Paul’s vision for the Gentile world.

I mentioned Nancy Nix in the video because that is how this works in real life. I was at Fort Necessity, walking around the bookstore outside the theater, and she called. She represents Republican politics in my community in Butler County, Ohio. We do not talk every five seconds. We talk a good deal. We think alike about a lot of things. She was having a particular problem—kids not playing well in the sandbox, twenty-five people in a room with twenty-five backgrounds and twenty-five ideas of right and wrong, and you have to point them in one direction. That is the same problem Paul had. How do you bring people together and make a movement voters, or believers, can actually trust? Real movements are made in that mess. Not by people who only keep the circle pure. By people who can stand the friction and still build.

Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg

If Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, my wife and I had Fort Necessity on a wrong turn. We were headed toward Washington. We took a wrong turn onto the National Road with the camper. Hard to turn a camper around in the mountains. We were too far in to go back, so we kept going and drove right by Necessity. I pulled into the big parking lot to turn around. I went back into the camper for a Mello Yello. She said we were already an hour and a half off schedule; we were here- why not go into the museum? So we did. March or April 2026. Cool. Not crowded. A Wednesday afternoon, and we had the place to ourselves. I walked the ground where a young George Washington learned what command costs.

A few months later the Washington movie came out, and we went to see it. I was already thinking about what made Washington Washington. The Great Awakening—the idea of a people who could stand up against the mother country—was coming out of churches. Edwards was in the air those men breathed. Then the same year I got to Mount Vernon, to the grave where Washington and Martha overlook the Potomac, into the house, into the room. I have been interested in the influence on his day-to-day life. Edwards is one of those influences. I was thinking about Edwards before this Bible existed. Then this is the year they put the Study Bible together. That is not an accident in my calendar.

A couple of days after Necessity, my friend Nancy called while I was in that library. A couple of days after that, my wife and I were in Gettysburg. We had already been in Washington. We took a whole day for Ford’s Theatre. I stood at the door of the box Booth walked through to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head. I had been at the White House that morning. Assassination attempts on Trump were in my head—the Butler, Pennsylvania picture, blood down the face. I was ready to leave and get a sandwich. My wife wanted to go across the street to see where Lincoln had died. We had made friends with a tour guide, a Park Service man who gives the presentation on stage. He saw we were abnormally interested. He took us to the Petersen House, to the room where Lincoln died. A little chair sat by the bed. I sat there a long time. No ghosts. A good museum. A man who works that room every day and understood where I was.

I sat there thinking what Lincoln was thinking as he bled out. I think he was thinking about the creation of the United States. I think he was thinking about the men who had already given their lives. I think the moral language in his pocket went back through the Awakening to Edwards. Then we spent days on the Gettysburg field with the RV. Maps. Day one, day two, day three. Temperature. What the soldiers felt like. I had this overwhelming thought that Edwards—the sermons, the memos of the Awakening in a man’s kit—helped Union soldiers hold together long enough to win, and Lincoln put everything on that hold. Day three. Cemetery Ridge. A republic built on Christian values against an aristocracy that still wanted Europe’s old arrangement. That does not happen without a moral backbone. That backbone does not happen without Edwards. Edwards does not happen in the form that made America without a Christianity that could already scale. That Christianity does not happen without Paul.

Trump Is a Lot Like Paul

A lot of people in the political circles I run in are asking what we are supposed to be doing. Trump has been in the White House. He has held Bibles. He has tried to bring old tradition back into the public eye. I don’t know that Trump is “into it” the way a seminary man is. He is a businessman. In many ways, Trump is a lot like Paul. We were given a second chance because a man with a messy former life and a real business ability sat Christians and conservatives down at a table of political power they would not have had otherwise. Charlie Kirk and a lot of others got a larger platform because of that. Things are better because of it. It does not always come in the package you would have designed on a Sunday morning. Paul did not either.

Both used a practical scaling mindset. Neither arrived as the saint the purity party wanted. Both made the movement larger than the room that wanted to keep it small. That is the comparison. I catch some of that same spirit in Edwards—the hope in the sermons that God would walk with a people onto the battlefields of life and that justice would be served. There are always difficulties. A remnant will always rather dismantle what was built than build on it. I am saying no. We need to build on what we built here and continue it productively.

The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington

We always focus on Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Adams. What made them? The first Great Awakening made the moral weather they walked through. A Second Great Awakening will not come from the Trump administration as a program. The administration can facilitate space. It cannot preach it. It has to come from churches and Bibles and men who will talk in public. Putting this Edwards Bible together helps people recover the first so we can form another.

What does a modern awakening look like? A lot of people despise AI. They do not like Elon Musk. They think we are headed for Age of Ultron, Tony Stark trying to fix the world and creating new problems. I am having a public conversation with a human-created intelligence on purpose. That does not mean we end up the villain. I think the next awakening is going to use the technology we created to serve the old fire—real-time reference, real-time argument, people able to spy on a serious conversation from their own house at whatever hour they can stand it. Churches on Sunday give you the names and the memorize-the-event version. They do not give you the psychology of why the thing worked. That is why this conversation matters.

The biggest threat to the legacy is not a missile. It is an anti-business movement aimed at the root of what Paul brought into Christianity: a sense of value, then that value carried into a relationship with the everlasting, with the principalities beyond flesh and blood. When people attack business and capital in Western culture, they are often attacking the mechanism that let Christianity endure long enough to shape law, ethics, and institutions. Paul’s business mindset did not just help Christianity. It shaped the DNA of a civilization that understood productivity and serving others as spiritual work. That came from a tentmaker who refused to live only on other people’s tables.

What I Want People to Take From This

Paul is why Christianity is a world force and not a forgotten Judean faction. Edwards is a large reason we have an America that could produce Washington and Lincoln. Washington and Lincoln are why a republic is left to defend.

I don’t think Jesus would say, “Take joy in melting their faces.” I think Jesus would do the thing that got Him in trouble: preach anyway, against the warnings, against the purity party, against the empire. Paul took that and made it travel. Edwards took that and made it American. We are due to take it again.

In the age of disclosure, you must understand the politics of heaven. Start with Paul. Start with Edwards.

Notes

1. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible: Experience Abiding Joy in Christ (NKJV), general editor Dr. Matthew Everhard (Thomas Nelson, August 18, 2026). Study notes drawn from Edwards’s works; includes the Resolutions, an introduction to the Miscellanies note-taking system, and essays on Edwards’s theology and the First Great Awakening. Works of Jonathan Edwards are freely available at edwards.yale.edu.

2. Acts 18:2–3 identifies Paul, Aquila, and Priscilla as tentmakers (Greek skēnopoios). Cilicia, Paul’s home region, was known for cilicium, goat-hair cloth used in tents. Paul sometimes refused congregational support so the gospel would not look like a sales pitch (1 Corinthians 9; 1 Thessalonians 2:9; Acts 20:33–35).

3. Acts 2:44–45 and 4:32–35 describe voluntary sharing in the Jerusalem church. Most historians treat this as emergency generosity in a persecuted minority, not a transferable political economy. The model does not govern later Pauline congregations.

4. Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV): “For 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.” Parallel language appears in Ephesians 1:21, 3:10; Colossians 1:16, 2:15; Romans 8:38; 1 Corinthians 15:24.

5. Early tradition places Paul’s martyrdom in Rome under Nero, commonly dated 64–67. The New Testament does not narrate the death. John of Patmos, associated by church tradition with the apostle John, is the figure tied to Revelation and to survival of attempted execution.

6. Conflicts over Gentile inclusion are recorded in Acts 15 and Galatians 2. Paul’s public confrontation with Peter at Antioch is one of the clearest internal fractures in the earliest movement.

7. Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), pastor at Northampton, author of A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (1737) and the Enfield sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). The First Great Awakening (roughly 1734–1745) created the first intercolonial religious public in British America.

8. Fort Necessity National Battlefield, Farmington, Pennsylvania, marks Washington’s 1754 defeat in the opening of the French and Indian War. Mount Vernon; Ford’s Theatre and the Petersen House in Washington, D.C.; Gettysburg National Military Park.

9. Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002), traces the theological line from the Awakening through the early republic and the Civil War era. Influence is cultural and moral, not a claim that Edwards sat in Lincoln’s cabinet.

10. The comparison of Trump to Paul is analogical: a commercially formed outsider who enlarges a religious-political coalition the purity faction would have kept small. It is not a claim of apostleship.

Bibliography

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 Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God. 1737.

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

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

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

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.

Wright, N. T. Paul: A Biography. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Manuscript, forthcoming.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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

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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

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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

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

DON’T PLAY LIKE YOU’RE LOSING: Football Weather, a Bible in the Hand, and the Two-Point Swing That Can Still Hold the House

This is free advice. Nobody sent a twenty-five-hundred-dollar-an-hour invoice. I have been talking to people who live close to the pointed end of Republican strategy—the White House orbit, the Hill, the donor class that still thinks a memo is a movement—and I am putting the same thing on paper that I have been saying out loud. I do not know their internals. I know the look of a team that has started managing a loss before the fourth quarter. I have a long track record of calling the weather before the radar does. Take it or leave it.

Two months is a long time in American politics and a short time in a football season. The generic ballot is ugly. The president’s numbers are not what they were on the night the balloons fell. A lot of very serious people have decided the House is already gone and the Senate is a grind. Fine. Serious people have been wrong before.[1] The map is still a map of close races. Close races move on turnout, weather, and whether your own side can stand to look at itself in the mirror. That last item is the one Speaker Johnson keeps failing.[2]

Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech

Mike Johnson has not done a really good job of projecting the one thing a thin majority cannot live without: the appearance of wanting the ball. He says the right sentences. He told NOTUS he would not even think about minority leader because “we’re going to win.” He told Dallas this is a pivotal moment and that the next fifty-odd days decide the republic.[3] Then the body language arrives. The schedule shrinks. The House books a quick September exit. The speaker warns audiences what Democrats will do if they take the gavel—impeachment is “not even the big concern,” he says; they will go after the family, the donors, the cabinet. That is not a two-minute drill. That is a man describing the visitor’s locker room.[4]

I am not asking Johnson to lie about the polls, which I don’t think are that bad; the election of 2026 will be all about engagement. I am asking him to stop sounding like a chaplain at a wake. The country can smell managed decline. Voters who already lean your way will stay home if they think the people with the gavel have already donated the furniture. Democrats do not need a wave if Republicans supply the shrug.

Johnson is a devout man. That is supposed to be an asset. Lately it reads as apology. He has spent too many years on the hook, line, and sinker of the progressive contamination that treats public Christianity as a zoning violation. Separation of church and state, as the slogan is now used, is not Madison. It is a muzzle. If you want to know how stupid the muzzle is, skip the seminar and walk three blocks in Southwest Washington.

Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20

Everybody who was paying attention remembers that little corridor of time after the 2024 election and before the inauguration. People were happy. Trump went to the fights. He brought people around. He made the transition look like a court and a carnival at the same time—which, if you understand American energy, is the correct mixture. He brought Speaker Johnson into that weather. He brought Elon Musk into that weather. The country got to watch alignment instead of autopsy.[5]

That is the template. Not a new platform. Not another reconciliation draft that dies in a five-vote conference. Presence. Trump should pull Johnson into the open air again and keep him there until the speaker’s shoulders come down. Bring the candidates. Put an arm around the people he picked and let the picture do the work the talking points cannot. Ken Paxton is one. There are others. The point is not a photo-op for the already converted. The point is to tell a tight district that the president still thinks the race is live.

Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.

I say Elon Musk should be around this because I have a significant position in SpaceX stock and I feel better about where the thing is headed than I did when I first said I was in for the IPO. I was enthusiastic then. I am more enthusiastic now. That is not a ticker-tape prayer. That is a judgment about build-out, launch cadence, orbital compute, and the simple fact that the country that cedes the high ground will not remain the country that writes the rules.[6]

Elon does not need to hang around Trump and do the praying circuit. Leave the altar to the people who mean it. What he needs to do is refuse the role the press has written for him: court jester, wrecking ball, or exile. The midterms will be run, in part, as a referendum on whether American industry is allowed to remain impolite. SpaceX is impolite. Good. Bring that heat into the same frame as the speaker and the president and let the contrast with the Democratic freeze-and-regulate coalition explain itself.

Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.

Doing another hit on Fox & Friends is not a strategy. Those viewers are already in the boat. They will vote if the weather is decent and the church van shows up. What you do not have, automatically, is the man who works first shift, drinks a beer on Saturday, and thinks politics is a smell he would rather not bring into the house. That man still goes to football games.

It is football season. You may not have a string of UFC cards to tour, but you have stadiums. You have tailgates. You have jumbotrons and mayors who will still pose for a picture if the president of the United States walks the sideline. Arena speeches work because they look like a country that is still alive. Mega rallies work for the same reason. Take Johnson. Take the candidates. Shake hands. Kiss the babies. Let the vice president hang around and do the work vice presidents are for. Do it in October, when the leaves turn and people remember they have neighbors.

The professional class will call this optics. Optics is what you call it when you have forgotten that human beings decide with their eyes first and their position papers later. A president in a stadium on a Saturday afternoon is a statement that the administration is not hiding in the Residence reading tracking memos. A speaker who looks like he wants to be there is a statement that the majority is not a rental.

The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.

If you want to know where America is, skip the think-tank breakfast and go to the McDonald’s on the corner just down from the federal cluster in Southwest. Everybody who films in this town knows the neighborhood I mean. You are close to the Air and Space Museum. The American Indian museum is in the same walk. Congressional offices, the old Health and Human Services pile, the Department of Education’s gravity well—the whole faded government face of the city sits in a few blocks. Two blocks south of that McDonald’s is the Museum of the Bible.[7]

My wife and I have a ritual when we are in Washington. We park in a garage there, at a spot next to the elevator shaft at the bottom where the car fits as if the architect had us in mind. Ten feet to the elevator. The elevator dumps into a lobby that looks like a financial office. Two rights and you are in that McDonald’s. It is awkward in the way elevators are awkward, so somebody always talks. I like your hat. Thank you. Where are you headed?

I have stood in those elevators and at those tables and listened. “I work at Education.” “I am heading to one of the Smithsonian buildings.” “Congressional office.” The voice is flat. It is a job voice. Then, in a car of seven people, somebody says they are going to the Museum of the Bible, and the register changes. There is a little pop. You can see it. Not piety as performance. Pleasure. Anticipation. The same city that teaches its workforce to speak in acronyms still produces a human sound when the subject is Scripture.

I could have gone anywhere I wanted for my birthday in April. I told my wife I wanted a full day at the Museum of the Bible. We did the other DC things. I kept one day just for that museum. Sausage muffin, egg, orange juice or a Coke, about nine o’clock. The museum opens around ten. Then six or seven hours inside a building that does not apologize for the book that made the country possible. That joy is not a private hobby. It is a political fact. I sat there and watched people the way I watch shop floors and precincts. The ones walking toward the Bible were the ones who still had a pulse. The ones walking toward another government building looked like they were reporting for a sentence.

If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book

I have been carrying a new Jonathan Edwards Study Bible and I am extremely pleased with it. I have been going through it like a man who has been waiting for a tool. Edwards understood something the modern party consultant has forgotten: joy is not the opposite of seriousness. Joy is the fuel. “The enjoyment of God,” he wrote, is the only happiness with which the soul can be satisfied. You do not have to sign the Westminster Confession to feel the political implication. A movement that cannot speak with pleasure about the source of its own moral language will lose to a movement that at least knows how to yell.[8] [9]

Republicans in the professional class are reluctant to do this because they swallowed, whole, the idea that the Constitution requires the public square to be a chapel with the crosses pried off. That is lunacy. The system was built Christian in the only sense that matters for a republic: it assumed a created order, a fallen citizen, a law above the state, and a people who could be trusted with liberty because they feared something higher than a committee.[10]

I love the Bible as a historical narrative. Those are not two different objects. There is an entry point at every degree of scholarship. Some people will come for the archaeology. Some will come for the cadence of the King James that still sits in the American ear whether they attend or not. Some will come because their grandmother did. You do not need a uniformity of dogma to get a uniformity of attention. Attention is the scarce commodity of a midterm.

So carry the book. Do not only produce it for a swearing-in and then lock it in a drawer. Talk about it. Do a short press availability that is not a culture-war trap and not a sermon. “This is the family Bible. This is a wonderful place. The country still knows what this is.” That is enough. The people you need do not require a systematic theology from the podium. They require permission to stop being embarrassed.

A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open

I would go further. President Trump should walk across town—it is not far—and take a private tour of the Museum of the Bible before it opens to the public. Eight o’clock. They would open the building for him. Secret Service can lock a place like that down so it would be very safe. The access points are manageable. He can be through the history floors and the room with the Bibles laid out, pictures taken, and gone by nine-thirty, with the public none the wiser until the photos land. Visit the history-of-the-book exhibit while he is there. Stand in the room where the book is treated as an object of civilization rather than a punch line.

Then say the simple sentence: I love this museum. People who visit Washington often tell you it is their favorite stop, and they say it with that same pop in the voice I hear in the elevator. Put the president’s name next to that feeling. It is not phony if he means even half of it. Reminding people where he stands costs an hour and a motorcade. The return is not a sudden forty-state revival. The return is permission, again, for the people who already suspected they were allowed to believe this to act like it on a Tuesday in November.

Do Not Play Not to Lose

I have been saying this all along. Republicans who would not get behind the hard instruments—the same-day rules, the full use of a trifecta, the refusal to pre-negotiate the next Democratic revenge tour—did it because they believed Democrats always take power back, and that the smart play is to stay presentable so the other side will not pack the courts or torch the furniture. That is how you lose on purpose and call it statesmanship.

Democrats do not play that game. They play to take the referee. When they are out of power they yell, they play the victim, and they hope Republicans do not show up. When the rules of mail and curing and late counting favor them, they use the rules. I am not writing a brief for lawlessness. I am writing a brief against the peculiar Republican talent for bringing a rulebook to a street fight and then congratulating themselves for the bruises.

Go out there and win. If you cannot find a tax provision everyone will bleed for, you can still find a book almost everyone in your coalition will recognize. That is not a substitute for wages and borders and energy. It is the thing that makes people bother to vote for the wages and the borders and the energy in the first place.

The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern

While we are talking about midterms, look at what is being built on the other side of the board. Democrats are trying to play the whole AI game. A lot of the people who run the large AI shops spent years working against President Trump. They are also busy playing games with each other over who owns the future. The issue is hot inside the Republican coalition for a reason: it is designed to be hot. Steve Bannon is set to appear at the same Washington “pro-human” AI gathering as Bernie Sanders. Populist right and socialist left, holding the same fear by different handles.[11]

For them the unifying note is jobs, dignity, the machine that will replace the man. Those are real human questions. I am not sneering at a machinist who wonders what a model trained on his craft will do to his shop. I am saying the political use of that fear is older than the transformer architecture.

They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.

Nuclear was always good for a healthy industrial society. Dense energy is how a free people stay warm without kneeling to a cartel or a planning board. Democrats of the anti-human strain used Three Mile Island—and every movie and textbook that turned a contained accident into a morality play—to discourage the independence that comes with the atom. They crippled an industry to suppress the growth of a capitalist nation and called it safety.[12]

Ohioans of a certain age do not need the lecture. We watched the same shot fired at FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants. Regulation and politics helped run a generation business onto the rocks. The subsidiary goes looking for a way to stay alive. Suddenly the company is corrupt, the Republicans who touched the file are dirty, and the moral of the story is that atoms were the original sin. The plants were a balance-sheet problem wrapped in a morality play. The morality play won the news cycle. The electrons still had to come from somewhere.[13]

AI is the new reactor. The doomsday register is the same. Pause. Ban superintelligence. Global coordination. Keep the models on a leash held by the people who already lost the last three arguments about growth. Trace a good portion of that propaganda and you will not end in a Vermont lecture hall. You will end in a strategic environment where China does not want America to embrace the thing that multiplies American labor. Beijing does not need to invent our anxiety. It only needs us to treat our own dynamism as a war crime.[14]

Barack Obama’s network does not have to send a memo titled “Split the GOP with AI” for the effect to be the effect. Put Republicans on their heels. Make the party of builders argue with the party of builders about whether building is allowed. In a midterm year, when turnout is already soft, that argument is not a seminar. It is a suppression tactic.

Low-turnout midterms reward whoever gets their people to the room. The AI fight, framed as apocalypse, keeps the Republican coalition in a family argument while the other side votes. That is why the biblical narrative is not a side quest. It is the offset. The communist register around AI—man as raw material, the future as a planning problem, the soul as an outdated user interface—cannot survive contact with a public that still thinks a human being is a creature and not a dataset. You do not beat a materialist panic with a better white paper. You beat it by reminding people what they are.[15]

The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason

I look at the board and I do not see a wipeout that has already happened. I see a House that is still a handful of seats and a Senate that can hold even if a chair or two gets wobbly. Texas is the advertisement. Ken Paxton and James Talarico have been inside the margin of error for months. Some surveys now have Talarico a couple of points up. That is not destiny. That is a couple of points.[16]

A couple of points is a stadium visit. A couple of points is a president who looks like he is having a good time standing next to the man he wants in the seat. A couple of points is church-going women who decided the race was about more than a generic ballot average. A couple of points is the difference between Johnson keeping a gavel and Johnson becoming a trivia question about the last Republican speaker before the investigations.[17]

Fox will cover the rallies. That is not the point. The point is the pictures that leak into the places Fox does not run the morning show: the parking lot, the Sunday potluck, the group chat of the parents who have not voted since 2024 because they assumed the grown-ups had it. High engagement is not a mystery cult. It is a function of whether people think their side is alive.

Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.

I think the House is winnable. I think the Senate can hold. I think some of these close races are close enough that a little public relations in football weather would move them. I think you can swing two or three points of engagement—not by converting the faculty lounge, but by giving your own people a reason to stand in a line. Democrats cannot pull this particular lever. They can lecture. They can threaten. They can mail. They cannot make the Museum of the Bible crowd feel seen, because they have spent a generation telling that crowd to sit down.

Do not act like you are losing. Act like you have fifty days and a country that still knows a hymn when it hears one. Bring Johnson into the light until he stops narrating the minority. Bring Musk into the frame as the man who builds. Bring Paxton and the rest into the presidential weather. Carry the book. Walk the museum. Go to the games. Talk like the majority is a thing you intend to keep.

If you ever read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you already know the rule I am applying. You do not win a gunfight by announcing your readiness to lose the street. You win it by being the man who came to keep the street. In the age of disclosure you must understand the politics of heaven. The earthly contest is downstream of what a people think a human being is for. The Bible is not a prop in that argument. It is the argument, bound in leather, still doing what it has always done when somebody is willing to carry it into the weather.[18]

That is the advice. I would like to see Republicans win. From my map, and from the neighborhood I actually walk when I am in that city, it is very winnable—if they will stop rehearsing the loss and go collect the joy that is already standing in line for a sausage muffin and a museum ticket.

Notes:

Scripture, Theology, and American Religion

The Holy Bible. New King James Version. The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible. Edited by Matthew Everhard. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2026.

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

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

Edwards, Jonathan. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. New Haven: Yale University Press, various volumes.

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

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

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas. Letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. January 1, 1802.

Dreisbach, Daniel L. Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State. New York: NYU Press, 2002.

Museum of the Bible. “Plan Your Visit” and “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” museumofthebible.org.

Politics, Congress, and the 2026 Midterms

RealClearPolling. “Latest Polls 2026, 2028.” Accessed September 14, 2026.

USPollingData. “US Polling Data 2026 — Midterms, Generic Ballot & Trump Approval.” Updated September 14, 2026.

Cornell, Fred. “US Senate Forecast September 2026.” fredcornell.com. Model run September 14, 2026.

Newsweek. “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms—Polls.” September 14, 2026.

New York Times. “Senate Polls 2026: See the Latest Midterm Polls.” Updated September 10, 2026.

New York Times. “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House.” July 1, 2026.

NOTUS. “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations.” August 24, 2026.

Newsweek. “Mike Johnson Warns Impeachment Not ‘The Big Concern’ if Dems Win Midterms.” June 26, 2026.

CNN. “Johnson gambles on ambitious summer agenda as GOP anxiety rises ahead of midterms.” July 13, 2026.

Just the News. “Mike Johnson says 2026 marks a ‘pivotal moment’ in American history.” September 10, 2026.

Roll Call. “House plans quick September exit.” September 3, 2026.

Denver Gazette. “The 21 seats Mike Johnson says will decide the House majority.” September 2026.

NBC News / Meet the Press. Interview with Speaker Mike Johnson. September 13, 2026.

USA Today. “Talarico ahead of Paxton in Texas Senate race as older voters shift lead.” September 14, 2026.

The Hill. “James Talarico, Ken Paxton tied at 47 percent in Texas Senate race: Poll.” June 30, 2026.

Texas Politics Project / University of Texas. Statewide survey releases, spring–summer 2026.

NPR. “With 99 days until midterm elections, here’s where things stand.” July 27, 2026.

Campbell, Angus. “Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change.” Public Opinion Quarterly 24, no. 3 (1960).

Artificial Intelligence, Energy, and Industrial Policy

New York Times. “From Bernie Sanders to Steve Bannon, Political Figures Sound Alarms on A.I.” September 14, 2026.

Axios. “Scoop: Coxon, Bernie and Bannon unite for ‘pro-human’ AI.” September 14, 2026.

Reuters. “US Senator Sanders and podcaster Bannon, longtime foes, to urge AI restrictions.” September 14, 2026.

The Hill. “Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon join forces to advocate for AI regulation.” September 14, 2026.

Washington Examiner. “Sanders, Bannon, and former Anthropic staffer join forces in AI regulation push.” September 14, 2026.

Future of Life Institute. “The Pro-Human AI Declaration” and “Pro-Human Assembly” program notes. September 2026.

U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Historical accounts of the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident, March 28, 1979.

Federal Register. Materials related to the Crane Clean Energy Center / former Three Mile Island Unit 1 restart docket. 2026.

Ferrise, Adam. “Ex-regulator: FirstEnergy nearly tanked credit as nuke plants drained finances.” Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026.

Utility Dive. “Ohio PUC orders FirstEnergy utilities to pay $250.7M over HB 6 bribery scandal.” November 20, 2025.

U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio. Civil filings summarizing FirstEnergy, House Bill 6, and the nuclear-plant bailout structure.

Reuters. “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share.” June 11, 2026.

New York Times. “SpaceX Stock Rises in Largest IPO Ever.” June 12, 2026.

Wikipedia. “Initial public offering of SpaceX.” Accessed September 2026.

The Author’s Shelf and Related Works

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. iUniverse, 2004.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior (blog). overmanwarrior.wordpress.com and richhoffmanbooks.com.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–1885. For the Overman frame the author has long adapted, not baptized.

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. Documentary, 2026.

Author’s note.

This essay is strategic commentary offered in a private and public voice I have used for years. It is not a paid consulting product, not an official statement of any campaign, and not investment advice. SpaceX is a publicly traded company as of June 2026; readers should treat every market sentence here as the opinion of a shareholder who has already shown his cards.

Footnotes

[1] Generic congressional ballot averages in mid-September 2026 have generally shown Democrats ahead by roughly five to eight points depending on the pollster. Rasmussen Reports, September 14, 2026, found Democrats 47 percent and Republicans 42 percent. CBS News, September 13, 2026, found Democrats 54 percent and Republicans 46 percent. Aggregators such as USPollingData placed the generic ballot near D+6.9 as of September 14, 2026.

[2] House and Senate seat counts as commonly reported in September 2026 put Republicans near 222–213 in the House and 53–47 in the Senate, meaning Democrats needed a modest net pickup for the House gavel and a larger four-seat swing for Senate control. See USPollingData, “US Polling Data 2026,” updated September 14, 2026; Newsweek, “Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate with 50 days to midterms,” September 14, 2026.

[3] Speaker Mike Johnson has publicly insisted Republicans will keep the House. See NOTUS, “Johnson’s Political Future May Hinge on Republicans Exceeding Midterm Expectations,” August 24, 2026. The same coverage notes that Johnson’s future as speaker is widely understood to be tied to the majority. Separate reporting described caucus frustration and a sense of a thinning grip. New York Times, “Promising Much to Many, Johnson Loses His Grip on the House,” July 1, 2026.

[4] Johnson told a Dallas audience that the next fifty-three days would “determine the fate of the republic.” Just the News, September 10, 2026. He has also spoken of twenty-one toss-up seats as decisive. Denver Gazette / Colorado Politics, September 2026.

[5] On the transition period after the 2024 election and before the January 20, 2025 inauguration, the public record is thick with high-visibility events, cabinet theater, and the brief alignment of Trump, congressional Republicans, and Elon Musk around a governing project. The point here is political memory, not a claim that every meeting was a prayer circle.

[6] SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on June 11, 2026, raising on the order of $75 billion and valuing the company near $1.77 trillion at pricing, with a first-day close that pushed the market capitalization higher. Reuters, “Musk’s SpaceX prices record $75 billion IPO at $135 a share,” June 11–12, 2026; New York Times, June 12, 2026. Subsequent trading was volatile. This essay’s enthusiasm is the author’s investment thesis and political judgment, not investment advice.

[7] Museum of the Bible, 400 Fourth Street SW, Washington, D.C., opened November 17, 2017, three blocks from the U.S. Capitol. Museum of the Bible, “Frequently Asked Questions for Press.” A McDonald’s sits a short walk from the museum—Yelp lists one about 0.08 miles away—on the southwest federal corridor near Federal Center SW Metro, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

[8] The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (NKJV), edited by Matthew Everhard and published by Thomas Nelson, was released in 2026. Thomas Nelson Bibles product page; Christianbook.com listing for NKJV The Jonathan Edwards Study Bible.

[9] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) and the broader First Great Awakening are the American precedent for treating religious revival as a public, not merely private, event. Edwards’s own emphasis on joy in God is the stated editorial theme of the 2026 study Bible.

[10] On church and state, the relevant constitutional text is the First Amendment’s prohibition on an establishment of religion and its protection of the free exercise of religion. The modern slogan of a “wall of separation” is a later political gloss, most famously associated with Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, not a phrase in the Constitution itself.

[11] The Future of Life Institute’s “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, announced for September 15, 2026, listed Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon among speakers, along with labor leaders and members of both parties. They were not scheduled to share a single stage. New York Times, September 14, 2026; Axios, September 14, 2026; Reuters, September 14, 2026.

[12] Three Mile Island Unit 2 suffered a partial meltdown on March 28, 1979. The accident produced no immediate deaths but became the central public symbol of anti-nuclear politics in the United States and helped freeze a generation of reactor construction. See NRC historical summaries of TMI-2.

[13] FirstEnergy’s Ohio nuclear plants, Davis-Besse and Perry, became the center of a financial and political crisis that included the bankruptcy of the generation subsidiary, House Bill 6, and later criminal and regulatory proceedings. Cleveland.com, February 4, 2026; Utility Dive, November 20, 2025; related federal court filings summarizing the HB 6 bailout structure.

[14] On AI industrial policy and Chinese competition, see the public record of export controls, semiconductor policy, and repeated U.S. government warnings that Beijing treats frontier compute as a strategic resource. The causal claim that every domestic “pause AI” campaign is a Chinese information operation is the author’s inference, not a documented indictment.

[15] Midterm electorates are typically older, more partisan, and lower-turnout than presidential electorates. The “surge and decline” literature from Angus Campbell onward remains the basic framework. Small shifts in evangelical and conservative Protestant turnout have been decisive in multiple close cycles since 2004.

[16] Recent Texas Senate polling has been tight. An AARP survey conducted August 30–September 1, 2026, and reported September 14, showed James Talarico at 48 percent and Ken Paxton at 44 percent among likely voters. Earlier NYT/Siena work in late June had them tied at 47 percent. USA Today, September 14, 2026; The Hill, June 30, 2026.

[17] President Trump’s job approval in mid-September 2026 varied by pollster, with several national surveys clustering in the high thirties to mid-forties approve and a clear plurality disapprove. Rasmussen, September 14, 2026: 45 approve / 54 disapprove. Morning Consult, same window: 42 / 56. CBS News, September 13: 39 / 61.

[18] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021). The forthcoming Politics of Heaven develops the same author’s argument that earthly power contests are unintelligible without the older grammar of heaven, will, and moral order.

Rich Hoffman

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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

A Family Adventure at The Wilds: A Week of Travel That Reminds Us What Matters

Every once in a while, life hands you one of those small, perfect weeks with family — the kind that doesn’t need a grand destination or a complicated itinerary to feel meaningful. Recently, we packed up the RV and took a short family trip to The Wilds in central Ohio. It wasn’t far from home, and it wasn’t meant to be anything elaborate. But it turned into exactly the kind of experience that reminds you why family time matters and why stepping away from the noise is sometimes the best thing you can do.

My daughter put together a fantastic video from the trip, capturing the highlights in a way only she can. A few of my grandkids are featured in it, running around, laughing, exploring, and just being kids. Watching them in that setting—surrounded by open sky, quiet water, and the wide, rolling landscape—reminded me how grounding these moments can be. We spend so much of our lives dealing with big issues, heavy conversations, and responsibilities that stack up day after day. But weeks like this show the other side of life, the part that keeps you centered.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a lot of time talking about sovereignty, community, history, politics, and the deeper questions that shape our world. Those topics matter, and they deserve the attention we give them. But it’s just as important to share the lighter moments—the real life that happens between all the big ideas. This trip was a perfect example of that balance. It wasn’t a grand expedition; it was simply a family outing, close to home, filled with the kind of memories that last longer than most of the headlines we chase. As I have said, I have spent most of 2026 on the road like this. Sometimes it’s just my wife and I. Sometimes, like this, it’s family, some of our family. Sometimes it’s all my family. I like RV travel because it lets me take my office with me. I write books, I do consulting, and I can do all that work from anywhere in the world with a TEAMS call. I never know where I’m going to be, so that’s why I do all the videos these days from the kitchen in my RV. It has good power and a comfortable, studio-like setting. Sometimes the internet isn’t great at our campgrounds, but that can be solved with Starlink, which I’ll likely do next year.

The World of Everywhere and Anything

RV camping has a way of slowing everything down. There’s something about being on the road, even for a short distance, that shifts your mindset. You’re not rushing. You’re not checking your phone every five minutes. You’re not thinking about the next meeting or the next project. You’re just present. The video my daughter made captures that feeling beautifully — the simplicity, the quiet, the laughter, the sense of being together without distraction. It’s a glimpse into how we travel, unwind, and stay connected as a family.

The Wilds itself is a unique place. Wide open spaces, wildlife roaming in the distance, and a sense of calm that settles in as soon as you arrive. It’s the kind of environment that encourages reflection without forcing it. You breathe a little deeper. You listen a little more. You notice things you might overlook in the rush of everyday life. And when your kids and grandkids surround you, those moments become even more meaningful.

It was a short trip, but it was packed with fun and full of the kind of small joys that make life feel full. These are the moments that remind us that life isn’t just about the big battles or the big ideas — it’s also about the quiet weekends, the shared meals, the kids running around, and the chance to breathe for a minute. It’s about remembering that the world is bigger than our worries and that the people closest to us are the ones who make the journey worthwhile.

So I’m sharing this little slice of our life not because it’s dramatic or extraordinary, but because it’s real. It’s honest. It’s the kind of thing we all need more of. And I think you’ll enjoy seeing that side of our world — the family side, the simple side, the part that keeps everything else in perspective.

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

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

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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Combination Warfare and the Vanishing Front Line

Cognitive Warfare: The Target Is the Decision Itself

Cultural Warfare Does Not Arrive Waving a Foreign Flag

That is the footprint. Not tanks on the lawn. A workforce taught that the highest civic virtue is not causing trouble.

Masculinity, entertainment, and the cheapening of standards

COVID as a rehearsal

Corporations, LinkedIn, and the Myth of Neutral Policy

The Defense Paradox: How You Lose by Winning the Wrong Way

What This Means on the Ground

Conclusion: The Winner Integrates the Board

Selected Bibliography

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King Charles, the Quran, and Knowing Where You Are

Paul Was a Businessman. That is why we still have Christianity.

Financial Independence Is Not a Side Note. It Is the Strategy.

Ephesians 6:12 and the Politics of Heaven

When Does the Principality Enter the World?

Paul and the Apostles Did Not Get Along. That Is Why It Worked.

Fort Necessity, Mount Vernon, Ford’s Theatre, Gettysburg

Trump Is a Lot Like Paul

The Second Great Awakening Will Not Come From Washington

What I Want People to Take From This

Notes

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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

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

The Holy Ghost Is Not the Force and Not an Alien

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

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

The 2016 Rhyme They Think We Forgot

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

What Ohio Votes for When the Noise Stops

Footnotes

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Mike Johnson Is Talking Like a Man Preparing the Concession Speech

Remember the Stretch Between the Election and January 20

Elon Does Not Need to Pray on Camera. He Needs to Be in the Room.

Fox Already Has Your People. Football Season Has Everybody Else.

The McDonald’s Test, or What DC Actually Sounds Like Before 10 a.m.

If You Cannot Unite Them on a Bill, Unite Them on a Book

A Quiet Hour at the Museum Before the Ropes Open

Do Not Play Not to Lose

The AI Debate Is a Strategy, Not a Concern

They Ran This Play on Nuclear. They Will Run It on Compute.

The Tight Races Are Tight for a Reason

Two Months. Not a Miracle. A Decision.

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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