Returning to the 501(c)3 status I laid out last post, we come face to face with some shocking revelations. First, the 501(c)3 status requires the church leaders, when speaking as a formal representative of the church, to be apolitical. Second, why do churches opt to be 501(c)3s in the first place? Other non-profit designations would fit a church without being politically handcuffed. The 501(c)4 designation allows for political stances as does a 501(c)7, just to provide two examples. It isn’t insane either to suggest a church run as a standard for-profit business since its expenses will likely outweigh its income and therefore will be net negative on the net profit line. Those establishing churches will need to rethink business structure, but this is no hard task and we should continue to innovate in the church as well. I intend to show that the Church committing to being apolitical undermines its God-given directive to make disciples of all humankind.

Firstly, is it possible to be apolitical? Asking this is likewise to ask if humans can be utterly devoid of any beliefs, which is impossible. Political beliefs or policies are inextricably tied to morality, values, and vices. Humans cannot divest themselves of these things; even in the case of the raw darwinian acolyte, survival instinct as the only guiding behavior is a vice without the influence of other virtues to re-situate and control that survival instinct. Someone might object here that I am question begging a worldview of good vs. evil, which is partly true. The darwinian approach to ethical (or non-ethical) behavior already raises the meta-ethical question about whether or not humans should act like beasts. In other words, the darwinian approach already implies an answer on the good vs. evil framework. Simply, the darwinian acolyte presumes that it is better to assume the world is not a good vs. evil framework, which is why they promote the animalistic darwinian behavior pattern.

This approach, however, is not socially acceptable even if we allowed that the “good-vs-evil-framework” did not exist. Many animals mate based on a “show of strength,” which often is a violent battle among males. The outcome of this is the animal kingdom’s version of “the right” to copulate with the females because this victorious male showed himself to be the most fit to pass on his seed. If we put this into human terms, we end up with women being effectively sex-slaves for the most violent male, with the male having claim on the woman’s body to carry his seed to full term without her compliance–what we would call “rape.” The darwinian idea that “good-vs-evil” does not exist gets checked hard by trying to put animal rules into a human society.

At this point, we could go much deeper into the ideas of socially constructed morality and how that might affirm or deny objective morality, but that takes us far afield of our present task. I will merely state that God being Trinity already lays out an intrasubjective framework for morality that society mimics, but let’s move on. Politics, then, implies society because there are no politics without human society. Society then implies morality, however we want to understand the existence or construction of good-vs-evil. There are political rules–our laws that come from legislative political action–that legislate certain behaviors to be worthy of protection or punishment. Murder is immoral; a just society punishes this behavior. What our society morally allows or disallows will be expressed legislatively through the political process.

To summarize, society has moral norms that demarcate what is good from what is evil. These moral norms–through the American government system–are advocated for by electing representatives who commit to legislatively advancing those moral norms. When legislation is successful, society’s moral norms are fortified into society as laws. If this is accurate, why would the church voluntarily opt for a non-profit designation that requires them to be apolitical?

Reading from the IRS’ website, a 501(c)3  “may not be an action organization, i.e., it may not attempt to influence legislation as a substantial part of its activities and it may not participate in any campaign activity for or against political candidates.”

What good reason could a conscientious church leader commit to this? At first, I thought this was nothing more than church leaders wanting to get paid or make more money, but, sadly, this isn’t entirely the case. Monetarily, a church leader could make the same money under a different non-profit designation and not be committed to being apolitical. Furthermore, if a for-profit business’ expenses outpace its income, taxes are nullified as there is no profit to tax. Whether a 501(c)3 or different entity type, employee payroll taxes apply and are to be paid, so this provides no impetus for a church to be a 501(c)3. Ministers get a few fiscal perks from the 501(c)3 status in terms of their personal taxes. I hesitate to ask, but could it be that in exchange for a few bucks off a minister’s taxes, they would commit to being apolitical?

We should out the psyop at this point. Somehow society by-in-large and the church in particular has come to believe that being unbiased and being apolitical is more morally excellent than being biased or politically-leaning. I’ve written a lot on this: humans cannot be unbiased because they are limited, and no human will ever become unlimited–whatever that would mean? By extension, being apolitical is equally impossible, but concealing or self-censoring one’s bias or political-leaning is possible, and it is precisely what the 501(c)3 status demands.

Therefore, two psyops have claimed victory over the mind of the masses: (1) that non-bias is achievable and good and (2) censoring yourself and political views is desirable and morally better than making them known. Think of the colloquial adage that many take as a kind of common good law: “around the dinner table with general friends and family, you don’t talk about religion or politics.” You’re telling me that the two things that will frame our moral world in the form of America’s laws, we should make sure we don’t talk about? That is insane. Being biased is more morally excellent than trying-to-be-unbiased so long as your biases are known-to-yourself and so long as these biases are tempered with testing, knowing that they may need to be revised or discarded altogether. As moral agents, it is more morally excellent to be politically-leaning than not since morality is entailed in political platforms and policies. Church members, as self-attesting agents of the moral-living-God, should advance His character and morality in every way feasible, should they not? Someone might object that church members do influence people towards God but only through their private life, not through political action. In response to this, I would merely point out the bifurcating private life from public life (political life) is impossible: the two are interpenetrating and cannot be ultimately untangled. Secondly, why would we think that the church’s influence campaign to advance a God-centric-moral-worldview should be limited to only a private affair? The better if more frightening question here is, whose morality is fueling the “should be limited” in the last question? Jesus said to go out into the world and make disciples of all humankind, which is quite the opposite of “should be limited.”

We should not forget that the political parties are extremely divergent on the moral norms they value, and it has been that way for a long time. The Democrat party was the party of the slave-owners back in the 1850s. Slavery is no small moral issue! One party, Republicans, deemed slavery as evil and immoral, and they were willing to die in hordes to put an end to it. Another party, Democrats, deemed slavery as acceptable and moral, and they were willing to die in hordes to maintain it as a societal way of life. We must highlight the fundamental moral quality of politics and its legislative actions. The church is the so-called manifestation of the Judea0-Christian God in this present world, and this God is inherently moral and likely–according to many theologians–His character both defines morality and constitutes the standards against which all moral actions are judged. In America, the most direct way to enact God’s will on earth writ large–His moral character–is through the political process. 501(c)3 status is an infection and terminal disease to the church’s mission, and it should be cast overboard.

Prime Theologian

There are certain things I have been taught over the course of my life to just assume. These are frameworks that are so assumed we never think to question them. In this category goes things like “food processing, taxes, inflation-as-a-feature-of-a-good-economy, car-mobility-and-freedom, that-news-reports-news, that-being-unbiased-is-best, and death. There are many of these structures that effectively frame every piece of our lives. If and when we question them, we sometimes discover them to be cons or psyops, which are information programs designed to frame you in, to control you.

One of the largest grand cons on the church is its conditioning to be apolitical, which is largely accomplished through 501(c)3 status but also its confused approach to violence. The Church is a gathering-ground for saints to organize around biblical values and then see their implementation in whatever government circumstance they might be in. Although America is tipping on a knife’s edge towards becoming a autocratic monstrosity, it looks now that its original Republic form may be restored–how long this will take, who knows. Christians, then, in America are the government–“We the People . . .”–even though the administrative state (or deep state) of unelected bureaucrats have frustrated this for all of my life. Christians can enact whatever values they hold through America’s representative republic approach to public policy. Again, I don’t want to be accused of far-fetched idealism, so I recognize that the administrative state and our bought-and-paid-for-politicians have sizably interfered with The People enacting their values through their representatives. If Christians can effect their values through political representation, why would Christian leaders agree to being apolitical? Let’s turn to the topic of violence, and then we will return to answering this question.

Theology is by far the most dangerous and destabilizing subject to the political centralization of power. Those governments which have been most tyrannical disallow or disavow God. Theology–humankind’s thoughts and reflections on God–is a transcendent and unmovable threat to governments. The best the governments can do is to limit access; enter censorship, enter infiltration of church leadership, and enter political persecution. The ship has largely sailed to prevent the distribution of the Bible itself although continued vigilance is warranted as digital forms of the Bible become dominant while leaving behind physical forms. Governments main task should be to do away with the source of any threat to their power; namely, do away with the Bible. Since this isn’t possible, what is the next best step to render the Bible moot? Upon deeper inspection, we should realize that it is the confluence of the Bible and humanity’s thoughts about the Bible that is really the danger. Imagine a world with no humans, only animals. In that world, even if there were Bibles everywhere, the Bible would not matter. It is the conjunction of humanity feeding on God’s word (the Bible) that is the danger to governments: this is why I said that theology is “by far the most dangerous . . . subject . . .” to governments.

In a world that has both good and evil, violence will inexorably happen. Before violence takes kinetic or physical form, it is long preceded by two other types of violence: the violence of speech and the violence of manipulated speech, or, put differently, the ability to form and frame human’s epistemology. In the old world, humans’ perception of the world was mostly framed up by their limited experience of the ground, food, water, family, and local politics around a church or town center. From this, the many cultures, differences of ideas, and a certain tribalism was the raw experience of humans. What is plainly absent is the intrusive messaging of a few in the homes of all; the old world was much free of this invasion. Someone might object that the messaging of the few did go into homes in the form of books in the old world, but I would argue that these books were chosen to be in the home rather than being forced or secreted into the home.

The violence of speech is as old as evil in this world. This is nothing new. Cruelty issues from our lips before we physically destroy the person we target. Violence of speech can happen without physical violence happening, which is a basis for why protecting freedom of speech is more important than ensuring no speech is violent. It is the difficulty of parsing out when speech becomes too violent that it should be censored that humanity now faces in 2024. Who is deciding what is considered violent is the issue: this is called the subjective aspect of this issue. What is considered violent speech to one may be humorous to another. All this is complicated by big tech, big media, and by government collusion with such entities. Said differently, all this is complicated by a special few who are trying to centralize their definitions of what speech is violence. To put the matter plainly, an elite few want their subjective views on violent speech to be the norm for the whole population of the planet. Because of big tech and big media, such daily and intrusive messaging is possible while in the old world such was impossible.

Take the so-called “hate speech” issue developing in the UK and across Europe right now. They are imprisoning people for hate speech, but the really obvious question is who is deciding what constitutes “hate speech?” The anti-Bible transgender movement’s views on what is hateful speech has been adopted by the elite few, who pump that message out to frame the masses’ epistemology; it is the elite few’s desire that we all–the masses–take up their view on what is hateful speech as centered around protecting and advancing the anti-Bible, anti-human transgender ideology. To make matters worse, they want us to sanction the imprisonment of these people by approving of such incarcerations. This effects the dual objectives to centralizing power by governments: there is violence for wrong speech–“the authorities will rough you up and put you in prison”–while the big-tech, big-media, and government collusion vector manipulates speech into their definitions (the violence of manipulated speech). This violence of manipulated speech is what fortifies mass-population-obeisance to the governments’ threats and violence and devolves resistance into tiresome debates about the definition of words. These battles over definitions are needed and inescapable, and it is the grandest success of centralized power (big-tech, big media, government collusion).

In the ability to control or formulate how the populace writ large understands the definition of words is the power to form the world. The world of humanity is words; consider this, the East Coast of the United States is only this because of humanity’s words and their maps. Imagine a world without humans, the East Coast is nothing more than a combination of rocks, sea, and vegetation. To animals and lower life-forms, this geographic area is nothing more than a present place to live. The rest of the animals on the planet that do not live there do not even know of its existence and they have no names or words to describe it. Indeed, the power to define words is the power over how humanity will develop and progress, or should I say, regress?

Coming back to the church now, the church must un-confuse its stance on violence. The first issue to tackle is the church accepting that violence is inevitable, unavoidable, and is good as a feature of justice. I do not think any of this is particularly controversial. To put context to this, let me give an example from when I was a Professor at Liberty University. The s0-called mastermind behind the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, was executed by seal team six while hiding in a compound in Pakistan. The student body was all over the board on this use of violence. Some students became fixated on how other students reacted: those students who celebrated his death were condemned by these so-called “righteous-minded” students, as they thought themselves. Do not the Psalms often celebrate the death of the wicked? To cite one example: “The enemy came to an end in everlasting ruins; their cities you rooted out; the very memory of them has perished (Ps. 9:6).” We could cite many more biblical passages where saints praise God for the death of “enemies” or evil people. Under the throne of God in Revelation 4, the saints that were killed in this world wrongly cry out for God to take vengeance on those like them. We could then jump immediately to the all-too-prioritized “turn the other cheek” text where we are commanded to “love our enemies.” I will not try to reconcile these issues here, but you can read some attempt in another article: https://againstallodds.site/2024/02/18/avenger-of-blood-vis-a-vis-turn-the-other-cheek/. What is the central piece of much of modern Christendom’s view on violence? Aversion to violence is likely the main feature; nevertheless the church simultaneously outsources it in what would appear to approve of it (to the police, military), but when faced with it as a topic of discussion often condemn nearly all violence. Is avoiding violence achievable? No, it is not. So long as good and evil co-exist, violence is the only remedy at the end of the day. If the Bible closes with the good-vs-evil final conflagration as a final solution, why would we be any better?

Does theology imply violence? What is entailed in this question? Let’s rephrase it to expose the answer: does doing theology presume objective morality in a world with evil beings? It might sound strange to speak of theology as “being done,” but all disciplines rightly pursued are likewise performed. The point of theological reflection is to enact it so that you become more like that to which your mind attends. The quick and simple of it is that Christians must make room for violence as a proactive and proper response to evil. The founding fathers of America were concerned about establishing a nation state as a way to sanction the violence they deployed in rebellion to the British crown. This is not to say that such an organization was “Christian” at its core, but the concern to respect Romans 13 is implied. As with St. Augustine’s work on just war theory, violence as part of a war against evil is good and protects the public order. Romans 13 notes that it is the government agent who is the “avenger of blood” and will execute God’s wrath on the evil-doer:

“Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God. Therefore, whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves. For rulers are not a cause of fear for those doing good, but for those doing evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword in vain; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil (Romans 13:1-4).”

The American revolutionaries were making themselves into “avenger[s] who bring wrath” by establishing “these United State of America.” What is really remarkable is the union of the idea of “self-determination” in terms of establishing the United States together with believing that the newly formed United States “exist [and] are established by God (Rom. 13:1).” To form a government for the purpose of revolting against the British was forming a government to commit violence against British persons. In light of Romans 13, this violence would then be sanctioned by God because it follows the order God lays out in this text.

If objective morality is in a world of evil person actors, then violence must be. Potentially more cynical is the Nietzsche view of humanity’s relation to violence: humans all “will to power” and as such we make war the normal state of things, not peace. The will to dominant other humans is obvious, but we can reconcile Nietzsche view with the biblical view of the world presently having good and evil in it. War, the will to power, and the desire to dominant are all features of evil existing and therefore objective morality is implied. I can’t digress far here, but all moral systems that don’t rise to the stance of being objective are therefore subject to change as trends change among peoples; this makes justifying violence in the name of the good very difficult since what is good today might be evil a few years from now. Society quickly destabilizes when the once-believed evil that was punished is understood to be unjust, and the violence done was little more than a fashionable trend.

Theology implies violence and peace. In a world with evil, theology to remain constituted as a good must resist evil through violence. A just society must utilize violence or the criminal “law of the streets” takes hold, which attributes authority to whatever gang can strike the most fear into the people. Theology likewise implies order, but order, when faced with disorder, must finally converge into a incident of violence: i.e., Revelation, Egypt and Pharaoh, etc. Theology implies peace when evil is not. The original symphony of the Trinity entails a personal interrelationship among the Father, Son, and Spirit that has peace as its only mode of expression since endless riches of good already implies endless riches of order. The Christian Church must unconfuse its stance on violence. The Bible is filled with many ways to either use or reject the use of violence, but what is certain is that human civilization must use violence for the public good. Hence, this is why most Christians agree to violence implicitly by outsourcing it to cops, federal agents, and the military.

Violence of speech and kinetic violence are both demonstrated in the Bible by God Himself and through the people of God with God’s approval. The violence of manipulated speech is the war to frame the world itself. It is the war to determine who will frame the masses’ epistemology. To resist evil always requires one of these violences. Theology, therefore, in a world of evil is a weapon of violence to deter unchecked violations of morality–or the law of God, what many Enlightenment writers called natural law. Jesus Himself deploys all three of these violences Himself, the violence of speech and the violence of manipulated speech in the Gospels, and kinetic violence in Revelation. Good will not be overcome by evil, and it uses violence to achieve its ultimate victory since the Sacrifice on the Cross is an example of using violence to claim victory over humanity’s epistemology (violence of manipulated speech). The Cross claimed victory to win humankind’s mind, and violence was part of that equation.

Dr. Scalise