We’ve heard it said lately that what we’re seeing in our culture is sin — and that’s true. But let’s not stop there. What we’re seeing is not simply a lack of virtue in a particular political party or a few mentally ill individuals making poor moral choices. What we are witnessing is a culture-wide descent into paganism—the same kind of paganism the prophets condemned in the Old Testament. And mark this: it is not new. Instead, it is ancient and dark. And it is very definable.

The prophets—men like Amos, Micah, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah — weren’t confused about the character of the nations around them. They saw it plainly.

As I’ve shared online, for the last few days I’ve been laboring to write a response to the political assassination of Charlie Kirk, trying to put words together that express a proper response to the shock and horror of the evil violence perpetrated against a Christian believer who understood the limitations of politics and the beautiful salvation message that only God could accomplish in Jesus. A person who was willing to dialogue and debate all comers in the hope of demonstrating the truth of what he said and believed. He was proud of the foundational principles of individual liberty, religious freedom, limited government, educational freedom/choice, and the importance of faith, family, freedom to live self-governed lives . . . and for that he was executed. That should truly shock us all to our core.

After finishing college at Seward, my wife Kathy and I served as lay missionaries in a remote Cree Indian village in Ontario, Canada. One day we decided we’d go for a snowmobile ride. I pulled the machine in front of our little shack. I glanced behind me to see Kathy hopping aboard, and I took off. I headed down the skidoo trail on the frozen lake on a bright clear, frigid day, chatting happily with my dear wife (or so I thought). I had made it nearly a half-mile before I realized that no one was talking back. Suddenly I did a hard double take and turned to see the empty seat right behind me. Looking back at the distant village, she was nowhere to be seen. Turns out I had taken off just as she straddled the seat, but before she’d sat down. . . . We laughed about it then, and still do to this very day.

It’s not a happy thing to read that so many of our countrymen are “nones,” belonging to no church and adhering to no way of paying homage to God. How do we raise children in a no-land, where their deepest beliefs will be met with what’s sometimes more discouraging than enmity, with the shrug of indifference and incomprehension?

I think we must bear in mind the character of this nothing. It is not deep — it cannot conceivably be deep — but it is broad, like a vast slick of muddy water and wreckage after a flood, shallow as a few inches in most places, but lapping at every post and foundation in sight.

At the 1995 synodical convention, the Synod delegates adopted resolution 6-02 titled "To Speak Out against Legalization of Assisted Suicide" (euthanasia) which reads as follows:

Whereas, The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod affirms the sanctity of human life and recognizes the reality of human suffering; and

Whereas, Any attempt to legalize assisted suicide is an affront to the Lord, who gives life, and opens the door for abuse and future legislation that would deny the freedom of many; and

America is a gift. Rights are God given, based on the inherent dignity of man. The horrible theory of evolution undermines this truth. We are likewise told that rights are granted by earthly governments. But the created order is such that man bears the image of God, even fallen. This truth is seen already in an ultrasound. In a sense, these rights are negative. I do not have a right to take your property, but then, you have no right to take mine. A man may not be imprisoned except for compelling reasons. The family comes before the state, and therefore children belong not to the state, but to the father and mother. The right to bear arms is simply an extension of the truth that I have a right to defend my family and my home. No one is obligated to listen to me, but I have a right to free speech. No one is obligated to give me stuff, but I have the liberty to earn it.

Our Founding Fathers are indeed the fathers of all Americans. DEI taught us to despise them, to concentrate on their faults, to think of ourselves as somehow more enlightened. Critical theory is all about destruction, about seeing through something so that you can no longer see the thing itself. DEI is the philosophy of the scoff and sneer.

But as Americans, we do well to think on the God of providence and to celebrate this day with thanksgiving. Now, mind you, I honor all peoples as they sing their anthems, giving thanks for their own special heritage. But our heritage is a cornucopia, a legacy that we are called to live up to.

475 years ago, Magdeburg, Germany, was under siege by her own emperor, Charles V. It was the last Lutheran city remaining in Germany only four years after the death of Martin Luther. At issue was the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. The highest authority in the land was demanding that the city churches re-institute Roman worship practices.

The city officers faced a difficult choice. Should they abandon the scriptural doctrine and practice restored by the Lutheran Reformation? Or should they take up arms against the God-ordained temporal authority? The pastors and theologians of the city penned the Magdeburg Confession to instruct the city councilmen of their God-given duty.

Two kinds of righteousness? I suppose, but not as it's often spoken about in our midst. There is civic righteous, which is to live in accordance with the natural law and may rightly describe the life of anyone, with or without Christ. Civil righteousness, reverence for life, for marriage, for the rights of property, and the like is a good thing. A Mormon may then live a life of civic righteousness, though he cannot be truly righteous or declared righteous.

We are told that the righteousness that comes from God is vertical and differs from all human righteousness. But such a notion needs to be challenged. The righteousness that we receive from God is, in fact, the righteousness lived on the horizontal plane. Many Christians think of righteousness as a gift from God that finds an opening in the cross of Christ. But that is misleading. The righteousness of God is, in fact, the righteousness of Christ, imputed to us because of Christ's active and passive obedience, even unto His death as a sacrifice for our sins. The likes of Forde and Paulson mislead, saying that Christ came forgiving, and for that He was murdered. By no means. Christ's forgiveness was made possible by the Father's sacrifice of His Son, as well as by Christ actually fulfilling, not putting an end to, the Law.

Recently, one among us complained that the LCMS has more often taken positions on the Republican side of things, with nothing from the Democrat agenda. I wonder if such complaints, from an opposite point of view, are made in the ELCA. What of it? Among the so-called Republican views cited were articles on being pro-life and warning against the rainbow revolution and the trans crisis. But these are not positions based on politics, though politics matter as a matter of justice and protection, but are essential to our humanity. Those who favor abortion, gay marriage, and the transgender agenda are in fact at war with the God of Genesis, the Author of creation. About such things there should be no debate among us, for to deny male/female, to deny the child in the womb is to deny Christ, who Himself lived in the womb of Mary, reiterated the truth of creation (Matthew 19, Mark 10) and came to be the groom for His bride, the Church.

English Statesman George Savile quipped, “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses would not be stolen.” With all that is happening in the world, his words concentrate our thoughts. Justice is not merely about trials and verdicts leading to punishment. It’s also about deterrence.

Through current events, many are relearning a seemingly long-forgotten factor relative to justice. As I watched the evening news with my wife, a segment came on about Venezuelan gang members being ordered back into the country after deportation. Without prompting, she asked, “What does it say when a federal judge orders the immediate return of violent criminals who’ve already been deported?”

The Bible is an earthy, fleshy book. God forms Adam from dirt. He fashions Eve from Adam’s rib. They eat forbidden fruit and use animal skin for covering. There are pillars of smoke and fire, roasted lambs and bitter herbs, bloody sacrifices and clouds of temple incense. And not only in the Old Testament — the New Testament continues with such physicality. Jesus heals with spit and dirt, fingers in ears, and caskets touched. A bloody cross culminates in bodily resurrection. Finally, He promises the resurrection of our bodies and a renewed physical earth.

Biblical salvation is not an offer to escape the body into some disembodied realm, whether platonic, gnostic, Eastern, transhumanist or anything else. Rather, the Bible deeply anchors redemption itself to the body. God carries out His redemptive deliverance through intense bodily realities from creation to consummation.

Make no mistake, legal suicide corrupts. Corrupts doctors who have taken an oath to do no harm. Corrupts a medical system that comes to think of patients as costs. Corrupts sacred bonds of a family, and the ties that bind generations. The fact that we are so willing to kill an unborn child, the fact that Obama, when in the Illinois legislature, would not even vote to ban partial-birth abortion should tell us something. The weak and the vulnerable are found at life's beginning and end and then everywhere in between. Where there is not right or wrong, there is only power; where life is not held as precious, it becomes cheap.

That's the story of salvation. We are given a glimpse in Abraham's willingness to put Isaac on the altar. In a worldly way, we see it when parents send their sons off to war. But what of those parents who say, "I just want my child to be happy"? I think we all get it, though that can't be the end all. There has to be something more. The writer to the Hebrews tells us that Abraham knew that Isaac would live again, would rise from the dead. But then, don't we?

It’s Friday, July 4^th, 2025, in Washington D.C. and it has been an incredible journey. Our LCRL work started in 2017. From the start, our mission has been to bring a faithful two-kingdom voice into the heart of federal politics—a voice that limits the reach of government, defends the family and the Church, and upholds First Amendment freedoms so that God’s people can freely proclaim the whole counsel of God without fear of coercion or intervention to the contrary. For a time, threats like COVID shutdowns, the Obergefell decision, and the politicized coercion of DEI-LGBTQ mandates eroded those protections and weaponized government against those holding to traditional, biblical values.

That's how Marxism works. In the Communist Manifesto, it's the freeman and slave, the patrician and the plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman. Translated into the present, it's critical theory where it becomes a matter accumulating points. Score one for being a woman, one for being a person of color, one for being LGB, and perhaps two for being T. Count yourself as an enemy of the one percent, and that's at least a half-point. Such an odd thing, yet you gain a bit of oppressed status by including yourself among the 99 percent. Say you are an LGBTQ ally, another half point, and so on. Colleges have long operated this way, and many young people, young women especially, come home as trained Marxists.

If a couple came to me and said, “Pastor, we’d like to get married, and we’d like to do everything we can today to make sure our marriage ends in divorce tomorrow,” then I would tell them that the first thing they should do is move in together. Cohabitation is that destructive to marriage and family life.

However, the warning must not stop there. Because it is a form of public and intentional sin, cohabitation is particularly destructive to the conscience, and not just to the couple’s conscience but also to the conscience of the Christian community. Many couples view their choices as going no further than themselves. I would like to challenge this by considering some of the ways that cohabitation harms the broader Christian community.

That's the very least we can do. We have a lot of work to do. Blue states love abortion, want more of it, will never even speak against partial-birth abortion, much less children who, if born, could live outside of the womb. Red states are full of pro-life folks, many of whom would rather not push the issue. Abortion is the dark underside of our culture. What's a child in the womb worth? Nothing at all? Or is an unborn child dispensable? Is the child's worth totally dependent upon the mother? If a person is not loved, does that mean they can be dispensed with?

The story has many troubling aspects, not least of which is the parents’ decision based on inaccurate information about the child’s chance of surviving and thriving. But what troubles me most is that I encounter fellow Lutherans who have bought the narrative that it is better for babies with physical imperfections to be aborted rather than embraced and loved for whatever time the Lord allows them to live. I offer four problems with that mindset.

Abortion is a human right. So also is the right to ensure that children have puberty blockers and hormone treatment leading to mutilating surgery. Engage in debate, present the facts, and you will be shouted down by the mob. But that is a little child in the womb, a human being at an early stage. But you will hear only "My body, my choice." And if you take the argument further, you will hear more shouting, as the protestors screams and then repeats over and over again. What is a woman? There is no answer, but that doesn't bother the mob. Is there really such thing as a trans-child? How would you know? Might the child simply be confused? No answer, only the mantra, "Trans right are human rights."