Individuals, families, churches, and governments all require maintenance. We readily accept this principle when it comes to our homes and automobiles. Yet we often neglect it where it matters most: in the moral foundations that sustain our common life.
A culture cannot indefinitely draw upon virtues it no longer teaches. Honesty, responsibility, restraint, courage, and justice must be explained, practiced, and passed from one generation to the next. Contemporary problems may arrive wearing modern clothes, but the human weaknesses beneath them remain familiar.
The traditions of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem offer a vocabulary for understanding those weaknesses. They remind us that freedom requires discipline, power invites abuse, and justice demands standards beyond convenience. Our circumstances change. Our need for moral instruction does not.
Culture precedes politics. What we tolerate in our neighborhoods eventually influences what we accept in our institutions. Laws cannot permanently compensate for a people unwilling to govern themselves. Neither can elections repair every injury caused by neglected families, weakened communities, or the disappearance of personal accountability.
For me, Christianity provides the clearest foundation for that accountability. We are answerable not merely to ourselves, our neighbors, or the government, but to God. That conviction places limits on personal appetite and political ambition alike. No individual, party, or institution becomes the final judge of right and wrong.
I learned something about accountability when I was about seven years old. Across from our home stood a Lutheran church with a Christmas Nativity display of roughly twenty-two life-size figures. To the neighborhood boys, the arrangement presented an irresistible opportunity for football.
Joseph became our middle linebacker. Mary played cornerback. We ran plays through gaps between the wise men and the angels. Pastor O’Morrow was not impressed by our creativity. A few hours later, neither was my father.
What followed was an education in the chain of command. For months afterward, our weekends included cleaning and mowing the church grounds. We discovered that misconduct created obligations extending beyond ourselves. We had disrespected something important to a congregation and a neighborhood, and we were expected to make amends.
My father also administered the sort of punishment familiar to many children of my generation. Looking back, however, the lasting lesson was not the sting. It was the certainty that someone would hold us responsible and require us to repair the harm. My grandfather had a blunt expression for his philosophy: “Paddle a fanny today, and save a night in jail later.”
Readers need not embrace his remedy to recognize his concern. Children need boundaries. Adults need them, too. Affection without expectations can become indulgence; authority without fairness can become cruelty. Responsible discipline combines clear standards, proportionate consequences, and the opportunity to do better.
That principle should extend into public life.
Peaceful disagreement belongs in a free society. Violence, intimidation, and destruction do not become acceptable because those responsible claims a righteous cause. Nor should we excuse wrongdoing merely because confronting it is politically uncomfortable. Compassion for an offender must not erase concern for a victim.
The same moral clarity applies to the exercise of power. When leaders treat human beings as expendable instruments of an ideology, the essential question is not whether their slogans sound compassionate. It is whether their actions respect human dignity and acknowledge meaningful limits on authority. I believe those limits are strongest when rooted in the recognition that government is not God.
That belief does not require us to pretend that Christians have always acted justly, or that our neighbors outside the faith lack conscience. It requires something more demanding: that we judge our own conduct by the standards we ask others to honor.
A Christian argument for public virtue must therefore begin with Christian responsibility. Churches should teach what they profess. Parents should model what they demand. Public officials should understand office as a trust, not a possession. Citizens should resist the temptation to excuse dishonesty whenever it benefits their side. America’s Christian inheritance, as I understand it, is an obligation rather than a boast. Invoking God means little if we disregard truth, neglect our neighbors, or surrender judgment to partisan loyalty.
This election, I intend to look beyond promises and personalities. I want leaders whose conduct demonstrates integrity, whose policies respect human dignity, and whose understanding of liberty includes responsibility. I will judge ballot measures by those same principles.
No election will substitute for the patient work of raising and educating our children, strengthening churches, serving neighbors, and holding ourselves accountable. Government cannot manufacture the character we refuse to cultivate. The maintenance of a free society begins close to home. It begins when we teach that choices have consequences, that freedom carries duties, and that none of us stands above the moral law.
That work cannot wait for someone else.
