I work in the muck-filled left-hand kingdom. The year 2023 marked the 500th anniversary of Luther’s exposition of that realm, and a rereading of the reformer’s Temporal Authority is certainly profitable for every Christian. In that concise treatment of the subject (you can get through the essay in less than two hours) Luther sets forth priorities—derived from Scripture—for our earthly governmental affairs, “That the temporal sword and law be used for the punishment of the wicked and the protection of the upright.” What makes Christians in America so fortunate (at first blush) is that the priorities given to us by the Word for our earthly dealings comport with America’s constitution as it is written; the preamble’s opening line, after all, declares the establishment of “Justice.” However, punishing evil requires a proper classification of what is evil and by extension what is upright—basic truths which were written on the hearts of all men (Jeremiah 31:33) but have been suppressed by many of our fellow citizens (Genesis 1:26, Isaiah 5:20, Romans 1:18) and ignored by the millions who dwell within our borders illegally. It follows, then, that for the wicked to be duly punished, their evil deeds must be thoroughly exposed (Ephesians 5:11) so that proper order be established and maintained toward the framers’ stated goal of “domestic Tranquility.” I would submit to you that the investigative work I perform on behalf of patrons nationwide (and the dozens of additional vocations performed by our Christian brothers in law enforcement, the armed services, and others) has been enriched by the Lutheran commitment to source material(s) and texts—ad fontes, if you will.
Allow me to illustrate the importance of source materials in the left-hand kingdom by way of a recent national disgrace: the adult son of the 46th U.S. president forgot to pick up a laptop which he had left at a Delaware repair shop. Due to God’s providence, the shop owner did not want to quietly conceal the (obviously) evil deeds (Proverbs 17:15) which the laptop exposed, so he made a copy of its hard drive. A team of private investigators, digital forensics specialists, and gumshoes (which I lead) later obtained a copy of this cloned hard drive. Instead of being satisfied with the American public receiving a substandard summary of the contents of the device from the cable commentators of our day—who are akin to the left-hand kingdom equivalent of a 16th century Roman curia who deemed the Scriptures too lofty to translate into the lingua franca (common tongue)—we saw fit to put nearly all of the contents of the abandoned hard drive online, with sensible redactions (for indecent imagery and social security/credit card numbers). The book published by our nonprofit clinically catalogs over four hundred violations of state and federal laws committed by the 46th U.S. president’s family and its associates. The breadth and depth of the primary source material and evidence in the form of photos, videos, text messages, emails, etc. is fundamentally different than any other American scandal. Just as the right-hand kingdom’s charge of proclaiming the Gospel and administering the means of grace are enriched by the actual source documents of the Scriptures, the left-hand kingdom’s charge of exposing and punishing evil is made possible by obtaining and divulging evidence that is accessible to our reason and senses (explanation of the First Article of the Creed). To fail at this left-hand mission is to deracinate the politia, one of the three estates.
In effect, the group I lead is engaged in the discipline of ponerology—the study of evil. Christ Himself did not need to study man as we do (John 2:24), yet He graciously gave us His word as a roadmap. To study 150 gigabytes of evil, its characteristics and forms, requires sobriety above all else. The sobriety is necessary in order to be a penetrating digital sewer diver, as one reader described us. Analogies aside: our federal system in America was constructed so that this work was to be performed by law enforcement entities. That duty has been abandoned. Those federal institutions (FBI, DOJ, CIA) have obviously atrophied and need to be wound down and reconstituted under new names and budgets if they are to fulfill the left-hand kingdom duties of punishing evildoers and restraining degeneracy. The Biden laptop miscarriage of justice is but one (albeit significant) example on the long, intolerable road of 21st-century failures by the federal government to rebuke evildoers. Yet words alone, without a sound understanding of good and evil, are but chaff—as the empty constitution of North Korea demonstrates. It is our duty as Christian citizens to rectify this disintegration through obtaining and maintaining significant national offices which exercise due, just authority so that one of the three estates is not lost in America at the federal level. To fail at this duty is an affront to our God, our ancestors who bequeathed this republic to us, and to our progeny.
The costs of exposing evil are not trivial in the short and medium term. Jobs and opportunities will undoubtedly be lost. Acquaintances (who you previously counted as friends) will renounce you due to their suppression of the truth and love of their belly (Philippians 3:19). Litigation brought by the 46th U.S. president’s family and one of their benefactors has stifled our nonprofit’s reach; the Secret Service and Department of Justice investigated us for ridiculous reasons from 2022-2024. In a much more serious example, another young Christian man from Illinois was assassinated last month in front of his family and three thousand onlookers. However, these serious and tangible costs should not cause us to sorrow “as others who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Mr. Charlie Kirk was given the gift of courage by God to “reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) with those who opposed his confession just as God gave the words to Paul in front of Felix (Acts 24:10) and in Athens (Acts 17:22). The evil man, darkened in understanding (Ephesians 4:18), who murdered Mr. Kirk does not get the final word, as the inscription on a most beautiful church in Palo Alto reads: “An eternal existence in prospect converts the whole of your present state into a mere vestibule of the grand court of life—a beginning, an introduction to what is to follow … The best thoughts, affections and aspirations of a [Christian] soul are fixed on the infinitude of eternity. Destined as such a soul is for immortality, it finds all that is not eternal too short, all that is not infinite too small.”