There are two ways to test a philosophy of power. You can read what it says about itself. Or you can watch what happens to the person standing underneath it.

A recent piece on this Substack, What Is Authority For?, proposed a diagnostic for exactly that second approach: every exercise of power can be judged by a single question — does it move outward, toward protecting the vulnerable, or inward, toward protecting itself? Scripture, the essay argued, is far more suspicious of authority than most of its defenders admit. Kings are a concession, not a blessing. Submission is a survival strategy, not a moral seal of approval. And the cry of the harmed, not the confidence of the powerful, is the test that actually matters.

It’s worth running that test against a very different document: Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto, the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a creed. Not because the two texts are arguing about the same thing — one is about technology and markets, the other about interpersonal and institutional power — but because they collide, hard, on a handful of very specific claims. And once you start pulling on those threads, they lead somewhere concrete: soda bans on food stamps, a hundred years of “redistribution is communism,” and a 2026 labor market that makes the whole abundance story a lot harder to take at face value.

There’s a piece of financial folk wisdom that’s become almost conventional strategy among the wealthy: don’t sell your stock, borrow against it. Avoid the capital gains tax. Keep your shares. Get the liquidity anyway. Repeat until you die, at which point your estate settles the loan and your heirs inherit the stock at a stepped-up basis — erasing the gain that would have been taxed had you sold it yourself. People call this “buy, borrow, die.”

It’s often framed as a free lunch: money enters circulation, GDP ticks up, everybody wins. But it’s worth asking a sharper question than “does this technically count as economic activity.” The better question is: what kind of economic activity does it produce, how fast, and at what cost — and how does that compare to just putting cash directly into the hands of people who’ll spend it?

The short answer is that borrowing against stock wealth is a monkey’s paw. The wish — liquidity without selling — is granted. But it comes wrapped in structural weaknesses that make it a poor substitute for real, broad-based economic circulation, and in some conditions, actively dangerous.

A recent post making the rounds quotes a popular leadership book calling Deborah “a fantastic illustration of how God does the unexpected” — because, we’re told, “women had no rights and the rulers, warriors, and decision-makers of the world were men.” God, apparently, “enjoys using people others might discount or dismiss.”

It’s a nice sentence. It is also not supported by a single word of the text it’s citing.

Judges 4:4 introduces Deborah the way it introduces every other judge: no backstory, no controversy, no committee debating whether a woman could really handle the job. She’s just already there — “leading Israel at that time” — and “the Israelites came to her to have their disputes decided.” Present tense. Ongoing. Unremarkable. When she tells the general Barak to take the army against Sisera, he’s the one who won’t go without her: “If you go with me, I will go; but if you don’t go with me, I won’t go” (4:8). That is not the posture of a man discounting a woman. That’s a man who knows exactly whose authority the mission depends on.

There’s a moment in Gladiator — you know the one — where Maximus turns to a bloodthirsty crowd and asks them the question the whole arena was built to avoid answering honestly: is this what you wanted? The crowd doesn’t care who’s under the helmet. They care whether the fight was good. That’s the deal the arena makes with everyone in it, spectators included: entertainment first, provenance never.

Publishing is having its own version of that question right now, except we’ve been arguing about the wrong half of it. The AI-writing conversation keeps circling “can you detect it” — can a classifier tell, can a reader tell, is the jig finally up for people who use AI to write. That’s a real question. It’s also the smaller one. The bigger question is the one Maximus actually asked: what did you come here for in the first place? Because the answer to that determines whether detection was ever the point.

Not all writing makes the same promise to its reader, and that’s the thing “does AI writing work” flattens.

There’s a genre of think-piece now — videos, newsletters, panicked LinkedIn posts — that goes something like: remote work is quietly ruining a generation. It’s making young people poorer. It’s making everyone lonelier. It’s widening the racial wealth gap. And there’s real data behind these claims. The problem is where the finger ends up pointing.

A quick caveat before I swing “capitalism” around, because it’s doing a lot of work in that headline: none of what follows is about markets in some abstract sense. It’s about specific decisions — weak labor protections, an exemption carved into a 1938 law, decades of zoning choices, the slow defunding of civic institutions. “Capitalism” is shorthand for that stack, not a replacement for naming it. A skeptical reader would fairly say “that’s not capitalism, that’s zoning” or “that’s not capitalism, that’s weak unions” — so let’s name the mechanisms.

But those mechanisms aren’t accidents sitting around waiting to be discovered — they’re actively defended. Take the FLSA’s failure to cap salaried hours: it’s not a quirk nobody’s gotten around to fixing. The Department of Labor has tried to raise the overtime salary threshold twice in the last decade, in 2016 and again in 2024, and both times business groups sued and won, keeping the threshold — and millions of workers’ unpaid hours — right where it was. That’s not a gap nobody’s minding. It’s a gap that gets re-fought every time someone tries to close it, by interests that benefit from it remaining. So the fairest version isn’t “capitalism” as some diffuse atmospheric force, and it isn’t “just policy” either — it’s that specific, well-resourced actors have a direct stake in keeping these gaps exactly where they are, and show up in court to make sure they stay there.

Matthew LaMaster’s recent piece, “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me,” lays out seven fronts on which he’s broken with what he calls the “evangelical left”: cultural naïveté, mystical sophistry, toleration of Marxism, Trump derangement, theological drift, family values, and respectability. It’s a candid, well-written piece — genuinely one of the more self-aware entries in the “why I left X” genre, especially in its closing admission that the pull toward respectability is something he has had to actively resist in himself.

But read closely, the essay is almost entirely a document of posture rather than argument. Across seven distinct disputes — several of them squarely theological — Scripture is invoked exactly twice, and both instances land in the final paragraph, in service of the meta-point that the church should be unified. Not one of the seven substantive disagreements is argued from a biblical text. The case is instead built from personal anecdote, a college reading of Marx, a sociologist’s book, and an appeal to “confessionalism” as a structural safeguard.

I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because the phrase gets thrown around loosely. By “vibes theology,” I don’t mean intuition or lived experience — those are legitimate inputs to any moral reasoning. I mean something narrower: arriving at a theological or cultural conclusion primarily through inherited instinct, tribal loyalty, or aesthetic reaction, and only afterward reaching for theological language to justify a position that was never actually derived from the text. The tell isn’t that someone has strong feelings. It’s that the argument could be fully restated without losing anything if you deleted every reference to God, Scripture, or the church.

A topic-by-topic review of the livestream conversation between Tim Whitaker (Tim Whitaker Speaks) and Pastor Matt Lamaster, prompted by Lamaster’s Substack essay “How the Evangelical Left Lost Me.”

Tim Whitaker and Pastor Matt Lamaster spent nearly two hours working through Lamaster’s essay paragraph by paragraph — biblical inerrancy, whether evangelicals put Trump in office, family policy, “wins” of the current administration, and the politics of respectability inside evangelical institutions. It was unusually civil for the genre: real concessions were made on both sides, and neither party strawmanned the other much.

But a lot of numbers got thrown around in real time, the way they do in any live conversation. Below, I’ve pulled out the major empirical claims from each topic and checked them against available data. Where a claim holds up, I say so. Where it’s wrong, exaggerated, or missing context, I say that too.

Every tax fight in America eventually turns into the same argument: why should I pay for something I don’t use? Non-residents shouldn’t fund NYC services they don’t consume. Downstate shouldn’t fund a Chicago train they never ride. Someone in the suburbs shouldn’t fund a bridge they’ll never drive across.

It sounds like a tax argument. It isn’t, not really. The rates aren’t actually that different from what other rich countries charge. What’s different is that we’ve stopped expecting the thing we build with the money to be good — and somewhere along the way, we stopped being embarrassed about that.

For most of American history, wealth and public monuments were the same project. Carnegie didn’t quietly write a check to the government and hope it got spent well — he put his name on 2,500 libraries and made sure everyone knew it. And it wasn’t just generosity. It was competition. Industrialists raced each other to endow the tallest building, the grandest concert hall, the university wing that would outlast them by a century. Cities raced each other too — for the best skyline, the best parks, the fair that would put them on the world map. Nobody remembers the Hoover Dam because it was the cheapest option. They remember it because it was built to be one of the great engineering feats of its age, and everyone involved knew it, and wanted their name near it.

On March 30, 2023, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed Act 372 — a law that does two distinct things to the state’s libraries and bookstores.

Section 1 makes it a crime — up to a year in prison — for a librarian or bookseller to knowingly furnish, display, or otherwise make available to a minor any item that is “harmful to minors.” That phrase isn’t left undefined; it’s a three-part test, and all three parts have to be met:

The average adult, applying community standards, would find the material has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex to minors.

The obvious rebuttal to the last piece is: but there are small groups. Life groups, home groups, growth groups, whatever the branding — most large-campus churches build an entire second structure specifically so people can talk, ask questions, and process the sermon together in a living room instead of a sanctuary. If the Sunday stage is one-to-many, the small group is supposed to be the many-to-many. That’s a fair point, and it deserves its own honest look, because on paper it answers everything the last piece complained about.

It’s worth being fair about what small groups are actually for, most of the time, for most people in them. Nobody joins a life group hoping it’ll double as a shareholder meeting. People join for the casserole when someone’s in the hospital, the honesty that’s easier in six chairs than six hundred, the prayer request nobody would say into a microphone. That relational function is real, and it’s not the thing this piece is questioning. The question here is narrower: when a small group does become the place where someone raises a real objection — to a sermon, to something political said from the stage, to how the church has handled a specific harm — what happens to it there. Not whether small groups are worthwhile. Whether they’re built to let that particular kind of concern go anywhere.

Almost none of these groups sit down and talk about whatever’s actually on someone’s mind. They work through a curriculum: a printed guide, an app, a set of “discussion questions” tied to that week’s sermon, usually written by the same staff who wrote the sermon. The questions are rarely do you agree with what the pastor said. They’re closer to how can you apply what the pastor said this week. The sermon isn’t up for discussion. It’s the assigned text, and the small group’s job is application, not evaluation. That’s a completely different activity than dialogue. It’s guided practice.

To be clear about scope: this isn’t a claim about every church. Quaker meetings, house churches, small Bible studies, plenty of congregational-governance traditions build real dialogue into how they gather. What follows is about a particular, very common shape — the large-campus, generally white evangelical church that has, not by accident, become one of the more comfortable spaces in American life to be openly MAGA. That’s the room I’m describing.

Go to a wedding and, at some point, someone hands you a microphone. It’s the toast — the best man, the maid of honor, sometimes half the reception, each getting a turn to say something in front of everyone. It’s ordinary. Almost nobody thinks twice about it. The room is built, on some level, for voices other than the one running the show.

Now go to one of these churches on a Sunday. Sit through the sermon. Try to imagine a moment — any moment — where you could stand up and say something in front of everyone the way you would at that reception. There isn’t one. There was never going to be one. And increasingly, there isn’t even a person in the room to say it to. It’s a screen.

There’s a question I keep coming back to when I hear another story of someone quietly slipping out the back of a church they used to love: what would it look like if the pastor actually did their job?

Not their job of comforting. Not their job of building the budget or growing the campus or keeping the potlucks running. Their other job. The Jonah job.

Most of us learned the Jonah story as a fish tale — a guy runs from God, gets swallowed, gets spit out, learns his lesson. But the fish is a footnote. The actual assignment was this: go to Nineveh, a city so violent and corrupt it had become a byword for cruelty, and tell them, out loud, that their sin had been seen and it had to stop.

Compass Church recently launched a five-week series called Foundations, opening with a sermon on the congregation’s mission statement: “helping people find and follow God.” The message is built from Mark 1:16–20 — Jesus calling Peter, Andrew, James, and John by the Sea of Galilee — and it’s a warm, well-illustrated sermon, anchored by genuinely strong historical and archaeological material on Capernaum.

But underneath the two-word mission statement — find and follow — sits a more useful analytical grid than the sermon itself supplies. If you break the mission down into two modes and three destinations, you get a clear picture of what the sermon actually covers, and — more tellingly — what it quietly leaves out.

Two modes — how the mission gets carried out:

There’s a strange gap in how most of us talk about Satan versus what the Bible actually says he does. Ask a room full of people to describe him and you’ll get a fallen archangel, a rebel who led a third of heaven in a war against God, a serpent who tricked the first woman, a being locked in cosmic combat with the Almighty for the soul of humanity. Ask them to point to the verse for any of that, and things get quiet.

This isn’t a piece arguing Satan doesn’t exist or isn’t dangerous. It’s an attempt to do something the Bible itself seems oddly insistent on: separate what’s recorded from what’s assumed. Because when you actually do that, the picture that emerges is smaller, stranger, and in some ways more interesting than the one most of us inherited.

Start with the Old Testament, where “Satan” barely shows up, and when he does, he’s often not even a proper name.

There’s a version of the AI-authorship panic that’s about ethics, and a version that’s about money pretending to be about ethics. This week gave us two case studies — a YouTuber and a novelist — that make the difference easy to see, if you’re willing to look at it.

Hank Green, the science YouTuber behind SciShow and Crash Course, admitted he’d been using ChatGPT as a research aid after fans caught what sounded like leftover AI phrasing in a script. He apologized, called it an unhealthy habit, and paused his main channel.

Jerry Falade, a debut novelist, had a $2.4 million book deal collapse after his own agents said they could no longer “authenticate” how his manuscript came together. He denies using AI and says the suspicion reflects a pattern: three Black authors landed major deals this year, and all three later saw those deals disrupted by AI rumors.

Fairness requires this companion piece. If the diagnostic from “What Is Authority For?” — does this authority move outward, toward the protection of the vulnerable, or inward, toward the protection of the one holding it? — is going to be run against Andy Biggs, it has to be run against Katie Hobbs too. She is, after all, the incumbent, which means she has something Biggs doesn’t yet have to answer for: four years of executive power, not just votes and floor speeches.

Hobbs’s path to office runs through social work, not law: she spent years as chief compliance officer at one of the country’s largest domestic violence shelters, then moved through the Arizona House, the state Senate as minority leader, Secretary of State, and finally the governorship in 2023 — the first social worker elected to the office in the country’s history, and the fifth woman to hold it in Arizona. She is currently seeking re-election against Biggs in November 2026.

Same caveat as before: this framework is not neutral, and applying it to a sitting governor mid-campaign risks reading conclusions into the record rather than out of it. I’ve tried to include her strongest defenses alongside the strongest criticisms.

The essay that opened this series offered a single diagnostic for evaluating anyone who holds power over other people: does this authority move outward, toward the protection of the vulnerable, or inward, toward the protection of the one holding it?

Andy Biggs is a useful — and timely — test case. He has held institutional power almost continuously for over two decades: fourteen years in the Arizona Legislature, the last four as Senate President; nearly a decade in the U.S. House; a stint chairing the House Freedom Caucus; and, as of July 2026, the Republican nomination for Governor of Arizona, where he’ll face incumbent Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs in November.

That is a long paper trail. Rather than argue a verdict, this piece tries to lay the record next to the framework and let the pattern — or lack of one — speak.

On July 29, 2026, Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security Committee for nearly three hours and said one sentence, over a hundred times: on the advice of counsel, he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to answer. Chairman Rand Paul had built a case, document by document, diary entry by diary entry. Fauci built a wall. Nobody moved.

It was, by any honest account, a hearing designed to produce a moment rather than an answer — and it mostly succeeded at that. But it’s worth separating out what actually happened from the theater, because buried in Paul’s exhibits is a genuinely uncomfortable record, and buried in the whole spectacle is a question this Congress still hasn’t tried to answer: what do we actually do differently next time?

I went back through The Diaries of Anthony Fauci, 2019–2022 — the edited compilation Senator Paul released — to check the specific lines quoted at the hearing against the source material. Several of the headline claims hold up almost exactly as presented:

There is a woman in Proverbs 31 who has become, over several centuries of sermons, almost unrecognizable to herself.

She is held up as a model of quiet domestic virtue — the woman who rises early, tends her household, and is a credit to her husband. What gets quoted far less often is what she actually does with her hands:

“She selects wool and flax and works with eager hands... She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes... She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings she plants a vineyard... She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.” (Proverbs 31:13, 24, 16, 18, paraphrased composite)

Every week, in churches all over the world, people say some version of the same sentence: forgive us our sins, by thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and what we have left undone.

It’s beautiful. It’s honest. It’s also completely generic — and that’s not an accident. Nobody in a room of three hundred people can stand up and itemize their week. The liturgy has to speak for everyone, which means it can’t speak specifically to anyone.

That’s fine, as far as it goes. The trouble is what we’ve quietly let that generic moment become. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us started treating the liturgy as the whole transaction — the place where sin goes in and forgiveness comes out, start to finish, in about ninety seconds, without ever leaving the pew.