The disarmed country

The companion essay, The Disarmed Sanctuary, argued that Dr. Joel Biermann’s counsel to leave the worshiping congregation undefended merely transfers the work from the parishioner to law enforcement for the sake of appearances. In his June 2026 conversation with Dr. Jordan Cooper, Biermann extends the same reasoning to the nation, with Cooper’s agreement, and the church is expected to accept the dissolution of its culture while maintaining its composure.

Giving Up Without a Fight

Christians bear no obligation to wield governmental authority, yet they remain called to resist the rebranding of individual sins as neutral social issues, mere policy questions on which the religious voice has no standing. Having voluntarily ceded the cultural territory, Christian leaders now characterize each encroaching moral failure as an unchangeable secular fact rather than recognizing it as the product of deliberate legislative choices and sustained institutional subversion.

The result is functional Christian quietism. Biermann explicitly rejects quietism as always wrong, however, the practical outcome of his counsel mirrors quietism precisely. A selectively applied two-kingdoms framework produces the result by consistently placing the obligations of restraint upon believers while treating each emerging vice as an immovable social reality to be accommodated through winsome witness. The moral decline operates in one direction without any mechanism of resistance, grave transgressions become trivial matters in the public consciousness, and those who object are accused of demanding a theocratic seizure of power.

Breaking Fences

The church’s retreat began after the federal consolidation of the early twentieth century and the societal upheaval that followed the First World War, and every voluntary ecclesiastical concession became an opportunity for the state to appropriate the ground or redistribute it to hostile hands.

Contraception is the type specimen. For nineteen centuries, Christianity uniformly opposed contraception as inherently against God. The 1930 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops opened the reconsideration with the serpent’s own question, did God really say, and within a generation the Protestant denominations had moved through the newly opened door into the cultural separation of sexual activity from procreation, leaving Roman Catholicism the sole institutional holdout.

American jurisprudence followed the same track. The 1965 Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut invented a marital right to privacy in order to invalidate the contraception statutes, and the privacy framework proved to be the instrument of every subsequent decomposition. The Court extended the privacy right to unmarried persons in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), constructed a constitutional abortion right in Roe v. Wade (1973), eliminated the sodomy statutes in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and constitutionalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), each step building on the breach contraception opened. Contraception was the battering ram by which the moral radicals and the enemies of Christianity demolished the legal architecture of restraint, though the Court’s opinions prefer euphemism to any acknowledgment of the progression.

California pioneered no-fault divorce in 1969, when Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act, effective January 1, 1970, permitting dissolution on irreconcilable differences without any showing of adultery, cruelty, or abandonment. The innovation spread rapidly, and it penetrated the traditionally conservative Lutheran strongholds of the Midwest with particular efficiency.

Evangelical opposition to Roeemerged slowly and fractured. Organized resistance began years after the constitutional recognition had occurred and the industrial-scale abortion infrastructure had been built, with roughly seventy million dead since 1973, and the delay left abortion to be carried publicly as a Roman Catholic cause rather than a universal Christian one. This is quietism in concentrated form. The Missouri Synod’s performance was marginally better, requiring eleven years for the Commission on Theology and Church Relations to issue Abortion in Perspective.

As the privacy jurisprudence dismantled the legal restraints, commercial vice filled the void, and the state converted from restraint to dealership. Gambling illustrates the conversion cleanly. Within living memory, gambling carried criminal stigma and social disrepute. New Hampshire initiated the state-sponsored lottery in 1964 and the revenue model spread state by state; the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 legalized casino operations across most of the country; and when the Supreme Court struck the federal sports-wagering prohibition in Murphy v. NCAA (2018), the last fence collapsed, and gambling promotion became a fixture of every sporting broadcast. A nation that once deliberately cultivated the restraint of vice now nationalizes its distribution, and the churches file the gambling-addicted young under unfortunate policy outcomes rather than naming them casualties of a deliberate institutional betrayal that deserves ecclesiastical opposition.

The drug trajectory runs parallel and starker. Government authority moved from the regulation of medicine through the licensing of vice toward the dispensation of lethal recreational drugs: from mid-century criminalization, through the manufactured OxyContin epidemic beginning in 1996, into marijuana legalization commencing in Colorado in 2012, and on to the decriminalization experiment of Oregon’s Measure 110 in 2020. Government-sponsored consumption facilities now operate in which state agencies supply narcotics, injection equipment, and sanitation oversight; New York City opened the first supervised injection sites in 2021, Providence followed in 2025, San Francisco and Philadelphia run comparable programs, and Denver pursues the same expansion. Drug-rooted homelessness has surged across these same cities alongside a systematic deterioration of living standards that were ordinary twenty-five years ago.

Pornography followed the identical path from the margins to the center. Playboy began the mainstreaming in 1953; the Supreme Court loosened the obscenity standards in Roth v. United States (1957) and again in Miller v. California (1973); and successive technological vectors, the mails, the videocassette, the internet, eliminated every barrier of access, shame, and restraint. OnlyFans completed the transformation in 2016 by legitimizing the commerce of sexual performance as ordinary, tax-documented content creation. What was criminal sexual commerce within living memory is now an openly discussed professional enterprise, and the American churches have collectively shrugged, on the theory that institutional detachment permits uninvolved witness.

The trajectory reaches prostitution itself. The statutes criminalizing commercial sexual exchange remain formally on the books in nearly every jurisdiction. However, the platform architecture circumvented them by removing physical contact while delivering immediate sexual gratification, lawfully distributed across all fifty states, processed through ordinary financial institutions, and documented on tax filings. Commercialized sexual transaction has achieved de facto national normalization beneath formally intact criminal prohibitions.

The Moving Goalposts

Against a century of fence-breaking, Biermann’s counsel deserves to be examined in its own words. In the June 2026 conversation with Cooper, he characterizes the United States as a pluralistic democracy whose pluralism is “baked in now.” But who did the baking, and from whom did the bakers take the recipe that produced the chaos and destruction now treated as given? He contends that the legal restraint of vice is futile unless one can win the votes, and he is skeptical the votes exist; America, he maintains, cannot become a Christian nation. Cooper offers no analytical resistance and embraces the post-Christian future as inevitable, speaking for a broader ecclesiastical cohort that laments secularization while refusing to acknowledge that the churches surrendered the culture actively rather than losing it to some passive decline. The same class bewails secularism while defending the very silences that enabled its advance.

The position wears a pious humility that masks strategic capitulation. The entire framework treats the present secular, vice-saturated condition of the nation as the fixed moral baseline from which the church must work, asking nothing about how the baseline was set. Yet the baseline is no inevitable given; it is the artifact of an ecclesiastical refusal to contest the manufactured Weimar conditions of pervasive, privatized public degeneracy. The baked-in pluralism was prepared deliberately, by hostile hands, within living memory, while the churches that were positioned to object consented instead to the proposition that governance and the cultural machinery belonged to the state’s management alone.

What Biermann labels Christian Nationalism is, applied retrospectively, simply the moral ecology the country possessed: a common understanding that vice destroys, and institutions that declined to tolerate it. The churches maintained a robust witness of faith across the kingdom boundary without prescribing the operations of government. A shared heritage of law, custom, and reputation created a collective moral capital that let the gospel be proclaimed without fighting an endless rearguard action against a deliberately engineered cultural mockery of God.

The simplistic two-kingdoms theorist recognizes only two alternatives, state-coerced morality or faithful witness amid hostility, and congratulates himself for choosing the second. What never appears is the third reality: the negligent, thoughtless surrender of previously normal and wholesome cultural conditions through ecclesiastical abdication. Biermann correctly identifies Christian quietism as perpetually wrong. Nevertheless, the posture he recommends produces functional quietism, a resigned acceptance that the moral and ethical domain belongs primarily to aggressive secular state actors, leaving the religious communities to testify amid the ruins of a civilization they themselves once built.

Conclusion

The disarmament of the country replicates the disarmament of the congregation, and it fails in the identical way. Just as a congregation guarded by imported law enforcement contradicts the Sermon-on-the-Mount fidelity it claims to display, a nation that files its transgressions under policy categories guarantees moral catastrophe for the generations that follow. The churches imagine they will step into a neutral public square to witness with confidence, when the square has been captured by enemies who mock and deride the futility of the appearance. The church should reject any theology that accepts post-Christian America, and a post-Christian West, as the fixed horizon of Christian engagement, and no synodical body should retain theologians who counsel resigned acceptance of that outcome.

“Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice: it is such notions as these that should be impressed upon the young, who differ from the young of other times merely in having a different middle-aged generation behind them. You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy; but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.”