A lot is happening in our world right now. It has me thinking of the saying that goes something like, “Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses would not be stolen.” I don’t remember who said it. I just know it makes sense viscerally right now.

For starters, and in a somewhat positive sense, it seems that many aspects of American life that had become chaotic are being restored. Criminals are being caught and punished. Documents are being unsealed, and truths are being made known. Wasteful fraud is being uncovered, and cuts are being made. But there’s something else happening, too. Many are relearning a seemingly long-forgotten factor relative to justice. It’s not merely about trials and verdicts leading to punishment. It’s also about deterrence. Here’s what I mean.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a parent, it’s that consistent and clear consequences function like guardrails on a road. They don’t just punish bad drivers with scrapes and dents. They keep vehicles from veering off course. Remove those guardrails, and people plummet off cliffs. Dismantle them, and the dividing lines between opposing lanes disappear. Sooner or later, someone crosses over and causes destruction. In this sense, deterrents are not merely judicial but protective. They don’t just correct individual behavior; they preserve societal peace by restraining chaos before it can even start.

This point was driven home again just this past week. Jennifer and I were watching the evening news when a segment came on about Venezuelan gang members being ordered back into the country after deportation. Without prompting, Jennifer asked, “What does it say when a federal judge orders the immediate return of violent criminals who’ve already been deported?” Less than ten seconds later, a guest on the segment echoed the same concern. They both recognized the same truth: that law and order don’t merely punish the wicked. They communicate to observers what will be tolerated and what won’t. They warn. They deter.

This is the precise situation that seems to be getting reset. Rather than enforcing the law and holding wrongdoers accountable, America has been seemingly overrun by emotionalized justice—punishing or pardoning not based on guilt or innocence but on political allegiances and ideological sympathies. Of course, we’re not out of the woods yet.

Take, for example, the ongoing vandalism and destruction of Teslas, a rage not driven by any wrongdoing of the vehicle’s owner but by hatred for Elon Musk and his efforts relative to DOGE. The idea that someone’s private property becomes fair game for destruction simply because of an ideological disagreement betrays an aspect of societal devolution. When this is the way a populace operates, it isn’t getting better. It’s getting worse. I have high hopes for Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, if only because they’re tough and because we’re living in a time when a man can execute an insurance company executive in broad daylight only to be cheered on by influencers and media personalities. Naturally, the result is that other potential villains see this, are emboldened, and the overall dreadfulness escalates. This is exactly why deterrents matter.

When the justice system demonstrates that wrongdoing will be tolerated, excused, or even praised by judges, legislators, media, or culture, wickedness is fostered.

In a conversation with my son, Harrison, about the federal judge ordering the return of the gang members, I told him I could accept how someone with a cognitive deficiency or a mental illness might be confused concerning the right and wrong of this situation. Nevertheless, for most normal people dealing with functioning moral faculties (because for believer and unbeliever alike, morality is written into the human heart [Romans 2:15, Jeremiah 31:33]), no matter how the narrative is framed, the facts are not complicated. These deportees are not struggling asylum seekers fleeing oppression in search of the American Dream. They are brutality-minded reprobates intent on terrorizing others. Even in their own words, they’ve come to inflict pain and suffering while perpetuating anything and everything (drugs, sex trafficking, and countless other dreadfulnesses) that destroy American families and culture. One gang member proudly described his tattoos, saying, “You only get these when you kill.” Still, the liberal progressive mind remains a strange one at this intersection. Led by the loudest among their bunch—people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, and others—protests erupt over the Trump administration’s efforts to capture and deport these monsters. Most honest, everyday citizens observe these protests and wonder at the insanity. They can’t figure out why the Democrat Party would foster such ridiculousness.

To find the answer to the “why” question, my first inclination is to lean into the “cognitively deficient” argument I made before. As I said, cognitively deficient people cannot discern distinctions between right and wrong. However, it’s likely they do know the difference; it’s just that they willfully reject right and wrong altogether, maybe even refusing to believe they really exist (which I’ll come back to in a minute). When this is the case, logic is disrupted, and emotions fill the vacuum. With this, they inevitably virtue-signal, minimizing complex issues that they really don’t understand, ultimately interpreting and then naming their overall efforts as pro-immigrant, pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ, and such.

If this isn’t the answer to the question, then my second inclination is to assume they actually do understand the complexity of what’s going on, and if so, then something James Lindsay said to me makes sense.

As a parent, when I let my child do whatever he wants without consequences, I invite household chaos. Is it possible that someone would do this purposely? Well, if the person wanted to make home life so unbearable that it destroys his marriage, freeing him to replace his wife with another woman, he might. If you want a society’s current structure to slide into disarray so that you can replace it with something else, get rid of disarray’s deterrents. Don’t punish crime. Allow or even encourage and maintain it. The thing is, it’s almost as if some of our leaders are doing this. When Maxine Waters encourages protesters to accost opponents in restaurants and at their homes to ensure they have no rest, when a federal judge orders a plane deporting thugs to return to the United States, or legislators press for open borders and an illegal alien’s right to vote, or a former president pits his justice department against parents fighting to keep boys out of women’s locker rooms, the only logical reason for these behaviors that undermine stability is to perpetuate destabilization. What else could it be?

Before I forget, I said I was going to come back around to a point I was making before. Referring to progressive-minded people, I wrote above, “Cognitively deficient people cannot discern distinctions between right and wrong… maybe even refusing to believe they really exist.” What I really meant by “cognitively deficient people” was radical individualists. Radically individualized people, while they may pay lip service to law and order, inherently do not view it as beneficial but as oppressive. Radical individualism does not understand personal responsibility as objectively good but as outdated. And because a radically individualized person believes he can be, say, or do anything he wants without consequence (people can be cats, men can menstruate and have babies, and other mentally ill thoughts), any actual consequence, natural or imposed, is by default deemed unfair.

In a world where this is the rule, chaos reigns supremely. In such a world, people burn cars not because they have been wronged but because they can do so without fear of punishment. In that world, violent criminals are shielded from deportation while law-abiding citizens live in fear. In that world, dreadfulness leads to reward, and goodness is smothered. In that world, horses are stolen not because men are desperate but because they know that no one will stop them.

Christians, you know better.

I sent a private message to someone close to me last week. The person claims Christianity and yet shared an article that favored abortion. In the private message, I wrote, “A Christian man sharing a post in support of abortion is like a firefighter advocating for arson. The Christian faith upholds the sanctity of life from conception (Psalm 139:13-16, Jeremiah 1:5), while abortion is the deliberate taking of innocent life.”

Why did I send the message? First and foremost, a Christian’s responsibility in this world is not to remain silent when falsehood runs amok in the “household of faith” (Galatians 6:10). Beyond Christian fellowship, Christ calls His believers to be “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” (Matthew 5:13-14). We preserve truth. We are bright-beaming beacons in falsehood’s darkness. Of course, the Lord is referring specifically to the Gospel. Still, the Gospel is truth’s source because Christ is the Gospel’s source (John 14:6). From there, the Holy Spirit at work by that Gospel doesn’t make the one He inhabits dormant. He stirs Christians to know and confess that abortion is murder—that the guardrail of God’s holy Law against it is not bad but good. In the same way, a Christian citizen does not abdicate the role God has given him in society. He becomes someone willing to “rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11). He understands that “if you say, ‘Behold, we did not know this,’ does not He who weighs the heart perceive it?” (v. 12).

As all of this relates to what I’ve shared so far, a Christian understands that the biblical mandate to love the neighbor (Mark 12:31) does not mean enabling lawlessness but ensuring that justice prevails so that our neighbors can live in safety and peace. And there’s a very important reason for this. Saint Paul urges believers to pray for and intercede with “kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way” (1 Timothy 2:2). He goes on to say, “This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (vv. 3-4). In other words, the preservation of law and order is not simply about maintaining civility. It is about protecting the Church’s ability to proclaim the Gospel without interference to a world that desperately needs it. A world with no law and order is a world without religious liberty. A society in disarray naturally stifles the Christian witness. Churches are inevitably threatened, and the Gospel is silenced beneath disorder’s weight.

God ordains governments to dispel chaos. That’s important to the Two Kingdoms doctrine. In its prescriptive sense, God established government (the kind we can rightly call “good”) to punish evildoers and reward those who live uprightly (Romans 13:3-4). When a government abandons this ordination, the Church cannot be silent. She speaks and acts against the forces attempting to destabilize and destroy society by undermining this crucial estate.

From Genesis to Revelation, God’s Word reveals that order, justice, and truth are not merely societal values—they are divine imperatives. Government exists to serve the good, and the Church must speak when that purpose is subverted. In that sense, the Church herself stands as a fixed deterrent. And by the way, this is not a definitively conservative or liberal position. It is, quite simply, natural law. It is how God designed His world. And His way is best.