If you’re about to crack open my new book Ashes To Ashes, but you’re doing so with Angel Studios or The Hallmark Channel in your head, do yourself a favor—close the book and walk away. There’s no soft lighting here, no mushy spirituality. This is humanity after dark.
It’s the story of a man—a Lutheran pastor—who’s tired of watching the world’s worst slip by untouched. And so, he’s done waiting for anything, including permission… from anyone. What follows is brutal consequence in literary form.
Again, this is no cocoa-by-the-fire Christian fiction. It doesn’t hold hands with anyone. Not at all. It grabs you by the throat and drags you across the line alongside an unexpected anti-hero, a man unlike any you’ve known. And along the way, you’ll find yourself praying that both of you find a way back.
For starters, as a clergyman, I knew I’d take some heat for the book. I knew those scenes of extreme vigilante violence—moments when a man in a clerical collar arrives to erase the most vicious among us—I knew this would send some spinning into a fever.
Honestly, I’ve really only read one critical sentence about the book from an advanced reader, and the expressed observation didn’t surprise me. He noted something I did intentionally. Beyond this, it seems most folks, once they picked up the book, couldn’t put it down until they finished it.
Nevertheless, two individuals reached out to me privately with concerns. While separate, their concerns were essentially the same. I’ll attempt to paraphrase their thoughts. But before I do, you should know the book’s premise.
Essentially, Ashes to Ashes follows Reverend Daniel Michaels, a small-town Lutheran pastor who, while visiting one of his members, is somehow knocked unconscious, and when he awakens, he finds the church member dead. From there, the story steers toward a human trafficking network operating under the cover of a nearby church-run women’s shelter. With the possibility of law enforcement being compromised and the guilty hiding in positions of authority—right out in plain sight—Daniel shoulders the unbearable burden of both grief and responsibility. What follows is a harrowing descent into vigilante justice—brutal in every way—scenes as messy as they are decisive. Daniel wages war against predators in their homes, alleys, and shady motels, each encounter leaving more blood on his clerical collar than before. However, threaded through the brutality is a much deeper conflict. I won’t reveal too much, except to say the novel builds inexorably toward a pile-up collision between repentance, vengeance, vocation, hope, redemption, damnation, right and wrong, Law and Gospel, ultimately leaving readers scorched along the way by some of the best narrative writing I think I’ve ever produced in my entire life.
Seriously. I’m so proud of this book. I immersed myself in Reverend Daniel Michaels’ world, and I employed every ounce of my creative faculties to bring the reader into it, too.
All of this said, and to paraphrase a concern: “Isn’t it dangerous to put a clergyman that close to this stuff? It seems unbecoming of a guy like you to write something this.”
I hear the concern. The question is serious. It deserves a serious reply.
First, take note that there’s no swearing in the book. Also, no sex or nudity. There is one scene in which an abused girl is noted as naked, and yet, Reverend Michaels, after he deals with the man in the room abusing her, and before he moves on to other rooms with the same fury, he covers her up, brushes her blood-stained hair, and tells her she’s going to be okay. His gentleness with the victims is markedly profound. He cares.
Second, admittedly, there is gore. And yet, the book isn’t about glorifying the results of a pastor’s rage. It’s about putting vocation into the most severe of circumstances—into the refiner’s fire—and watching what burns away, and what does not.
If you felt a shiver reading that, good. You were meant to. The book is a meditation on the threshold of talk and action—the proximity of hero to villain, prayer to fury, genuine justice to unbridled vengeance. Daniel prays before and after; the words are “always crisp.” And yet the soundtrack in his head is Johnny Cash’s The Man Comes Around, a cracked, apocalyptic psalm about a God who, whether or not we want Him to, does, in fact, come around. And He chooses how He’ll do it.
So, how does He use us in the process? Where do we fit in? The book never lets the reader relax into easy answers, because the context isn’t easy.
In one of the two messages I received, I was told I “put the man in the collar too near the sword.” That comment was referring to Romans 13—the government’s bearing of the sword.
My reply: Yes, I did—and on purpose. Not to baptize vigilantism, but to force an honest Christian reading of Romans 12 and 13. Paul’s words are prescriptive, not descriptive. And so, what does that mean exactly in a world where “the powers that be” can be both God’s servants for good and, at times, participants in harm. For example, when a nation sanctifies the slaughter of its own unborn children, that is not righteousness—it is evil dressed in legality. Evil doesn’t become less monstrous because it is legal or convenient. It remains blood crying from the ground (Genesis 4:10), and the Church’s unwillingness to confront it makes us complicit in the very silence that lets it thrive.
There’s a funeral sermon in the novel that walks that blade’s edge aloud. Daniel proclaims, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ saith the Lord, ‘I will repay,’” then warns that we too often hear the verse only as comfort for victims and not as a warning to the evildoers. And so, Daniel preaches, “Do not mistake God’s patience for apathy… He will act.”
But, again, what’s our role?
Whatever the answer, you’ll notice in that same sermon—in the same breath—Daniel wrestles himself back to the Gospel’s center. He preaches the Lamb who ultimately bears vengeance in His own body so that sinners might become sons and daughters. We are transformed into those who can take action when action is required.
If, while you’re reading the book, you feel the tension in these things, then the story’s doing precisely what it’s supposed to be doing. I refused to rest in the cheap catharsis of tidy judgment or pious quietism, both of which are a pestilence in the Christian Church today. Instead, I chose to walk Daniel straight into the furnace and keep him there until the sparks started flying and you, the reader, flinched.
Ashes to Ashes isn’t tidy, because life isn’t tidy. Evil certainly isn’t. It’s raw, relentless, and sometimes terrifyingly close to home.
And so, in this world’s darkest pages, what must we bring to moments like these?
One of the comments I received was that in the moments of confrontation, Reverend Michaels offers no grace to the villains. I suppose I’d ask, is grace the appropriate first response in every situation? I’m one to say no. Hopefully, there’d be time for grace in any normal situation. But first, evil needs to be subdued and the victims protected. Unfortunately, sometimes that means making a mess. Sometimes that mess is bloody, and the villains ultimately lose out on grace’s opportunity.
Another comment said straightforwardly that this book “could scandalize the weak.” That concern is baked into the book’s DNA. The dedication page itself anticipates readers who’ll “see autobiography where none exists.” In the end, it’s fiction, though painfully plausible fiction, and if a reader can’t figure that out, they probably shouldn’t be reading it to begin with. Also, it is not a sermon in disguise. In fact, the story risks discomfort precisely to protect Christian preaching from naïveté. In other words, keep it simple, and remember: if we will not name evil, no matter its form, our sermons deserve to be taken less seriously by those in the pews who’ve likely already experienced what we refuse to see.
Another paraphrased comment: “It valorizes anger.” No. It interrogates it. Daniel’s anger is understandable, but it is also corrosive; he knows “refinement and ruin come from the same flame.” His most powerful moments are not when his fist is clenched and the Colt 1911 is raised to judge, but when his conscience is pierced. He is repeatedly pulled back to his calling, to the Gospel, even as judgment drums in his ears. The novel’s best question isn’t “How far will he go?” but “What will the fire leave behind when it’s done with him?”
If someone reads Ashes to Ashes and comes away thinking, “Pastors should punch harder,” then they read carelessly. The arc is faithfulness-shaped: a parade of revelations that corner the reader with the same double-bind that corners Daniel—do something and don’t become someone else while you do it. In that corner, you discover why he wears the collar while doing what he does. It’s not to bless sin, not to cosplay a crusader, but first, to let the demons know who’s coming for them; and second, to do everything he can to hold on to who he is—to Whom he belongs—when the room is filling with smoke.
I suppose I should add my own concerns at this point.
If anything, the Church needs two kinds of courage right now. It requires the courage to be clear and the courage to act. Mercy without either of these leaves victims unprotected. It turns us into the thing we hate. In a little town—Linden, Michigan—a place that smells like spring and looks “peaceful and quiet,” evil was buying time and gaining strength because the only thing opposing it were people wearing piety’s mask of politeness. The book tears the mask off and demands that the Church, and I suppose, all of society, look in the mirror.
It demands, “Do something. Stop sitting idly by and do something.”
So, to those who wrote to me with worried words: I’m with you in the worry. You should know I wrote Ashes to Ashes to earn that worry—not to dismiss it. But I’m also asking you to step into the furnace with me for close to four hundred pages. Watch what burns. Watch what stubbornly will not. And when you’re done, preach Christ crucified like it matters for victims and perpetrators alike. Then go to the altar and receive what we cannot manufacture: genuine mercy that doesn’t blink in the face of horror, and the holiness that can stand and act in any circumstance without losing one’s soul along the way.
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.
Cruciform Stuff 