Posted November 09, 2026
Today’s news is filled with conjecture regarding how Democrats will respond to their “blue wave” midterm victories and how President Trump will respond to their response.
For example, Mr. Trump’s decision to replace Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller as his chief of staff is seen by the Wall Street Journal as indicating that he “intends to spend the final two years of his presidency doubling down on his core beliefs, many of which were rejected by voters on Tuesday, and not seeking out deals with Democrats.” For their part, House Democrats are “preparing a vast oversight agenda” to investigate the president and his family; Hakeem Jeffries, in line to become House speaker, has not ruled out trying to impeach Mr. Trump for a third time.
At its heart, the issue is whether our elected leaders should primarily seek to do what their constituents want them to do, or whether they should do what they believe to be in their constituents’ best interests, whether their constituents know it or not. To the degree that the Democrats were elected to address affordability, will investigations of the Trump administration please an activist minority but frustrate the majority? To the degree that Mr. Trump refuses to work with the Democrats, will he please his core supporters but frustrate the rest of his party?
This is an issue that transcends the political moment and speaks to every Christian seeking to be salt and light in our secularized culture today.
The philosopher Antony Flew made famous a parable regarding the existence or non-existence of God. Called the “invisible gardener,” it was first introduced by philosopher John Wisdom and later popularized by Flew. In Flew’s version, two explorers discover a jungle clearing in which there are both flowers and weeds. One insists that there must be a gardener, while the other strongly disagrees.
To resolve the question, they watch for the gardener, install electric fences, and employ bloodhounds, all to no avail. The believer eventually asserts that the gardener is invisible, intangible, and undetectable. The skeptic then asks, “Just how does what you call an invisible, incorporeal, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?”
While others have pointed out the fallacy of comparing the God who transcends space and time to a human gardener, Flew’s parable powerfully encouraged a growing belief in secular society that religious belief is subjective and unfalsifiable. As a result, it should not be tolerated when its edicts contradict our tolerance-based society.
If the last sentence seems contradictory to you, that’s because it is. And yet, the conviction that “intolerant” religion must not be tolerated is a growing feature of our post-Christian culture. Its advocates believe this is not only best for secular society, but for religious adherents as well, whether they know it or not.
To illustrate: Cultural commentator Kat Rosenfield has reviewed the new movie Fjord, which follows the true story of a devoutly Pentecostal couple who emigrated ten years ago along with their five children from conservative Romania to a remote village in liberal Norway. The state eventually took away their children, claiming that their parents were beating them and that their traditional approach to parenting was harming their offspring.
It turned out the parents didn’t know about a Norwegian law forbidding all corporal punishment. By spanking them, they violated this law. But theirs is just one of numerous stories of children taken from their parents by the Norwegian government for reasons opponents consider to be religious or cultural persecution.
Closer to home, the US government enforces—or inflicts, depending on your point of view—its will every time it holds citizens accountable to laws with which they disagree, from speed limits to theft and murder. The government believes that such laws are best for all people, including those who break them. Even lawbreakers usually agree when they become the victims: thieves don’t want their possessions to be stolen and murderers don’t want to be murdered.
Accordingly, we typically want personal opinions, including religious beliefs, to cohere to societal norms. When a Jehovah’s Witness dies because he refuses a blood transfusion that could have saved his life, we understand the impulse to force such procedures on patients to enable their survival, believing that we know what is best for them better than they do.
Here’s how this conversation is relevant for evangelicals: The more our society rejects our biblical beliefs, the more it needs them. From abortion to adultery, pornography, LGBTQ issues, and euthanasia, believers are increasingly out of step with our broken culture. Consequently, we will be increasingly encouraged to privatize our beliefs, reframing our faith in God as faith in a “god,” a deity akin to the Greek and Roman gods who were part of their culture but not its moral compass.
For example, in How to Survive in Ancient Greece, historian Robert Garland reports:
Greek religion did not promote morality. Piety towards the gods and the dead, not good behavior, was its central aim. The Greeks invoke their gods to do harm to their enemies just as frequently as they invoke them to give benefits to themselves or their family.
But privatizing faith in the “gods” to avoid the intolerance of those who consider us intolerant is a betrayal of biblical faith, since we serve a God who is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6, my emphases). And it victimizes those who insist upon it, since “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Here’s where this conversation becomes personal: your next temptation will suggest that you do what you want to do, even though God doesn’t want you to do it. To resist, you’ll have to decide that God knows what is best for you, even though it doesn’t seem so at the time.
When last did you pay such a price to follow Jesus?
Will you do so again today?
“Faithfulness in small things is a big thing to God.” —David Peterson
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