The legislative totalitarians in California are coming for the children. Things have turned ugly, and there is no reason to think that their work is done. Short of leaving the state, parents and all concerned citizens need to rise up and stop the abuse.

California has a long history of “firsts.” The Golden State was home to the first computer, the first movie theater, and, importantly, the first martini. Sadly, the state is now leading the nation in abusing children.
For starters, Governor Gavin Newsom announced a vaccine mandate last week for students age 12 and older, making California the first state in the nation to require public and private school students to be fully vaccinated for in-person instruction. (Unvaccinated students will have the option of enrolling in an online school or attending independent-study programs offered by districts.) The ruling will go into effect once the Food and Drug Administration approves vaccines for kids over the age of 12. Depending on when the FDA decision comes down, students will have to get the jab by either January 1, 2022 or July 1, 2022. On deck are school children ages 5 to 11, who will be forced to join the vax club as soon as the FDA green lights it for them.
Vaccine proponents are quick to explain that the COVID vaccine is just an addition to a list that includes mumps, measles, and rubella—but there is a big difference. While children are directly impacted by mumps, etc., they do not have a significant risk from COVID, nor are they “super spreaders.” Teachers are far more likely to catch the disease in the teachers’ lounge than in the classroom.
As Dr. Scott Atlas explains, “It’s unconscionable that a society uses its children as shields for adults. The children do not have significant risk from this illness.” He adds, “My role as a parent is to protect my children. My role is not, and I will never use my children as shields to somehow protect me. And that’s really just a heinous violation of all moral principles in my view.”
While most parents will fall into line with the vax mandate, many will not. On October 1, Newsom claimed that just 63.5 percent of kids between 12 and 17 had received at least one dose of the vaccine. California’s public schools lost more than 160,000 students as of April 2021, a 2.6 percent decline, the largest enrollment drop in two decades. That number may grow considerably, and since the mandate also covers private schools, look for homeschools and microschools in California to grow exponentially. In fact, according to California Globe, immediately following the announcement of the mandate, homeschooling and tutoring inquiries were up dramatically, with some homeschooling sites going down due to the sheer volume of parents searching for help. Also, many teachers may follow their students out the door, as they, too, must be vaccinated.
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Any Christian theory of government must recognize that, time and time again across the ages, the government has itself been an instrument of evil rather than good. The challenge in a fallen world is to identify a role for good government to restrain evil alongside other God-given institutions while at the same time establishing robust means to check the evil of government.
There’s a debate raging among Christians about the proper role of government in enforcing biblical morality. You’ve likely encountered this debate in one of its various forms. Sometimes it’s framed in terms of “Christian nationalism.” Other times you might hear a reference to “common good” conservatism. David French defends the “liberal democratic order,” while others are “post-liberal.” There’s Roman Catholic “Integralism” and its cousin, “magisterial Protestantism.” All these terms and phrases are circling the same question: To what extent should the government use its coercive power to enforce Christian ethics?
The argument for a more aggressive governmental role in regulating morality is seemingly straightforward. In its most simplistic form, the syllogism goes something like this: Scripture tells us certain conduct is evil; the government’s role is to restrain evil (Romans 13); thus the government should prohibit some evil conduct. In recent months, I’ve encountered highly educated and undoubtedly sincere Christians arguing for the criminalization of blasphemy, profanity, and speech promoting an unbiblical sexual ethic.
As a Christian, I understand the alarm that my fellow believers feel as we find ourselves increasingly out-of-step with a culture that seems ever more hostile toward us. We are pilgrims, not pioneers. I also understand the critique of the claim that the government can be truly neutral on matters of morality. As my good friend Jonathan Leeman has said, “Behind every [law] . . . is someone’s basic worldview of how things ought to be. And behind that worldview is a god.”
At the same time, I think this faith in a more muscular government, particularly when it comes to punishing and restraining speech, is misguided for at least three related reasons.
Firstly, the more expansive vision of government being advocated by some Christians today fails sufficiently to account for universal fallenness. Because, as a Christian, I believe that all men and women are corrupted by sin, any theory of government must include a mechanism to restrain and punish government actors when they act unjustly. Irenaeus of Lyons made this point in Against Heresies where he argued that justice requires that, when government magistrates act “to the subversion of justice,” then “they shall also perish.”
This universal fallenness makes me exceedingly concerned when, for example, Christians call for restraints on speech they find repugnant. Short of violent revolt, speech is the citizen’s last line of defense against corrupt public officials. A theory of government that grants to government the power to punish speech is a theory of government that unjustifiably assumes the nobility of those who hold government office and a-historically assumes that fallen men and women, given the power to punish speech, will not wield that power to suppress criticism of them. In a fallen world, it is critical that the principle of free speech be maintained, and not because of an optimism that fallen citizens will always use that freedom in an honorable way. Rather, free speech is critical to protect against the reality that fallen government actors will use the power to punish speech to quell critique of their dishonor.
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Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title: “Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”

What follows might sound quite strange to many Christians, but ALL God’s people today ARE called to have a prophetic ministry, and ALL God’s people today ARE called to be engaged in resistance thinking – and action. The only reason this sounds alarming and foreign is because we have moved so far away from New Testament Christianity.
The idea that we should have a prophetic voice and lifestyle, and that we should be actively resisting the ungodly culture all around us is really just basic Christianity 101. But it is a sign of the times that such basics sound radical and even revolutionary to most Christians – at least in the West.
I could cite countless believers from over the past two millennia who have spoken about such matters, but let me refer to just one: an 80-year-old Christian that I just highlighted in an article yesterday: billmuehlenberg.com/2022/06/14/notable-christians-os-guinness/
Nearly two decades ago Os Guinness released a brief but powerful volume entitled Prophetic Untimeliness (Baker, 2003). It is well worth revisiting – or for many of you, being introduced to for the first time. In his Introduction he explains the book’s title:
“Prophetic Untimeliness is a term adapted from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but shaped by the precedent of the Hebrew prophets rather than the German iconoclast. Nietzsche saw that independent thinkers would always be out of step with the conventional wisdom of their generation.”
As to prophets, he says this: “We might distinguish capital-P ‘Prophets’ from small-p ‘prophets.’ The former are those, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, who have heard a direct, explicit, supernatural word from God and can legitimately say, ‘This is the word of the Lord.’ The latter are those who interpret their life and times from a biblical perspective and therefore ‘read the signs of the times’ with greater or lesser skill, but never presume the authority and infallibility of ‘This is the word of the Lord’.”
He also explains that the notion of “resistance thinking” is adapted from a 1945 essay by C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics”. I dug it out from his God in the Dock, where Lewis said this:
“Science progresses because scientists, instead of running away from such troublesome phenomena or hushing them up, are constantly seeking them out. In the same way, there will be progress in Christian knowledge only as long as we accept the challenge of the difficult or repellent doctrines. A ‘liberal’ Christianity which considers itself free to alter the Faith whenever the Faith looks perplexing or repellent must be completely stagnant. Progress is made only into a resisting material.”
So the Christian is to be a prophetic voice and resist the world and its wayward direction. But Christians resist the world and its wrong paths because we want something better of the world:
“A vital secret of the church’s power and glory in history lies in its calling to be ‘against the world, for the world.’ C. S. Lewis calls this the ‘two-edged character’ of the Christian faith.
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