If for most ancient idolaters it was the human form with its physical qualities that represented their highest conception of themselves, for us as moderns it is the human mind, a calculating rationality or unconstrained will, disembodied and stripped of embodied particularity. Pursuing this ideal, we constructed computers in this image—an image of ourselves as we hoped to be. Whereas ancient idols had mouths but did not speak, Siri speaks but with no mouth, and listens without ears. Having made such images and given ourselves over to them, we have increasingly become like them.

Have you ever stopped, in the middle of checking your notifications for the umpteenth time after some post you thought particularly witty or important, to reflect on how pathetic you must look: measuring your social significance by means of a number next to a heart icon? “137 likes…ooh…138—I’m really somethin’ today.”
Human beings crave social affirmation. There’s nothing wrong with that, on one level; that’s how God made us: “It is not good for man to be alone.” Like all natural desires, it was transformed into an unquenchable thirst by the disordering effects of the Fall, so that we engage in pathological attention-seeking behaviors, from the 3-year-old’s tantrum to the teenage boy’s death-defying-dare to the conquering general’s blood-soaked quest for glory. But buried beneath the often foolish and overwrought expressions of this desires lies a wholesome and very human urge to know oneself as one is known, to be seen and recognized and loved by one’s fellow man—and hopefully to see and recognize and love in return.
But in the digital age, something strange has happened to this fundamental human urge: it has become dehumanized. For human beings, the various means by which we give and receive social affirmation are manifold; indeed, no two are quite alike. I feel a warm glow when I receive tokens of my wife’s love, my children’s affection, my parents’ esteem, my coworkers’ respect, my customers’ satisfaction, etc. But these experiences are not quite reducible to one another, and indeed, we recognize it as a pathology in ourselves when, starved of recognition in one sphere of relationships, we try, leech-like, to suck such recognition out of another relationship—such as when a man thwarted in his workplace demands that his wife make up the difference. But digital technology encourages us—nay, positively programs us—to reduce each of these experiences into one quantifiable interchangeable measure of admiration: a number (or to be precise, two numbers: likes/reactions and reposts/shares). We have traded the infinite shades of qualitative difference between a child’s hug and a colleague’s pat on the back for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, yes or no, one or zero. We have, in short, computerized ourselves.
As I’ve been reading and reflecting on digital technology over the past few months, a consistent theme has been the ways in which the digital is digitizing us—that is, how our technologies are changing our sense of what it means to be human and remaking us in their image. In debates over artificial intelligence, the question everyone wants an answer to is, “So can we actually create an artificial intelligence that matches human intelligence?” Well, no, we can’t, because human intelligence is always embodied (not to mention ensouled), and thus qualitatively different. There are always two ways of meeting a benchmark, though: you can raise your performance till you clear the benchmark, or you can lower the bar. If we can’t make computers human, we can at least make humans computer-like.
This is a constant theme of Anton Barba-Kay’s A Web of Our Own Making: even as we make virtual reality ever more realistic, the virtual does not lose its distinction from the real: we know that “Facebook friends” is not the same as “IRL [in real life] friends,” that cybersex isn’t real sex.
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Indispensable servants are always at risk of becoming oppressive masters. Humanity has always known this; it is only recently that our technologies have become so useful as to replace human servants and occupy this ambivalent position, leaving their owners and users reduced to the spectacle of pathetic Ish-bosheths—unable to live with them or without them. There is no simple answer to this dilemma, though it may perhaps at least be some comfort to us in our predicament to realize that we are hardly alone, but are simply facing an age-old paradox that bedeviled Agamemnon before it bedeviled us.

In much writing about technology (including my own) you will often encounter the metaphor of technology as a treacherous servant. For instance, I wrote in a column for WORLD earlier this year about smartphones, “Technology is a great servant but a bad master; although these devices may be here to stay, we have a responsibility to ourselves and our children to ensure we are using them, rather than them using us.” The metaphor is common enough to be at risk of becoming a cliché, but I don’t know that we give it the thought it deserves.
After all, I think we are often tempted, when reaching for such language, to think that this paradox of “servant as master” is one of the novel features of our current technological experience, that it is precisely because our technologies have become so advanced that they are in danger of using us, rather than we them. After all, who was ever at risk of being tyrannized over by their hammer or hatchet? And yet, the problem of treacherous servants turning on or exploiting their masters is a theme as old as literature itself—or probably older.
I had occasion to reflect on this while preparing for my “Faithfulness as Christian Citizens” mini-course for churches, where I draw extensively on Old Testament narratives to draw out illuminating insights for political life. One of my favorite such passages is 2 Samuel 3. For those a little rusty on their Samuels, the narrative goes like this:
Saul has died, and David, as the Lord’s anointed, is seeking to consolidate his rule over Israel. However, initially he enjoys only the support of his own tribe, Judah; the rest of Israel, understandably, rallies around Saul’s sole surviving son, Ish-bosheth. A civil war commences, and the balance of power slowly shifts: “And David grew stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker” (2 Sam. 3:2). A fascinating narrative then ensues. Abner, the commander of Ish-bosheth’s army, is described as “making himself strong in the house of Saul” (3:6); Ish-bosheth then accuses Abner (falsely or truly, the narrative never tells us) of sleeping with one of Saul’s concubines (thus symbolically appropriating kingly authority to himself). Abner responds indignantly and decides to defect and “transfer the kingdom from the house of Saul and set up the throne of David over Israel” (3:10). Abner then summons a council of the elders and goes to David on their behalf to pledge fealty.
David accepts Abner’s peace overture, but when David’s own general, Joab, learns of it, he denies that the overture is genuine, denouncing Abner as a spy and treacherously murdering him. David then goes to great lengths to publicly distance himself from this action, proclaiming his grief at Abner’s death and cursing Joab.
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Failure to honor God leads to mental darkness, which leads to idolatry, which leads to a debased mind, which leads to corrupt actions, which leads to a disordered moral vision, and so on. Do people behave like beasts because they treat God like a creature, or do they treat God like a creature because they want to behave like beasts? Yes.

Earlier this week, I attended a summit at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation on the upcoming Supreme Court case, Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which could determine the future of any efforts to regulate children’s access to hardcore pornography. One of the presenters, Lisa Thompson, shared the results of a recent study that demonstrated that teens who regularly watched pornography were more likely to (1) have much worse relationships with their parents, (2) have poorer academic achievement, and (3) show a propensity to acts of sexual harassment or violence. Today, another of our collaborators in this battle, Michael Toscano of the Institute of Family Studies, published an article at the IFS blog documenting a recent survey that showed that frequent porn consumption doubles the risk of feeling depressed or lonely.
When hearing Lisa’s numbers, I couldn’t help hearing the voice of a devil’s advocate (in this case, it really is the devil’s advocate!) in my head: “correlation doesn’t imply causation.” The porn industry will tell us that of course, teens who are lonely and depressed and have bad relationships with their parents are more likely to take refuge in porn, and that those who have a sexually predatory streak will be more apt to want to watch porn too. They might even suggest that lazy, unfocused students are going to be the ones with more time for watching porn anyway. Now of course, none of these retorts place their industry in a very good flattering light—“So what you’re saying is that your product is best suited for depressed, anti-social, predatory drop-outs?”—but at least it gets them off the hook for causing the anti-social behaviors.
In following Jonathan Haidt’s Substack, I’ve noticed a similar theme. For the past couple of years, he’s been playing whack-a-mole with more tech-friendly sociologists who insist that the connections he’s documented between social media use and poor mental health don’t tell us anything about causation—maybe it’s just that otherwise unhappy, unstable people are just more likely to binge on X or Instagram? And indeed, they probably are!
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Within such a post-truth society, the most countercultural thing that Christians can do is refuse to play the game. Whatever the world may pretend, we know that reality is a very stubborn thing, and it can only be evaded, not twisted into whatever shape we wish. Thus, even if others insist on casually lying to you or about you, you can still choose not to make any claims whose veracity you cannot vouch for with a straight face—however much you may feel they are true.

If you grew up as a Christian in the 1990s or early 2000s, chances are you were exposed to Christian worldview training that warned against the dangers of postmodernism. We were told that postmodernists did not believe there was such a thing as absolute truth: At best, all truth claims were relative, reflecting perspective and bias. At worst, they were just assertions of power by elites seeking to reinforce their privilege.
By this definition, we’re all postmoderns now.
Whereas some progressives were ideologically committed to this “hermeneutic of suspicion,” imbibing it from philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Richard Rorty, conservatives learned their suspicion from experience. As James Davison Hunter writes in his new book, Democracy and Solidarity, “Conservatives … looked around them and saw universities, news organizations, and even the new social media websites—all the proud inheritors of the liberal discourse tradition—cheerfully employing every tool at their disposal to restrict the range of acceptable opinion.” Truth claims, many of us concluded, were mere power plays.
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Hospitality must be carefully measured out, lest the family or nation dissolve under the burden of too many guests, and those welcomed become dependent in a way that corrupts their characters. Why is the conclusion that we may (and perhaps must, given judgments of prudence) limit immigration so hard to voice in polite company? Why, in many churches, are arguments for enforcing borders greeted with an appalled gasp? 

Speaking to a gymnasium full of high schoolers in 2015, Angela Merkel sought to explain why Germany needed to close its borders to the tide of Syrian refugees. She was brought up short by Reem Sahwil, a refugee girl facing deportation. The girl’s tears accomplished what no lobbyist or newspaper could: a volte-face in Germany’s immigration policy. Soon the country was welcoming 10,000 refugees per day, stoking a heated political debate that continues to roil much of Europe. The same influx of newcomers helped spur Trump to victory in 2016, and with nearly 300,000 migrants per month trying to cross our southern border, it may well do so again in 2024. The debate over immigration is also likely to continue tearing the Church apart, as mainline congregations post signs declaring “Love has no borders,” while evangelical Christians demand a wall, the national guard, secession—anything to stop the flow.
In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, historian Tom Holland concludes his two-thousand-year narrative with Merkel’s encounter with Reem Sahwil. Nowhere is the impact of the Christian revolution so apparent, he argues. The willingness of Western nations to open their borders to the huddled masses at their doorsteps is imaginable only because of Christianity. Throughout human history, almost no one other than Christians has felt this way: Outsiders remain outside, and that is that. As a pastor’s daughter, however, Merkel internalized Jesus’s imperative: “‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ God loves not just German people. God loves everybody.” In this interpretation, Christianity has always offered a vision of radical hospitality; tearing down of ethnic boundaries was at the heart of St. Paul’s gospel.
Why then do so many evangelical Christians today intuit that something is wrong with Merkel’s reasoning? Is the call for control of the border simply a nativist reflex that we must stifle, a manifestation of sinful pride and selfishness that we must mortify? Or does the globalist war on borders constitute, rather, an idolatrous striving to transcend our finitude, to be as gods unbound in time or space?
In my estimation, secure borders, national sovereignty, and limited immigration are affirmed by traditional Christian moral theology. Of course, there is nothing sacred about lines on a map; they are human constructions, which serve human goods. But these goods—the goods of hearth and homeland—are not to be despised, for without them we would lose our humanity.
The language of “hospitality” is often invoked on the progressive side of the debate. Openness to immigrants, we are told, is a simple duty of Christian hospitality. We must welcome the stranger into our national home and see that he is clothed and fed. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” admonishes the Epistle to the Hebrews. The notion of hospitality has much to commend it, and indeed the analogy between the home and the polity is almost as old as politics itself.
But does the appeal to “hospitality” entail a call to abolish or open our borders? To show hospitality in my own home, I must have a home—that is, a house with four walls and doors that open, close, and (ideally) can be locked. To invite people into this home, I must maintain a clear distinction between residents and guests. If every passing drug addict can crash on the couch, I may be running a worthy ministry, but I am not maintaining a home. In fact, if I have children (and it is striking how many of the progressive advocates of open borders do not—Merkel included), I will know instinctively that I must sometimes put their needs above the practice of hospitality. Some strangers will be too dangerous to allow into my home. Others may be safe enough, but they will compete for the limited temporal and financial resources that I owe to my wife and children before all others. Of course, a residence totally closed to neighbors and strangers would likewise be a travesty; it might be a beautiful house, but we would rightly hesitate to call it a home.
Hospitality, then, is an essential function of a home, and yet an unlimited, revolving-door hospitality would quickly destroy most homes. The lesson is clear enough: a nation, likewise, ought to be open to strangers, but it will soon have little to offer either residents or visitors if it does not establish appropriate limits. A nation without borders is no better than a house without walls. Common sense, therefore, shows us that, like every creaturely good, hospitality (whether by household or nation) is made possible only by recognition of its limits.
This intuition is fortified by Scripture. Israel is called to be a separate, bounded nation among the nations, and yet a nation for the nations, offering hospitality to “the sojourner.” The Israelites are repeatedly reminded, “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 22:21).
The vision of hospitality made possible to a consolidated and bounded people is mirrored in the relationship of individual Israelite families to the land. Each family and tribe has its particular portion and inheritance, to be secured throughout the generations. Yet this possession serves a wider good. The surplus of each Israelite’s fields is “for the poor and the sojourner” (Lev. 19:10), as is the surplus of the whole nation (Deut. 26:12). Hospitality and charity are not boundless. Although naturalization is possible (for example, Ruth), ordinarily the sojourner remains a sojourner and does not receive a portion of the land. In his time of residence, the sojourner is expected to abide by Israel’s laws, both criminal (Lev. 24:22) and ceremonial (Num. 15:15).
Biblical Israel is an imperfect analogue for modern nation-states. Its national boundaries were defined above all by circumcision, not border checkpoints, and justice was administered by elders at the gate, not by centralized courts and bureaucracies. But the Bible’s account of Israel’s norms for treating strangers tells us at least that the call to hospitality does not abolish property lines or territorial distinctions.
What about the New Testament? Understandably, given that its contents were written by and for small and disempowered communities of believers, it provides little direction for the conduct of states. But the analogy between polity and household allows us to draw wisdom about statecraft from its teaching on private property.
Interpretation of the New Testament’s statements about property is famously vexed. Christian socialists have pointed to Christ’s direction to the rich young ruler, and to the sharing of goods within the Church in Acts 4, as evidence that believers are called to live without private property, giving in accord with capacity, taking in accord with need. However, much of the rest of the New Testament takes ongoing inequalities of property for granted (e.g., Acts 5:4; 1 Cor. 9:1–12; 1 Tim. 5:8). Possessing wealth is permitted, so long as property is ordered toward the goods of hospitality and charity.
As is the case with many questions in social ethics, we cannot resolve the biblical status of private property by exegesis alone; we must frame it with reference to basic theological categories. Is private property a necessary evil, a response to the Fall’s disordering of human affections, which the community of the redeemed is called to overcome? Or is it a God-given good, a natural feature of created humanity?
In our answer to this question about property, we will have our answer to the question of national borders. For the doctors of the Church and later medieval theologians, who debated the issue fiercely, recognized that private property and political authority evoke the same theological question: In a world made up of divine image-bearers, equally sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, by what right could some humans ever claim to limit, exclude, or command other humans? By what right could a householder say, “This is my property; if you want to use it, you may do so only on my terms”? And by what right could a king say, “This is my territory; if you want to live here or pass through, you may do so only under my laws”? The word for both kinds of authority is the same: dominium, lordship.
The Church Fathers, for the most part, took a more pessimistic line on dominium. In a world without sin, there would be no occasion for either private property or political authority. In the Garden of Eden, all the good gifts of creation were available to all in common, and, untainted by greed, each human being freely shared with one another as each had need. There was no distinction between meum and tuum. In Edenic innocence, no one would ask for anything unless he really needed it, and no one would withhold anything in the face of such need. Thus, there would have been no occasion for governments to apportion goods or mediate disputes.
The Fall destroyed this primordial harmony of affections, pitting men against one another. It also introduced scarcity into the equation. Man must toil, and the cursed ground fails to yield fruits sufficient for our ever-expanding wants.
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Negative World has its drawbacks, but it is at least clarifying. In a world where even the most basic Christian moral stances won’t get much traction in public debate, perhaps there is an opportunity to stop trying to persuade outsiders and get our own house in order.

In a thought-provoking recent column at his Substack, evangelical commentator Aaron Renn offers a forceful summons to American Christians to get serious again about the idea of “vice”—and serious about rejecting vice in our own lives and communities. The very concept of “vice” is apt to feel passé, a throwback to medieval morality manuals or perhaps mid-20th century “vice squads”—police units responsible for busting gambling or prostitution rings. And if there’s anything that Christians in 2024 are nervous about, reeling from a string of culture-war defeats, it’s seeming old-fashioned or “puritanical.”
With voters lining up behind abortion rights, some Republicans voting to formalize federal same-sex marriage protections, and conservative candidates hastening to distance themselves from Alabama’s ruling on IVF, the consensus seems to be that it’s time for Christians to stop talking about morality in public. It only serves to get us dismissed as judgmental schoolmarms who like meddling in others’ lives.
This consensus, though, is nothing new. For decades, at least some evangelicals have been soft-peddling moral issues, abandoning their traditional opposition to the legalization of pornography, gambling, marijuana, and more on the grounds that “it’s a free country” and government should restrict itself to legislating only on serious harms. The tacit bargain that many evangelical leaders tried to strike with the culture was, “we’ll drop our ‘fundamentalist’ opposition to all these private vices, and prove we’re not puritans, if you let us continue opposing abortion and same-sex marriage.” Needless to say, the bargain has not been accepted.
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The book makes little pretense of being even-handed, offering instead a series of exposés of the various tricks of the trade that managers use to exploit workers and oppress consumers. There simply are no “good bosses” that populate this narrative. Nor, strikingly, are there any bad workers. It may well be true, as Ahmari charges, that many facets of American contract law are systematically rigged in favor of employers. But that is no justification for rigging the moral argument against them; “You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great,” warns Leviticus 19:15. 

In my earliest political consciousness, I imbibed a framework that may be familiar to many American conservatives. There were two basic spheres of life: the public sector, run by the government, and the private sector: the zone of free enterprise, the market economy, and private property. Needless to say, the former was labeled Bad and the latter Good; the goal of any good politics was to shrink the former and expand the latter as much as possible. Why? Well because the government acted (indeed, only could act) by coercion, by compulsory action, while the private sector acted by free exchange, by voluntary action. Of course, sometimes coercion was necessary—we weren’t anarchists—but it was always regrettable.
Thankfully, I spent most of my youth fairly apathetic about politics, and so these assumptions functioned as little more than a vague default background framework. No sooner did I bring them to explicit consciousness and expression, during my brief fling as a Ron Paul devotee in 2007-08, than I began to find the framework full of gaping holes. For one thing, a simple binary was obviously not enough: at the very least there was a third sphere, governed neither by the logic of state or market, the family. The family seemed to belong to the private sphere, and yet it more closely resembled the unequal “coercive” logic of civil government than the free and equal exchange of the market. And where did the church fit into this equation? Both family and church, in fact, seemed to defy both state and market by modeling a kind of harmony or symbiosis even amidst inequality, rather than presupposing competition and constraint.
The more I looked, the more the anomalies multiplied. After all, was it really true that I only obeyed the law because I was coerced to? That didn’t really match my experience—in fact, increasingly it seemed to me a circular dictum: only if I thought of government action as coercive did I feel coerced; if I thought of it as rational or defensible, or of obedience as a duty of Christian charity, then law-observance turned out to be every bit as voluntary as any form of market exchange. And after all, what was law-making but a great corporate act of decision-making, a corporate exercise of freedom? I soon learned from Richard Hooker and the Christian tradition that most of what I had been taught to think about the “coercive” public sector was wrong.
And as I read economics and, more importantly, started paying attention to the world around me, it became equally obvious that the private sector could not possibly be the paradise of free exchange that Ron Paul said it was. Collusive monopolies used their market power to constrain and oppress consumers, while leaning heavily on the levers of government to tilt the playing field in their favor. Libertarians charged that such “crony capitalism” was a perversion of the true order of things, was proof that everything goes wrong when government gets involved, but what if this was instead an almost lawlike feature of society: businesses will always lobby for laws that favor them, and very powerful businesses will do so with greater success?
On a more basic level, the compulsory/voluntary binary just didn’t seem to fit the realities of experience. Did I buy the cup of coffee before my job interview because I wanted to or because I needed to? Did I ride the bus to my job interview because I wanted to or because I needed to? Did I take the job on the terms offered—the only job offer I could get—because I wanted to or because I needed to? Clearly the answer in each case was somewhere in between: in theory I could turn down the job and take my chances, but I had to get some income somewhere fast, and beggars can’t be choosers. I could have woken hours earlier and walked to the interview, but “drenched with sweat” doesn’t usually make a good first impression. And I could have foregone the cup of coffee, to be sure, but as an addict, I wouldn’t have found it easy and might’ve been lethargic at the interview. Most of my “market” transactions, it turned out, just as most of my interactions with the law, turned out to lie somewhere on a spectrum between 100% voluntary and 100% involuntary, rather than at the poles.
This basic insight, blindingly obvious once you wake up to it, but seemingly ignored by much popular political discourse for the past two generations, is the central contention of Sohrab Ahmari’s blockbuster new book, Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It. Of course, it’s not the only contention; as a title that spicy suggests, Ahmari is engaged in a bit more than merely an exercise in conceptual clarification. And rightly so, for conceptual confusion at this crucial point has profound consequences. “What you see is all there is,” as psychologist Daniel Kahneman likes to say, and if you operate with a political-economic framework in which private sector coercion is simply a contradiction in terms, then you will simply never see it—and thus never do anything about it, however abusive. Ahmari’s goal in this important work is to open our eyes to the real power imbalances that characterize the modern marketplace (or indeed any marketplace) and the ways in which the powerful use these asymmetries to coerce and exploit the weak.
Of course, as soon as you put it like this, suspicions are likely to be raised: doesn’t this all sound a little bit Marxist? It is, after all, a basic feature of Marxism in all its permutations to read the world through the sole lens of power, and to see every imbalance of power as a structure of oppression to be dismantled. The old Marxism focused on economic power, preeminently the power of the “boss” over the “worker,” while the new cultural Marxism has widened its remit in a self-contradictory quest to interrogate and dismantle power of any kind (except, of course, the power of the victims to exact revenge on their oppressors). Within the toxic discourse of wokeism, a return to the old-fashioned Marxism of labor activists and class consciousness may feel almost like a breath of fresh air. But it’s hardly where we should want to end up.
Ahmari’s work, then, is shot through with ambiguities. On the one hand, it represents a much-needed clarion call to discard the blinders of ideology, with its convenient binaries of bad “coercion” and good “freedom,” and wake up to economic and political reality, so we can make responsible political choices within the options actually available to us. On the other hand, it can’t seem to help indulging in a different ideological binary, one between bad bosses and good workers, oppressors and victims, that ignores the fine-grained realities of experience. By trading the false alternatives of neoliberalism for the false alternatives of old-school Marxism (or at least dallying with the latter), Ahmari misses a fantastic opportunity to transcend this zero-sum discourse and highlight the fundamental mistakes that both have in common: namely, an obsession with power to the exclusion of authority. For cultural conservatives tired of the stale categories of Friedman-style economic conservatism, it is high time to connect the dots between our economic and social maladies, between our alienation from our work and our alienation from ourselves.
Without authority, every constraint is felt to be oppressive, from gun licensing laws to my work schedule to the biological sex of my own body. Within a healthy understanding of authority, any number of constraints may be experienced as liberating.
By saying this, I do not mean that all the downtrodden worker in a dead-end job needs is a change of perspective (although as Paul’s advice to Roman slaves highlights, a change of perspective can change quite a lot). Ahmari is not wrong to draw attention to concrete evils and abuses of the contemporary market economy that conservatives have long turned a blind eye to. Many of the stories he chronicles should lead any sober reader to burn with indignation and demand immediate political changes to reduce the chances of such abuses. But this side of the eschaton, the poor we have always with us, and the powerful. Inequalities of wealth, wits, and strength will persist, and with every such inequality, an asymmetrical relationship between governors and governed, managers and managed. A just regime is one that accepts such imbalances, vigilantly watches for and seeks to mitigate abuses, and above all seeks to instill a healthy sense of solidarity and civic friendship between all orders of society based on the conviction that there really is a “common good” that is common to all of them.
At its best, Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. points us in this direction. But ultimately, I fear, he cannot resist the temptation to stoke ressentiment that seems to have seduced nearly everyone wanting to write a best-seller in modern-day America.
Let’s begin though with the crucial lessons that Tyranny, Inc. can teach us.
The Ubiquity of Coercion and the Need for Countervailing Power
Ahmari begins his book with a clever rhetorical ploy: he narrates three stories of worker oppression ostensibly drawn from China, Russia, and Iran, before revealing that all three injustices actually took place within the United States—not at the behest of totalitarian governments, but of private corporations. The lesson is clear: “tyranny” is not just something that happens over there, and more importantly, it is not something that must be exercised by “the government.” We have been indoctrinated to forget, he says, “that private actors can imperil freedom just as much as overweening governments; that unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties; that there are finally such things as private tyrannies and private tyrants.”
In chapter 1 he examines the false dichotomy that has perpetuated our blindness to private tyranny: the facile opposition between “liberty” and “power,” between “consent” and “coercion.” In fact, liberty depends on power. It would be a cruel mockery for a doctor to tell a quadriplegic lying on the examining table, “Ok, you’re free to go now.” Freedom to act without any corresponding power to act is an empty name. Just so, notes Ahmari, “You, as an employee, might be free to tell me, your oppressive employer, to ‘take this job and shove it.’ But your ability to make good on this threat—and survive physically afterward—depends on the relative power of employers and employees in a given labor market.” When the weak go head to head with the strong, the poor with the wealthy, the jobless with the business owner, the isolated with the well-connected, the two parties are simply not equally free because they do not have equal power.
Far from being some radical Marxist notion, this point was recognized as a truism by no less a liberal than Adam Smith. Later on in the book, Ahmari quotes a famous passage from the Wealth of Nations that when employers and employees go head-to-head, it is not hard to “foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into compliance with their terms.” Even in a worst-case scenario, the employer will generally have enough money to sustain himself for a year or two, while “many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment.” While the economist may be right that “in the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him,” still, Smith observes, “the necessity is not so immediate,” and this difference gives a strong edge to the employer in any negotiations.
Because of these differences in negotiating power that are simply a feature of almost any human relationship (economic or otherwise), the binary of “consent” and “coercion” also blinds us to reality. It imagines two worlds: one of slaves who live under the thumb of cruel masters armed with whips, coerced at every moment, and another of two perfectly free and equal individuals coming to barter with one another—the classic parable from the Intro to Econ textbook of the farmer who could use a new horseshoe and the blacksmith who could use a gallon of milk. In reality, most of us consent to various agreements under some kind of duress. When the harried mother of four hungry children stops at the grocery store for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread, she probably does not have the luxury of shopping around for the best price. And she certainly doesn’t negotiate for a better deal. She pays what she has to and gets her screaming kids out of the store as quickly as possible.
This is a simple and relatively minor example, but it highlights a reality that again should be familiar to everyone’s experience: real market interactions have little in common with the Intro to Econ barter story. Companies set prices, consumers pay them; consumers might, to be sure, be able to exert indirect bargaining power by shopping around, but in the near-term, the sellers tend to have more leverage, especially in highly consolidated industries (which is most industries nowadays). More importantly for Ahmari’s purposes, employers set contracts, and employees sign them. Nowhere is the myth of free consent more obvious than when it comes to modern contracts, drawn up by teams of highly-paid lawyers in opaque fine print, and then put before employees on a “take it or leave it” basis. Free-market apologists insist that workers enjoy “liberty of contract.” Really? Ahmari acidly observes, “Newly hired workers, in this telling, carefully review each paragraph and voice their objections before coming to a mutual understanding with their employer over disputed provisions. As your own experience likely tells you, that is almost never how this process takes place.”
In various chapters, Ahmari drills down on some of the particularly egregious abuses that hide in these contracts: non-compete clauses, non-disclosure clauses, arbitration agreements, one-sided intellectual property policies, etc. In each case, it is difficult to imagine an employee who actually possessed equal bargaining power being willing to sign such a contract. In most cases, employees don’t really understand what they are signing, and figure there’s no point in understanding, because they don’t have a choice anyway: they need a job, and another employer in the same industry is likely to have a very similar-looking contract. The same, of course, applies to many contracts that consumers sign nowadays as well, such as the “End User License Agreements” by which we regularly sign away our rights to technology companies.
The problem with the free market envisioned by capitalist theorists like Milton Friedman is not that it’s a bad idea or describes a bad world; it’s just that the world it describes is science fiction, like a world in which the force of gravity still regulated motion but in which friction and inertia did not exist. The happy results predicted by the free-marketeer would in fact result if—if the marketplace was characterized by perfect competition of equally powerful and wealthy actors. It isn’t. If every participant to an economic exchange had perfect information (or at least, equally imperfect information) about the product, service, and economic conditions. They don’t. If the future prospects of each participant were the same. They aren’t.
Ahmari then invites us to be coercion realists: to recognize that almost every social interaction or market exchange, if you look closely enough, happens under conditions of at least some coercion: that is, conditions in which one party has somewhat more leverage over the other, and the weaker party feels some constraint to give up what he really wants to avoid worse consequences. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and certainly not a wicked thing—we need to remove the stigma from the word “coercion,” Ahmari seems to imply at key points in the argument, and simply recognize it as a reality of the social world, just as gravity is a reality of the physical world.
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As the days darken and we find ourselves increasingly besieged by barbarism both within and without, we are likely to find the lifeboat of the church inundated with more refugees like Ayaan Hirsi Ali—cultural converts who realize that the worldly goods they valued cannot sustain themselves without the aid of Christianity. This may prove either a blessing or a curse; it all depends on how prepared our churches are to offer these converts the necessary catechesis. 

In 312 AD, by the banks of the Tiber River, a seasoned Roman campaigner stood weighing his options. The struggle in which he was engaged was, to his mind, not merely personal but civilizational. Roman order and all that it stood for was under threat from the rise of expansionist barbarian tribes, which were mobilizing a vast population against the West. At the same time, Rome was rotting from within as the viral spread of exotic mystery religions ate into the moral fiber of the next generation. For decades, Rome had endeavored to fend off these threats with military, economic, diplomatic and technological efforts to defeat, bribe, persuade, appease or surveil. And yet, with every round of conflict, it found itself losing ground.
The Emperor Diocletian had tried to reverse the decline with a revival of Roman patriotism and Roman values based on a revival of the polytheistic state cults. But polytheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life? The spiritual void in Roman life had merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma, and the result was a world where cults preyed on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action. Rome could not withstand the Goths, Slavs, or Persians if it could not explain to their populations why it mattered that they fought.
Polytheism was bankrupt; that much seemed clear to Constantine. If he was to take control of the Empire and actually renew it, he must ground his project in something deeper and more enduring. Christianity alone seemed to have the staying power—the philosophical depth and moral fiber—to save a dying civilization. Accordingly, having seen a strange omen in the morning sky, he opted to interpret it as a message from the Christian God: “In this sign, conquer.” From then on, he called himself a Christian, a lapsed polytheist, steering the Empire he gained away from its decadent paganism toward a social and legal order based upon Christian teachings.
There are of course other interpretations for what happened that fateful morning at Milvian Bridge. One is more cynical: a self-aggrandizing warlord, looking for some kind of leverage over his foes, some justification for his rule beyond mere military might, invented a cock-and-bull story about seeing the sign of the cross in the heavens, thus attracting gullible Christians to his banner. Over the next quarter century, he continued to play on their credulity and ambition, pretending to advance the cause of Christianity while really using the church as a prop to support his own rule. The legacy of this was “Constantinianism,” the millenium-and-a-half devil’s bargain between Christianity and state power, in which the church sold its soul to gain the world. Another is more charitable: Constantine really and truly did have a “conversion experience,” and humbled himself in gratitude before Jesus Christ who had granted him victory and, he thought, a mandate from heaven to remake Rome in obedience to Christ. In the quarter century that followed, he endeavored, albeit with stumbling steps, to secure the church against its foes within and without, to wean his people away from their paganism, and to govern as befitted a servant of Christ.
In between these two interpretations lies perhaps the most probable one, the one with which we started, and which Peter Leithart defends at length in Defending Constantine. Constantine was not seeking merely his own glory or the glory of Christ; he was seeking the glory of Rome, and he saw Christianity as the civilizational glue that could rekindle the dying embers of Roman order. He genuinely recognized and esteemed much that was good in Christianity, but saw it chiefly as a means to an end, not an end in itself—at least at the outset. But he did, crucially, submit himself (as much as any proud Caesar could, at any rate!) to the teaching of the church, and in time came to fully embrace Christianity and seek to advance the kingdom of Christ. And not only did he seek—he succeeded: paganism was sent packing, churches were filled, gladiatorial games ceased, and the Christian Church was positioned for a millennium and a half of civilizational dominance that, while far from perfect, was good for the church and for the world. At what point in his personal development was Constantine “saved”? At what point did he have what we would call a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ”? Such are the questions we modern evangelicals are itching to ask, and yet why should we need to know the answer to these questions? The secret things belong to the Lord our God.
It is a timely moment to reflect on the conversion of Constantine, because our civilization stands at a similar crossroads to that which confronted this Roman leader at Milvian Bridge. And many of our own seasoned leaders are making a similar gamble: Christianity alone can provide the glue to hold us together, the spiritual resources to revive our peoples. Indeed, the highly attentive reader might have noticed that most of the phrases in the first two paragraphs of this essay were direct quotations from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Why I Am Now a Christian,” an essay that sent shockwaves throughout the ranks of Western intelligentsia a few weeks ago. Ali, after all, has been one of the most outspoken proponents of the “New Atheism” for the past two decades, campaigning alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others for a world without religion.
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The Christian study center movement is poised to offer something much more than some Christian window-dressing to the intellectual life of the university; it can offer instead a picture of what the university was meant to be: a community of shared learning that receives the gifts of God and reflects them back into the world.

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at the launch of the new South Carolina Study Center in Columbia, S.C. Occupying a charming historic white house across the street from the University of South Carolina, the SCSC is just the latest representative of a bold new movement that is challenging Christians to rethink the nature and purpose of higher education. The term “study center” may evoke images of Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri and its various offshoots, retreat spaces offering a space for reading, rest, reflection, and mentorship for Christians and seekers alike. But the Christian study center movement, though inspired by Francis Schaeffer’s compelling blend of faith and scholarship, has forged a model for engagement at the very center of modern intellectual and cultural life—the public research university.
Since the formation of the first Christian study center at the University of Virginia in 1975, the Consortium of Christian Study Centers has grown to include 38 member institutions. Initially, most did little more than offer a thoughtful Christian add-on or occasional antidote to whatever was going on in the neighboring university: a C.S. Lewis reading group….
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