When God opens our eyes, and ears, we encounter his majesty. We hang on his words, as some did when he taught in the temple (Luke 19:48), and we testify in awe, with those officers who confessed, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46).

Lightning can be majestic. That is, from a safe distance. Or from a secure shelter that frees us from the threat of electrocution, and allows us to enjoy the spectacular show.
The concept of majesty first brings to mind great sights, like distant lightning. Whether it’s a scenic vista of purple mountain majesties, the skyline of a great city, the dazzling beauty of gold or precious jewels, or the grandeur of a royal palace and its decorum, we typically associate the noun majesty, and its adjective majestic, with stunning glimpses, panoramas, and sights.
Majesty captures a greatness, power, and glory that is both impressive and attractive. And as with lightning, what is majestic from a safe distance can be terrifying when right overhead, without shelter. And so it is when the living God showcases his majesty at the Red Sea—his enemies panic with fear (Exodus 14:24), while his people, whom he rescues, know themselves safe and praise his majesty:
In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble…Who is like you, majestic in holiness,awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?Exodus 15:7, 11
Yet when Scripture mentions the majesty of God, the reference is not exclusively to the visible. Thunder, not only lightning, also may strike us as majestic, when we don’t find ourselves exposed and at risk. And so, as Scripture testifies, God’s voice is majestic.
His words ring out with divine greatness, and tangible goodness, in the ears of his people. His speech is both authoritative and appealing, imposing and attractive. His voice both cuts us to the heart, and makes our hearts thrill. His words wound us in our sin, and we welcome it in the Spirit. God’s majestic words, spoken and written, surprise and delight his people, even as his enemies cower at his thunderings. Their fear is terror; ours is reverent awe and joy.
His lightnings enthrall his saints. As does the thunder of his words.
Greatness of His Word
Consider, first, the greatness of “his majestic voice” (Isaiah 30:30).
No voice speaks with such authority—or anywhere even remotely close to such authority—as the voice of the living God. His words, unlike any other words, are utterly authoritative, and on every possible subject he chooses to address. Like no other mind and mouth, his words are not limited to an area of expertise. His expertise, as God, is all things, without exception.
But the greatness of his word includes not only his right to speak on any given subject (and every subject), but also his ability to speak to the most important subjects and do so extensively, and perfectly, and have the final say. He not only takes up far-reaching, bottomless, eternal, truly great topics, but he never speaks above his head, or out of his depths, as even the world’s greatest minds do when they come to the topics that matter most.
God never speculates. He never overreaches or overextends his knowledge. He never over-speaks. As God, he may publicly address any subject matter he chooses, and with unassailable authority, and he does so perfectly, every time, in all he chooses to say and not say.
In Scripture, he does give us an extensive word, but not an exhaustive one. He chooses to limit his spoken revelation to a first covenant and then a new one, 66 books, and 30,000 verses across the span of a millennium and a half. However, he chooses not (yet) to speak to every possible subject in his created world and beyond, but to speak with both clarity and repetition, despite the trends and undulations of every generation, to the realities that are most timeless and essential. And in doing so, he cues his people in on the subjects and proportions of his focus that prove most important in every time and season.
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The fallout of the French Revolution would prove that Pascal’s arguments about God…and his observations about the human condition, were right….Even today, Pascal’s writing has lost none of its fire, nor has the fruits of his intellect, passion, and eloquence dedicated to God diminished.

On August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician, and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Despite his shortened life, Pascal is renowned for pioneering work in geometry, physics, and probability theory, and even for inventing the first mechanical calculator. His most powerful legacy, however, is his Pensées, or thoughts, about life’s biggest questions, including God and the human condition.
Pascal’s intellect garnered attention at an early age. At 16, he produced an essay on the geometry of cones so impressive that René Descartes initially refused to believe that a “sixteen-year-old child” could have written it. Later, Pascal advanced the study of vacuums and, essentially, invented probability theory.
His life radically changed the evening of November 23, 1654, when Pascal experienced God’s presence in a powerful way. He immediately and radically reoriented his life and thinking toward God. He described the experience on a scrap of parchment that he sewed into his jacket and carried with him the rest of his life:
FIRE—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certitude, certitude. Heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and thy God. Thy God shall be my God. 
From that moment, Pascal dedicated his life to serving God through his writing. His ideas on apologetics were collected and published after his death in a volume entitled, Pensées, or “Thoughts.”
Best known of his ideas is “Pascal’s Wager.” Facing uncertainty in a game of life with such high stakes, he argued, it makes far more sense to believe in God’s existence than to not: “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”
Pascal also offered keen diagnoses of the human condition, such as this:
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Written by Kurt M. Wagner |
Monday, March 4, 2024
America is obviously getting more polarized and that trend is likely not letting up any time soon. Red and blue as categories can be overly simplistic, but given the modern Democrat platform I think it’s helpful and maps well enough onto Renn’s three worlds model. Roughly speaking, “red” can be viewed as more or less positive, “blue” firmly negative, with perhaps suburban pockets with more moderate, so-called “classical liberal” and/or libertarian-leaning neoconservative types representing what remains of the neutral world. It is clear that much of the Federal government, mostly through the administrative state, has been captured by the Left and is deep blue. Retreating to red states for shelter or to engage in political and cultural battles at the state level may make sense for a lot of people.

As evangelical Christians in America enter and wake up to the reality of living in the Negative World, accurate and depressing descriptions of the times abound. However, practical prescriptions are few and far between as many begin to think about the prospect of having to navigate these uncharted cultural and political waters faithfully. Much of the counsel being offered to address this, including Aaron Renn’s own, is a most welcome and good start. However, we are admittedly only in the beginning of the conversation, the exploratory phase of discovering and implementing faithful responses to the challenges ahead. Things still need to be spelled out at a more granular level, with many sensing that certain specific, concrete steps need to be taken sooner rather than later. We need options: Benedict, Boniface, and everything in between. Understanding the times isn’t enough. We also need to know what ought to be done. 
Thinking about civilizational decline and the loss of the rule of law at a national or even state, much less imperial, level can beggar the political imagination and leave one at a loss as to what to do, what practical action one can take to prepare for further decline while hoping for the best. Don’t get me wrong, I like to speculate about possible regime change, civilizational collapse, or the outcomes of potential reactions as much as the next guy, but it’s draining and unproductive for me more often than not. Though I am very thankful for the national political and cultural actors representing God and sanity, for most people, focusing on national politics has a tendency to suck the civic oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or will for much else. 
Conversely, the potential effectiveness of focusing on the local governance of one’s own community, where the political rubber meets the road, can be easily judged based on the reaction these efforts get from mainstream media and broader political interests, attracting the tireless attention of the proverbial Eye of Sauron. People on both the right and the left seem to instinctively know this. Things get scary for those ostensibly afraid of the so-called Christian nationalism bogeyman when it begins manifesting itself at the local level. Examples have abounded in recent years of regime-resisting actions (think local action and policy from the COVID era, or regarding DEI, gun rights, marriage licenses, etc.) of humble county clerks, sheriffs, school board members, and local DAs, faithfully practicing, whether consciously or not, the doctrine of the lesser magistrates. These are too numerous to be listed here, but any even moderately informed reader could easily call several of them to mind. 
Christians pursuing national excellence in politics and culture is a worthy goal, and fostering a counter-cultural elite that represents evangelicals at the state (kudos to Oklahoma State Senator Dusty Deevers, e.g.) and national level is undoubtedly important for the long-term survival of America as we have known it. Though a good aspiration for some, it’s just not a realistic goal for most Christians. Ambition isn’t a bad thing in itself, but we can’t all be great. In the near term, many ordinary Christians are just trying to find a place to live where they can raise their families within a society that at least still acknowledges the Tao. This doesn’t necessarily signal cowardly retreat or ultimate defeat, but it is a realistic and practical assumption to have for most people in evangelical America. There is currently a dearth of high-trust, rooted, and intergenerational communities that facilitate family formation, encourage living out Christian ethics, and support positive, explicitly Christian civic engagement, and is doubtful if urban or other progressive centers, the magnets of the elite, will be anywhere near fostering anything like this anytime soon.
Why Local?
America is an extremely vast country. Less than an hour’s highway drive from almost any town or city in whichever direction usually leads to huge amounts of relatively unoccupied, undeveloped, and minimally governed space. And like the US highway system, another often overlooked and underappreciated yet ubiquitous aspect of American life is local (county or equivalent) government: that political infrastructure quietly existing in the civic background of virtually every American. I will argue in this essay that the already existing structures of American local government, if properly leveraged, are at least theoretically sufficient to serve as the political backdrop of faithful Christian living in a quickly declining America. As real-world arenas for natural family life and freedom of religion in the public square, counties offer realistic options in the near to mid-term, and in the long-term could serve as potential springboards to greater, actually viable state and national cultural and political action. 
There are over 3,000 counties or equivalents in America, and this gives me great hope. Decentralization will be key going forward, and I would suggest that drilling down beyond the state into the county level is the right scale at this time for practical Christian self-governance, utilizing extant local political structures as a means to further the ends of the common good rooted in natural law, if not to an explicitly Christian local polity. While most of the  “three C’s” (the campus, the coast, and the city) are squarely fixed in the negative world, it’s conceivable that many suburban areas still have a lot of neutral world characteristics, and that many rural areas are still in the positive world in a lot of ways. It’s the particular matter of cultural influence and elite institutional power that makes negative world areas seem so lopsidedly powerful, punching well above their weight in negativity, geographically speaking.
For most people, the mere thought of local government, with its seemingly petty and provincial details, such things as zoning, sidewalk committees, utilities, waste management, levies (property taxes!), etc., can understandably make one’s eyes glaze over. It doesn’t exactly spark the imagination or inspire zeal. At the same time, local government can also be so accessible and practical that once it is on one’s mental radar, one is almost without excuse for not getting involved to some degree. It falls within a kind of political ordo amoris (town/city, county, state, nation, empire) which has much more of a claim to our immediate civic duty. Maybe that’s why it’s more common to describe, theorize, and speculate about issues on the national rather than local level. There is actually more of the uncomfortable possibility, even obligation, that one get personally involved with the latter rather than the former. As state governments are constitutionally sovereign, focusing locally (at the county or equivalent level) means that the higher authority one is mostly dealing with is the state government, which acts as an intermediary between the local and Federal governments. This serves as a buffer and added level of protection not afforded at the state level, which would be set up for direct challenges from and confrontation with Federal actors. Not many have the stomach (not to mention the actual position, capacity, or skill) for that kind of thing. 
County Government 101
Enough with the generalities, let’s get into the weeds. One can get a quick, basic education on American counties and their equivalents here and here. A few key concepts to know going forward in this essay revolve around what are called Dillon’s Rule and Home Rule, along with the legal term state preemption. These are important terms when considering the feasibility of living out a positive local Christian vision within a viable legal framework. 
Every state’s relationship with its counties or equivalents is unique, generally being written into their constitutions, and counties can vary widely even within the same state. I would encourage everyone to become familiar with their own state and county details, or the details of those in which they would be interested living in. For example, some state constitutions allow for county home rule and charters, allowing for varying degrees of state constitutional county authority within their jurisdictions without direct, specific approval from state legislatures. Other states control their counties in a much tighter way. 
Dillon’s Rule vs. Home Rule
“The founding document of the United States, the Constitution, is silent on local governments. Instead, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments reserve all other powers not previously delegated or prohibited to the states and the people. Therefore, each state is responsible for granting broad or limited authority to each local branch of government, such as counties, municipalities, school districts, and other political subdivisions. There are two guiding principles of governance for local governments: the Dillon Rule and Home Rule.”
Home Rule refers to the constitutional granting of municipalities (towns, cities, and county or equivalents, etc.) more local control over their governing structures, policies, and even some legislative power. Dillon’s Rule on the other hand views local government as merely an agent of the state, created by and deriving all authority explicitly by law from the state legislature. Dillon’s Rule gained more national traction after a SCOTUS decision in 1907 in favor of the states, establishing a precedent for the dominance of this view of state-county relations well into the 20th century. However, in reaction to this, Home Rule later gained more popularity, with many states amending their constitutions to explicitly grant local governments more flexibility and agency in matters of “county concern”. This is especially true in the Western states as counties became responsible for larger and larger legal jurisdictions and service areas. One could make the argument that Home Rule is the local expression of federalism the Founders had in mind, and that the last clause of the 10th Amendment, “or to the people” could refer or apply to local government. 
“The history reveals that, contrary to modern assumptions, local governments were not always seen as subunits of states, but instead, were often treated as voluntary quasi-private associations that possessed considerable power as a matter of custom.”
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