Hopefully, Sound of Freedom will help encourage people to speak out. However, the exploitation of children is not just about Epstein and secret Hollywood parties. The film will shock ordinary people and show them how nefarious worldwide networks operate and what it takes to battle them. When Ballard thought of quitting his job and going it alone in the fight against child trafficking, he feared for his family and was wracked by doubts. But his wife Katherine – played in the film by Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino – dispelled them, saying, “You have no choice. You have been called to do this. You know it’s the right thing to do.”

Last week, JPMorgan accused Cecile de Jongh, wife of the former governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), of working for Jeffrey Epstein and facilitating his underage sex ring.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan itself reached a $290 million settlement with some of Epstein’s victims.
The two incidents do not just highlight Epstein’s vast network; they remind us of the horrific crime of child trafficking, believed to yield annual profits of $32 billion in the U.S. and $150 billion worldwide. It is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, in competition with drug running and the arms trade.
One man, Tim Ballard, has made it his life’s mission to fight this evil and rescue as many of its innocent victims as he can. A former undercover operative for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Ballard worked on its anti-child-trafficking teams but felt frustrated by the limitations of a government agency. In 2013, he and some colleagues quit to set up Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which now has 150 employees, 80 contractors, and 70 trained dogs. Ballard and other staffers, who pose as customers to infiltrate child sex rings, have so far been involved in 7,000 direct rescues, resulting in 5,000 arrests. They also provide therapeutic aftercare to rescued children and train law enforcement agencies in five regions worldwide.
His valiant story is the subject of Mexican producer Eduardo Verastegui’s film Sound of Freedom, available for viewing nationwide beginning July 4.
Indeed, there’s an Epstein connection: Jim Caviezel, who plays Ballard, says the film features an Epstein island allegory, and wonders how the “three-letter agencies” could not be aware of the extent of the child-trafficking problem. He hopes the film will motivate more witnesses and whistle-blowers into speaking up.
In the film’s dramatized storyline, a boy whom Ballard has rescued while a government agent tells him to also rescue his sister, handing over a necklace to help identify the girl. Unable to do much in his official capacity, but not having the heart to ignore the boy’s request, Ballard quits his job, teams up with some other agents, and against great odds rescues the girl from Colombia.
While there is no denying that multiple factors encourage the sexual exploitation of children, the real-life Ballard believes that one major contributor in our times is the woke political atmosphere in the country. The irony, he says, is that 20 years ago, people could be arrested for giving pornography to minors, but today, teachers supply what is essentially pornography as part of the curriculum. He warns of the harm teachers and school authorities inflict by manipulating children into gender confusion and gender transition treatment without parental approval. “If you can consent to genital mutilation, you can consent to sex with a 50-year-old,” he says, adding that there are attempts to normalize pedophilia by portraying it as “child liberation” rather than abuse and viewing parents as the enemy for limiting access to their children.
In a parallel development, pedophiles are insinuating themselves into the LGBTQ movement, reinventing themselves as an alternative orientation – Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs).
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What is clear from Davenport is that a Christian commonwealth is one of coordinate states wherein rulers fulfill Isaiah 49:23 by helping, nourishing, and protecting the true religion, the true church. None of this implies a dependence of Christ’s objective preeminence on any earthly powers—get that out of your head! It is a matter of duty, justice, and order according to the natures and ends of both powers. More basically, the best form of government is one where both church and state flourish according to their design, mutuality, and end (mediate and final). 

Consternation from certain wings of Evangelicalism over Christian nationalism consistently ignores threshold questions for essential any political theory, thereby exposing they do not have an operative political theory apart from baptizing the status quo. Namely, what would you do if you could start from scratch? What is best and permissible in principle? What is the ideal? Or as one friend likes to ask, what if we win? What if Christians were in charge and the majority of the population was at least culturally Christian? What kind of polity, what kind of church-state relationship, what kind of laws would you set up? I shudder to think how limp and lame many contemporary answers to these questions would be.
Concessions according to prudence and context can only be properly considered once these kinds of threshold questions, the types of questions political theory are most concerned with, have been answered.
This is the entire purpose of the so-called state of nature discourse. It is not, in its best form, concerned with vainly divining primordial existence. Rather, it is a heuristic for determining proper socio-political organization.
A fatal problem with most of our interlocutors is that they do not or cannot contemplate these things. Their entire vision, intellectual frame, is saturated with what currently is, or at least as they understand what is, which is almost never in a functional but rather ideological sense.
That is, the ideological sense—explanations—as proscribed by the incumbent ideology itself. This exercise is unserious because it is unrealistic and lacks utility.
In any case, this, among other reasons, is why reading older political theory from our rich Protestant tradition is essential, even if the reader rejects the conclusions therein, the sources in view reform the mind. John Davenport’s short treatise, A Discourse About Civil Government (1663), is one such text and should be read, for maximum effect, in conjunction with his 1669 election sermon.
To begin, Davenport improves upon the predominant framing of church-state questions.
“the only wise God hath fitted and appointed two sorts of Administrations, Ecclesiastical and Civil. Hence, they are capable of a twofold Relation, and of Action and Power suitable to them both; viz. Civil and Spiritual, and accordingly must be exercised about both in their seasons, without confounding those two different states, or destroying either of them.”
This is, of course, boilerplate. Few disagreements will emerge from it. We have two administrations or polities, spiritual or ecclesiastical and civil. What will appear irregular to some readers is that Davenport elects not to distinguish between the two administrations or powers with a church-state (commonwealth) dichotomy, but rather to speak of a “Christian Communion” with the ecclesiastical and civil administrations being two species of the same Christian communion genus. This makes sense given that God is the author and efficient cause of both, his glory is the end of both, and man is the common subject of both. Differences, indeed, remain. Thus, they are not of identical species and the genus in which they both participate is limited to two species (e.g., Luke 22:38).
The kind or expression of power is a notable distinction. Davenport says the ecclesiastical power has only “oeconomical” power by which he means stewardship given that Christ is the only true head of the universal invisible church. The civil power, on the other hand, possesses “despotical” power (Luke 22:25), or what Baxter would call regal power or Hale would call nomothetical power. Christ has given civil rulers “lordly” power over men (1 Peter 2:13). This is proper since, while there is overlap, the ecclesiastical power primarily concerns itself with the inner man and the civil power with outer man, albeit, again, this distinction is not clean or absolute. For the ecclesiastical power is accidentally, we might say, concerned with the outer man just as the civil power is accidentally concerned with the inner man, but these are auxiliary concerns.
The glory of God is the final end of both administrations of Christian communion. Their mediate ends are diverse. The mediate end of civil order is preservation of society and the common welfare; the mediate end of the ecclesiastical order is salvation of souls and the sanctification of men. But both, as receptors of power from God must glorify God.
These differences explain their difference in operation. But this does not make them contrary to one another or anywise in tension. They are to be “coordinate States,” mutually helpful, reciprocal, aiding the whole man within one Christian communion and honoring the same God.
Here we have the ideal, theoretical relationship between what we now call church and state. This is the vision of a happy, cohesive and coherent society. Now the question arises as to what is to be done in a preexisting society and a newly founded one “wherein men are free to choose what Form they shall judge best.”
Here’s the kicker. Many Christians today take Paul’s advice to the Romans as perennial, delineating the permanent posture for believers (i.e., subjugation and martyrdom) in any and all circumstances. Davenport begs to differ. An extended quote is in order. Be forewarned: it will break some brains.
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Grace, by definition, is unjust. It is not giving us what we deserve, but giving us the opposite. It is why just grace is an oxymoron. If God puts his grace upon us justly then he is giving us what we deserve. But we do not deserve God’s good favour, that is what grace is!

I wonder if you have ever thought about the opposite of grace? We all know (I suspect) that grace is unmerited favour despite what we deserve. It is more than just unmerited favour because you can put your favour on someone who hasn’t done anything warranting your ire. Grace is unmerited favour in the face of what we deserve. God shows his grace towards us by showing us unmerited favour in the face of the wrath and judgement we deserve by nature.
What, then, is the opposite of grace? Some would argue it is judgement. After all, if we don’t have God’s grace on us, we stand under his wrath. We will face his condemnation. But that is really the result of not receiving God’s grace. Or, more accurately, the result of our own sin. It isn’t the opposite of grace, just what results if we don’t receive God’s grace.
Look again at our definition above. God’s grace is his unmerited favour in the face of what we actually deserve. If we do not have God’s unmerited favour in the face of what we deserve, we must have God’s wrath in line with what we do deserve. Grace is undeserved so what happens apart from grace is entirely and properly deserved.
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