All the Days of the Judge

The remedy for a nation is political, and revival from below is not

In 1952 Billy Graham told his hearers that “the only hope for our country is a spiritual and moral awakening—a revival.” In 2013 he wrote that “when God sets out to change a nation, He begins by changing people. It starts with individuals.” Conservatives say it in Andrew Breitbart’s words, that politics is downstream from culture. Scripture gives a different order. This paper argues that the remedy for a nation is political, that God heals a land through its rulers, and that a revival which waits to rebuild the nation from below leaves the cause of its disorder in place.

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The question

Billy Graham’s answer to the nation’s decline was revival. Turn enough hearts and the nation turns with them. Pray, preach and win souls, and the laws, the schools and the rulers will follow the people.

We question that order. Our disorder is a public order, a body of law that teaches every citizen what a man is, what marriage is and where God belongs, and a public order is healed by rule. We do not deny that God converts men one at a time, and we do not ask the church to preach less. We deny that converted men, added up, heal a land. In Scripture God heals lands through their rulers.

By politics we mean what the word first meant, the ordering of a people by law and rule. We do not mean campaigns and elections. None Gives What He Has Not tells a Christian to decline the vote, and this paper builds on it. When we say politics comes first, we mean first in the order of the remedy, not always first in time. In Scripture the prophet’s word and the people’s cry often came before the ruler acted, and sometimes the ruler moved first. Either way, what set the land’s law and worship was the ruler’s act. The question this paper presses is whether a revival aimed at the people, under an order like ours, can bring a land to that act. We argue that it cannot, and that the missions which turned nations went to the throne. We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

The argument in its own words

Graham’s case is clearest in a sermon his association first published in 1952 and printed again in 2021 under the title “Revival or Disintegration.” It opens with a claim about history: “No nation has ever improved morally without a spiritual revival. History proves that point.” His proof was Britain. In the 1700s, he said, “God raised up Wesley and Whitefield,” and Britain “was saved from a terrible fate because her entire social structure was changed by this spiritual revival.” He named two American cases, an awakening in 1800 that began among people praying on the James River in Virginia, and the revival of 1857 that began “in a little prayer meeting on Fulton Street in New York.” Then he gave his hearers their part: “You can start a prayer meeting in your home.”

Graham did not mean a private glow, and he did not ignore rulers. He said the revival he wanted was not “a powerful emotional experience,” and that in it “We will recognize God in the affairs of nations.” On February 3, 1952, he preached from the steps of the Capitol to call the nation’s leaders to prayer, and that April President Truman signed the law that set a National Day of Prayer. That is the argument at its strongest, because it wants a nation that confesses God and it speaks to rulers. What it asked of them was prayer, and a day of prayer followed. The road it named still runs upward, from a prayer meeting in a home to the affairs of the nation.

In 2011, near the end of his life, Christianity Today asked Graham what he would do differently. He said, “I also would have steered clear of politics,” and explained that “looking back I know I sometimes crossed the line,” though he valued his ministry “to people in high places.” In the same interview he told evangelicals that “The central issues of our time aren’t economic or political or social, important as these are. The central issues of our time are moral and spiritual in nature.” Two years later, in a letter asking Christians to pray by name for friends and family who did not know Christ, he gave the order in two sentences: “when God sets out to change a nation, He begins by changing people. It starts with individuals.”

Conservatives say the same thing in political terms. The Hedgehog Review called “politics is downstream from culture” Andrew Breitbart’s mantra, and summed it up as “Change the culture, change the government.” His own publication calls it a sentiment that has echoed throughout the conservative movement. Breitbart’s culture was the media and Hollywood, not the prayer meeting, and he and Graham wanted different things from it. They agreed on the direction it flows. Each put culture upstream of law, so that changing the law waits on changing the culture. That is the claim this paper examines.

Where it came from

The idea that renewal must rise from below is younger than the church. It has a history, and the history runs through the men who took religion out of the ruler’s hands.

The line runs from Locke’s inward persuasion to Graham’s “It starts with individuals.” Locke took the care of religion away from the magistrate and left it to persuasion. In 1788 American Presbyterians wrote a rule of the same kind into their confession, keeping the magistrate as protector of every church and taking away his care for which church taught the truth. Once a ruler may not care for religion, the only renewal left is the kind that rises from below, and Graham’s strategy followed the road the liberal order left open to religion. Bottom-up revival is not liberalism’s cure. It is the Christianity liberalism permits. It also shares liberalism’s premise. None Gives What He Has Not traced the claim that authority rises from the people. The bottom-up strategy makes the people the spring of a nation’s goodness as well.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and this one is built from three.

Only God gives a new heart. God promised it through Ezekiel: “I will give you a new heart, and will put a new spirit in you” (Ezek. 36:26). Christ said, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). No law does that. The twist concludes that law has no part in making a people good. Scripture puts the two together. When Hezekiah called Judah to keep the Passover, “the hand of the Lord was present to give them one heart to come, to do according to the commands of the king and of the princes, by the word of the Lord” (2 Chron. 30:12). The king commanded what the word of the Lord required, and the heart God gave was a heart to obey it.

Each man must believe. “How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14). The gospel goes to persons, and no man is saved by his nation. The twist concludes that a nation is nothing but its persons added up, the free and equal individuals of the liberal order. Scripture treats a people under its ruler as one body. “When a king hearkens to unjust language, all his subjects are transgressors” (Prov. 29:12). What the king listens to sets the course of the people under him.

Faith cannot be forced. Christ’s kingdom does not advance by the sword (John 18:36), and Paul said, “we persuade men” (2 Cor. 5:11). Locke took that truth and concluded that rulers have no care of religion at all. The sword never made a believer, and no one in this argument asks it to. Law restrains, protects and trains, and our paper Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers sets out what Scripture asks of rulers toward the church and what it forbids them.

How God heals a land

Judges gives the pattern in its plainest form, and it does not flatter the people. “The Lord raised up judges, and the Lord saved them out of the hands of them that spoiled them: and yet they hearkened not to the judges” (Judg. 2:16), and “they turned quickly out of the way in which their fathers walked” (Judg. 2:17). Even so, “the Lord was with the judge, and saved them out of the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge,” and “it came to pass when the judge died, that they went back, and again corrupted themselves worse than their fathers” (Judg. 2:18–19). The judge did not make Israel faithful. His rule held back the worst of it, and when he died the people went lower than before. The book ends with the cause of the ruin it records: “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own sight” (Judg. 21:25).

The reforms of Judah came through its kings. Some began with a word from God and some did not. Asa removed “the altars and the idols” from the cities of Judah before the prophet came to him (2 Chron. 14:4), and Josiah began to purge the land six years before the book of the law was found (2 Chron. 34:3, 8). When the prophet Azarias met Asa with a message (2 Chron. 15:1–2), and Asa heard it, “he strengthened himself, and cast out the abominations from all the land of Juda and Benjamin” (2 Chron. 15:8) and led the people into a covenant “that they should seek the Lord God of their fathers with all their heart and with all their soul” (2 Chron. 15:12). That covenant carried the death penalty of the law of Moses (2 Chron. 15:13, Deut. 17:2–5). We cite the reform for its order, not its penalty, and Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers explains why we argue for no penalty. Jehoshaphat sent princes, Levites and priests through the cities, “and there was with them the book of the law of the Lord, and they passed through the cities of Juda, and taught the people” (2 Chron. 17:9). In the first month of his reign Hezekiah “opened the doors of the house of the Lord” (2 Chron. 29:3), and when the worship was restored, “Ezekias and all the people rejoiced, because God had prepared the people: for the thing was done suddenly” (2 Chron. 29:36). Josiah heard the book of the law that the priest had found (2 Chron. 34:14–15), read it to “all the people small and great,” and made a covenant before the Lord, “And all the people stood to the covenant” (4 Kingdoms 23:2–3). The Chronicler gives the result: he “caused all that were found in Jerusalem and in Israel, to serve the Lord their God all his days” (2 Chron. 34:33). His son “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his fathers did” (4 Kingdoms 23:32).

Scripture is just as plain about what these reforms did not do. Under Jehoshaphat, “Nevertheless the high places yet remained; and as yet the people did not direct their heart to the Lord God of their fathers” (2 Chron. 20:33). Under Jotham, “still the people corrupted themselves” (2 Chron. 27:2). When Hezekiah’s messengers went north, the towns of Ephraim “laughed them to scorn” (2 Chron. 30:10). In Josiah’s own days the Lord said that “faithless Juda turned not to me with all her heart, but falsely” (Jer. 3:10), and after the greatest reform of all, “the Lord turned not from the fierceness of his great anger” against Judah for the sins of Manasseh (4 Kingdoms 23:26). A king set the public worship of the land, and even a good king did not set all of it, since the high places stood under Asa and Jehoshaphat. He did not reach every heart, and he did not undo a judgment God had already passed. A faithful king did not guarantee a faithful people, and Jotham proves it. What Scripture never records is a reform of the land’s worship that came from below while the king stood against it. That is what this paper claims for rule, and no more.

Joash shows how the rule turns. He “did that which was right in the sight of the Lord all the days of Jodae the priest,” the man who governed beside him. “And it came to pass after the death of Jodae, that the princes of Juda went in, and did obeisance to the king. Then the king hearkened to them. And they forsook the house of the Lord God of their fathers, and served the Astartes and idols” (2 Chron. 24:2, 17–18). The princes turned the king, the rule changed, and the land went with it.

The pattern runs the other way too. Jeroboam made two golden heifers and told the people, “behold thy gods, O Israel,” and “this thing became a sin; and the people went before one as far as Dan” (3 Kingdoms 12:28–30). For two centuries Scripture judged his successors by whether they “walked in the way of Jeroboam the son of Nabat, and in his sins, as he caused Israel to sin” (3 Kingdoms 15:34). One king’s act set the worship of ten tribes. Proverbs states the rule: “A righteous king establishes a country: but a transgressor destroys it” (Prov. 29:4).

Law trains. Aristotle saw it without Scripture: “it is difficult to get from youth up a right training for virtue if one has not been brought up under right laws” (Nicomachean Ethics X.9). Aquinas drew the conclusion for Christians. Some men can be trained by a father’s words, but those “not easily amenable to words” must be “restrained from evil by force and fear,” so “that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous.” He called this “the discipline of laws” (Summa Theologiae I-II q.95 a.1). Paul teaches the same through the office. Rulers are “a terror” to evil works and give “praise” to the good (Rom. 13:3), and the church prays “for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Tim. 2:1–2). Paul ties the quiet and godly life of the church to the rulers it lives under.

Isaiah gives the order in a single chapter, and our paper The Path to Restoration followed it. “For, behold, a righteous king shall reign, and princes shall govern with judgment” (Isa. 32:1). Later in the chapter the land lies waste “until the Spirit shall come upon you from on high” (Isa. 32:15). The king is promised first and the Spirit finishes the work. The bottom-up strategy reverses Isaiah. It waits for the Spirit to remake the people so that the people can remake the rule.

How nations were turned

History cannot prove a doctrine. It can test Graham’s claim that history proves his, and the historical premise of this paper stands only as far as the record below goes. The nations of Christendom were not established in the faith by revival from below. They were established when their rulers took it up, and the record is long.

The record has its counter-cases, and they belong in it. Mindaugas of Lithuania was baptized and crowned in the 1250s, and the faith was “embraced only by Mindowe and his immediate friends,” who went back to paganism about 1262 (Catholic Encyclopedia, “Lithuania”). Julian renounced the faith in 361, and the empire did not go back with him. Boris’s people rose against their baptism. A ruler’s turning did not always carry his people, and a ruler’s fall did not always carry them away. What the record does not contain is a nation established in the faith without its ruler.

The record also shows where the missions went. Augustine landed in Kent and sent word to the king, and “the king came into the island, and sitting in the open air, ordered Augustine and his companions to come and hold a conference with him” (Bede I.25). Paulinus came north with Edwin’s queen, Clovis’s queen asked Remi to bring the king the word, and the captive in Iberia taught the queen before the king. The preaching that turned nations aimed at the throne. Some of these rulers used force we do not defend, and Vladimir’s summons carried a threat. We cite them for what followed, as Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers cites the Persian decrees for what they protected, not for how they punished.

Kent. Bede gives the clearest single case. When Æthelberht, “among the rest, believed and was baptized, attracted by the pure life of these holy men and their gracious promises, the truth of which they established by many miracles, greater numbers began daily to flock together to hear the Word.” The king “compelled none to embrace Christianity” (Ecclesiastical History I.26). The preaching and the miracles drew men, and the king’s baptism opened the kingdom to them. His son Eadbald refused the faith and took his father’s wife, and “By both which crimes he gave occasion to those to return to their former uncleanness, who, under his father, had, either for favour or fear of the king, submitted to the laws of the faith and of a pure life” (II.5). When Eadbald was converted, he recalled the bishops who had fled. He could not restore the bishop of London, Bede says, because he “had not so much authority in the kingdom as his father,” and could not act “against the will and consent of the pagans” (II.6). Where the king’s authority reached, the church came back. Where it did not, the church stayed out.

Graham’s own examples need the same test. Wesley and Whitefield were priests of the established Church of England, and they preached in a kingdom whose statute book still required officeholders to take its communion (Test Act, 1673, repealed 1828) and made it an offense for a professed Christian to deny the Trinity or the truth of Christianity (Blasphemy Act, 1697). That revival did its work inside a Christian legal order. It did not replace that order. Graham said the revival of 1800 changed “The whole social structure” and that of 1857 “swept the country.” The inference that follows is ours. Nearly a century after Fulton Street he told his hearers, “our country is falling apart at the seams,” so whatever those revivals did, they did not leave a nation that held.

Nor does revival check itself. Early in his ministry Charles Finney found the country around Evans’ Mills, in northern New York, what he called “a burnt district.” A few years before, he wrote, a “wild excitement” had passed through it, “which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious,” and it “resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion” (Memoirs, 1876). Finney said his own revival there showed “no appearance of fanaticism, no bad spirit, no divisions, no heresies, no schisms.” We take him at his word. A revival is as sound as the men who lead it.

Where it leads

The bottom-up strategy goes three places, and each is visible now.

It reaches a ceiling it cannot pass. Graham’s own record shows how far a movement from below can carry the law under our order. In 1952 a sermon on the Capitol steps was followed within weeks by a National Day of Prayer. Ten years later the Supreme Court held that “it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers” for schoolchildren (Engel v. Vitale, 1962), and a year after that it struck down state-required devotional Bible reading in the public schools (Abington v. Schempp, 1963). The Court said the Bible is “worthy of study,” and it did not forbid that. What it forbade was the state’s worship. Whatever the crusades did for the men who heard them, they did not hold the law, and the law reached every child in every public school. It did not teach nothing. It taught that religion belongs to the home, the church and the individual heart, and not to the state. A movement from below won a day of prayer, and it could not hold the schools, because the frame of the order forbids the state to aid religion. Changing the frame is the political act, and the bottom-up strategy does not ask for it. In 2015 the Court reasoned from “the right to personal choice regarding marriage” as “inherent in the concept of individual autonomy” (Obergefell v. Hodges). A people that leaves the law alone is not left alone by the law.

It fades and has to be started again. Judges records a people held back for a ruler’s lifetime who went lower when he died. A revival with no rule behind it has nothing to hold it even that long, and the strategy then asks for another revival. Its history is a list of awakenings, each one counted from the last.

It ends at the ballot. Graham regretted his politics and drew no such conclusion, but Finney did. Converted men become voters, he said, and “if he will give his vote only for honest men, the country will be obliged to have upright rulers” (Lecture XV). He did not want a Christian party, and said so. He wanted Christians to vote for honest men, and that was his way for a revival to reach the law, through the people who elect the lawmakers. It is the act None Gives What He Has Not tells a Christian to decline, because it treats the people as the fountain of the ruler’s power. The bottom-up strategy makes the people the source of a nation’s goodness, and then it sends them to the ballot, the act that makes them the source of its authority.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers. None of these gives a nation its rulers. God gives them, as The Path to Restoration argues, and a subject cannot. What a subject can do is ask God and the rulers he has for the remedy, prepare men to govern, and govern well the offices he already holds. That is prayer, petition and the rule of a house, and we say so plainly. It differs from the bottom-up strategy in what it asks for. It asks for rule, not for a movement that will one day reach the rulers.

He governs himself by the book. The king of Israel was to copy the law “and he shall read in it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord thy God” (Deut. 17:19). A man reads Scripture every day, keeps the Lord’s day and keeps his word, whether or not a revival is moving him. Habit is how Aquinas says law makes men good, and a man can put himself under it.

He rules his house. The house is the first government a child lives under, and the law of the house comes before the child’s heart can be asked for: “thou shalt teach them to thy children, and thou shalt speak of them sitting in the house, and walking by the way, and lying down, and rising up” (Deut. 6:7). A father sets the worship, the rules and the habits of his house, and he does not wait for his children to want them first.

He asks his church to pray for rulers and to teach what they owe. Paul told the church to pray “For kings, and for all that are in authority” (1 Tim. 2:2). A man asks his elders to pray for rulers by name every Lord’s day, to teach what rulers owe Christ, and to read the Westminster Confession’s chapter on the magistrate as the Assembly wrote it, before the American revision of 1788.

He asks rulers for law. He speaks and writes to officeholders and tells them that they hold their office under Christ: “Now therefore understand, ye kings: be instructed, all ye that judge the earth” (Ps. 2:10). He asks them for laws that acknowledge Christ, protect his church and restrain public evil, and he stops telling them, or himself, that law has to wait until the culture changes. He takes appointed office when it is offered, and he raises his sons to be the princes Isaiah promised beside the king (Isa. 32:1).

Eight objections

“In Nineveh the people believed first.” They did. “The men of Nineve believed God, and proclaimed a fast,” and only then “the word reached the king of Nineve” (Jonah 3:5–6). Section 01 grants that the word and the people often move before the throne. The city’s turning became public when “it was commanded in Nineve by the king and by his great men” (Jonah 3:7), and God answered what the whole city then did: “God saw their works, that they turned from their evil ways” (Jonah 3:10). Nineveh also had a prophet sent from God and forty days before judgment, not a plan to change the culture over generations. It shows a people moving before its king. It does not show a land healed without him.

“If my people will humble themselves, God will heal their land.” The verse is true and we grant all of it: “if my people, on whom my name is called, should repent, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their evil ways, I also will hear from heaven, and I will be merciful to their sins, and I will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14). God spoke it to Solomon, answering the prayer the king had prayed at the dedication of the house, a prayer that reached even a people carried captive with no king of their own (2 Chron. 6:37–39). God hears his people when they repent, wherever they are. The healing the verse names is God’s answer to drought, locusts and pestilence (2 Chron. 7:13), and he gives it to a repenting people with or without a king. Our claim is about a different healing, the restoring of a land’s law and public worship, and the verse does not speak to it. A people that repents should ask God for righteous rulers, which is the cry of the next objection.

“The Path to Restoration put the cry before the king.” It did, and we hold to it. The people cry, and God answers. Judges gives the answer: “the children of Israel cried to the Lord; and the Lord raised up a saviour to Israel” (Judg. 3:9). The cry asks for the remedy, and the remedy God sent was a ruler. Isaiah put the king before the Spirit (Isa. 32:1, 15). A cry to God for a deliverer is not a plan to rebuild a nation from below. It asks God for the political remedy this paper describes, and it is why section 01 says first in the order of the remedy, not always first in time.

“The church grew for three centuries without a Christian ruler.” It did, from the first day, when “there were added unto them about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). The church grows by preaching, and nothing here says otherwise. But the church is not a nation, and the question is how a land is healed, not whether God saves men without rulers. Section 06 counts Rome as the great case of growth from below, and what it received at the end was a Christian ruler and a Christian law. The promise the church was given was not a church without rulers forever. It was “kings shall be thy nursing-fathers” (Isa. 49:23).

“Only God changes hearts, so you cannot legislate morality.” Only God gives a new heart (Ezek. 36:26), and section 04 grants it. Every law legislates morality, since a law against theft says theft is wrong. What law cannot do is make a man new, and it was never asked to. Aquinas, quoting Aristotle, held that lawgivers make men good “by habituating them to good works” (I-II q.92 a.1), and he limited it: human law forbids “only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain” (I-II q.96 a.2). Law trains, restrains and teaches. God gives the heart, and in Hezekiah’s day he gave it as a heart “to do according to the commands of the king and of the princes, by the word of the Lord” (2 Chron. 30:12).

“Conversion from the top makes hypocrites.” Bede says as much. Some in Kent had kept the faith only “for favour or fear of the king” (II.5), and Jeremiah said Judah turned “falsely” under Josiah (Jer. 3:10). We grant that rule brings some men into line without faith. Aquinas expected it and gave the reason it still matters, that men who obey from fear “might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear.” Their children grow up under the law and hear the word preached. Revival makes hypocrites too, as Finney found in the burnt district. Christ said the tares grow in the field until the harvest (Matt. 13:30). Neither way of renewal empties the field of them.

“Prohibition proved that law cannot change a people.” The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned the manufacture and sale of liquor, and the Twenty-first repealed it in 1933. Scripture does not forbid wine. It says “wine makes glad the heart of man” (Ps. 103:15). Aquinas warned that human law leads men to virtue “not suddenly, but gradually,” and that it does not lay on imperfect men “the burdens of those who are already virtuous” (I-II q.96 a.2). Prohibition broke both rules, and it could not hold. That shows a law against what God permits will not hold a people. It does not show that law cannot teach, and section 07 shows what our law teaches now.

“Then Christians should vote for better men.” That is Finney’s plan, and section 07 shows where it ends. The remedy is political, and it is not ours to confer. None Gives What He Has Not argues that no people has authority to give its rulers, and The Path to Restoration argues that God gives righteous rulers to a people that cries to him. A Christian’s political work is older than the ballot. He prays for kings, tells them what God requires, petitions them for righteous law, serves by appointment, and raises sons fit to govern.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not deny that God converts men one at a time. The gospel goes to every man, and every man must believe. We do not belittle the preaching of the gospel or the men who came to Christ at Graham’s crusades.

It does not claim the ruler always acts first in time. The prophet’s word and the people’s cry often come before him. It claims that a land’s law and public worship are set by its rulers, and that a revival aimed at the people stops short of asking for them.

It does not judge the faith of the men it answers. Graham and Breitbart are answered for what they said.

It does not put the ruler in the pulpit or compel belief. Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers sets out what rulers owe the church and what they may not do.

It does not counsel resistance, and it does not counsel the vote. The rulers we have are the powers that be (Rom. 13:1), and the Christian obeys them, honors them and prays for them.

It does not make law a savior. A king can rule a people, but he cannot reach every heart, and the Spirit finishes the work (Isa. 32:15). Josiah’s reform did not turn away the judgment already passed on Judah (4 Kingdoms 23:26).

It stands or falls on one premise. If a revival aimed at the people could bring a land under an order like ours to confess Christ in its law without asking rulers to do it, the bottom-up strategy would work. Section 05 answers that premise from Scripture, section 06 from the record of the nations, and section 07 from Graham’s own record. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Billy Graham, “Revival or Disintegration” (1952), reprinted in Decision, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association of Canada, 12 May 2021.

“Billy Graham and the National Day of Prayer,” Billy Graham Library.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, “Q & A: Billy Graham on Aging, Regrets, and Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, 21 January 2011.

Billy Graham, letter on My Hope America, in “In His Own Words: Billy Graham on My Hope America,” Billy Graham Library, 25 October 2013.

“Politics Is Downstream from Culture, Part 1: Right Turn to Narrative,” The Hedgehog Review, 22 February 2017.

“13 Years: The Legacy of Andrew Breitbart,” Breitbart News, 1 March 2025.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X.9, trans. W. D. Ross, Internet Classics Archive.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.92 a.1, q.95 a.1, q.96 a.2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (1920).

Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History II.7–8, trans. Chester D. Hartranft, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 2 (1890).

Theodosian Code XVI.1.2 (380), Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II.31, trans. Ernest Brehaut (New York, 1916).

Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation I.26, II.5–6, II.14, III.1, trans. A. M. Sellar (London, 1907).

Nicholas I, Responses to the Questions of the Bulgars (866), ch. XVII, Internet Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University.

The larger Jelling stone (DR 42), Samnordisk runtextdatabas.

The Russian Primary Chronicle, entry for 988, trans. Samuel Hazzard Cross (Cambridge, Mass., 1930), excerpted by C. T. Evans.

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), trans. William Popple.

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), 23.3, and the American revision of 23.3 (1788), as set side by side in “A Tale of Two Texts,” Themelios.

Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York, 1835), Lectures I and XV, and Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York, 1876).

Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962). Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963). Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015).

Test Act (1673), repealed by the Sacramental Test Act (1828). Blasphemy Act (1697).

“Homo religiosus: the phenomenon of Poland’s Mieszko I,” Polish History Museum, Warsaw.

“Lithuania,” The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1910).

None Gives What He Has Not. The Path to Restoration. Kings Shall Be Thy Nursing-Fathers.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering and spelling (3 and 4 Kingdoms are 1 and 2 Kings, Psalm 103 is Psalm 104, Jodae is Jehoiada, Ezekias is Hezekiah, Josaphat is Jehoshaphat, Azarias is Azariah, Nineve is Nineveh). New Testament from the King James Version. Iberia is the kingdom of Kartli in modern Georgia. Modern authors are quoted briefly and paraphrased otherwise. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com