By Michael Tavoliero
Kevin McCabe, in his essay “Pastors, We Need You. Where Is Today’s Black-Robed Regiment?” in the Alaska Watchman, calls the colonial New England theologians “the civic architects of liberty.” Those pastors shaped how ordinary people thought about God, government, law, and resistance. They did not simply offer comfort to individuals; they provided a moral and intellectual framework necessary to American self-government. Today, most pastors in Alaska serve as cautious chaplains to a fragmented culture rather than as public teachers of a coherent vision of ordered liberty.
The preachers of the founding era did not skirt the political questions. They named concrete public sins: slavery, tyranny, corruption, cowardice. They applied Scripture to taxation, sovereignty, the authority of the king, just-war criteria, and the conditions under which resistance was justified. Their sermons were not vague; they were specific, local, and costly. They knew that speaking this way could cost them social standing, financial security, and even personal safety, yet they believed that a God who rules nations must also speak to how nations are ruled.
Alice M. Baldwin, in The New England Clergy and the American Revolution, chronicles this in colonial New England. In Chapter X, “The Making of Constitutions,” New Englanders were “nourished from their youth on the election sermons” and “thoroughly enlightened by their pastors in theoretical and practical politics.” Ministers guided ideas about government.
These “election sermons” (annual messages preached on election day) explained how government is ordered and judged through Scripture and natural law. They also taught farmers, tradesmen, and merchants about authority, liberty, and civic duty in explicitly theological and political categories. Many laypeople lacked formal schooling. Their pastors, often the most educated men in their communities, articulated these ideas clearly. Clergy, in other words, were not spectators to constitutional development; they drove it.
In today’s Alaska, many pastors have retreated from the public square. Why do they no longer connect biblical teaching to civil structures?
The majority of pastors today can be roughly grouped into four types:
- The quiet shepherds who emphasize personal conversion, family life, and internal church issues, and while they often hold strong pro-life convictions, they refuse to address the prevailing culture of death publicly;
- The issue-selective activists who speak readily about homelessness, addiction, poverty, or environmental concerns, but soften or ignore topics like abortion, sexuality, and family breakdown conflicting with prevailing social taboos and legal regimes;
- The explicitly pro-life pastors who preach against abortion, support pregnancy centers, promote adoption and foster care, and urge legislative engagement;
- The pluralist chaplains who see their main function as keeping civic peace, offering generic spirituality, and blessing whatever broad consensus currently exists.
Furthermore, few pastors today can articulate a biblically informed structure of civil government. Young people are rarely taught principled civics. Rather, they are indoctrinated by social media, entertainment, and bureaucratic slogans. They pick up fragments, “democracy,” “rights,” “equity,” “freedom”, but not the deeper questions of who grants authority, what justice is, and what limits should be placed on state power.
When someone tries to recover a biblical framework for public life, especially noting how deeply it once shaped America, many secular critics react with reflexive suspicion. Instead of engaging claims about limited government, rule of law, human dignity, and moral accountability, they dismiss the whole project as “theocracy” or “Christian nationalism,” treating any use of Scripture in politics as an attempt to impose a state church or force private piety into law.
This superficial disdain is reinforced by a distorted understanding of “separation of church and state.” That principle, in its healthier form, means no state church and no coercion of conscience. In today’s discourse, however, it is often taken to mean that religious convictions may never shape political arguments. Secular moral frameworks, expressive individualism, and equity politics are all treated as neutral and permissible in public reasoning, even though they function as rival worldviews.
Explicit biblical reasoning, by contrast, is shunned. Critics then attack motives rather than ideas. Anyone who invokes Scripture is simply nostalgic for old hierarchies or seeking to protect their group’s status. That move sidesteps the real questions: Is government answerable to a higher standard than majority will? Should moral law limit state power? Are citizens allowed to bring their deepest convictions, religious or not, into debates about justice and the common good?
This helps explain why pastors are no longer the civic architects of liberty they once were. In colonial New England, clergy preached election sermons that shaped the political imagination of an entire people; they named public sins, applied Scripture to questions of power, and accepted real risk for doing so.
Today, clergy have widely accepted a narrow role: caring for individuals’ inner lives while avoiding the contested terrain of public life or speaking only on issues that do not threaten the reigning secular orthodoxies. Meanwhile, cultural gatekeepers treat biblical frameworks for civil order as suspect. The result: politics is noisy, but pulpits are muted; the state’s reach grows while the church buries its head.
As a result, youth are shaped almost entirely by secular conditioning. Through schools, digital media, and administrative systems, they are taught that government is the ultimate referee, and personal autonomy is the ultimate good. They learn skills, but not wisdom; slogans about “democracy,” but not the moral foundations that give liberty meaning and limits.
If the church refuses to recover its older, harder task of teaching a biblically grounded vision of law, authority, and freedom, then the next generation will simply inherit what the culture already believes: faith has nothing to say about how we order public life. To recover pastors as civic architects of liberty is not to ask them to run the state. It is to ask them to form minds and consciences capable of judging governments and policies by biblical standards, and to teach that true freedom requires more than mere tolerance.
Pastors have conceded to 501c and FEMA rules
Christians are required to apply biblical principles to all areas of life. Pastors are called to teach those principles. When they neglect their job and eschew controversial topics they leave their congregants unprepared to face the hard questions of life. The Bible has all the answers, but the principles need to be taught.
As someone raised in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations many congregations in New England are no more than cults pushing perverted lifestyles. Everything is fine so long as they receive the bloated compensation packaging dictated by their mainline hierarchy. When operational funds are exhausted the “Christian ” leadership gobbles up the property while abandoning worshippers. Those “churches” that survive proudly display perverted rainbow flags on their front lawn driving.Biblical loyalists to a real church.
This is why Charlie Kirk was murdered, and why every other Christian with the courage to speak out on social issues is a target.
Without a transcendent authority, nothing is inherently evil and people are material cogs. It is no mystery why secularism results in death culture. Christ or chaos.
Yup.
“Mainline” churches are failing.
Those that preach “reformed” Calvinism – which is most of the Protestant churches, are failing.
That that use the Scofield bible and preach the supremacy of Israel and Zionism are failing.
TPUSA will fade away as the zionists take over.
The youth are surging towards Catholicism and other Orthodox religions.
Religions that are steadfast, original, and battle to rise above the cultural norms of the day are growing.
Society established that religious leaders are often poor mentors. On the Christian side are galling examples:
Jim Baker… drugged and raped secretary and cooked the books. Sentenced to 45 years in prison
Ted Haggard… enjoyed crystal meth and a male prostitute
Bill Gothard… sexual assault on children, multiple rapes, etc.
Tony Alamo… child rapist, pedophile, married an 8yo girl. Sentenced to 175 years in prison
Fred Phelps… Westboro Baptist. Founding pastor. Known hate group.
Dave Reynolds… charged w/ 70 counts of possessing child porn
Jimmy Swaggart… known passion for (self) pleasure, prostitutes and porn
Mike Hintz… slipped the spirit of the lord to a minor that came to him for counseling
Rob’t Tilton… requested and rec’d money for thousands of prayers. Took money; dumped requests
Mark Driscoll… said Haggard enjoyed homosexual men because his wife had “let herself go”.
Joshua Duggar… religious TV goof. Known to have molested four of his sisters plus others.
Rory Coyle… posting selfies on grinder was reason for dismissal
Outside of Christendom Jews and Muslims foment hate. All of the world’s genital mutilation is faith based (and that’s just the tip).
Placing faith in Stan Lee comic books is much safer.
Yup.
All Calvinism “prosperity gospel” types.
Compelling list
Believe me, the last thing pastors want to do is to get in the middle of the current Right/Left political war. It’s already straining their congregations. They would much rather stay in the safe space of preaching the Gospel than dip their toe into the MAGA maelstrom. They’re not stupid.
Galatians 1:10 — For am I now seeking the favor of people, or of God? Or am I striving to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be a bond-servant of Christ.
Pleasing people is the gateway stupidity. It produces silence, silence produces drift, drift produces capture. The alternative isn’t partisan frenzy; it’s clear moral speech, disciplined action, and refusal to normalize decline.
And the moral logic is simple: you can’t preserve a nation by sacrificing courage and truth to avoid upsetting people. Hans, you’re smarter than this.
Try plugging the miasma of the Trump administration into your claim Michael. With trump routinely effing over every truth, norm and civil process that holds America together, and our leaders do nothing, we are normalizing decline.
Thank you once again Mr. Tavoliero.