The Rule of Law and the Christian Life

“His looke was sterne, and seemed still to threat
Cruell revenge, which he in hart did hyde,
And on his shield Sans Loy in bloudie lines was dyde.”

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Our nation has been reeling under an onslaught of violence and accusation. From where I sit, this began in August 2025 with the horrifying death of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who was senselessly stabbed to death by a convicted criminal who had a lengthy rap sheet and should never have been allowed back on the street at all. The liberal news media declined to provide any coverage on this, which you can verify by googling it: According to them, it did not happen, because it was not news.

In September Charlie Kirk was assassinated. As Nancy Pearcey fearlessly pointed out, Christianity Today’s response was typical progressive rhetoric, cowardly, and profoundly unhelpful. Died: Charlie Kirk, Activist who Championed MAGA Doctrine was their headline. “He didn’t just die,” she demurred forcefully. “He was murdered for his political beliefs shared by half the country. And for his beliefs on sexuality, abortion, and gender shared by 2 billion Christians worldwide.”

Then in January of 2025, Renee Nicole Good was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Although she had been trained as a political agitator and gunned her car engine after the officer told her to stop, hitting him and causing internal injuries, she was held up by liberal pundits as almost a Christ-figure for her martyrdom, and the federal agent who shot her (acting within the provision of the law) as Judas himself. The fact that she had tried to run over him with her car was not mentioned, since this fact did not support the narrative that Trump was trying to impose some form of martial law on the country and terrorize innocent civilians by shooting them in the streets.

This weekend, Alex Pretti showed up at an anti-ICE demonstration with a gun. He got into a struggle with law enforcement officers and was shot and killed. The fact that he had a gun was instantly denied on national news, making one wonder why they felt they had to deny it. Then when enough preponderance of evidence was available so that it could no longer be denied, the narrative switched to insisting that he had dropped the gun and that ICE agents had then shot him anyway. Whatever the facts of the matter, you were instructed to take away the conviction that President Trump was ordering his jackbooting agents to kill as many innocent people on our streets as possible, and if you did not agree with that assessment, you were part of the problem.

I noted that many of my liberal friends shared online the quote from George Orwell about the Party telling you to reject the evidence of your own eyes, and it being the final, most essential command. Perhaps someone should tell them that he was writing about the predictable end of socialism, something he was rather knowledgeable about firsthand, and that the quoted observation was made by Winston about the political group that had control of the news media. In other words, that he was talking about those who had the ability to change people’s perceptions of the evidence of the past, those who were using their power to flout the rule of law.

Evidence is a legal idea, and it is instructive to think about what the law has to say about each of these not-unconnected events, even (especially?) in those situations where the news media has desired us not to know certain elements of the situations.

Iryna’s death is not complicated for the law to weigh in on. A man had committed horrible atrocities against society, and a liberal judge put him back on the streets. He murdered Iryna in cold blood, and the news media tried to expunge the incident from our consciousness. The law says that the man is a murderer and should receive the death penalty. The law says the judge who put him back on the streets should not be a judge any more.

Nor is Charlie Kirk’s death hard to sort out. The shooter committed cold-blooded murder, and should receive the death penalty. Charlie Kirk was not provoking anyone, nor was he engaging in any kind of violence or lawbreaking. He was on stage at a private event talking to people about their differing points of view, an activity that would be viewed by any reasonable person as a virtuous and productive one. Yet the news media (including supposed Christian news media) still subtly implied that he was somehow responsible for his own death, since he held conservative views and must therefore have been some kind of extremist who deserved what he got.

Nicole Good’s death is where things begin not to be so easy to determine. The law is very clear that an armed officer may use lethal force if a vehicle is driven at them in a manner that “threatens to cause death or serious physical injury” to them. Did she do that? Was her partner’s screaming “Drive, baby, drive!” just before she got shot evidence of her inciting Nicole to kill the ICE agent? I do not think we can decide that from looking at the videos in a Facebook post. A jury will decide whether the agent did the right thing, and he will have his right to a day in court. What is certain, though, is that Nicole Good was not just an innocent bystander. She was involved in a way that did in fact cause direct harm to another and thus the mechanisms of the law must be called upon to render a decision on the facts.

Neither is Alex Pretti’s case so open-and-shut. He brought a gun to an anti-government demonstration. Does this mean he should have been shot for it? Certainly not – but he was not just sitting on a metro railway seat reading a book. He was not an innocent bystander, he was an armed participant in a struggle that ended in his death. Again, the case will be tried before a judge and a jury, and it is to be hoped that a just verdict will be given.

Underscoring the last two cases is the inescapable reality that millions upon millions of illegal immigrants have been allowed into our country by the Biden administration. Even such avowed liberal loyalists as Senator Mark Warner have admitted that they “made a mess” of our border in so doing. Plenty of those folks are hardworking, morally upstanding people who just want a better way of life. I know some of them. But since they are also human beings, that means some of them are violent criminals who have committed murder, rape, and fraud since they have been here. As such they are subject to punishment by law. That law necessitates the presence of officers whose job it is to sort out those who are here illegally and correct the malfeasance that allowed them to break our laws in the first place. To resist those officers in their work, especially when armed with a vehicle or a gun, is to bring the punishment of Romans 13 on one’s head. It is nothing more or less than the consequences of rash and lawless decisions.

It is the liberal news media’s consistent and unapologetic opposition to the rule of law that ought to give us concern. When a person sitting on a railway seat who is 100% innocent is murdered, but happens to be white and her assailant black, they censor the story and will not talk about it. When a person trying to talk with others about their differing points of view is murdered, but happens to be a Christian and his assailant a transgender man, they smear the victim’s name and imply that it is his own fault. When a lesbian woman drives her car into a law enforcement officer and causes him internal injuries, disobeying his orders to stop and he uses lethal force to stop her, they cast her as Jesus Christ in the flesh who should be held up as an object of worship. When a man carries a gun to an anti-government demonstration and gets into a struggle and the officers use lethal force to stop him, they present him as an innocent martyr who was taken out by rogue police who are looking for victims.

Should it come as a surprise to us that there are those who call good evil and evil good, who put darkness for light and light for darkness? It should not, if we read the Old Testament and more specifically Isaiah 5; but the surprise comes when Christian voices we know and respect are willing to accept the accounts of the liberal news media without question. The more our country’s journalism turns into simple lies, obscuring relevant facts and dispensing with the function of law in our society, the more poisonous venom it drips into all our relationships as it elevates evildoers to positions of worship and relegates actual innocent victims to becoming objects of scorn.

That scorn is a not insignificant component of all this. If we suppose, as Christ-followers who are dedicated to truth, that we will escape the scorn of those who rejoiced in Charlie Kirk’s death and turned a blind eye to Iryna’s horrifying death, we are fooling ourselves. Persecution has been a reality for believers all through history, from being torn to pieces in the Roman arena to the atrocities of the Roman Catholic Inquisition to the confiscation of the Huguenots’ worldly goods. “Be faithful unto death,” Christ promised in His letter to the Church in Smyrna, “and I will give you the crown of life.”

This will be difficult for us (for me), since as American Christians we have had the force of Law on our side for a long time. But we need to remember something about the Law. It can restrain evildoers, it can punish the wicked, it can provide a deterrent to those who would contemplate wrongdoing; but it cannot save. There is no redemption in it. Nobody in the history of the Scriptures or in human writings has ever found salvation from our sin in living by the requirements of the Law. Paul illuminates this for us in Titus 3:4-7:

“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”

There is no room for works here. If I am as innocent as Iryna, as virtuous in my civil discourse as Charlie Kirk, if I never drive a car into a police officer, if I never bring a gun to an anti-ICE rally, I will still fall short of the perfect obedience that is required for my holiness to meet God’s standards. The Law can never save me. But the faithful life, sinner’s death, and miraculous Resurrection of Jesus Christ will save me, if by faith I respond to the call of the Gospel. He has kept the Law on my behalf and on that basis – only on that basis – I am an heir of all the benefits of His active and passive obedience. This is our great boast, and we must not forget it. It is a hope worthy even of suffering for, if we are counted worthy of it, and it has power to save even the persecutors whose scorn we meet with grace.

When the proud Paynim of Spenser’s epic comes forth fierce and full of wrath, and his sharp-head spear pierces even the sacred Red Cross on our breast that has been the standard for so many of Christ’s valiant servants, let us not lose faith in that struggle. Sans Loy (“without Law”) is his name, and such were some of you. Such was I. But we were washed, we were sanctified, we were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. In that hope let us stand firm to the end, and He will give us the crown of life.

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Artwork credit: St. George and the Dragon, illustration copyright Trina Schart Hyman, 1984