The Moral Floor
How We’re Slipping Under It
My guts are just wrecked right now. I’ve been staying away from a lot of the “outside,” but it doesn’t do to be that way for long.
The incredible efforts of historian Heather Cox Richardson to offer a continuous first-person academic record, for us and for our descendants, of what is happening in real time is one way I check back in. I honestly don’t know how she and others do it. Kudos and deep appreciation.
Her post from December 27, 2025 was the punch that left me twisted up inside.
She began with this:
The Framers of the Constitution established the United States of America on the rule of law, rejecting any religious qualifications for office or religious legal doctrine. They recognized that the establishment of one religion over others attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Those in charge of government could throw representative government out the window and make themselves tyrants.
That paragraph isn’t academic. It’s a warning flare, especially in light of the very concrete actions by people operating as agents of the state that she went on to describe.
I’m going to say this bluntly:
We are living in another moment in our history when the state is actively deciding whose conscience counts. And that means the state is deciding whose life counts.
That “state” is now made up of people cloaking themselves in a religion, Christianity, and a text, the Bible, and claiming those as their guides and goals.
Are They Truly Biblical?
The words and actions of figures like Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and Laura Loomer, as described in Richardson’s essay, stop me cold.
Are they behaving as Christians?
Are they following the Bible?
My memory of the Ten Commandments leaps to mind, and the answer feels like a resounding no. But I also find myself wondering whether my memory is skewed. Maybe I overestimate how central the Ten Commandments really are to modern Christian life. Maybe they’re more decorative than formative now. Maybe they’re just symbols wheeled out when convenient.
But then I remember the cultural weight they once carried.
Remember 1956? Charlton Heston descending Mount Sinai in The Ten Commandments. Tablets raised. Law etched in stone. Thunder in the background. That film wasn’t fringe religion. It was Hollywood America. It told audiences in packed theaters that moral law stood above kings, mobs, and empires. Then it became prime-time and cable America. Now it’s streamable.
It’s striking that the same “golden age” nostalgia invoked by Stephen Miller this week, holiday movies, whitewashed memories, sentimental Americana, is being used to justify something profoundly different: exclusion, cruelty, and domination.
Heather Cox Richardson states clearly and correctly that the Founders did not form this nation as a Christian nation. We were established as a country founded on law. And in one of the earliest amendments to that law, religion and state were explicitly separated. That separation is one of our unalienable rights.
I’m going to say this clearly:
Moral behavior does not need to be couched in religion.
What Happened to the Moral Floor?
You don’t need to be Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, or anything at all to recognize a shared ethical baseline:
Don’t bear false witness.
Don’t steal dignity.
Don’t dehumanize.
Don’t sanctify cruelty.
Don’t turn power into an idol.
Call it the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments.
Call it natural law.
Call it conscience.
What we are watching now is not faith revived. It is faith weaponized. Religious language fused to state authority, military force, deportation machinery, and racial hierarchy. Christianity presented not as a moral discipline, but as a tribal marker: our people, our nation, our God.
That move isn’t new. It’s ancient. And it is always dangerous.
The Constitution Builders Knew This Trick
The Framers did not reject religion. Many of them were deeply religious.
What they rejected was religion enforced by government.
They understood, because history had already taught this lesson, that once the state claims divine authority, dissent becomes heresy, citizenship becomes conditional, and law becomes whatever the powerful say God wants today.
Freedom of conscience was not an afterthought. It was the keystone. Remove it, and every other right can be pried loose.
That is why government agencies declaring a shared Savior, or framing violence and deportation as religious celebration, feels so wrong. It is not just offensive. It is unconstitutional in spirit and authoritarian in design.
Cruelty Dressed as Celebration
There is something especially grotesque about cruelty wrapped in holiday imagery.
Christmas paired with mass deportations.
Faith paired with bombing announcements.
Mockery replacing moral seriousness.
When suffering is made festive, conscience is trained out of the public.
And when critics are dismissed as “snowflakes” or “pearl-clutchers,” that is not strength. It is a tell. Mockery is how people avoid reckoning with what they are doing.
Who Rings Today of Conscience?
Not a single savior.
Not one party.
Not one religion.
Conscience rings today in:
religious leaders who refuse to let faith become a weapon,
teachers and librarians quietly defending pluralism,
veterans who know violence is not holy,
parents insisting their children’s worth is not conditional,
neighbors who refuse to laugh when others are dehumanized.
It rings wherever someone says: No. The state does not get to decide whose soul counts.
This Is the Line
I am not writing against Christianity.
I am writing against domination disguised as faith.
I am not arguing for moral relativism.
I am arguing for a moral floor so basic that every tradition recognizes it.
Conscience is not conformity.
Faith is not state power.
Patriotism is not exclusion.
No one gets to be the nation’s “real” people.
The United States was founded on a radical idea: that government must serve all, precisely because conscience is unalienable.
Lose that, and we lose everything else.