[This interview was conducted by Obadiah D. Morris in the summer of 2024, with Michael Plaisted, a Christian anarchist who has been exposing the evils of statism for quite some time now]

Leaving Egypt Ministries: Could you tell us a little bit about your ministry? You run AbolishHumanArchism.com. The average person wouldn’t know what that means, mostly since they don’t realize the “an” in “anarchism” is actually a prefix to another word, “archist” or “archos,” meaning essentially that one is against rulers. But the “human” part of your site’s name says something stronger than the average secular anarchist, who says absurdities like “no gods, no masters.” It implies that the real Christian anarchist position is actually one of no human rulers, not no rulers whatsoever. This exposes secular anarchism as really a fallacy. The choice is rather who is your archist, the Lord or men? While “Christocrat” or “Christarchist” or something of the like may be a better term to express the Christian anarchist position that the Lord is the only true and legitimate archist (which is anarchist only insofar as we are speaking of human archists), can you help explain this to people who are new to these ideas? How do you respond to the inevitable statist idolaters who are going to come out of the woodwork to say “God gave us human rulers…you don’t know what you’re talking about”? How do we explain to professing Christians that they must oppose human archists if they truly regard Jesus as the King? How do we succinctly make the case that all Christians must be anarchists insofar as we are talking about human rulers of the world? And how do we explain the false dichotomy, or false political spectrum, of those who think things are so simple as “libertarianism to authoritarianism”? How can we help show them that Jesus Christ is the King and the true way to liberty is rejecting all archists but Jesus our King?

Michael Plaisted: To flesh out the meaning and purpose of Abolitionism would require an uninterrupted decade of monologue, but I will try my best to condense an introduction here. You touch on an important facet by highlighting the “human” aspect of its moniker. When God gave dominion to man, it was over the land, vegetation, and animals. The only thing that God never gave man dominion over is his fellow man. This is because man is the only creation that is made in God’s Image, so long as he keeps the Dominion Mandate. It is the Dominion Mandate that keeps man free. When man gives up his rights to his labor (through social security enrollment and income tax), and his rights to his property (through tax write offs and legal titles), he ceases to hold Dominion and must go under the dominion of ruling men. He ceases to possess the image of God, and starts to possess the mark of a beast, because he is property of a ruling administration to be its workhorse as its property. Man should be an “archist,” only over the things that God prescribes: land, livestock, labor, and his family through natural relationships as God intended with Adam. Man should never play archist over his peers. This perversion of Dominion is always a result of sin and therefore is a consequence for sin. If you are in bondage to your sin, under the dominion of ruling men, then you are in need of repentance, to cry out to God for salvation, to be adopted into His Kingdom instead. God gives rulers to those who need to be punished for raising up rulers. They are a punishment for evil works. The only punishment explicitly listed by Paul in Romans 13 is taxation. This means that, if you are taxed, then you are being punished for your sin, and you are in need of a divine liberator.

This makes Jesus the quintessential abolitionist because he abolished human authority, according to 1 Corinthians 15:24-26, and its kingdoms of death, according to 2 Timothy 1:10. The purpose of Abolitionism is to liberate man from the dominion of man, and to restore to him the right to be ruled by God alone, as is expressed by the principle of Jubilee in Leviticus 25:10. This is the reward for repentance and faith, as we see with the Israelites at the Exodus and the early Christians at Pentecost. Each group was removed from the jurisdiction of human rulers, and restored to God’s jurisdiction.

The simple distinction between an abolition-minded person, and someone who is either a statist, or archist, or voter, or what-have-you is whether or not they know what a gospel is in the first place. Most are unaware that the term is not “Christian” in origin, do not admit that it is not exclusive to Jesus Christ, and cannot define it outside of some Sunday School rhetoric. Of course, they will tell you that it means “good news,” without understanding that this myopic definition begs the question: Is every piece of good news to be considered a gospel? To get to the point, gospels are political campaign messages. The gospel of Caesar was of the Pax Romana, a one-world government that promised peace, liberty, protection, provision, and bureaucratic convenience. Jesus, on the other hand, preached the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, which also promised peace, liberty, protection, provision, and personal responsibility unto the weightier matters. It is necessary that the two gospels are in opposition. God does not share dominion over man, and neither does Caesar. For this reason, the early Christians were kicked out of the social security administrations of Rome when they declared themselves to have no King but Christ. In truth, the term Christian Anarchist is a redundancy in terms. They are synonymous. There are anarchists in one group, and there are those who take Christ’s name in vain, if they take it at all, in another group. All of Scripture polarizes all of humanity into one of those categories. The Bible is a textbook of political science, where every single entry is a prescription of the Kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven, and a proscription of the kingdoms of false gods, on earth as they are in Hell.

What’s most important to express here is that failure to be aware of these subjects is not an ignorance issue, but rather a sin issue. Those who know God, hear his voice, and recognize truth when confronted by it (John 10:27). Those whom God has given over to a reprobate mind to belong to false gods in their idolatry, will suppress the truth in unrighteousness, deceiving themselves and react out of their conviction when exposed in their sin. God compels us to preach the Gospel anyway: Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand (Matt 3:2). You cannot serve two masters (Matt 6:24). You must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).

Leaving Egypt Ministries: I have tried to make that last point in some of my articles, too, how the reaction that men are giving against the (redundant) Christian anarchist message (they fight against it) is based more so in sin and a lack of spiritual discernment on their part, than it is some simple moral failing alone, though it is that too. This, to me, seems to be the shortcoming in much of secular libertarian philosophy and free market economics. These mere theorists of liberty think that if only we can show people the “logic” of liberty or the reasoning behind a free economy, that they will up and convert and abandon their statism. F.A. Hayek famously said that “if socialists knew economics they wouldn’t be socialists.” But it’s obviously much deeper than that. Men aren’t simply statists and socialists because they are economic illiterates, as many assume who take up the goal of economic education in an attempt to change men. They are chasing after false gods. Statism is a false religion that has tricked men into serving evil. We’re facing more of a sin problem than an economic ignorance problem when it comes to the support for violent political intervention, right? How do we get secular libertarian anarchists to see all this? How does all this change our strategy and approach to the lost men of the world who are still trifling with politics? Obviously, it’s not as easy as saying “read an economics book!” 

Michael Plaisted: In truth, secularism is a fantasy. The early Christians were accused by the Romans of being atheists, precisely because they refused to bow down to the gods of human civil government, referring to the judges and magistrates of Rome. Their God was invisible, the God of Nature, and therefore the arbiter of Natural Law. He is in direct competition with unnatural gods and their legalism. The discrepancy is never between “God” and “no god,” it is only between “the one true God” and the “pantheon of human institutions.” Everyone is religious, by definition. You either practice public religion, by giving up your taxes so your neighbor can receive benefits, or you can practice pure and undefiled religion by volunteering your charity so your neighbor can receive benefits. Everyone must belong to a society. The society of polytheists is bound in contracts, entitlements, and taxation. The society of Christians is bound in faith, hope, and charity.

The pressing matter is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Even those who value liberty, but attempt to map out its heading without including repentance of the sins that brought them into bondage and unto faith in the way expressed by God’s prophets and followed by God’s people. Any such endeavor that excludes these notions can only ever circle the drain of civil bondage and self-destruction. Repentance requires the admission of the sins that led to bondage, and begs for a divine liberator. Any worldview that dismisses the importance of repentance and faith is one that imagines that bondage is characterized by perpetual victimization, and any work that does not hope for an external savior invariably is characterized by self-refuting works-based salvation. Civil bondage is meant to be a hopeless futility for everyone who does not want to be ruled by God, because only sin leads to bondage.

The simple truth is that only a Christian worldview is one that can properly value liberty. Every other opinion and idea must borrow from and plagiarize the Christian worldview, and no doubt emphatically insist on its own genuine existence, but cannot account for its origin. Only the Author of the concepts of truth, justice, mercy, righteousness, and freedom can make a people upright and free. And it is only the rejection of His jurisdiction that allows them to be given over to a reprobate mind to serve the false gods of their own making. Can reprobate thinking accurately see the moral necessities of liberty? Or will they always be stumbling around in the dark, either justifying institutionalism with their mouths, or with their habits and behaviors in spite of their vocalized desire to be free? The way to liberty is very narrow, and few will find themselves on it. Freedom is a very exclusive club, and the only prerequisite to get in is a Biblical worldview that values personal accountability for one’s own bondage, and personal responsibility towards one’s own liberty. Most people value a concept of liberty on some moral grounds, but they lack a consistent worldview full of ultimate answers by which to presuppose liberty as valuable, or morality as definitive. Abolitionists recognize that only an evangelical approach to a lost and self-righteous generation is one that might free them from the bondage of their own making. Men must be converted if they want to be free.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: I’ve been finding it difficult to give the Christian anarchist message to professing Christians that seemingly prefer to just stay ignorant and lost in the world. They are all filled with this idea that “we’re not supposed to judge” or that telling them to turn away from idolatry is somehow “mean” and done in “anger.” Some people like to respond to our rebukes that “that is between me and God” and is “none of your business” when we tell people stuff like God doesn’t want people serving as police officers or soldiers. Is calling people to repentance outside of our role? The scriptures on reproving and rebuking suggest otherwise (2 Timothy 4:2). Are men who try to follow the Lord to be free to do whatever they want to do without anyone like us saying something about it? It seems like most people who fight against the Christian anarchist message—that we should separate ourselves from the State, abstain from voting, tear down idols like flags, criticize military service, etc—are often just guilty of all these idolatrous themselves and just don’t like being called out on it. Do you find that to be the case? 

Michael Plaisted: Professing Christians will always be the hardest mission field to reach for the simple fact that Jesus Christ came to heal those who humbly admit that they are sick and not those who falsely believe they are well. The Pharisees stood on two thousand years of dogma and human tradition, reading from the same scriptures that Jesus did, but coming to opposing interpretations. The worldview of modern Christians is much more aligned with that of the Pharisees than it is with that of Christ, even though they admit that Jesus is the “Messiah.” It’s bonkers. In reality, their beliefs, which contradict their professed worldview, were not concluded through careful study and reason, but were passively received dead traditions and empty rituals. They are products of their environment, and did not have to work at the truth in order to win the right to say that they possess it. They are not “working out their salvation with fear and trembling,” and do not acknowledge that faith without works is dead. This is why their beliefs about policing agents, military, politicians, passing judgment, and any other contradiction against Scripture and common sense are so easily ignored: they just do not have a frame of reference by which to judge their ignorance. They say a prayer one time, go to church once a week to sing some songs, listen to some sophistry, and pass the plate, but they do not even know what Christ commanded his followers to do, much less do what he commanded. They say “Lord, Lord,” but receive “depart from me, I never knew you” (Matt 7:21-23).

If Jesus preached today the same message that he preached in the first century, the overwhelming majority of professing Christians, conservative and liberal, would be the loudest one shouting “Crucify him” (John 19:15). This is not speculation. This is not me being edgy. This is based on experience. Churchgoing Christians, when their backs are up against the wall, and confronted with their apathy and idolatry, are quick to threaten you with bodily harm and imprisonment. If you stand outside of a church some Sunday morning, as grown men are walking their little old mothers inside, and you try to tell them about their obligation to love their neighbor and to do justice and love mercy, and be their brothers keepers, they will sit their mothers down in the nearest pew and then return to you to scream in your face, call the cops, and threaten you with physical violence. I am saying this from a lot of personal experience, different men, different churches, all professing evangelical christians who have no idea what it means to be Christian other than to vote republican. But there’s a reason why Jesus went to the lost sheep of the house of Israel before turning to those who did not take God’s name at all. Judgment begins in the House of God, as the good book says, so maybe professing Christians are the target audience for the Gospel, until they’ve had ample opportunity to reject it. Unfortunately, they most surely will.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: You were telling me how you’ve had the police called on you for holding signs in front of churches. What was the nature of these debates? Typical hard-headed statists who didn’t want to listen to you because they would be indicted for their own idolatry? Very few people are willing to take the message of God to the streets, as I have done myself. In my own experiences, I have had mixed reactions. Some have praised me for doing it, others yell stuff at me (it would be instructive, by the way, for me to show one day how holding a sign quoting the prophets gets you called a “democrat” outside a car window by conservatives). It seems men today have lost touch with what Biblical figures were doing, such as the prophets preaching against whole cities and the rulers themselves, or the apostles traveling around with the gospel. Do you think we could make a bigger impact if more people were doing this? And let me hearken back to you pointing out how the “gospel” is not just some generic message but is political in nature. Because others have done street preaching with, I hesitate to say this, a sort of generic “Jesus loves you” message. Do you think that the people who are already out there need to be saying more than this? Shouldn’t they be talking about the kingdom of God? About man’s need to separate himself from the kingdoms of men?

Michael Plaisted: So, the encounters I’ve had with the public and self-professing christians have not even explicitly been over the subjects of bondage, liberty, and anarchism, but rather over one of the lowest hanging fruits of Christian apathy: the abortion holocaust that plagues the world. Church-going christians are so far gone in their reprobate thinking that they cannot even fathom the culpability of their own inaction concerning the mass infanticide of pre-born human beings, much less their complete lack of awareness about the explicit purpose of Christianity in the first place. I have had the cops called on me by churchgoers, and then had those same church goers threaten my person with bodily harm in front of the same cops they just called on me, all because I have said that people who call themselves Christians should be doing something about a holocaust that is occuring on their watch. No doubt if they are so convicted in their apathy over something so obvious, they will expose themselves as intolerant, violent animals when confronted about their sins of commission, referring to their idolatry, covetousness, and statism.

This is due to the fact that professing Christians are so afraid of the concept of “works based salvation,” that they hate the concept of works altogether, and are entirely comfortable with doing the bare minimum when it comes to some idea of “obedience to God.” Nevermind the fact that they imagine that dressing up to attend a weekly ritual even remotely resembles obedience in any sense, they also imagine that “the Gospel” is just the good news of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

But if you tell them that Jesus himself preached the Gospel, but he didn’t teach his own death, burial, and resurrection, they just give you a blank stare. The churches they attend are clearly not feeding doctrinal meat, and the milk that they are espousing from these pulpits is either so watered down that its nutrition is neutralized, or so spoiled that these people cannot recognize fresh truth when they hear it. As I say often, the perfect metric to gauge whether a professing christian, whether he warms a pew or stands on a soapbox, understands the barebones definition of Christianity, is to ask him if he knows what a gospel is. Most will recite some Sunday School answer about the Gospel, but you can always tell right away that they don’t understand that the phrase “The Gospel” is a synecdoche for “The Gospel of the Kingdom of God.”

And even most celebrity theologians cannot define that either, without referring to some nebulous and ethereal ambiguity that is necessarily hyperspirtual, apolitical, and functionally meaningless. But every single prophet of Scripture clearly taught a literal Kingdom with its own laws, customs, governments, system of welfare, and historical continuity. They taught a very specific way to organize a free society, and they condemned every other form of society, each characterized by subject citizenship plagued by taxation, and drowning in debt, covetousness, and sloth towards the weightier matters (Matt 23:23). Most evangelists today can say all the right aphorisms, and use the correct vocabulary, but their meanings and definitions are entirely peripheral and irrelevant to the meanings and definitions of the early Christians.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: It seems like those who are caught worshiping military and police already don’t want to be corrected on all these things you address either, lest they have to confess that they have been idolaters who championed state-sanctioned murder. So it’s easier for them to go on acting like God doesn’t mind flag-wavers, men who put on boots and badges for the State, etc. And they cite a few scriptures to support their ideas of militarism, even though books like Joshua were God’s people hanging kings and such (Josh 10:22-28). I guess they imagine that the American military today is akin to the Joshua story? How do people make so many excuses? We also hear people say “the centurion had faith” as a supposed argument for Christians serving in the military. How do we show these people that their attempt at a Biblical justification for their legalized murder doesn’t work? How is it that so many men basically just read their own worldview into the Bible, rather than to have it inform their understanding of the world?

Michael Plaisted: I am reminded of a paraphrase of a quote by Jonathan Swift: ”It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he never was reasoned into.” These positions that people hold are idolatrous, but they did not reach them through careful thought and consideration. They arrived at their conclusions through sin, sloth, and fear of man, and then worked backwards to justify themselves by forming intellectual-sounding excuses and eisegesis. In short, their positions are insincere, no matter how emphatic and insistent their “reasoning.” Statism, bondage, and idolatry are not ignorance issues, in need of education and reasoning, they are sin issues in need of confrontation and repentance. But when a sinner’s back is against the wall, and you expose his darkened heart to reveal that it is full of cockroaches climbing over each other to stay in the dark, the man lashes out and reaches for any scripture he can twist or excuse he can make to deflect with, and distract you from shining the light on his sin. He becomes feral and desperate, like Adam who wants to hide from God.

You see, all men who do not want to be ruled by God, and want to rule themselves, or elect other gods to rule him instead, all must become cowards first, and then must whitewash and sophisticate their cowardice through lofty opinions raised up against the knowledge of the truth. No doubt this deep-seeded intellectual cancer is strengthened by a suicidal sense of normalcy bias: they have always known tax-funded cops and military and politicians and welfare, and they cannot imagine another way. Their reprobate minds can only show them a surface-level knee-jerk reaction to the idea of reforming those readily available realities. They cannot possibly be ready to admit that absolutely everything they know and take for granted are things that God actually hates. They are not ready to confess that they have been doing it wrong their whole lives, that their parents and grandparents might not be in Heaven because they did it wrong too, that they themselves taught their children to passively and effortlessly go with the multitude to do evil. They don’t want to admit that they’ve been lied to, and co-opted the lie. Truth sounds like hate to those who hate truth, and institutionalism is necessarily a Tower of Babel, where the voice of the people, if numerous enough, and loud enough, can drown out God’s call to righteousness.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: Ah, yes, I run into this all the time. I point out that God hates to see men serve Pharaohs and Caesars as soldiers and police officers, and they try and paint me as the “hateful” and “angry” one who is lacking the Spirit of God for simply pointing out the truth. They try to play the nice-guy virtuous card, as if being nice while harboring lies in your mind negates the lies. They think it is better to avoid confronting evil and idolatry if it might make someone think you aren’t being “nice,” than it is to rebuke and reprove and risk coming off as “mean.” A quote from AW Tozer explains this idea perfectly. He said, “To wink at iniquity for the sake of peace is not proof of superior spirituality; it is rather a sign of a reprehensible timidity which dare not oppose sin for fear of consequence.” But it isn’t actually loving to try and not let another man live a lie. Another argument I come across often is “you can’t claim to know what God thinks.” But God gave us his word, and it is clearly a scathing rebuke against statism, is it not? Do these people not read the Bible? Or did they read their own worldly philosophies and biases into it? Did all the false pastors of the world make them think this way? The main reason, it seems to me, that people fight against the Christian anarchist message is that they simply don’t want to repent from their worldly statism and so do anything they can to make us go away. Sadly, as you said with most Christians being willing to crucify Christ again today, it seems that most of them are the same people from the Bible who killed the prophets, even though they would say, “if we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets,” but by getting angry at our rebuke of their idolatry, “testify against [themselves] that [they] are the sons of those who murdered the prophets” (Matthew 23:30-31). 

Michael Plaisted: People love to be fooled. They all have a conflict of interest against assenting to any form of repentance that actually requires them to have personal accountability, and a change in daily habits that is keeping in repentance. On one hand, yes, they are being lied to by clergymen, seminaries, and celebrity theologians, but on the other hand, they raise those institutions up to tell them exactly what they want to hear. But they never wonder why, if the early Christians were so heavily persecuted for being at enmity with “the world,” that they themselves are living comfortably and possess no evidence of opposition from the pagans that surround them.

Ironically, as you point out, these false converts do expose themselves as such. If they assert that “you can’t know what God thinks,” then they are confessing that they do not know God, and have never had a relationship with His Spirit. They will also say “You don’t know my heart,” never realizing that you are just examining their fruit, which is naturally indicative of the tree from which it is grown (Matt 7:15-20). The oversocialized will always conflate the exposing of division with the causing of division. But the truth is necessarily divisive precisely because it is indivisible. The truth is a rock on which to build a house, and they want to split it or mold it so that it better suits their pre-made house full of presuppositions and recycled beliefs that just aren’t true. When you expose the lie, they shoot the messenger, and then blame you for their reaction. Paul’s letter to the Galatian sums up the sentiment: “Am I therefore become your enemy, because I tell you the truth?” Paul also mentions in Romans about what it means to be given over to a reprobate mind when idolaters, whether or not they take Christ’s name in vain, are actually worshiping the institutions of their own making. God gives them up to futile thinking, to have the reactions that you’re describing, or they make the excuses that you’re witnessing. Like Pilate, they do not actually recognize truth when they hear it. They are not God’s sheep who can really hear the Shepherd’s voice. This is a scary place to be. Scripture says they have scales on their eyes, and that it often takes a miracle for them to be removed. The paradox is that we must still commit to the foolishness of preaching, knowing full well that it falls on deaf ears most of the time. The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few (Matt 9:27).

Leaving Egypt Ministries: I’ve seen a lot of people lately who like to try and separate politics and religion in an illegitimate way. They claim to follow the Lord, for instance, but abandon Him when it comes to politics, and say, for instance, “I’m not worshiping [the guy I want to be president], I’m just voting for him…calm down, I’m not actually idolizing him.” But isn’t voting essentially a form of worship and idolatry? Can a man really separate these two things if he claims to be a Christian? Aren’t we to make all things captive to Christ? Don’t we already have a King in Jesus? 

Michael Plaisted: To understand what worship actually is, according to the Bible, it is necessary to understand what religion is, according to the Bible. People who try to separate it from politics confess that they do not know the first thing about Christianity. Religion is politics. In his Law Dictionary published in 1856, John Bouvier defines religions as “Real piety in practice, consisting in the performance of all known duties to God and our fellow men.” Scripture, in both the ancient Hebrew, and the Koine Greek defines God or gods as lawgivers, judges, magistrates, and civil rulers with either absolute or limited authority. Public religion, therefore, consists of duties to ruling men who are Benefactors who exercise authority, who take care of our fellow man by extorting us through taxation and other forms of compelled sacrifice. Pure and undefiled religion, according to James 1:27, is to visit orphans and widows of our own accord, out of personal responsibility and adhocratic charity, and to keep ourselves unstained from the world of public religion.

This brings us to how worship should be defined. Most people would imagine that it refers to some sing-along on a Sunday Morning, with or without fog machines, mood lighting, and simple chord progression from a man on stage sporting skinny jeans. However, Scripture paints a more political picture. There are several Greek words we find translated as “worship.” Proskuneo is “used of homage shown to men and beings of superior rank.” It has to do with doing the will of someone seen as a superior like a ruler or judge. The word idolatry comes from the Greek word eidololatria, a compound of eidolon (“image/idol”) and latreia (“worship”). The Greek word latreia is said to mean “worship, service paid to the gods, hired labor.” The verb latreuo is defined as “to serve, minister to, either to the gods or men and used alike of slaves and freemen.”

For fear of being long-winded on the subject, I won’t go into how the Hebrew words for worship make even a stronger case for the concept being purely political. To summarize, they relate worshippers to being like dogs who “lick a master’s hands,” or to be “compelled to work,” like we see with the Israelites in corvee slavery in Egypt, which is just no different than an income tax today.

To finally address your initial question, I would not liken voting to worship as a primary connotation. I say this, because, etymologically, a vote is moreso related to prayer than it is to worship. According to Webster’s Dictionary, anyway. The term, borrowed from Latin, comes from “vow,” and a Votary is a person, such as a monk or nun, who has made vows of dedication to religious service. There’s plenty of Scripture that warns about making vows, and how they always lead to compelled service. Matthew 5:33-37 comes to mind, where Jesus says that anything more than making your “yes,” yes, and “no,” no comes from evil. We know that the warnings that Samuel gave to the idolatrous Israelites who voted for a king came true (1 Sam 8:11-17), and they were cursed with service to his administration, in actual worship through heavy taxation. They did not want to be ruled by God alone, in their hearts and minds, and wanted a ruling king like all the other nations. Most professing Christians today take the exact same stance, because they do not believe in God’s power, so look to give power to presidents and Supreme Courts to do what they refuse to do, according to God’s Law out of personal responsibility.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: Another idea we keep seeing today among “Christian voters” is their claims that us non-voters are somehow the ones giving into evil, when it’s clearly them! When they see us call them away from these systems, they say, “Oh, so we should just overlook evil now? Should we allow evil to become law? We should let pro-abortionists get elected?” They like to quote the idea that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Are we doing nothing when we abstain from voting? Are we doing nothing if we refuse to attempt to advance God’s kingdom through the political means of coercion? Arguably, these are the very means of doing evil, and we’re not called to return evil for evil, but to do good. It seems the Christian who is involved in politics really doesn’t understand Jesus or Biblical Christianity. Are we being too harsh to suggest that most people claiming to know God are fools who are lost in the world?

Michael Plaisted: Misery loves company. Those who go with the multitude to do evil do so because they require acceptance and validation from the herd already, so when you expose their weakness, and their conscience accuses them because of it, they turn into drama-hounding rage machines, projecting their own guilt onto you. If you do not need the herd to tell you how to think and, in this case, to vote, then something must be wrong with you. Every institutionalist, at heart, is an imperialist. Towers of Babel need slaves to be built and maintained, and no child gets left behind. If the standard for herd mentality did not include voting, but did include belonging to a 501c3 social club, then you would be labeled evil for not attending a church once a week. The common denominator isn’t participating in democracy, or church membership, but whether you’re willing to goose-step to any of the arbitrary demands of groupthink. There is no self-reliance or individualism acceptable to a statist’s mind. They are inferior and so they feel inferior, and they must drag you down to their level to feel better about themselves. That level always expresses some weakness, like going to the polls, to let tyrants rule over your neighbor at the insistence of their own taxes, no less.

Voters confess themselves to be easily manipulated. They know they are powerless, having giving up the power of God willingly in their idolatry, and choose to believe that the only power they can possess is vicariously through some civil father, protector, provider, lawgiver, judge, and savior that they have nursed into legislative, executive, and judicial authority. They don’t want to keep the weightier matters. It’s too much work. So they must redefine the standard for righteousness to be about voting. We know that doing so is less than the bare minimum (and that it is actually evil instead) but they absolutely need a cathartic, simulated event that mistakes motion for action. They wear the jerseys, cheer for their favorite team, and attend their weekly watch parties, but after the Superbowl big election every season, whether their team won or lost, they feel a sense of satisfaction and emotional validation which ties them over till the next season. They have no identity or personality outside of their gang mentality and, as pointed out in the football allegory, this mentality permeates every single aspect of their lost little lives. Nationalism, political parties, football teams, American Idol contestants, cell phone manufacturers, brands of power tools… examples can be continued ad nauseum, but the point is that nobody can think for themselves, and nobody actually wants to. There’s way too much accountability and pressure to be right all alone compared to being wrong with everyone else.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: You once made a good comment to someone who said something like “real Christians are bad Romans.” While this comment is further than most men make it, your response showed its shortcomings. You said something like, “real Christians do not have Romans.” I think this is what a lot of people don’t understand today, especially those who tell us we must get out there and vote because an evil government rules over us. If we actually obeyed God and stopped being involved in these systems, we wouldn’t even have Romans ruling over us; the Romans come precisely when men fail at their duty to love God and their neighbors. If we gave half as much time and attention to building up our neighbors and loving them, as Jesus commanded, we wouldn’t even have to worry about the kingdoms of men, which exist only when we forsake our duties to God, family, and neighbors, by giving over our inheritance to false benefactors who call themselves “the government.” Can you say more about this?

Michael Plaisted: The implication of Jesus Christ’s message is that there’s no such thing as dual citizenship between the Kingdom of Heaven and any of the kingdoms of the world. The early Christians were not persecuted by the Roman Empire because they were disobedient Roman citizens who happened to call themselves Christians. They were persecuted because they were not Roman citizens at all, but had their own kingdom altogether, within the heart of the Roman Empire, but entirely independent of it. They had their own laws, customs, government, system of welfare, and historical continuity. They had an organized, grassroots network that spanned across several continents, growing every day in spite of persecution. We see in the gospel accounts that those who declared themselves to have no King but Christ were put out of the temples, which were civil offices of social security enrollment. They were no longer allowed to partake of the socialist benefits of authoritarian government, and were no longer counted among its citizenry.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: Christians today have strayed far from these ideas, though. Whole congregations are filled with people collecting “social security” checks, retirement packages from serving the State, etc., and they have no idea just how much these things represent their bondage to these systems. They attend vain worship services and no pastors call people to abandon these systems and renounce their welfare payments. One of the convincing mechanisms of such state programs as “Social Security” was to get men to say that they paid into it and were only collecting the money they were due. But we see how that has worked out. Social security checks are being taxed, payments are being pulled for people who don’t pay them, and the totals are being cut and changed all the time. It’s total bondage to the rulers. Since those who represent the “church” today are not truly part of daily ministration for their people and others, it has allowed them to neglect these aspects of Kingdom-work and think that all they really need to do is believe in God and not be doers of the word (James 1:22-25). If only we could get people back to being Kingdom-minded, which would necessarily mean coming out of the institutional church as we know it and the statist system that men still participate in! 

Michael Plaisted: Yes, they say they believe in God, but they do not love him. He says that if they do not forgive their debtors, then they will not be forgiven by God. But anyone who receives socialist benefits like you’ve described must still necessarily say that his neighbor must pay for them through taxation. They are still collecting what they think they are owed in their entitlement, enslaving their neighbor in the process. Jesus literally says that the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, and social security is, not just a rejection of that command, but an imperialist aggression against the poor and needy. But if you will not obey the laws of the Kingdom of Heaven, can you really have citizenship there? If your providence comes from false gods and their socialist administrations, wouldn’t that express exactly where your citizenship does belong?

The unrighteous mammon is bankrupt. Anything that subject slaves “pay into” it goes to alleviate the interest on the debt borrowed by their parents and grandparents when they received socialist security. Likewise, anything they “receive” comes from borrowing against their children and grandchildren whom they have sold into bondage as collateral for their covetousness. This is the nature of the beast. Whatever they think they are owed from the system is paid for in blood, because they have sacrificed their children onto the altars of Baal and Molech through birth certification and social security enrollment for tax write-offs and some future promise that their children’s labor will pay for their old age. Jesus explicitly says that this Corban makes the word of God to none effect because children should be honoring their father and mother by taking care of their parents in the old age out of personal responsibility, and not socialist benefactors who exercise civil authority.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: What are things we should be doing to break out of Egypt today? Given that so many men think politics is sufficient for changing the world, many of them have given up on any real Kingdom work that could actually affect change. They don’t think they need to work with their neighbors, but instead think it’s alright to take a bite out of them through the democratic political system, which is the very thing that thwarts the kingdom. Others attend vain worship services once a week at buildings they call a “church” and think that’s all they need to do to be doing their part. How do we get people acting like the true “church” again? How do we build networks where men are involved in a daily ministration and see politics, socialism, and Sunday church worship are not the answers? How do we build communities that can actually escape the system that men have built up around themselves? And what were the things that men did wrong that caused these systems to come about?

Michael Plaisted: The only way to leave Egypt is to be saved from it. At least, this is the context for which the concept of salvation should be understood. When Jesus tells men to “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” he is not referring to some afterlife intangibility, but to a political reality requiring an expatriation from the bondage and sin under which you were born. It should be noted that the wilderness that the Israelites went into when they were kicked out of Egyptian citizenship was still under Egyptian jurisdiction. The Egyptian exodus for the Isrealites did not immediately or necessarily mean the “love it or leave it” approach that idolaters sarcastically mean today. It meant that they were in the world of Egyptian borders without being of the world of its citizenship. The same is true for the early Christians at Pentecost when thousands of Jews were kicked out of Rome’s social security programs at once. They did not leave the lands occupied by the Pax Romana, but they were no longer subject citizens enrolled within its political jurisdictions. They were not subject to its legalism or owed it taxes, or were even eligible to vote if they even wanted to.

This is because, in both instances, the Israelites and the Christians were already repenting and doing the works that God had intended from the beginning of human history. Salvation from Egyptian and Roman citizenship was a reward for their obedience and faith. They both had stopped receiving the benefits of pagan governments, and were working twice as hard to continue paying what they owed to Pharaoh and Caesar, while also contributing to a network of charity to keep their fellow man free from having to apply to Pharaoh and Caesar for daily bread and other boons of their administrations.

It’s true that people who go to church on Sunday mornings think they are fulfilling the command to “not forsake the assembly,” or whatever, but in reality, they do not know what it means to assemble together according to Christ’s commands and the practice of the early Christians. When Jesus fed the 5000 families, he first instructed them to organize themselves into ranks of adhocratic small groups, about ten families per group. Their purpose was not to sing some songs and listen to some sophistry, but rather to form a political unit of accountability and welfare redistribution. This group became their means of being their brothers’ keepers to supplement each other with voluntary sacrifices that rivaled the systems of taxation and socialism offered by pagan kingdoms. When organized in this manner, fulfilling the weightier matters out of personal responsibility, God blessed their relationships by miraculously multiplying their burnt offerings like he had done with the loaves and the fish. The entire account was a lesson that God’s providence actually feeds his people, and strengthens the hand of the poor and needy, while the providence of false gods is a false promise of prosperity, but only ever cripples the poor with more debt.

When the early Christians assembled together, it was to be faithful to the other members of their ten-family congregations, and to set the Lord’s Table by bringing their surplus of bread and wine and other symbols of provision to make sure that each other had enough to eat for the rest of the week. The Lord’s Supper is a system of freewill welfare to replace social security, food stamps, public education, and other financial aid that entices men into bondage under Pharaoh, Caesar, President, and any other example of paganism you can imagine. This network of charity only began in the individual congregations, but it did not stay confined to them. Because their obedience to this model of society was blessed by God, they had enough provision for congregations to take care of other congregations, all of them networked together in a literal Kingdom. They facilitated care packages across the entire known world with better expediency and efficiency than the bureaucracies of the Pax Romana.

It was this success that inspired Rome to persecute the Christians. They became perfect scapegoats for a socialist empire in its late stage, writhing in jealousy over the prosperity of an anarchist society. This reality has every reason to exist today. If modern Christians in the United States repented in the same way that the Israelites and Christians in bondage to Egypt and Rome repented, then they would be abandoning their Sunday rituals, and their election cycle rituals, and their Independence Day parades, and any other empty tradition that they take for granted, and they would intentionally organize themselves into actual communities to make sacrifices for their neighbors in an intimate congregation. They would stop rendering unto Caesar that which is God’s by refusing to apply to Caesar for anything, like in marriage licensing, or birth certification, or social security enrollment. They would start creating a free society, reliant on self-reliance and the promises of God to reward such dedication to the Dominion Mandate. They would begin to admit that loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself are actually political statements, meant to describe the behavior of a redeemed people who no longer love false gods, or outsource their love of neighbor to the socialist administrations of those false gods. They would no longer be divided by political parties or senseless denominational preferences, but would seek to save their neighbor from civil bondage so that their neighbor would seek to save them in return.

They would actually begin to bear each other’s burdens. They would be teaching each other’s children so that no one would have to send them to public schools. They would be paying off each other’s debts. They would be pitching in to build or buy each other houses with land, so they can farm them and free each other from relying on currency to buy groceries because they have chosen instead to take dominion of the earth, and feed each other with the fruits of their labor. The first hallmark of a repentant people is that they are living as though human civil government does not even exist. With men in government, this level of liberty is impossible, but with God, all things are possible (Matt 19:26). Modern Christians need to stop taking Christ’s name in vain, and to learn to actually obey God rather than men. The God-man Jesus Christ did not come to redeem Christians to dress up for a church service. He did not suffer an unimaginable form of capital punishment and death, just for Christians to hold hands while playing singalong and then vote Republican every four years. He came to teach His followers to turn the world upside down (or rather rightside-up) by calling for repentance of idolatrous institutions, and preaching the redemption of man from the dominion of man by forming a literal Kingdom by which to receive those who want to be ruled by God alone, committed to his Perfect Law of Liberty.

It should be noted that the Bible tells us that the firstfruits of Idolatry is forming a central bank by which to bind a society. This is the nature of the Golden Calf that the Israelites picked up on in their bondage to Egypt. When individuals come together to pool their resources in a collectivist-statist way, by melting down their precious metals into some nationalist icon, they are binding themselves together by contract for a sense of security and provision. They are agreeing to force each other to be a form of protection and sustenance for the group. This Unrighteous Mammon, as Christ called it, is a perversion of God’s natural order. When man entrusts his wealth to the collective, while retaining his entitlement to its use, he exercises authority over his fellow man who has done the same. This is the bare-minimum requirement for a democratic society: socialism. Everyone is culpable for the decisions of the collective, because everyone has bought into this society. They have sacrificed their wealth for security, to become part of the herd. Invariably, this model leads to forming institutions and policing agents to protect the bank, which leads to more and more power and equitable rights being given to these institutions to do other things that the people do not want to do out of personal responsibility, which leads to authoritarian bureaucracies that rule over the people with legislation, judicial oversight, and executive power.

This is how all empires are formed, each resting firmly and squarely on some golden calf or central bank. This is why God always commands His people to, instead of forming central banks, to retain their own individual wealth, and only contribute what they want to give to sustain their neighbor, without exercising authority over how the gift should be used. He calls this a burnt offering, because it is proverbially given to God through his servant ministers, and they redistribute it however it is needed. The left hand of government, which dishes out welfare, does not know what the right hand of government, which exercised imperium is doing. Those who are in unrepentant sin are no longer eligible to receive the charity, but they are also never taxed or forced to contribute to their neighbor at all. They are free to leave the community without some legal obligation to their society. They have not rendered anything to any Golden Calf and are therefore in possession of their possessions and family, without liability like pagans have with legal titles and legal guardianship. Free people come together when they have needs. They do not come together to exercise authority over each other or how their possessions are used. This is the difference between the Kingdom of the God of Heaven and the kingdoms of false gods of the world. We must choose on this day whom we will serve. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

Leaving Egypt Ministries: Big amen. Praise God for sending a true minister of His word this way. We are blessed to have you on. May the Lord exalt this interview and use it to show others the way out of the kingdoms of the world and to the real, non-political nature of His kingdom. May men read this and get the fire in them to start working on God’s kingdom among their own people, because the kingdoms of men are coming to nothing, and won’t continue to provide for men as they believe they will. God bless you, Michael.