How Do You Get Politics From The Bible?
A Method, The Stark Reality, And The Most Controversial Thing You’ll Read This Year
How should Christians read the Bible and build political concepts from it?
And a more pressing question: Are we even supposed to do that?
Let’s start with the second question—by asking another: If not the Bible, then what book should we read?
You don’t get to opt out of building a political philosophy. That’s not neutrality—it’s surrender. All law is moral. All legislation implies an underlying vision of the good. And every political system—from the most democratic to the most despotic—flows downstream from a set of beliefs about human nature, authority, justice, power, and responsibility.
So the question is not should we draw from the Bible—the question is what else are you going to use?
Marx? Nietzsche? Rawls? TikTok?
The Bible is not a handbook for building picnic tables, though it will tell you how to build them honestly—how to pay your workers fairly, tell the truth, and serve people with excellence. That’s Christian ethics in business.
But politics are about people—about how we order a society, restrain evil, promote justice, and build institutions that reflect what we believe about God and man.
So if the Bible is not our foundation, where else are we going to draw the moral architecture needed for civil life?
Historical fact check:
For centuries, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, and philosophers in the West believed the Bible was the greatest political document in human history. Not just a religious text, but a civilizational cornerstone.
The entire Western project—from Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence, from common law to human rights—has been shaped by a biblical understanding of human dignity, justice, and the rule of law.
To say otherwise is either willful ignorance or historical malpractice.
But modern liberalism—and especially its deconstructionist child, anti-colonialism—has trained a generation to see the Bible not as the foundation of freedom but the source of oppression. That’s not just wrong—it’s ahistorical. It’s a betrayal of the very civilization that gave the critics the freedom to criticize in the first place.
So yes, we are meant to build political concepts from Scripture. But we must do it wisely.
Here’s probably the most controversial thing you’ll read all year:
According to Black professor and public intellectual Jason D. Hill, being a Christian slave in the colonies was—in some ways—better than being a free pagan in Africa.
Now, Hill isn’t defending slavery. He’s not excusing the evil of chattel ownership, nor is he minimizing the suffering endured. What he is doing is offering a brutal thought experiment—an uncomfortable comparison that many won’t touch:
That to participate—even at the bottom—in a civilization shaped by Christian ideas, education, and exposure to eternal hope, was in many respects a more meaningful existence than to remain unexposed to the gospel in a violent, premodern, tribal context.
And yet, ideas like this are quickly dismissed—not because they lack intellectual merit, but because we live in an outrage culture where people would rather be offended than think.
Hill’s point (and mine) isn’t to excuse the failures of Christian history—it’s to offer perspective. Because here’s the uncomfortable truth that no one wants to say out loud:
Even at its worst, Christian civilization produced more liberty, more advancement, more human dignity, and more opportunity than any other political or religious system in history.
Let’s talk Crusades?
Fine. They were a belated response to over 600 years of Islamic military conquest of Christian lands—from Spain to Syria. Without them, there is no Europe. There is no West. And if you think that’s hyperbole, go read a map of 11th-century Christendom.
The Inquisition?
It was brutal, yes—but it killed fewer people than 9/11, was internally criticized, and was eventually repented of and abandoned. Meanwhile, pagan and Islamic systems of justice were often far more violent and far less reformable.
These events—the Crusades, the Inquisition—are the perennial cudgels used to discredit political Christianity. They’re the “gotcha” history moments waved around to invalidate centuries of Christian rule.
But let’s be honest: they’re historical footnotes, not the whole story.
The real story?
Fifteen hundred years of moral progress, scientific innovation, university-building, literacy, human rights, abolition, art, law, and the sanctity of life—all flowing from a Christian worldview.
So no, Christian politics aren’t perfect. But compared to what the world had to offer?
They were a gift.
Political Christianity continues to be a gift to the world. But we need a method for reading Scripture.
Here is a sketch for how I think Christians should read the Bible while doing politics:
