In the summer of 2024, I joined a nearby ministry that took the gospel into a local detention center, talking about the God of the Bible and his son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to young men and women incarcerated for felonies and awaiting transition to prisons where they would serve their sentences.I had just been confirmed in the Catholic Church a year earlier, so I was skeptical about how much value I could add. It was also the first time I was making my way through the Bible in a serious manner, using a Didache Bible, which incorporates the Catechism of the Catholic Church.Without His sacrifice on the cross, there is no resurrection, He does not achieve victory over death, and our path to salvation is forever obscured.The woman who coordinated the ministry ran each week's 45-minute session for about a dozen or so attendees, all there voluntarily; most were black and male. Each meeting involved a Bible reading followed by discussion and questions and answers. It was very moving to watch the inmates work their way through the Bible. They were earnest in their questions, observations, and admissions about the reality of their lives.At my third session, after the opening prayer, the coordinator introduced the topic for the day, and she asked me to lead the discussion on what it means to be a man. I was caught completely off guard. But then something miraculous happened: For about a minute, I said things that not only had I never said before, I had never even thought them before.In retrospect, I now understand what Christians mean when they say that the Holy Spirit spoke through them.I told these young inmates that there were two essential characteristics of manhood: the willingness to take responsibility and the courage to sacrifice.To that end, I said, Jesus was the ultimate man. He took responsibility for each one of us and, as Tim Tebow puts it so beautifully, the wounds inflicted upon Him are our sins. Because we cannot redeem ourselves from our own sin without the grace of God, the God who loves each one of us sent His son to bear responsibility for what we cannot: literally the moral weight of a world that is drowning in the wrongs of each person.Jesus also satisfied the second element because he willingly sacrificed himself on the cross, not just for us, but (paraphrasing Tim Tebow again) because of us. His death was the ultimate sacrifice because it was voluntary, substitutive, and redemptive. Without His sacrifice on the cross, there is no resurrection, He does not achieve victory over death, and our path to salvation is forever obscured.I told the young inmates that no matter why they were there (we never discussed their crimes), it was time to take responsibility, so that when released they might find a better path forward.It required doing things that were simple but profound, starting literally as soon as they walked out of that room:Resist the temptation to join gangs.Stand up for an inmate who needs help.Improve their reading, writing, and basic math skills through the prison library.Start or join a Bible study.Pray daily, not only for the Lord's forgiveness, but to hear His words.Profess Christ as their Savior.Speak plainly and without profanity.Harm no one, and never seek vengeance against another inmate or a guard for a perceived wrong.I also told them to build physical discipline — which works in tandem with spiritual discipline, as it had in me — because if their bodies were to be temples of the Holy Spirit, then they were responsible to guard and develop their physical capacities, which are a divine gift.As the Gospel of John tells us, Jesus carried his cross — the horizontal beam, which likely weighed about 100 pounds — to Golgotha, where He died. How many American men could pick up and carry 100 pounds even 100 feet, let alone doing so while beaten and bleeding?I talked about my own life, how I came to finally acknowledge Christ as King, and how He freed me from lifelong addictions to both pornography and anger. I said that if they doubted the love of a God whom they did not know (as I long did), they might reflect on my life experience.My mortal father, a Marxist, had limited capacity for responsibility and sacrifice because of his unremitting mental illness. However, God the Father, in His boundless mercy and wisdom, did not forsake me even when I did and said horrible things; He guided me when I was at my poorest and weakest, and He steered me through a life full of completely improbable twists and turns that ultimately all worked for my good, which is His promise. And then, I finally opened my heart to Him and His word.When I was done, there was dead silence.After exiting the building and meeting in the parking lot, as was our habit each week, the coordinator was in tears. She said, "I don't know where to find more godly men like you." She was absent for the next couple of weeks, but during that time, she clearly reconsidered this immediate post-meeting assessment.In a late July 2024 conference call, she dismissed me from the ministry. It dawned on her after my testimony that she could not have a Catholic man on her team. She further went on to explain that there could be no theological distance between her and others who presented to the inmates, and thus neither I nor my Didache Bible were welcome to return.I was appalled, but I replied by quoting Christ himself. In the Gospels, Jesus basically told the apostles (paraphrased): "If someone will not hear your testimony, shake the dust [of their house] from your feet when you depart" (Matthew 10:14; Mark 6:11).I never went back, and I never heard from her again.RELATED: Why Christianity is a pilgrimage — not a vacation ZU_09/Getty Images PlusThe final twist to this tale is my departure from the Catholic parish where I came face-to-face with the risen Christ. Things started to slide downhill when the parish promoted content developed by Jesuit Fr. James Martin to adults in a class on Catholicism. Martin was Pope Francis' personal emissary to the LGBTQ alphabet mafia and recently persuaded Pope Leo to allow a procession with a rainbow cross into St. Peter’s Square.However, the parish did not believe it important to tell recipients who Martin was or why he was controversial.The coup de grâce was a homily on Mother's Day in which the priest — who in Masses I attended had never once asked assembled parishioners to pray for Christians slaughtered weekly in Nigeria by Islamic jihadis or for girls whose spaces were invaded by men in dresses — requested prayers for those facing persecution.He identified three persecuted groups: the aborted child, the illegal immigrant, and the gay person. To conflate the murdered babies with deportation of people here illegally and the ceaseless promoters of sexual anarchy was an abdication of moral responsibility in which biblical truth was casually and carelessly sacrificed on the altar of political ideology.Jesus was most assuredly not a politician. Had He been so, He would have lectured the Romans about how to run their empire. He was God made man to die on the cross for our sins, so that we may live eternally with Him.I may be Catholic, but no one summarizes this better than the late, great Voddie Baucham: The Bible does not tell you to invite Jesus into your heart. It tells you to repent and believe, so that you may joyously and willingly obey His laws and commandments and live with Him eternally.In other words: Follow in the footsteps of the ultimate man.

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Was the politics of compromise a politics of appeasement?More than 150 years after the Civil War ended, Americans continue to debate the circumstances that led to the bloodiest conflict on US soil and whether that struggle could have been avoided. The controversy typically centers around the issue of whether sufficient effort was made to arrive at a compromise, thereby precluding the deaths of over 600,000 Americans at the hands of other Americans.But the real question should be: Was there too much compromise?The conflict was, indeed, not based on any failure to compromise; rather, if there was failure, it was in not dealing early on with the contrasting socioeconomics of the northern and southern states. But, of course, at the time there was a perceived need to, at almost any cost, bind the fledgling nation together in the face of great disparity between two economic systems. And this felt need was driven by a fear of losing what the founders had just sacrificed so much to achieve and institute – an independent republic with a democratic form of governance.F. Andrew Wolf explains. President James Monroe, the president who signed the Missouri Compromise.US Constitution - the “three-fifths” compromiseThe compromises regarding the two vastly different forms of socioeconomics began with the inception of the United States, itself. America’s Constitution famously declared that the institution of slavery would enjoy the status of official recognition in order to secure agreement with the southern states for a binding document.The socioeconomics between the North and South (land, capital, population, industry, agrarian vs urban interests, types of labor force) were so vastly different that neither was willing to trust the other without a well-delineated form of equitable representation in the Constitution. This was to ensure that the voice of each was fairly heard in the law-making body that dealt with taxation and the subsequent disposition of that revenue. The result was the “Three-Fifths Compromise” for apportionment of representatives regarding the bonded servants in the South. It was agreed that each bondsman (slave) would count as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation and taxation. Moreover, in rather euphemistic language, Congress was authorized to ban the international slave trade -- but not for another 20 years.The immediate effect of this “formula” was to inflate the power of the Southern states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. These were the states in which the vast majority of enslaved persons lived. The first Census, taken in 1790 after the Constitution’s ratification, is illustrative. 25.5% of North Carolina’s population was enslaved, as were 35.4% of Georgia’s, 39.1% of Virginia’s, and 43% of South Carolina’s. To offer context to the situation, the 1800 Census showed Pennsylvania's free population was 10% larger than Virginia’s but received 20% fewer electoral votes, because Virginia’s population was augmented by the Three-Fifths Compromise. In fact, counting enslaved persons under the compromise added an additional 13 members from “slave states” to the House and eighteen additional electors to the “College.” Is it a coincidence that for 32 of the first 36 years after the Constitution’s ratification, a white slaveholder from Virginia held the presidency?  The situation was further compounded by the fact that the framers of America’s founding document failed to mention the issue of slavery as an institution even once. David Waldstreicher, professor emeritus in history at the City University of New York and author of Slavery’s Constitution, holds that this failure created ambiguity about the framers’ intentions as well as the constitutionality of both proslavery and antislavery legislation which was to follow.It can be argued that the Civil War had its genesis in the incipient stages of the founding of America by the early compromises made in the Constitution over the issue of agrarian economics driven by the institution of slavery in the southern states.This acquiescence to the perceived needs of the South -- to keep the nation bound together -- informed not only the evolution of slavery in America but gave rise to much of the dysfunction in national politics and issues of inequality, still with us today. It makes little sense to talk of a failure to compromise, except insofar as every war or political conflict is a failure to achieve agreement. The original compromises enshrined in 1787 would ultimately touch everything in America from that point on. Nineteenth century compromisesThrough the early to mid-nineteenth century, several agreements between the North and South were hammered out. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 permitted Missouri to join the Union as a slave state in exchange for Maine entering as a free state. There was the Compromise of 1850 which allowed California’s admission as a free state but also enacted the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing for the kidnapping and re-enslavement of people in free states who had escaped slavery. And the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed western territories to decide for themselves if slavery was to be permitted.The “Tariff of Abominations,” enacted in 1828 by representatives of the northern states, was a protective tariff aimed at supporting northern manufacturers by taxing imported goods, which worked against and angered southern states. This led to the Nullification Crisis, where South Carolina attempted, unsuccessfully arguing states’ rights, to nullify the tariff, further escalating tensions between the two regions.  Lincoln - the great compromiserAs slavery spread, so did the zeal of the antislavery cause. Abolitionists at the time were often depicted from various sources as suspicious, even dangerous fanatics. But in truth the antislavery movement comprised numerous efforts to compromise when it came to liberating those from the forced labor of involuntary servitude. One idea was that of colonization, which advocated resettling former slaves to South America or Africa (e.g., Liberia), derived from the jaundiced belief that they could never coexist with whites?One of those advocates of colonization was Abraham Lincoln, offering support for the idea as late as 1862, as Daniel Biddle & Murray Dubin attest in a 2013 article in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.Even as a presidential candidate in the run-up to his election in 1860, Lincoln and his Republican Party colleagues were amenable to any number of compromises to keep the slaveholding South in the Union. One such proposal was the never-ratified Corwin amendment to the Constitution -- permitting the institution of slavery to continue (without federal interference) where it already existed -- but prohibit its establishment in new territories.Yet, it was the slaveholding states of the South that refused to compromise on this offer, notes Manisha Sinha, historian at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition.There was really only one aspect of the slavery issue where Lincoln could likely have circumvented the war between the states. “Lincoln could have avoided the Civil War if he had agreed to compromise on the non-extension of slavery, but that was one thing Lincoln refused to compromise on…” Sinha asserts.“When it comes to the Civil War,” she added, “we still can’t seem to understand that the politics of compromise was a politics of appeasement that at many times sacrificed black freedom and rights.” A culture warAt the center of the disagreement between northern and southern states was also the issue of “class differences” among white-male property owners.A culture war was brewing between North and South. The North viewed their neighbors as somewhat backwards with little education, little in the way of industry and an aging infrastructure. The South felt denigrated and besieged economically.Both regions had different visions of what constituted a moral society; yet, both were denominated by Christians who believed in democracy, capitalism and shared a history dating from America’s inception. Where they parted ways was on economics – and that meant slavery.President Lincoln's election of 1860 was the final blow to the South. Most of his support came from north of the Mason-Dixon line, which put in jeopardy the South's clout in the Union. Southern states viewed the situation as an existential threat to their socioeconomic lifestyle and reacted to preserve it. This marked, for years to come, the beginning of the South’s decline in political power in Washington – a poignant footnote to the compromises embedded in the Constitution of the United States some 74 years earlier – ostensibly to keep the South in and the Union intact. But it would take a war between the states and the assassination of a president to finally achieve those ends. Did you find that piece interesting? If so, join us for free by clicking here.  References Nittle, N. (2020, October 30). The History of the Three-Fifths Compromise. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/three-fifths-compromise-4588466National Park Service. The Constitutional Convention: A Day-by-Day Account for August 16 to 31, 1787. Independence National Historical Park. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-august25.htmCensus.gov. Return of the Whole Number of Persons within the Several Districts of the United States. https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1790/number-of-persons.pdfAmar, A. The Troubling Reason the Electoral College Exists. Time.com. https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/Monroe, Dan. The Missouri Compromise. Bill of Rights Institute.  https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-missouri-compromiseMark, H. (2025, June 9). Compromise of 1850. World History Encyclopedia. https://www.worldhistory.org/Compromise_of_1850/Garrison, Z. Kansas-Nebraska Act. Civil War on the Western Border. https://civilwaronthewesternborder.org/encyclopedia/kansas-nebraska-actMcNamara, R. (2019, July 19). The Tariff of Abominations of 1828. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/tariff-of-abominations-1773349Longley, R. (2021, October 6). The Corwin Amendment, Enslavement, and Abraham Lincoln. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/corwin-amendment-slavery-and-lincoln-4160928

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