After years of writing, editing, and arguing in group chats across four time zones, Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated and Expanded is officially out.

You can buy on Kindle or paperback on Amazon by clicking here. If you’d like to order directly from LCI, you can do so here.

What’s In the Book

230 questions. Six authors — Norman Horn, Kerry Baldwin, Doug Stuart, Dick Clark, Cody Cook, and Jacob Winograd. One Q&A-format guide that covers the terrain where Christianity and libertarianism meet.

We wrote it for the person who’s tired of being told these two commitments can’t coexist. For the Christian who reads Romans 13 and senses there’s more to the story. For the libertarian who suspects the case for liberty has deeper roots than Locke. For the pastor whose congregation is wrestling with state power, economics, immigration, public goods, healthcare, the environment, the American founding, and what the church has to say about any of it.

Two Ways to Get It

📖 Kindle — available on Amazon
📕 Paperback — available on Amazon
📕 Paperback — available at libertarianchristians.com

If you pre-ordered, your copy is on the way. If you’ve been waiting to see the final product before committing, the wait is over.

Why Your Order Matters

Buying the book on day one does two things. It pushes Faith Seeking Freedom up the rankings where more people can find it. And it tells the broader market that there’s an audience for serious work at the intersection of Christian theology and libertarian political thought.

If this book matters to you, the most useful thing you can do today is order a copy and tell one person about it. That’s it. That’s the ask.

▶ Order the Kindle edition on Amazon
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▶ Order the paperback at libertarianchristians.com

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Perhaps one can argue that because not all libertarians are Christians, these libertarians don’t believe in the sinful nature of humanity in the first place, but it is the same for political conservatives and progressives as well.

As should be evident from the libertarian arguments against political power throughout this book, libertarians have a keen sense for the evil people can perpetrate against one another when social institutions are set up with aggression at their forefront. Libertarian historians take great pains to understand the depth of human depravity that takes place through states and their activities, especially wars and their effects on more common people. Libertarians don’t reject the sinful nature of humanity, but rather pinpoint just how awful the sinful nature of people can come out when political power corrupts them even further. An evil person acting alone is much more easily thwarted than an evil person commanding the power of the state.

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It is true that the Israelites had kings, but do not forget that God brought them out of Egypt so that he alone could be their king. Their request for a human king as recorded in 1 Samuel 8 is granted, but not without a stern and prescient warning for what the government they asked for would ultimately do to them:

“These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen, and to run before his chariots… He will take your daughters… He will take the best of your fields and vineyards… and you shall be his slaves. And on that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves; but the LORD will not answer you on that day” (1 Sam 8:11–18).

This is an incredible statement! God says that because they are choosing a human king rather than God as their king, they will be set upon by the human government they have chosen. Their sons will be sent to war (conscription), the human king will take their land and possessions (taxation), and they will literally be made to be his slaves.

So much for the supposed virtue of the democratic process! Though God worked through Israelite kings to accomplish his ultimate plan, that was never God’s preference from the beginning.

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Amazingly enough, it all begins in the book of Genesis. The Tower of Babel narrative (Gen 11) is the “origin story” of the state. In the passage, we learn that the people of Babel aspire to build for themselves a tower that would “reach the heavens” so that they could “make for themselves a name.” They do this as they “journey eastward,” which parallels the language of separation from God being “east of Eden.”

Many commentators as far back as the first-century Jewish historian Josephus have noted that these things together mean they are either literally or symbolically rebelling against God by trying to take over heaven itself. They are responding to their separation not by turning to God in repentance but by turning against God entirely.

In Jewish antiquities writing, it was Nimrod, the “mighty rebel” before the Lord (some versions read “hunter,” but this is not the best translation) and the first king of Babel/Babylon, who incited them to do so. God disrupts their plan and scatters them about both in their location and in their languages. We can see this story as the theological beginning of all states, which are ultimately founded in rebellion against God and trying to take the place of God on the earth.

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Of course Jesus cared deeply about the poor. When he said, “the poor you will always have with you” (Matt 26:11), it was a character marker of the type of people who were attracted to Jesus and his followers: those who were impoverished. So when we apply this characteristic of Christlikeness broadly to society, it is easy to believe that social justice is all about caring for the poor.

Yet social justice should consider a set of conditions, not a particular set of outcomes. Too often we evaluate the state of justice based on perceived outcomes without assessing the institutions that produce those outcomes. For example, those who lament wealth inequality rarely decry the central banking system which creates vast inequalities of both opportunity and government privilege. Because they are formed by human beings, institutions are also flawed and in regular need of reform. Social justice requires us to think about what is properly “social” as well as what is “just.” The poor are far better served when they are treated as legal equals in a society rather than persons to be pitied. Christians should demand equal treatment under the law, freedom of enterprise, secure private property rights, access to adequate defense, expedient justice in courts, and a host of other institutional arrangements under which conditions the poor can flourish along with the rest of society.

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Most people compare what the government spends on welfare for the poor to the private charity dollars spent on the poor, arriving at the conclusion that private charity organizations could not bear the burden of providing for the poor if the welfare state were simply removed. However, this comparison is unfair for two reasons. First, it does not account for the fact that private charity organizations, on average, have far less bureaucratic overhead than government-run ones. Money spent through private charities is often more effective than government-run welfare programs.

Second, and more importantly, it ignores a third but very prominent anti-poverty measure that doesn’t require government at all: free market capitalism. People achieved prosperity in the past 200 years not through welfare programs but through free markets. Oftentimes, governments have regulated the market in such a way that it creates the conditions for higher unemployment, increased prices for goods and services, and other factors that burden the poor.

Charity is only a short-term solution to the direct symptoms of poverty, not its causes. A robust society addresses the root problems to poverty by looking at a variety of issues.

Libertarian Christians believe that because work is essential to our life and our well-being, being recipients of the fruit of other people’s labor (whether private or public) can only go so far. What those in poverty want and need is the fruit of their own labor.

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Human flourishing should be the goal of any human-based institution, both private and public, so long as it is done within its sphere of capacity and ability.

Christians who believe the state should guide or lead us to human flourishing usually have in mind initiatives and programs that force individuals and businesses to behave in certain ways they view as conducive to human flourishing. Yet they fail to recognize that governments are particularly bad at guiding free human beings in ways that yield certain results. When governments try to pick winners and losers through subsidies and special privileges, they almost always fail.

As an institution on the monopoly of violence in society, the state’s narrow role should be to enable human flourishing through means that actually achieve human flourishing. That is, if the state’s role is to protect private property by enabling free exchange, not only would the economy grow, individuals and communities would flourish not because of the state but because the state was in its proper role in society.

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The political philosophy of democracy supposes that governments ought to be directed by the people.

Under normal circumstances, most people intuitively accept the idea that a property owner is the one who decides how to use a particular asset. For the Christian, this should be even more obvious, because divinely inspired scripture clearly commands us to observe property rights by abstaining from stealing (Exod 20:15, 1 Cor 6:10), negligent or malicious damaging of property (Exod 21:33–34, 22:5–6), and compensation for its use (Exod 22:14–15).

The theory of democracy supposes that property rights may be abridged when a great many people vote to do so. That is in contrast with the way that God ordered the nation of Israel, a covenant community formed by consent (Exod 24:3), and based on a system of familial and individual property rights. It is wrong for a king to exempt himself from his own laws (Deut 17:18–20), and even divinely appointed rulers are accountable under God’s immutable standards of justice (2 Sam 12:7–14). If King David was subject to God’s law, so too is the population at large, majority or not.

If the will of the people is contrary to the will of God, it is wrong to follow the will of the people. Throughout scripture, we see examples where the will of the people did violate God’s commandments: Aaron’s fashioning of a golden calf at the people’s urging (Exod 32), the demand by Israel’s elders to Samuel for a king (1 Sam 8), and Pilate’s capitulation to the people when he ordered the crucifixion of Christ (Mark 15:15).

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “Any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one already.” Simon Peter said it better when he said, “We must obey God rather than any human authority” (Acts 5:29).

This question is from Faith Seeking Freedom: Updated & Expanded, launching June 2026 in paperback, PDF, and Kindle. Subscribe to this Substack so you don’t miss updates, previews, and the launch announcement.

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Voting is sometimes regarded as a civil sacrament in American culture. Many activists across the political spectrum, opposed in nearly every policy area, will nonetheless agree to the secular “article of faith” that voting is inherently good, and that everyone should vote no matter what!

Christians should be wary of the quasi-sacred treatment received by ballots and elections in popular culture. In a way, politics is like two neighbors wrestling in the front yard over a loaded gun. The state is a violent enterprise (see Question 34), and voting is designed to allow a polity to decide which candidate to entrust control of that violent organization.

Some libertarians claim that casting a ballot somehow signals consent to the government under which the election is taking place. The abolitionist Lysander Spooner famously argued that under a government you never chose and can’t escape, voting is mainly an act of self-defense, not a genuine sign that you consent to be ruled.

It may be the case that a Christian prayerfully concludes that one candidate is more dangerous than the other to justice and peace. We often hear about voting for the lesser of two evils. The basic problem with that is that it leaves the voter supporting some kind of evil in the end. If a vote might injure a Christian’s conscience or public witness as a believer it is best for the believer to abstain from attempting to influence the outcome of that election through voting. Eternal things are simply more important than transient concerns of a particular time in history.

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Christians believe that God cares deeply about how we treat one another. For that reason, the way governments act, and the ways we allow ourselves to be governed, carry real moral weight. Modern political discourse often assumes as a given that democratic government is good. Before we can talk about democracy being good or bad, though, we should first identify what democracy is. The word democracy is often used as a synonym for majority rule. In this sense, there is no good reason for Christians or libertarians to be particularly democratic, especially when it comes to questions of right or wrong. A majority of people may indeed hold to a view that is abhorrent and advocates the violation of rights.

The word democracy comes from the Greek language and denotes, literally, rule by the people. It has often been used to describe something that is the opposite of autocratic authoritarianism, and implies a social structure where decision-making authority is more decentralized. Ludwig von Mises described this sort of democracy as referring to “the right of self-determination both of individuals and of nations.” However, Mises also warned that “Majorities are no less exposed to error and frustration than kings and dictators.”

While we are rightfully wary of appeals to simple majoritarianism, libertarian Christians view decentralized authority favorably. This is consistent with the injunction of Jesus to not behave like the rulers of this world (Matt 20:25), and instead practice servant leadership like the early church did in the book of Acts.

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It might initially seem like the state is necessary to protect certain kinds of natural resources, but how can we expect a government that mismanages practically everything to maintain a complex ecosystem? We can observe from the history of state-managed ecology projects that the government is far better at destroying than preserving. Besides, private parks already exist in various forms. From small private campsites to massive amusement parks (hey, they call them parks for a reason!), we can see that private ownership of land and the freedom to use it in entrepreneurial ways can surely allow for the development of the equivalent of any “government” park. Some parks, like Bryant Park in New York City, will be open to the public and run by private foundations, funded by donations from individuals and businesses. Some will be attached to businesses to encourage people to become customers of that business and to serve the community. Some will have subscription services or entry fees like a country club. The state is simply not necessary to ensure that parks stay solvent and operational.

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Even if all roads were privatized, not all roads would be toll roads. Your neighborhood probably would rather not operate that kind of system even if it were a gated community. Businesses desire people to frequent their establishments and therefore may invest in the road system around them in order to make it more appealing to go there. But ultimately, it is up to entrepreneurs to experiment and find ways to serve their road-going customers most effectively.

We could turn this question and ask if government-run road operations are efficient, safe, and cost-effective? Our experience in the United States, at least, suggests that such qualities are near non-existent on government roads. Think about it: if any business had to answer for nearly 40,000 people per year dying while using their goods or services, they’d probably be out of business in two seconds flat. Yet that is the reality of government roads. It’s high time to get rid of road socialism.

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While this question may at first seem like a trump card against the idea of privatization in general, it is readily answerable from both a theoretical and historical point of view. Simply put, roads would be produced both by companies and individuals. Their operations would be funded by tolls (for highways), subscription fees (for local roads), and neighborhood dues (for streets like those in front of your house). Throughout history, roads have been built privately and even continue to be built this way today. Most roads are not actually produced by the state but by private companies as contractors. The libertarian argument is to suggest that this should be expanded even further and not have the state involved in the first place.

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Christians believe that all things are ultimately owned by God in Christ (Col 1:15–17). Humans, as image bearers of God, are given stewardship over themselves and their property. By property, we specifically mean the resources that a person owns in exclusion to others. Good stewardship not only involves fulfilling our responsibility to God, but also respecting the property rights of our fellow humans.

Human rights are foundational in a libertarian society due to their normativity. In the words of Frederic Bastiat, “[rights] do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that [rights] existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” But how do we identify or articulate them? This has been the problem philosophers have faced for centuries, even back to ancient times. Property rights, however, are a useful way to clearly identify human rights. Christians may claim property rights (in their person and of their things) vis-à-vis Christ’s teaching in Matthew 20 (see especially verse 15) and Luke’s reference in Acts 5:4.

In fact, property rights are so useful that Murray Rothbard said they’re axiomatic; that is, self-evidently true. Christians can agree stating this is a God-given norm through creation, which is why they are self-evident. Because property rights are evidenced by nature, human beings (whether believers or not) may operate on the same rules, and we don’t need to teach every individual a contrived political-economic theory.

Property rights are useful because everyone recognizes them regardless of their personal political proclivities. Even socialists believe in property rights; they simply believe the government has the right to a given property. So libertarians operate from a principle of property rights because they are universally understood and self-evident. And Christians may operate from this same principle because it’s supported by scripture.

Now here’s the part I didn’t cover in that post.

The six of us who wrote this book — Norman Horn, Kerry Baldwin, Doug Stuart, Dick Clark, Cody Cook, and Jacob Winograd — have never been in the same place at the same time. LCI is a distributed team, and the work gets done across time zones and group chats. There has never been a book signing. There has never been a page with all six of our signatures on it.

We’ve set aside 200 copies of the first print run to be signed by all six authors. A bookplate signed by each of us, bound into the book. When the 200 are claimed, that’s it, they’ll be all gone!

How to Get Your Signed Copy of Faith Seeking Freedom

There are two ways to claim a signed copy:

1. Donate $100 or more to LCI during our mid-year matching campaign (running now through June 30).

2. Sign up as an LCI Insider ($20/month) before June 30.

Either one puts you in the first 200. First come, first served.

A few things worth knowing:

• You’ll need to wait. We’re signing book plates in July, when five of us are finally in the same room for the first time (Dick already signed the plates). Signed copies ship mid-July. If patience isn’t your thing, you can grab an unsigned copy on release day, June 30. But if you want the signed edition, mid-July is the timeline.

• Current Insiders are already in. If you’re an LCI Insider right now, your signed copy is already in the queue. You don’t need to do anything, except maybe pre-order copies for your friends!

• Your gift is doubled. Every dollar given before June 30 is matched dollar-for-dollar by an anonymous donor, up to $6,000. Every new Insiders sign-up also adds $50 to that match. So a $100 donation becomes $200 toward LCI’s work. An Insiders sign-up becomes $20/month plus a $40 match credit.

Why This Matters

LCI doesn’t run on book sales. It runs on the people who believe this work needs to exist and put their money behind it. The match is live because one of those people decided to make every other gift count double for six weeks. The signed edition exists because we wanted to do something tangible for the donors who show up during this window.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to support LCI — or to upgrade from reader to Insider — this is the moment. You get a signed first edition of the book six of us spent years building, and your gift does twice the work on the way in.

Donate $100

Become an LCI Insider

We are thrilled to announce that Faith Seeking Freedom is available for pre-order today. The book releases June 30, 2026.

Faith Seeking Freedom is a Q&A-format guide to the intersection of Christian faith and libertarian thought. We gathered a team of authors who affirm historic Christianity while drawing from the libertarian tradition to tackle the questions Christians actually ask. This book doesn’t skirt the hard ones: 230 tough questions on government and authority, the ethics of force, property rights, poverty and charity, war and peace, immigration, and more.

Where to Pre-Order

Kindle edition → Amazon — delivered to your device on release day, June 30.

Paperback → libertarianchristians.com — pre-order direct from LCI, and we’ll ship it for free on the release date. If you wish to order the paperback on Amazon, they will be available for purchase on June 30.

Why Pre-Order?

Pre-orders matter more than most readers realize. They drive launch-week rankings, signal to retailers that the book has an audience, and help LCI keep producing work like this. If you’ve been waiting for a resource that takes both your faith and your liberty seriously, this is the moment to act.

Mark the date: June 30, 2026. And if you find the book useful, the best thing you can do after reading it is hand it to someone else.

More to come as we get closer to release—including sample questions, endorsements, and a few surprises.

Pre-order for Kindle

Pre-order Paperback from LCI

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Paul does tell the church in Rome that the authorities that exist are “established by God” (Rom 13:1, NIV), but Romans 13 is definitely not a prooftext for justifying state power.

True, Paul proceeds to caution against rebellion and to encourage doing “what is right” in the eyes of the ruler to protect oneself. But these words were written to Christians in Rome who were constantly at risk of persecution, even unto death, from the Roman Empire. Paul’s encouragement to them, and likewise to us, is that our interactions with state power are on a prudential basis. Our greater priorities are to live out the gospel and support our family and community, and we should not put ourselves into a compromising position against the state unless it is specifically for the cause of Christ and his message.

Therefore, we pay our taxes not because the government has a divine right to tax us, but rather because if we don’t, we might end up in prison and unable to fulfill our true calling to protect our families and spread the gospel. Ultimately, we should also turn to other scriptures to get a full view of what the Bible has to say about the state instead of only reading Romans 13 and thinking that we fully understand God’s intention for government.

Some libertarian Christians take different interpretive approaches to Romans 13 (provided in Additional Resources below), but the common thread is that the passage does not give special permission to governments to commit aggression against others.

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No. Just because a behavior is legal doesn’t make it moral or something anyone should condone. For those who might balk at the idea of legal prostitution, consider how we draw the distinction on abortion. It’s easy for us to see how something can be legal and not moral. (Obviously this becomes disanalogous when we understand why abortion should not be legal either; see Chapter 14.)

Libertarianism draws a much sharper line between legality and morality—and not because we seek a more licentious society, as some have claimed. Many Christians believe the role of government is to legislate morality—that is, to prescribe moral rules for society over and above rights violations. Romans 13:4 is often used to hit home the idea that the role of government is to promote what is morally good and punish that which is morally wrong. Christian libertarians would certainly agree that all rights violations are morally wrong, but that’s where we stop. Why?

Those behaviors that are morally wrong but are not rights violations in themselves, like prostitution, drug addiction, or suicide, are indicative of social ills or health problems that can be addressed by the free market (and the gospel). Prostitution, which is often connected to human trafficking (which is a rights violation), usually occurs when women are in desperate situations. And often when they seek to escape prostitution, they wind up punished and exploited by the criminal justice system.

Alternatively, women who choose prostitution voluntarily cannot seek justice for rape, often because the authorities believe they deserved to be raped. Is that justice? We don’t think so. So while Christian libertarians wouldn’t endorse prostitution, we do believe that legalizing it will help women who want out to escape it, and women who want to stay in to at least get justice when rights violations occur.

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The right to self-defense belongs to every moral agent created in God’s image. That right does not vanish because some misuse it; rather, justice demands that only those who violate others’ rights lose liberty through due process. A violent offender serving a sentence, or someone who is threatening or committing aggression, may be justly restrained. But outside those narrow circumstances, moral law grants no authority to preemptively disarm peaceful people.

The right to self-defense and property ownership includes the freedom to possess the means necessary for that defense. On principle, no firearm or “weapon of war” is unlawful or immoral for an individual to own. The objections to this view stem from misconceptions about legitimate use of violence, or from ignorance of the functionality of different weapons. The term “assault weapon,” for example, is a meaningless propaganda phrase (viz “assault”) designed to blur distinctions between civilian and military firearms. An AR-15 is simply a popular semi-automatic rifle—mechanically identical in function to countless hunting and sporting arms owned by millions of peaceful citizens. Any so-called “assault weapons ban” would inevitably amount to the mass confiscation of ordinary semi-automatic firearms. This is because laws have to define a thing by what it does, not what it looks like, thereby criminalizing responsible ownership without reducing crime.

The truth is even automatic weapons bans accomplish little because state-sponsored weapons sales, black markets, and illegal modifications make them easy to bypass. In truth, there is little evidence that gun control measures reduce overall violent crime rates in the states and countries that pass them. True public safety arises not from coercive disarmament, but from a society where individuals retain the moral and practical means to defend themselves and others from aggression.

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The ownership of weapons is a particular kind of property right that is also derived from the right to self-defense. The right of self-defense flows from the biblical command to protect innocent life. Scripture affirms that life is a sacred gift from God, and that to stand by while violence destroys it is itself a moral failure. Proverbs 24:11 urges us to “rescue those being taken away to death,” and Exodus 22:2 allows for defense of one’s household from violent intrusion. The consistent moral principle is that force may be used to stop aggression—not to take vengeance or assert dominance, but to preserve life made in God’s image.

Christians abhor aggression, but recognize that firearms are tools which, when justly used, can help believers prevent or stop aggression. The modern push for sweeping gun control, while allegedly motivated by compassion, misunderstands both morality and economics. Criminals ignore gun laws, while peaceful citizens bear the cost of compliance—not only the cost imposed by the state, but the cost imposed by crimes that might otherwise be mitigated even by merely bearing a holstered side arm. Additionally, every prohibition must ultimately be enforced by armed agents of the state—meaning that gun control depends on violence to suppress non-violent ownership. Such measures betray the alleged compassion for peaceful people that gun control proponents claim to advocate for.

History shows that gun confiscation has often paved the way for tyranny. The British disarmed the Irish to maintain control, the U.S. government disarmed Africans and Native peoples to subdue them, and regimes like the Soviet Union, Communist China, and the Khmer Rouge confiscated weapons to secure total power. Each instance left populations defenseless against State violence. In contrast, a society that respects the right to self-defense discourages both personal and political aggression. Christians who value peace must also value liberty, recognizing that a well-armed and virtuous people are among the strongest deterrents to tyranny and the surest guardians of human dignity.