One of my most cherished memories from middle school is the quiet anticipation that would settle over the classroom whenever Mr. Sanderson reached for a specific book. We were a typical, restless bunch of kids, but when he opened to a chapter from Paul Harvey’s The Rest of the Story, everything would fall silent. Mr. Sanderson didn’t just read to us; he performed. He read with such passion and enthusiasm, adjusting his voice to match Harvey’s iconic, suspenseful rhythm, ensuring we were fully immersed in the lives of the historical figures he described. We hung on every word, waiting for that signature pause—and the inevitable twist—before the famous sign-off: “And now you know... the rest of the story.”
Back then, I enjoyed all the entertainment it provided. But looking back on those afternoons years later, I realize Mr. Sanderson was teaching us a very valuable lesson about the nature of truth. Some stories are good, even inspiring, when taken at face value. But their impact is greater, and their meaning can be completely changed, when we know the full truth. A story that ends abruptly is inherently manipulative. When we stop reading at the climax, we replace reality with a sanitized, comfortable half-truth.
Nowhere has this lesson been more painfully clear to me than in my recent reflections on the North American Evangelical Church of my youth. We were brought up on a steady diet of half-stories. In Sunday School, we were taught the triumphant tales of biblical heroes, perfectly crafted to reinforce a very specific worldview. We learned about miraculous victories, such as Gideon’s defeat of the vast Midianite army with a small band of three hundred men. These curated narratives conditioned us to see ourselves as an outnumbered, righteous remnant destined to triumph over the surrounding culture. We sang hymns like “Faith is the Victory” and were encouraged to be fearless warriors for God in our schools and, eventually, in the world.
But the curriculum always seemed to end there. The flannelgraph figures were put away before the heroes grew old, became complacent, or were corrupted by the very victories God had given them.
This selective reading of Scripture wasn’t accidental; it was intentional. It effectively prepared an entire generation for the Evangelical Industrial Complex. By omitting the tragic endings—the cautionary tales of what happens when the faithful acquire the worldly power they once opposed—the Church validated our pursuit of dominance. To understand our current moment—why the generation that raised us celebrates strongmen, manipulates Scripture for militaristic aims, and marches in unison with the Empire—we need to look beyond the Sunday School victories. We must turn the page and finally engage with the rest of the story.
The Sunday School Cut
If you grew up in the Evangelical community, you’re familiar with the story of Gideon. It’s a key part of the Sunday School curriculum, designed for flannelgraphs and children’s Bible illustrations. We were introduced to a relatable hero in Judges 6: a scared, hesitant man threshing wheat in a winepress to hide from the oppressive Midianites. He wasn’t a soldier; he was merely trying to get by. When the angel of the Lord appeared and called him a “mighty warrior,” the irony was obvious even to us as kids.
We enjoyed the drama of the fleece—Gideon testing God not once, but twice, to prove he was truly chosen. But the highlight of the story, the part that captured our imaginations, was the battlefield strategy. God didn’t want a large, traditional army. He intentionally reduced Gideon’s forces from 32,000 to just 300 men. The reason given was clear: so that Israel couldn’t boast that their own strength had saved them. The tactics were just as unusual and exciting to a child’s mind: trumpets, torches hidden inside clay jars, and a midnight surprise attack. They didn’t even need to draw their swords. They simply blew their horns, smashed their jars, shouted, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” and watched the terrified Midianites turn on each other in the chaos. It was a perfect underdog story.
The lesson we learned from this story was clear, simple, and immediately applied to shape our spiritual growth. We were taught that God doesn’t need a majority to achieve great things; He only requires a willing, faithful minority. We sang the classic hymn “Faith is the Victory,” with our young voices ringing out the chorus: “Faith is the victory! Faith is the victory! O glorious victory, that overcomes the world.”
In youth groups and summer camps, this story became a blueprint for our identity. We were the 300. We were the outnumbered, righteous remnant, surrounded by a hostile, secular culture that served as our modern-day Midianites. The world was vast, loud, and intimidating, but we had the secret weapon of faith. We were taught to view every cultural clash as holy warfare. We weren’t just kids going to school; we were vanguards entering enemy territory, called to smash our pitchers and let our lights shine, scattering the darkness. The unspoken promise was that if we just had enough faith and stood firm with our trumpets and torches, we would inevitably triumph over the culture.
What we didn’t realize back then was how this carefully crafted narrative was creating a major theological blind spot. It was essentially shaping an entire generation for assimilation into the Evangelical Industrial Complex. By reinforcing the idea that we were God’s underdog army, we were conditioned to seek victory, dominance, and cultural conquest as the ultimate indicators of God’s favour.
The danger of the Sunday School cut is that it halts the protagonist at their most sincere moment of faith. Since Gideon started in the winepress—because his first victory was clearly guided by God—we were taught to believe that everything he did afterward also had that divine approval. We adopted a harmful idea: marginalized faith leads to God-ordained victory, and thus, any power, influence, or cultural dominance we achieve is inherently blessed by God.
We learned to justify our ends because we remembered our humble beginnings. We never considered that the marginalized faith of the 300 could gradually, almost unnoticed, turn into the very empire-building we claimed to oppose. We were so focused on defeating the Midianites that we never paused to ask what happens to the righteous remnant after they win the war, take the spoils, and suddenly find themselves holding the reins of power. We were blinded by our own triumphalism, completely unaware of the trap waiting for us in the very next chapter.
The Golden Snare
To grasp the modern Evangelical situation, we need to move forward. We need to read Judges 8.
The battle is over. The Midianite coalition has been shattered, their kings captured and executed. The adrenaline from the midnight raid has worn off, replaced by the exhilarating reality of complete victory. But triumph is a dangerous test. Hardship often makes us fall to our knees in reliance on God, but victory can lead us to think we’re self-sufficient. It challenges our character in ways the winepress never could.
After the slaughter, the Israelites turn to their hero. They’re exhausted from the cycle of oppression and seek a lasting solution. They don’t just want a judge; they want an institution. They say to Gideon, “Rule over us—you, your son and your grandson—because you have saved us from the hand of Midian” (Judges 8:22).
This is the Empire’s timeless appeal. The people seek to replace the unpredictable with the tangible, localized security of a human dynasty, requiring reliance on an invisible God. They wish to institutionalize the miracle.
Gideon’s initial reply is skillful. It’s the perfect, religious, Sunday School response: “I will not rule over you, nor will my son rule over you. The Lord will rule over you” (Judges 8:23).
If we stop there, Gideon remains the humble servant. But one of the most vital lessons of biblical discernment—and political observation—is that religious language often masks worldly ambition. We must observe actions, not just listen to words. Because in the very next moment, having just declared that God alone is King, Gideon says, “And I do have one request, that each of you give me an earring from your share of the plunder.”
He doesn’t seek the title of king, but he demands the riches that come with it. The people happily spread out a garment, and the victorious army tosses in the gold rings taken from their enemies’ corpses. The text notes the weight of the gold: 1,700 shekels—about forty-three pounds. But Gideon doesn’t stop with the gold. He also takes the crescent ornaments, pendants, and purple garments worn by the kings of Midian. In just a few days, the scared farmer hiding in the winepress has dressed himself in the royal purple of the defeated empire. He looks, acts, and taxes just like the kings he was meant to defeat.
Then comes the fatal misstep. Gideon takes his forty-three pounds of gold and uses it to craft an ephod.
Historically, an ephod was a linen garment worn by the High Priest that contained the Urim and Thummim, used to seek God’s will. It was intended to serve as a humble tool, located in the tabernacle at Shiloh. Gideon, however, constructs a large, solid-gold replica and places it in his hometown of Ophrah.
Why? Because a golden calf would have been too obviously pagan. Gideon was too clever to craft a secular idol; instead, he built a religious one. He created a monument to his own victory, wrapped it in the aesthetics of sacred worship, and confined the presence of God to his own area code. He constructed something that appeared to be faith but functioned as power.
The author of Judges delivers a stark, impactful verdict: “All Israel prostituted themselves by worshiping it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and his family” (Judges 8:27). The object of worship turned into an idol. The hero became the villain.
This is the rest of the story we were never told, and it acts as the precise blueprint of the Evangelical surrender to Empire.
Like Gideon, the American Evangelical movement achieved extensive cultural, financial, and political successes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We established megachurches, universities, publishing empires, and large voting blocs. And when the political system offered us a dynasty—when they granted us a permanent seat at the table in exchange for our loyalty—we eagerly accepted it.
Our leaders, perfectly mirroring Gideon, continued to feign piety. They stood behind pulpits and declared, “Jesus is Lord,” and “God is sovereign over America.” But their actions exposed a desperate hunger for wealth. We sought the Supreme Court seats, the Oval Office power, the legislative control, and the cultural dominance. We took the rewards of our political victories and fashioned them into a golden ephod called Christian Nationalism.
Christian Nationalism is our golden snare. It’s not a secular idol; it’s a religious one, which is why it has deceived so many. It uses our vocabulary. It wears the cross. It speaks of prayer and revival. But it functions as a monument to our own localized power. It demands that we pledge allegiance to an earthly kingdom while pretending to serve a heavenly one. We traded the marginalized, world-overcoming faith of the 300 for the shiny, heavy, suffocating armour of the Empire.
We forget that when the Church demands to rule, she ceases to be the Church. We set up our golden ephod in our sanctuaries, voting booths, and social media feeds, unaware that we’re constructing the very trap that will destroy our witness. And as we’ll soon see, when we build a golden snare, it’s only a matter of time before the bramble king rises to claim the throne.
The Bramble King
Idolatry rarely remains confined to a single generation. What parents see as a strategic compromise, children often accept as an absolute worldview. Gideon crafted the golden ephod and limited God’s presence to his own neighbourhood, yet he maintained the polite illusion that God was still in control. He played coy with the crown. However, his son felt no such restraint.
Enter Abimelech.
If Judges 8 is about the snare, Judges 9 is about the slaughter. Abimelech doesn’t seek the spiritual disguise of an ephod; he desires the raw, unfiltered power of the throne. He goes to his mother’s relatives in Shechem and makes a purely political, identity-based appeal: Why be governed by the seventy sons of Gideon when you can be ruled by your own flesh and blood? The leaders of Shechem agree. And in a chilling detail that perfectly captures the unholy alliance of religion and state power, they fund Abimelech’s political campaign using silver taken from the temple of Baal-Berith. With this blood money, Abimelech hires “reckless and scoundrelly men,” marches to his father’s house, and massacres all seventy of his half-brothers on a single stone.
This is the inevitable, harsh consequence of the Evangelical Industrial Complex. When you educate a generation that their primary calling is to conquer culture and dominate the city, you’ll eventually produce leaders who view compromise as a weakness and ruthlessness as a virtue. The Sunday School lesson ends with the 300 men blowing trumpets. The rest of the story concludes with a slaughter on a rock.
But one brother escapes. Jotham, the youngest son of Gideon, hides during the slaughter. When he hears that the people of Shechem have gathered to officially crown Abimelech king, Jotham climbs to the top of Mount Gerizim and shouts down a prophetic parable that stands as one of the most devastating political critiques in all of ancient literature.
Jotham recounts the story of the trees seeking a king (Judges 9:7-15).
First, the trees approach the olive tree and say, “Be our king.” But the olive tree refuses, asking, “Should I give up my oil, through which both gods and humans are honoured, to reign over the trees?”
Next, they go to the fig tree. “Come and rule over us.” The fig tree refuses, asking, “Should I give up my fruit, which is so good and sweet, to reign over the trees?”
Desperate, they turn to the vine. “Come and rule over us.” And the vine refuses, asking, “Should I give up my wine, which cheers both gods and humans, to reign over the trees?”
Don’t overlook the deep theology woven into Jotham’s fable. The trees that produce good things—things that heal, nourish, and bring joy to the world—refuse the crown. Why? Because they understand their calling. To step out of the orchard and into the palace, they would have to stop bearing fruit. They realize that seeking political power means abandoning their God-given, life-giving purpose.
So, the trees, desperately seeking a ruler, eventually turn to the bramble—a thorny, useless tumbleweed. “Come and rule over us.”
The bramble, having nothing of value to offer and no fruit to lose, eagerly accepts the crown. It issues a boastful, absurd ultimatum: “If you really want to anoint me king over you, come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, then let fire come out of the bramble and consume the cedars of Lebanon!”
It’s a dark, tragic comedy. A bramble offers no shade; it only has thorns that scratch and tear anyone who gets too close. Additionally, a dry thornbush is highly flammable, posing a fire hazard that endangers the entire forest. The trees have labelled a hazard as a saviour.
We need to look in the mirror because Jotham is speaking directly to the Church in North America.
For decades, the Church has been called to be the olive tree, the fig tree, and the vine. We’re called to bear the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We’re meant to provide oil for the wounded, sweetness for the bitter, and wine for the weary. We’re called to serve the marginalized and wash the feet of our neighbours. But somewhere along the way, we grew tired of bearing fruit. Fruit takes time; it needs pruning. It requires staying rooted in the soil of humble service. We looked around at the culture and decided we didn’t want to serve the forest; we wanted to control the trees. We wanted the crown. And just like Jotham’s fable, because the true Gospel can’t be used as a weapon of political dominance, we had to give up our fruit to seize the throne. We left the orchard, marched to the palace, and demanded a king. And who did we find waiting for us? The bramble.
When you abandon the character of Christ to engage in a culture war, you’ll inevitably grow a thorn. This best explains the phenomena we observe today. It clarifies why prominent faith leaders can stand in pulpits and compare Donald Trump to Jesus Christ with a straight face. It shows how Pete Hegseth can twist the sacred, sacrificial language of Scripture into a militant, America-First crusade, painting crosses on weapons of war.
They’re like brambles, shouting from the heart of the Evangelical Industrial Complex: “Come and take refuge in my shade!” We’re told to find our security in the shadow of strongmen who produce no spiritual fruit, thrive on division, and tear at the fabric of our society with thorns of rhetoric and grievance. And the threat remains the same: submit to the bramble, or the fire of the culture war will engulf everything you cherish.
Triumphalism and the Obituary of the Evangelical Mind
In our earlier essays—specifically The Radicals You Raised and What Have We Become?—we examined the painful cognitive dissonance of witnessing the institutions that shaped us abandon the very principles they taught. We mourned this intellectual and spiritual collapse in Obituary of the Evangelical Mind. However, writing an obituary raises an important question: What was the precise cause of death? How did a movement supposedly rooted in the teachings of a crucified Saviour transform into a political action committee demanding a conqueror?
The Evangelical mind died the moment it stopped reading at Judges 7.
It died when it chose the dopamine hit of a sanitized victory narrative over the sobering, complex reality of biblical truth. We became so addicted to the triumphalism of the trumpets and the smashed pitchers that we lost the capacity to recognize the golden snare being built in our own sanctuaries. We traded the difficult, rigorous, quiet work of bearing spiritual fruit for the cheap, intoxicating thrill of wielding political power.
Because we refused to read the rest of the story, the Evangelical Industrial Complex is now operating entirely in “Abimelech Mode.”
Abimelech Mode occurs when the Church stops pretending to be a reluctant participant in the culture war and instead explicitly seeks the crown. It’s characterized by the ruthless, unprincipled consolidation of power. Remember, Abimelech didn’t rely on the Lord’s deliverance; he depended on silver laundered from a pagan temple, a hired gang of scoundrels, and his willingness to slaughter his own kin to secure his position. He saw perceived enemies not as individuals to be won over, but as obstacles to be eliminated.
When we examine the current political landscape, we see the spirit of Abimelech alive and well. We observe it in the unquestioning support for Donald Trump by prominent faith leaders, who have proven they’re willing to overlook cruelty, corruption, and a complete lack of spiritual fruit as long as he promises to defend their cultural dominance and punish their opponents. We notice it in figures like Pete Hegseth, who manipulates the sacred, sacrificial language of Scripture to serve a hyper-militaristic, America-First agenda. When Hegseth and others openly parade the imagery of the cross alongside the machinery of war, they’re not embodying the faith of the 300. They’re aligning themselves with the very mechanisms of the Roman Empire that Jesus explicitly opposed.
They’re demanding we pledge allegiance to the bramble. And in our fear of a changing world, millions of Evangelicals have agreed to the terms. We’ve convinced ourselves that the only way to survive the culture war is to employ a ruthless king willing to burn our enemies to the ground.
But Jotham’s parable contained a literal, fatal prophecy. The bramble warned that if the trees didn’t submit, fire would erupt and consume them. By the end of Judges 9, the political alliance between Abimelech and the leaders of Shechem inevitably falls apart—because power built on ruthlessness always backfires. When the city rebels, Abimelech doesn’t just defeat them; he massacres the citizens, destroys the city, sows it with salt, and sets fire to the tower where a thousand men and women had sought refuge. The bramble burned the forest to the ground.
This is the ultimate, devastating cost of the golden snare. Just as Gideon’s ephod destroyed his family, and just as Abimelech’s ambition reduced Shechem to ash, the pursuit of Christian Nationalism is eroding the Church’s witness in North America.
We believed we were capturing the culture, but we were actually constructing our own pyre. The collateral damage is evident everywhere: empty sanctuaries, deeply fractured families, and a watching world that sees nothing of Jesus of Nazareth in the American Church. We’re actively alienating the very people we were called to reach—especially the younger generation, “the radicals we raised,” who have the biblical literacy to recognize a golden calf or a golden ephod when they see one. They understand that a church fixated on controlling the empire can’t be the light of the world.
We can’t legislate our way out of this moral collapse, nor can simply electing a different leader save us. The problem isn’t just who holds power; it’s that the Church ever sought the throne in the first place. We’ve come to the end of the simplified story told in Sunday School, and the reality of the aftermath is now obvious. The bramble is burning, and the credibility of the Evangelical Church is caught in the crossfire.
Tearing Down the Ephod
The tragedy of Gideon is a profoundly sobering truth. He didn’t die in battle, nor as a martyr. He died peacefully in old age, buried with his father. But his true legacy wasn’t the miraculous faith of the three hundred in the valley; it was the golden snare he left behind. He was a man called by God to free his people, who ultimately ended his life compromised, complacent, and leading his entire nation into spiritual prostitution under the guise of holy victory.
For the faithful citizen, the answer to our current crisis isn’t to escalate the culture war. It’s not to find a more polite thorn to oppress us, nor to rewrite the beginning of the story and pretend the genuine faith of our past never existed. The solution is repentance. We must honestly examine the golden ephod we’ve created—the idols of Christian Nationalism and partisan dominance set up in our sanctuaries and voting booths—and we must demolish them.
True faithful citizenship requires a significant shift away from empire. It calls us to leave the dangerous, prickly shadows of the bramble and return to the orchard. We must revisit the peaceful, disciplined, life-affirming work of bearing the fruit of the Spirit. Above all, we need to turn back to Jesus, the true King who faced the might of Rome and declared that His kingdom isn’t of this world—the Saviour who was offered the kingdoms of the earth and firmly refused the crown.
For far too long, the Church in North America has been satisfied to live in the comfortable, sanitized illusion of the Sunday School version. We celebrated our victories while ignoring the rot inside. But we can no longer pretend ignorance. The flames of the bramble are now visible for all to see. We must finally acknowledge the tragic, cautionary ending of our own triumphalism.
And now you know… the rest of the story.
