Last week, I forgot to mention that I was going to take a Labor Day break from Emotionally Healthy Success to talk about Labor Day and the importance of labor. In the meantime, you can still sign up for an advance copy of Emotionally Healthy Success and get a free copy of one chapter. Take time to do this. You will not regret it.

One word about this post. All forms of economic organization, including free enterprise, communism, socialism, and state managed economies fail when not connected to the greater good of human flourishing. There can be no independently successful  economic organization separate from the transcendental goal of fairness and the search for harmony and the common good. I would not want this blog to be read otherwise.

In my first pastorate, our family lived in a small town in the third-poorest county in Tennessee. Our church was near the dividing line between wealthier and poorer areas. On my first day, a member asked to take me on a drive through an extremely poor part of the city. It was also a part of the city where unemployment, drug abuse, and violence were endemic. Much of the city’s crime stemmed from that neighborhood. The drive left a lasting impression. Before that ministry was complete, our church led a citywide effort to create a community center in that neighborhood. One of the community center’s goals was to provide educational opportunities that lead to work.

Biblical Background

The Bible begins with a story about two people living in a perfect world—a garden we call Eden. They were to be shepherds and gardeners, taking care of the creation God had given them. Very quickly, they fail in their task and are removed from the garden into a life marked by hard work, family difficulties, and a host of other problems.

Because of the way the story is structured, many people see work as a curse. I was one of those people for a long time. Our time in West Tennessee helped cure me of that misunderstanding. I’m not much of a gardener; however, we had a small yard, and I became a gardener. Gardening changed the way I looked at the book of Genesis and the creation story. One thing I can tell you for sure: even without the Fall, the human race was going to be hard-working. I learned very quickly that weeds don’t just get pulled up once; they get pulled up all summer. I learned that plants don’t need to be pruned only once; they need to be pruned more than once. I learned that trees have to be trimmed and that pests have to be dealt with. I learned that gardens have to be planted more than once. Gardening is a pretty demanding profession.

I’m telling the story because it’s important to read our minds of the idea that work is evil and to read the story of Creation as telling us that work, that is, work given to us by God for our own good, is a blessing, even though it’s hard. And idleness, especially that idleness that comes from an inability or unwillingness to work, is not a blessing. It’s a curse.

Labor Day

Each year, in early September, we celebrate Labor Day. Many of us have little idea why we celebrate Labor Day. We’ve celebrated Labor Day every year for most of our lives. On Labor Day, we go fishing, or camp out, or have a neighborhood block party, or spend time with our family and friends. What we don’t do on Labor Day is work with our hands. We also don’t think about those who do.

It used to be that in major cities, and even in the small town where I grew up, there was a Labor Day parade. The unions, which are much less influential than they were in my youth, sponsored the Labor Day parades because it was the time of year when they could celebrate labor’s victory over a period in our nation’s history when laborers were abused.

With the Industrial Revolution came a host of social problems. America, which had once been a land of small farmers, suddenly became a place where many people, eventually most people, lived in urban areas and many worked for large corporations in which they had little or no ownership. There was a division between management and labor. The extreme division between management and labor was caused by the Industrial Revolution.

In my own family, we owned a farm. Our great-grandfather was the primary farmer and went into the field every day, though his role was mostly managerial. The children and others provided most of the labor. When we lived in Brownsville, we lived in a farming community, where there had been a pretty big division between the landowner farmers and what were once called sharecroppers. One of the members of my congregation, who was in his late 80s, was famous for always going out into the field to work with everyone else. The only difference is it was his habit to wear a white shirt and tie underneath his overalls. Everybody else just wore the overalls. He was a wise and practical person who had spent most of his life on a tractor., though he owned a fairly significant farm.

With the advent of large corporations and significantly white collar cities, many in management never even see the laborers they distantly supervise.  They work in office buildings in places like Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, or New York City. Laborers often work in oil fields or factories far removed from corporate headquarters. This builds a sense of psychic distance that I am not sure is healthy.

In the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,  women and children were forced to work excessive hours. Safety was largely ignored. Workers were poorly paid and taken advantage of, perhaps especially in the mining and manufacturing industries. The result was the growth of unions. Unions were formed to protect laborers’ rights against the social evils created by the Industrial Revolution.

In some ways, the Industrial Revolution was a time not much different from our own, when wealth had become extremely concentrated and power was exercised by just a few oligarchs. It was a time when the national economy was run for the benefit of the few. Some of you know that part of the blogs I’ve written deals with the legal problems created by the way state legislators, and even our national government, resisted regulating these enormous businesses.

Labor Day is an annual celebration that honors the social and economic achievements of American workers and recognizes their vital role in making the American Dream a reality. Since the late 19th century, there have been efforts to highlight the importance of labor and its value to our nation. For instance, in 1882, Peter J. McGuire, the general secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, proposed dedicating a day as a “general holiday for the laboring classes” to pay tribute to those “who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold.” Because revolutionaries adopted May 1 as their day, there was resistance to fixing American Labor Day in the spring. After a long period of ad hoc local celebrations, on June 28, 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed a law making the first Monday in September each year a national holiday. It remains America’s Labor Day.

Why a Labor-Free World is a Bad Idea

Many utopians envision a world in which people don’t have to work. Some people believe that the advent of artificial intelligence and robotics means that people will not only not have to work, but they also believe many people will not be able to work. Robotics empowered by artificial intelligence has the potential to eliminate many jobs. These utopians want a national minimum wage, allowing many, if not most, people to enjoy endless leisure. Even among white-collar workers, we already see the impact of artificial intelligence on employment. I think this is a problem that needs to be thought about by every American and our leaders.

Meaningful work, you see, is an ennobling experience. Those who work to produce goods and services for others have the satisfaction of knowing that they’re helping their fellow human beings while earning their own living and supporting their own family. There is a certain independence and healthy self-image that comes from knowing that one earns one’s own living and supports one’s own family.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s psychologically important to work. When I was young, I was pretty lazy. My father and his best friend conspired to get me to work on the Frisco Railroad, laying ties and working on bridge gangs for several summers. Today, some of my fondest memories are swinging a spike maul on a hot afternoon in Arkansas, barely able to keep going. I’m also extremely grateful for the friendships I made while living in a railroad car converted to house workers on a bridge gang. Even though I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a white-collar professional, I am grateful for the experience of working hand in hand with laborers, belonging to a union, and sharing their lives as we traveled across southern Missouri and Arkansas, laying track and repairing bridges.

Most of the things we did have long since disappeared, but just occasionally, when I’m home, I pass a crossing or go over a bridge, and remember that I worked on that bridge at that crossing over a half century ago. I remember the foreman and a number of the workers who taught me how to work with my hands. Work draws a person out of isolation into a community of fellow workers.

Work is not just socially important or economically important. It’s emotionally and spiritually important for the worker. Going back to my first church, on that first day,we passed house after house in which young men were sitting on the porch, getting ready to go out for the night, or drinking or taking drugs. Every one of those young people was larger, stronger, and more capable than I ever was. Many of them would end up fathering children out of wedlock, engaging in illegal activities, drinking or taking recreational drugs, and spending a bit of time in and out of the county jail. They didn’t have to work because of welfare, but the absence of work was not a good thing.

Those who think we ought to do away with work sometimes forget that young men who are tired after a long day of swinging and using a spike maul don’t get into much trouble at night. My brother, my best friend, and I might occasionally have an illegal beer at a local bar on the way home, but by 8 o’clock we were getting ready for bed because 6:30 AM comes early, and by 7:30 I was swinging a spike maul again. The social cost of people who don’t work or who don’t have sufficient or appropriate work for their capacities is huge.

Conclusion

Labor Day reminds us of an important truth. We often view our economy as simply a system for generating money to support families and help some individuals become wealthy. Of course, earning money supports families, which is crucial. However, what we sometimes overlook is that the wealth of a few is actually the result of creating valuable work for everyone. The core purpose of our economy isn’t to make a select few extremely rich or to boost the net worth of the wealthiest Americans, fueled by the idea that wealth will gradually reach everyone else. At its core, our economy isn’t solely about money at all; it’s about providing meaningful, helpful, and, ideally, rewarding work for everyone who needs a job.

This is why I believe that even if we could make work optional, even if we could create a world in which no one has to work, it would be a bad idea. It would deprive most people of the ennobling experience of labor. It would be better to find ways to ensure that every person who can work has work. We ought to be thinking about work that is truly ennobling and productive, not make-work that benefits no one.

I mentioned that I have fond memories of the Frisco Railroad. It’s gone now, merged into a larger conglomerate. One day more than 50 years ago, I sat on the porch of a caboose with an elderly-looking black man who had once been a jockey and was now part of our bridge gang. He was only a short time from retirement. Both of us were drinking Coca-Cola in the twilight of a hot July Day near Black Rock, Arkansas.

He shared his life and his dreams with me. He grew up as a sharecropper and escaped poverty by working on the railroad. His family still lived on a small plot of land in Mississippi, from which he commuted. Upon retirement, he planned to return to that little farm. He intended to spend a good bit of time sitting on the porch in his rocking chair. But he knew enough about farming to know that’s not all he would be doing. Even old men can be useful at planting and harvest time.

I will remember that conversation for the rest of my life. My friend, so different from me in every possible way, rarely leaves my mind for more than a month. He’s one of the blessings of having been a laborer in one of the most difficult and exhausting jobs a person can do.

Happy Labor Day.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

This is the third week we’re exploring the upcoming book, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.[1] You can pre-order the book on Amazon and other platforms. In this inspiring work, Scazzero continues to emphasize how vital emotional health is for pastors, church leaders, members, and entire religious communities. I’ll never forget the first time I read Pete’s powerful words: “There are many people in the church who cannot be the disciple God calls them to be because they lack the emotional maturity to become mature disciples.” That moment truly changed my life and perspective on ministry. It helped me realize that his words resonate with many people I’ve known in the church—including myself.

When I was in seminary, a New Testament professor discussed the great reversals Jesus brought about in people’s lives and in the expectations of the people of God. The Beatitudes summarize the reversals Jesus instituted. God’s blessings, it turns out, are for the poor in heart, the poor in spirit, those who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and those who are persecuted. This week, we’re going to focus on how Jesus requires us to reverse our thinking about success if we are to receive the kind of success the gospel offers.

The reversals Jesus offers require us to accept that success includes suffering, vulnerability, a willingness to go unnoticed, sacrifice, servanthood, and, above all, humility. If we embrace the reversals of Jesus, we will need to adopt a different way of measuring success, a different scorecard, than the world around us. Unfortunately, the church, and perhaps particularly the Western evangelical church, has long been dominated by the values of achievement, control, size, and visible success. It really doesn’t matter what pastors preach from the pulpit if the lives they lead in the churches they build are grounded in values indistinguishable from those of corporate leaders with extremely talented staffs.

In order for us to change the secularization and worldliness of the contemporary church, we need four great rehearsals which Scazzero describes as follows:

1. From prayer for results to prayer for communion
2. From charisma to weakness and limits
3. From our best ideas to discerning God’s voice
4. From critical mass to critical yeast. [2]

From Prayer for Results to Prayer for Communion

Most pastors keep some form of prayer list. Unfortunately, studies have shown that many pastors rank prayer lower than other aspects of ministry, and many admit to having an inadequate prayer life. One study I read years ago found that pastors of larger congregations were especially likely to have an inadequate prayer life. Among Protestants, the problem is even worse. Protestants, with their historical skepticism of mystical religion, often underestimate the importance of communion with God compared with vocal or silent prayer. Among charismatics, there can be an emphasis on what used to be called “prayers of power.” I used to have a friend who ordered God to do a lot of things on the theory that this was the appropriate thing to do.

For me, the change came with exposure to Centering Prayer. For Scazzero, the change first came with his exposure to the Trappist monks:

The first gift came through exposure to Trappist monks who had dedicated their lives to prayer. Their commitment to silence and stillness as a means of surrendering their will to God’s will, along with their focus on listening to God more than talking to him, quietly unsettled me.[3]

The second change came through his study of and immersion in Jesus’ prayer life. Jesus, it turns out, made prayer a priority, and his first goal was simply to be in communion and constant fellowship with God. This is why the Father could say of the Son, “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:21-22).

Communion, Clarity, and Direction

This, then, should be the first item in the scorecard of a Christian leader: Become a simple child of God, sitting at the Father’s feet, listening for wisdom, experiencing the Father’s love, and being content with the status of a beloved child of God. Unfortunately, too many Christian leaders drift slowly away from the Father’s feet, caught up in ceaseless activity on behalf of the Son, and, in the end, lose the power of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus withdrew to pray at decisive points in his ministry. He withdrew in order to renew his sense of purpose, discern the Will of God, and make important decisions, such as choosing his disciples.[4] When I’ve faced difficult decisions as an administrator, I’ve found that taking time to pray quietly can be incredibly helpful. Over the years, through many successes and setbacks, I’ve learned to rely on silent prayer in challenging moments. Sometimes it may seem like a waste of time, but I’ve discovered that this quiet time often brings a deep sense of guidance. After praying, I might not hear a clear voice, but I do feel a nudge toward certain actions. Once I follow that lead, I often feel assured that I am aligned with God’s will. I believe that for every Christian leader, pausing for listening prayer is a vital way to connect with God and find clarity in making good decisions.

Prayer and Power

One primary delusion in our society concerns power and its ability to force others to adopt our way of thinking, acting, and believing. This is a kind of power that Christian leaders must reject. However, there is another kind of power that Christian leaders receive when they make prayer their first priority. It is not the overt power the world worships. It is a quiet power that reveals itself in weakness, servanthood, occasional suffering, and even failure. Here is how Scazzero makes the point:

Prayer is where we, too, receive power. Not the power to make things happen on our terms, but the strength to persevere, wait, obey, and stay faithful through testing and setbacks. No strategy or support system can give us that. Only God can.[5]

One of the most challenging times I faced in ministry was dealing with a staff member at a large church who had committed financial wrongdoing. Even though I was trained as a lawyer and had years of experience as a senior pastor, this issue, along with others I was handling at the time, felt overwhelming. It quickly became clear that I needed to meet with the church leadership responsible for finance. I spent twenty minutes alone in my office, praying for God’s mercy and wisdom. After that, I picked up my pen and quickly listed ten steps essential to address the problem. I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to come up with that on my own, but I was confident that God had granted me the wisdom to identify the first important steps needed to resolve the situation. The group met just before noon, and by 1:00 in the afternoon, the church’s lay leadership had taken charge of the problem.

Abandoning the False Lure of Charisma

Another false scorecard item pastors are tempted to believe is that extreme charisma is a sign of spiritual power and sound decision-making. Anyone who pays attention to the dramatic failures of popular, visible charismatic Christian leaders should realize this is false. Charisma, as our society counts it, is a rare combination of physical, emotional, personal, and other characteristics that gives a person the power to get others to do what they want. As pastors, we are not seeking that kind of power. We are seeking the power to do God’s will.

Interestingly, this insight isn’t just for religious professionals. When Jim Collins wrote his book Good to Great, he found that the most impactful changes in organizations weren’t led by charismatic leaders. Instead, they came from individuals who genuinely prioritized the organization, its employees, and its customers, always humbly serving the company’s best interests above all.[6]

Discerning God’s Will

During the 1990s, at the height of the Mega-Church movement, many pastors attended large conferences where pastors from very large churches urged them to imitate those churches’ leadership, worship, programming, and other practices as a key to success. More than one returned to his local church, attempted to implement changes, and failed miserably, sometimes ending his ministry.

A third problem with using the wrong scorecard and refusing to follow the humble path of Jesus is substituting one’s own will for that of some celebrity leader concerning what God wants from a particular local congregation. Discerning God’s will means slowing down, refusing to act impetuously, listening carefully to God and others, and then acting. It also means recognizing the limits of a particular church, a particular situation, and most importantly the limits of a particular leader. This means we must slow down, surrender control to God, and listen for God to direct our steps.[7]

Nothing is more indicative of an immature leader than an unwillingness to slow down, surrender control, embrace humility, and listen carefully to God and others. This means we must abandon the notion, so common in America and in the media, that leadership is primarily about being decisive, quick to act, and uncompromising. The truth is that the best leaders listen to everyone with humility, take whatever time is necessary to make a good decision, and are more than willing to compromise, change direction, or even abandon a course of action if it turns out to be outside God’s will.

As one inclined to embrace a worldly vision of leadership and the character of a worldly leader, I can testify that nothing is more spiritually liberating than giving up the false ideal so common in our culture, the leader as master of everything. There is a wonderful freedom in submitting ourselves to God, to those God has brought around us as leaders, to the limits God has placed on us and those around us, and to the tendency to overreact out of fear or anxiety. All these things distort our decision-making and prevent us from making the best decision in God’s world.[8]

An Ignatian Moment

Pete Scazzero directs our attention to Ignatius of Loyola’s insight that we need to reach a point of “indifference” in our prayer life and decision-making to make good decisions. In summary, we need to listen to God in the movement of God, not just in our minds, but also in our Will and emotions as we make decisions. What we are waiting for is the moment when we want God’s will more than anything else and, so to speak, are indifferent to the worldly consequences of the answer to our prayer. In other words, when making decisions, leaders should feel that they, their organization, and the people closest to them will be drawn closer to God by the decision. This kind of decision-making takes time.

From Numbers to Discipleship of Future Leaders

One important discovery a Christian pastor or other leader can make is that the number of followers is less important than their quality. Success depends not on the actions of a large number of people, though many may be involved in the end, but on the actions of a few people who do the right things at the right time and in the right place. Christian leaders need to remember that, while Jesus did speak to large crowds, he focused his attention on a relatively small number of people who would carry his ministry to the ends of the Earth. Skipping personal discipleship with small groups deprives Christian leaders of their greatest potential for impact.[9]

Conclusion

By now, it should be clear that Jesus calls Christian leaders to a different kind of leadership and a different measure of success than the world elevates. In recent years, my wife and I have primarily attended relatively small congregations. Some were new church plants; others were ancient churches led by priests. One thing I have appreciated learning is that the best church leaders are personally humble, love their congregation, get close to members, act carefully and wisely, and try to imitate Christ.

Becoming this kind of a leader requires adjustment. Here’s how Scazzzero puts it in Emotionally Healthy Success:

Jesus is not asking us to make small adjustments to our leadership. He is inviting us to stop playing the old success game entirely— to step out of the world of scale, hurry, worldly influence, comparison, and visibility— so we can learn a new way of seeing what truly matters.[10]

Next week, I will move on to the kinds of changes that Christian leaders and others need to make to become leaders like Jesus who focus on what truly and eternally matters.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. The blogs in this series are inspired by this book. I was given the opportunity to review an advance copy of the book, which I recommend to interested readers.

[2] Id, 57.

[3] Id, 58-59.

[4] Id, 62.

[5] Id, 63.

[6] Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2001).

[7] Emotionally Healthy Success, 71.

[8] Id.

[9] Id, 76.

[10] Id, 79.

 

This is the second week of an examination a toon o be released book, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.^[1] One endearing characteristic of Pete Scazzero’s writings is the winsome honesty and self-disclosure that permeate his work. He’s not afraid to admit his own failures. I remember reading The Emotionally Healthy Church, the first of his books I read, and being touched by his admission of personal and pastoral failures, some of which I shared, and his willingness to share them.[2]

I wouldn’t want to take anything away from people reading his story for themselves, but I will share just enough to show that when he was a younger pastor, he was captured by a common evangelical desire to build a growing, thriving, and successful church. At some point along the way, a series of crises forced him to face the fact that he did not have the emotional health to be the kind of leader he wanted to be. The result was the creation of what is now Emotionally Healthy Discipleship. The church of Jesus Christ is better off because Pete Scazzero was willing to look at himself and see his own failures.

The False Metrics (Scorecard) We Create for Ourselves

Pete, like many of us, sometimes found himself comparing himself to other church leaders who seemed more successful. Such comparisons often brought him down rather than lifting him up. He might think, “I’m not a strong enough leader,” worry that his church isn’t growing quickly enough, or feel discouraged because people aren’t responding as he hoped. These negative thoughts can become endless and harmful because we often carry unhealthy scripts about what success should look like—scripts based on false ideas about our ministries and lives. Here are just a few of those misleading messages: ^[3]

1. I make too many mistakes and fail too often, violating the false metric that requires me to avoid mistakes.
2. I sometimes upset people or hurt their feelings, violating the false metric that people should always respond positively to my ministry.
3. I sometimes fail to meet people’s expectations, violating the false metric that one should always say yes to and meet other people’s expressed needs.
4. I don’t always get things right, violating the false metric that I must be right all the time.
5. Not everyone likes me or supports my ministry, violating the false metric that I should be liked and approved of by everyone.
6. My decisions sometimes result in conflict, violating the false metric that requires successful leaders to avoid conflict.
7. I am not always productive and thereby violate the false metric that a leader should accomplish a lot and work productively all the time.
8. I have physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and other weaknesses and thereby violate the false metric that I must not be weak or needy.
9. There are limits to my knowledge and experience, and I constantly fail the false metric that requires me to know more than everyone else.
10. There are times when I fail to put others first and meet my own needs, violating the false metric that requires me to make my personal life secondary.
11. There are times when I show anger, sadness, disappointment, and other emotions, violating the false metric that requires not to showing or expressing true feelings.
12. When I look around at others in my position, I recognize that I am just not good enough.

These internal narratives, the metrics they imply, and many others we could create are misleading and often false. In some cases, they lead us to be untrue to ourselves, our real needs, and the people who rely on us. As we internalize these false ideas, we create an “internal scorecard” we use to measure our success—a scorecard that can be deeply damaging.

The Problem with False Metrics (Bad Scorecard)

The problem with misleading metrics is straightforward: neither we nor anyone we know can truly meet them. If we try, failure is almost certain. For a long time in both my careers, I held a misguided notion of success that pushed me to be someone I wasn’t—someone smarter, stronger, tougher, more ruthless, and more daring than I was created to be. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t succeed. More damaging, failure deeply ingrained those false standards into my personality, resulting in obsessive workaholism. It took many years to finally let go and move forward.

Pete Scazzero puts it this way:

The weight of living up to all these scorecards is crushing. To keep everyone satisfied, to keep approval levels high and productivity up, we push ourselves far beyond what we can humanly sustain.^[4]

For a few years, our church compared itself to another congregation, a nearby mega-church that was part of a larger mega-church movement. We made our plans and set goals on the assumption that we should attempt to be like that church. We constantly fell short of our unrealistic goals. Finally, our Director of Christian Education, a wonderful person and good friend, advised senior leadership to stop imitating this other church and stop judging our success by its standard. She concluded with, “We just need to be who we are.”

It was one of the most liberating moments of my professional life. It was the first time it occurred to me that I did not always have to strive for our congregation to be bigger, better programmed, with a bigger facility and a larger budget. We could simply be who God created us to be. Most importantly, we could remain the community-centered church we had always been, without striving to become a more corporate congregation.

Social Status and False Scorecards

There was a time in America when pastors were held in high esteem. In particular, pastors of large mainline churches were highly respected members of local communities. When I was young, I was privileged to experience this phenomenon. The church my wife and I attended was prominent, and our pastor was a highly respected figure in a very large city. Unfortunately, the decline of Christian faith in America and a series of high-profile scandals have almost eliminated this phenomenon. It is rare today for a pastor to be seen as socially important.

One notable outcome of this phenomenon is that some pastors try to imitate successful leaders from the worlds of business or government, not only in how they lead but also in how they live as Christian mentors. For example, in one community where Kathy and I lived, there was a prominent pastor who never called himself a pastor. Instead, he sometimes referred to himself as a “religious businessman.” I believe this reflected a heartfelt desire to belong to a respected profession that offers social status and recognition. I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with wanting to be seen as a community leader, but unquestioningly emulating the values, objectives, organizational structures, and other aspects of business and government is problematic.

When he was a young man, the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a doctoral thesis in which he argued that the church was a visible social organization as well as a visible spiritual one.[5] He persuasively argued that the sacred community of the church could not be reduced to the categories applicable to other social organizations. This is a point all pastors need to internalize: As a church, we share certain characteristics with other social organizations and must be managed efficiently, just as they are. As I sometimes used to tell some of our staff, “We have to pay the light bill just like everyone else.” On the other hand, the church is a spiritual organization, and we cannot always lead it in accordance with the values of a secular society. This can be hard for some people to understand. I’ve had to explain to successful businesspeople who were elders in a local congregation that a strategy successful in a business context simply could not be used in our local congregation.

When we use metrics developed for business or other social organizations, we risk being unfaithful to Christ. In the same way, when we ultimately use the ministry of Christ to achieve for ourselves the same order of secular objectives that motivate secular leaders, we are almost certainly victims of a false metric and are measuring our ministry inadequately. This is particularly true when physical or fiscal size (members and budgets) becomes our most important metric. In the end, behind all the metrics ministries use to measure success, the fundamental question remains: “How good a job am I doing and our organization doing, in making more and better disciples for Christ?”^[6] Numbers can hide the spiritual reality that nothing important is happening in a church and in the spiritual lives of its members.

The Consequences of Inadequate or False Goals

Most parents encourage their children to learn to make good decisions. We spend so much time educating and training our children and trying to model a healthy lifestyle for them because we want them to make good decisions and lead happy, meaningful lives. A life characterized by bad decisions is never a happy one. The same is true for leaders as individuals and for the organizations they lead. Bad decisions have bad consequences. A bad notion of success leads to bad decisions, personal and otherwise.

When we adopt a false metric and therefore judge ourselves, others, and the organizations we participate in in a false or inadequate way, we open the door to suffering. When a pastor or other leader embraces a false scorecard, the results harm that person, those closest to us, and the cause of Christ.

There are certain signs that we have adopted a false scorecard and are harming ourselves, including the tendency to work beyond physical, emotional, and spiritual limits, constant overwork, feelings of inadequacy because one is not accomplishing enough, and constant comparison with others. Unfortunately, I have known many pastors who experience these feelings, including myself a good bit of the time.

When we act in this way, it can influence those around us, encouraging a similar behavior. For leaders, this might mean setting a standard that pushes everyone beyond what they thought was possible. While this can sometimes lead to personal challenges, it’s important to remember that pushing ourselves too hard can also affect our relationships with loved ones—family and friends—impacting the emotional bonds we cherish most.

Finally, when we push ourselves beyond our natural limits and live alienated from our own emotional well-being, we do violence to the cause of Christ. Over and over again, Scazzero points out that the most important changes people make occur slowly. Hurry, rush, and anxiety work against the slow work God intends to do in transforming our lives and the lives of those we have been called to serve. The mission we have been called to undertake becomes distorted and diverted from God’s fundamental purpose.

I’ve had the opportunity to help turn around more than one church. One of my personal failures has been to focus on structural flaws in the organization rather than on personally discipling people. When I look back on some of my successes that have not endured, I realize the failure was not growing the people, but trying to fix problems. God primarily calls pastors to disciple people, not to fix organizational charts or personnel problems. (This does not mean that fixing structural problems is unimportant.)

Scazzero describes the phenomenon as follows:

We do violence to God’s work whenever we rush ahead to do for God what he has not asked us to do. When we act for God without listening to God, we misuse our authority, distort priorities, and carry responsibilities God never entrusted to us. This is not a new pattern. Jesus’s disciples constantly succumbed to the temptation to take charge for God.[7]

The disciples, in many ways, misunderstood Jesus’s personal and communal messianic mission to transform lives. They hoped for something better: a politically and administratively reorganized Israel with them at the head. We can fall into the same way of thinking. We can fall into the habit of believing that because our church is growing, we’re doing God’s will. We can fall into the habit of thinking that because people praise our preaching, we’re doing God’s will. We can fall into the habit of thinking that because giving is increasing over the year, we’re doing God’s will. That may be the case, but it’s not necessarily the case.

When a church and its leadership embrace a false notion of success, there can be highly visible programs, a lot of activity, plenty of volunteers, and many indicators of health, while all along, under the surface, things are not good. Scazzero describes his experience as follows:

People under my leadership grew in areas that were visible–skills, knowledge, gift development— but not in the deeper places that actually change a person. We recycled the same problems year after year: defensiveness, poor conflict management skills, emotional reactivity. Significant parts of people’s lives remained untouched.[8]

My first pastorate was in a small church in a poor community that had experienced many years of decline. It was a small church, and so I was able to get personally involved in the life of many people. In particular, there was one young leader, about forty, with whom I became friends almost immediately. We spent a lot of time together. He was in a Bible study with me. He was in an accountability group with me. We began a men’s ministry which he led, and in which I participated. Interestingly, the five years we spent together were very productive for him and for me. That Bible study we started continues to this very day, thirty-five years later. He is still a leader in the church. He’s discipled other leaders in the church since I left. I can’t say this about every church I served. Devoting time to people is the most important thing a leader can do.

Don’t Play the Success Game

The most important takeaway from this blog is that we need to avoid judging our personal or ministry success by the standards of our society or secondary organizations. In Pete Scazzero’s terms, we need to refuse to play the success game. This does not mean we become isolated, highly spiritual, and entirely different people to whom normal people cannot relate. The reverse is true. We need to become whole people with whom people can easily relate. Next week, we’re going to talk about how we go about that difficult process.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

^[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. This, the last and the remaining blogs in this series are inspired by this book. I was given the opportunity to review an advance copy of the book, which I recommend to interested readers.

[2] Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 2010). His other books include Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). For those who wish to read all of his books, see Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, updated ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), and The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming your Inner Life will Deeply Transform your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017).

^[3] Emotionally Healthy Success, 32-33. I have taken some liberty with the actual list Scazzero outlines to make it more personal to readers and to extend its meanings.

^[4] Emotionally Healthy Success, 33.

[5] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1998).

^[6] “Making More and Better Disciples for Christ” was the motto of my first church. It was not a large congregation, but at some point it was widely seen as very active and productive in its area. The focus on discipleship allowed the development of leaders, some of whom are still active today.

[7] Emotionally Healthy Success, 46.

[8] Id, 48.

This week, I am shifting from political philosophy to discipleship, returning to a theme that has been the subject of many past essays. For the next few weeks, I am going to take a leisurely walk through a book that will be released in the next few months, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus by Pete Scazzero.^[1] This book is in the final stages of publication. I was given the rare privilege of reading an advance copy. Readers can order the book in preorder on numerous websites, including Amazon. There may be some changes between the text that read and the final product. The Emotionally Healthy website is https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/.

In Emotionally Healthy Success, Pete is reaching out religious leaders with an important message—and one that is especially needed within the contemporary evangelical movement. The message is simple: For the contemporary church in the West and those impacted by American culture to recover spiritual and emotional health, spiritual values and disciplines that have been ruled secondary since the Reformation need to be recovered by the contemporary church.[2]

Pete Scazzero and his Ministry.

For many years, Pete Scazzero has been helping pastors and church leaders escape the shallowness of the American church and focus on deeper issues of emotional and spiritual health in the local church and among church members and leaders. Through his ministry, he has impacted many church members and leaders, including me.

Nearly a decade ago, I was asked to help a troubled congregation restore itself to health. One of the associate pastors pointed me to Pete’s book, The Emotionally Healthy Leader, and suggested I read it. Within weeks, one of our children reported to me that her Anglican congregation was reading The Emotionally Healthy Church together. Eventually, I read both books, then everything that Pete has written. Kathy and I participated in and later taught Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationships in local congregations. Over time, his message began to sink into my soul and changed not just my life and ministry, but our family as well.

Pete’s ministry has included planting and pastoring a growing church, facing the pressures and challenges of the contemporary pastorate, confronting his own weaknesses, writing books on the importance of emotional health in congregations, and, more recently, coaching and consulting with congregations of all shapes and sizes. One question he is constantly asked is, “Pete, how exactly do I know if I am succeeding or failing?”

False Metrics

The mere fact that this question is asked so frequently (and I have asked it myself) should alert us to a big problem in American Christianity: We are captured by the materialistic success orientation of our culture. We don’t ask, as I think the Apostle Paul would have asked, “Am I following Christ and sharing his love with others?” We ask, “Am I succeeding?” In Pete’s case, he pondered the answer to that question and came to the conclusion that he needed to change. In the process of looking at his own inner life, he concluded that American church leaders are confused about the meaning of their ministry because we often use the wrong metric to judge our success and failure.

From the time I began my ministry, I looked at some metrics every week. The metrics I looked at included how many people attended worship that week, the collections for the week, how many people attended Bible studies, Sunday School, and other discipleship events, and the like. My list was pretty long. I have friends for whom the list ended with the number of people in worship. I’ve also known people who abandoned their ministry when they didn’t see dramatic growth in attendance or even a small decline. This focus on metrics eventually turns into a kind of mania. “If my church grew by 10% last year, it should grow by 10% every year. In fact, it should grow by more than 10%. I should be doing better and better every year.”

Fortunately, during my first pastorate in a very small church, our church actually grew by about 10% a year; one year it grew about 30% and then returned to a slower growth rate. Years later, when I was called to a new pastorate, I looked at the issue of who dropped out of our fellowship. Guess what I found? I discovered that the greatest dropout rate among members was among those who joined during the years we grew fastest. That 30% year was the case in point. Our little church was simply incapable of nurturing a third more people each year. My focus on growth had not worked. From that point forward, I realized that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was judging success. I made every effort not to let growth metrics control my ministry or our church’s ministry.

The problem of false metrics is not limited to church leaders. I have been a lawyer involved in business, as well as a pastor, throughout my professional career. The problem of false metrics for success is always with us in any profession. In any profession, false metrics often reflect a need for personal approval. In business, they often involve a need for financial gain. In government, false metrics involve power and position in a bureaucracy. The problem is the same: We fall into the habit of comparing ourselves to others we feel have experienced greater success, as measured by the metric we are using.

Why False Metrics Matter

When I was a young lawyer, I was assigned to help a businessman clean up a failed investment. It was an interesting experience. To sell what remained of the business, we had to continue operating it for many months. In the process, we found that the former managers continually compared themselves to the largest company in the industry, which made an expensive product. To gain market share, the company cut prices, resulting in massive losses during a recession. We, on the other hand, bid whatever it took to make a profit, because we were going to sell the company anyway. We got every contract we bid on. Why? Because, in fact, the company was the second choice for most customers, who only gave us the contract if our larger competitor was unable to fill the order. In other words, we could bid much higher because we were meeting an urgent need. Using a false metric drove the company into an unnecessary bankruptcy. Once we understood that fact, we were able to restore the company to profitability.

The lesson? False metrics matter, and recognizing that we are using a false metric is the first step toward renewed health, whether in business, government, non-profits, the church, or one’s personal life.

We live in a culture obsessed with false metrics. Our false metrics are often a version of size matters. But there are other false metrics—power matters, position matters, personal pleasure matters, getting what I want matters, being right matters—the list is pretty long. The problem with false metrics is that they result in failure and pain. The pain is felt by everyone: the person who uses the false metrics, their family, children, neighborhoods, church, cities, even the nation as a whole. False metrics create suffering. We are surrounded daily by the consequences of living according to false metrics and a false narrative of what a truly blessed life requires. The ruins lie all around us in the form of broken families, neglected children, alienated employees, troubled churches, and a host of other signs that something is deeply wrong in our culture.

The church is not immune to false metrics. I have been a pastor for a long time. I have been to many meetings of pastors, local groups, denominations, and large training events. Almost inevitably, the first question pastors ask each other is, “How large is your church?”  The most pervasive metric in today’s evangelical movement is size. Size = success is a false metric.  Interestingly, based on this metric, Jesus was a failure.

During his ministry, he attracted crowds, but at the end of his life he was completely alone. He had twelve close colleagues who deserted him, and a larger group that did the same. Jesus, however, did not think that size was what mattered. He also did not think that financial security, a large home, and a host of other things we view as signs of success were important. He thought having a relationship with God, whom he called “Father,” was important. Success was being a faithful son of the Father.

The night before he was executed by the successful and powerful people in his culture, he asked that the fate allotted to him not be required, but in the end, he accepted his destiny with a calm, “Not my will but Thy will be done.” His metric for success had nothing to do with success, money, position, power, pleasure, or fame. It had to do with carrying out the will of the Father in constant, unbroken communion with God. In the eyes of the world, he would be seen as a failure. In the eyes of God, the Beloved Son had achieved the greatest success the world had ever seen or would ever see—a victory over evil, sin, and eventually death.

False Metrics Lead to False Comparison

If we use a false metric to judge ourselves, our families, our professions, or our churches, we inevitably end up comparing ourselves to others. Pete Scazzero puts it this way:

Comparison with others is a unique kind of self-torture. What begins as a glance sideways often grows into something far more dangerous: envy and covetousness. Comparison says, “How am I doing?” Envy whispers, “I’m not enough unless I have what they have.” It is the voice that says, “I’ll be happy when our church reaches two hundred or five hundred.” “I’ll be content when we finally have our own building or are debt-free.” “I’ll feel so much better when we have a bigger youth ministry or a second campus.” This struggle with comparison isn’t new. It’s a dynamic that appears repeatedly in Scripture.^[3]

The Bible is full of stories about people and nations that had a false ideal that led to destruction and death. Israel wanted to be like all the nations that surrounded them, and the result was a series of failed kings, division, and finally enslavement in Babylon. Saul wanted the adulation of the people more than faithfulness to God, and the result was the loss of God’s favor and eventually the loss of his kingdom and life. David wanted the pleasure of being with Bathsheba more than obedience to the law, and the result was suffering for his family and nation. When Jesus arrived, the leaders of the people valued the continuation of their comfortable way of life more than the recognition of the unexpected Messiah they had been given by God.

I wish I could look back on my own professional career without regret for having followed false metrics and the damage they caused. But the facts are otherwise. When we discover that we have been captured by a false ideal of success, the best thing we can do is recognize it, repent of it, and live beyond its control as we do the best we can to undo the damage and suffering it has caused.

Conclusion

The good news is that God is merciful and we can move beyond our cultural captivities to false ideals and notions of success. In the process, we find our true selves and the joy of using our best talents, be they large or modest, in the way God has intended. In my experience, undoing the consequences is never swift, easy, or complete, but there is real healing. In this world, real healing, personal and social, is both important and enough.

At least to this point in my Christian walk and as a Christian leader, I have not accomplished all I hoped and dreamed of. Along the way, there have been failures and shortcomings. There has also been mercy and undeserved success. One of the great mercies has been the discovery of Pete Scazzero’s writings and the Emotionally Healthy Discipleship movement.

One word about Emotionally Healthy Discipleship generally and Emotionally Healthy Success in particular: These are not books to be read quickly or summarized in an essay like this. You have to read the books, do the exercises they recommend, and make the changes required to achieve emotionally healthy spirituality, relationships, and leadership. This is why pastors and church leaders need to do the work personally before leading a group of people through the materials. In a reversal of the phrase, “It is not about you,” it is about you (and me). It is about being the person and disciple God calls you (and me) be before anything else.

Perhaps just as importantly, it is important to do the work with your spouse and other colleagues. Fortunately, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship offers online leadership training for church leaders, preparing them to bring this ministry to their local church. Kathy and I have done the training, and it was wonderful. We are still in contact with some of the people we met during the training. Next week, we are beginning a new couples course with folks from around the country. It has been a wonderful experience.

Next week, I am going to return to how false metrics lead us to false ways of thinking about ourselves and what leadership requires of us, causing failure and misery to ourselves, others, and the cause of Christ.

Blessings to all.

^[1] Pete Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Success: Measuring What Matters Most to Jesus  (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2026. See also, Peter Scazzero, Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). For those who wish to read all of his books, see, Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2003, 2010), Emotionally Healthy Spirituality updated ed (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming your Inner Life will Deeply Transform your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017)

[2] Although Emotionally Healthy Success is primarily written for religious leaders, its principles are equally valid for those of us in secular occupations. They are also valid for non-Christians, though people from other faith traditions or no faith tradition will have to adapt certain principles for their own tradition.

^[3] Id, 24.

It might seem unusual to find a section on God in the political arena as part of a series of informal writings about the search for justice. Hopefully, by the end of this blog, we’ll see that including God in process-based political discussions is justified. The modern world often reacts against the idea that God or religion should play a role in politics, and a quick look at history helps us understand why. Before the Enlightenment, Europe was torn apart by religious wars among Protestants, Catholics, and various political groups trying to assert control over the church and its followers. This turbulent history, which concluded with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, left a lasting negative impression on many thinkers.[1]

In France, in particular, many people felt that the close ties between the Roman Catholic Church and the French government unfairly burdened the poor and lower classes. Across most European countries, religious dissenters often faced persecution. One of the main aims of Enlightenment thinkers was to protect individuals from the threat of religious persecution by advocating greater separation between church and state.

The Enlightenment thinkers dreamed of freeing the human race from religious superstition and institutions, enabling the advance of science and technology, and, originally, the emergence of a universal moral system on which all rational people could agree and on which human societies and their laws could be based. Unfortunately, this dream could not be realized, and the modern world lost confidence in the possibility of a universally agreed-upon moral system. In addition, with the breakdown of Enlightenment confidence in human reason, a kind of cultural nihilism developed in Europe and the West, including the United States.

The God of Process Thinking

Major process thinkers are often considered “constructive postmodernists.”[2] In other words, this group of thinkers has generally opposed the deconstructive potential of much modern thought and has been sympathetic to religion and morals. Some of these thinkers early on saw the potential for cultural and political nihilism as the modern world decayed, and addressed that decay by offering constructive thinking about the problems of religion and morality. As a whole, they reject the idea of “God as a Super Tyrant” who undertakes to manage the universe in great detail. Nevertheless, they are concerned to make room for a realm of the spirit, universal values and human freedom in the search for justice.

As always, when discussing the various takes on process and thought, it’s common to begin with Alfred North Whitehead. (This is not to deny the contributions of many other thinkers.) Whitehead was not religious but was sympathetic. He grew up in a religious household. His father was an Anglican priest in the Church of England. Although Whitehead lost interest in the Christian God of his parents early on, he remained sympathetic to religion and often had positive things to say about Christianity in particular. Despite this, he’s often been regarded as a kind of Western Buddhist because of similarities between aspects of his thought and Buddhist philosophy.[3]

For Whitehead, God is “dipolar,” meaning there are two aspects to God’s being. He begins his analysis by distinguishing between the primordial eternal (or transcendental) nature of God’s being and the “consequent” (or postmordial) nature of God as God is involved in the universe. In this essay, I will speak of the primordial and postmordial natures of God as the distinction between God’s eternal nature, considered without regard to his relationship with creation, and his postmordial nature, which includes his intimate involvement in his creation, allowing Christians to believe that we live and move and have our being in the ever-present God of wisdom and love revealed in Christ.[4]

Eternal Objects and Whitehead’s God

To better understand Whitehead’s perspective on God, let’s explore what he calls “Eternal Objects.” As we discussed earlier, Whitehead describes our everyday world—sometimes called the “Actual World”—as composed of many actual occasions, which I have called “momentary events” or “units of becoming.” The things we perceive as stable objects, which he calls “Enduring Objects,” are really just complex events that persist because of their underlying structure.

Whitehead points out that there are two types of objects that influence the emergence of the world of actual occasions but are not themselves actual occasions. These are:

1. Eternal objects, that is, ideal entities, like “justice,” that represent pure potentials for becoming real in the actual world. They also serve as the foundational concepts underlying all actual occasions. As to notions such as justice, I have called these “Transcendental ideals.”
2. God is the unique Eternal Object, who is both an Eternal Object and the primordial actual entity. (That is to say, God exists and has always existed as an actual entity that influences reality. While God is not an actual occasion (“momentary events” or “units of becoming”), God is present in all actual occasions.

Eternal Objects are the qualities and structures that shape actual occasions, such as instances of “justice” or “injustice.” Every individual entity is noetically composed of and defined by an endless hierarchy of these Eternal Objects, which can be a lot to take in. Basically, Eternal Objects are essentially the same as what philosophers call “universals,” which are repeatable qualities, characteristics, or types that can be shared by multiple distinct objects or individuals.

For example, consider me: I am a human being, a man, Caucasian, with blue eyes, a Christian, and a seeker of justice. I am also a citizen and a church member. Countless universals make up who I am. For Whitehead, Eternal Objects gain meaning and become “real” through their embodiment in individuals. In turn, individuals find their meaning through their participation in these eternal logics.[5] In this respect, they are somewhat similar to what Aristotle called “Potentials.” Eternal objects find their concrete existence as they become embodied in something that exists.

This feature allows each actual entity to be experienced in important ways by future entities.

1. Eternal Objects participate in the causal connection among individual entities, functioning as private qualities and public structures that characterize the growth of actuality in its rhythmic advance from private, subjective immediacy to public, extensively structured fact.
2. Eternal Objects are real potential elements (noetic ideals) that ensure that the process of nature is not deductive succession but organic growth and creative advance. This characteristic is important for understanding such political notions as Justice, for the search for justice is one of constant change and creative advance.

According to Whitehead, Eternal Objects are pure potentials that arise from the nature of the special actual entity humans call “God.” In God’s eternal life, Eternal Objects are ideal possibilities or potentialities, carefully ordered by logical and aesthetic principles, that become actual when embodied in Actual Occasions. Because God is both eternal and involved in his creation, God is both the originator and the recipient of every actual embodiment of these qualities. When these objects are realized in God, they transcend the specific actual entities in which they are found. For instance, consider the concept of blueness—it’s present in many actual entities, such as my blue eyes, but the essence of blueness itself transcends any single physical example.

Throughout Western philosophy, several fundamental ideas have been proposed about the ultimate nature of God. One is classic theism, which sees God as eternally above the universe. Those who reject classic theism often turn to pantheism, which views God as the inner spiritual essence of everything in the universe. The final idea, which aligns well with a process view of God, is called “panentheism.” This perspective sees God as both present within everything as the inner spiritual essence and existing transcendently beyond the universe. Therefore, God and his eternal qualities are both transcendent and potential, and present and real in concrete reality.

In summary, the God of process thinking is both eternal and unchanging, with the characteristics philosophers and theologians have historically attributed to God, and loving, personal, and social, maintaining constant contact with his creation and everything in it. The “postmordial” nature of God is not transcendent but present in creation and actively part of the world’s process. In a real sense, God can be seen as “becoming” as creation unfolds in both the natural and social worlds that human beings create.

In classical Christian terms, God the Father is not knowable in his essence, which transcends human existence, but the word of God (the logos) is present in the universe and became supremely present in the incarnation of Jesus Christ. The word of God, which is present in every actual occasion, is therefore knowable and can be known and experienced in human history. That specific quality of the logos that we call justice likewise becomes existent in a human society when people act justly in a specific situation. A court is considered just, or a decision is considered just, when it embodies that quality we call justice in a principle or decision.

A God of Persuasion Instead of Force

For Whitehead, God is “actual” (an actual entity) but nevertheless “non-temporal” (not a part of space/time as we know it), yet is the source of all creativity and innovation.[6] God transmits his creativity through what Whitehead refers to as “Persuasion.” God does not force the universe to do God’s bidding. Instead, God “persuades” or “lures” the universe through wisdom and love into becoming what God intends it to be. In this act of persuasion, God submits himself to the fact that the universe and human beings may freely ignore or violate that persuasion.

As mentioned earlier, Whitehead’s God has two poles of existence: a transcendent pole, which is primordial, and a consequential or physical pole that I have called “postmordial.” The transcendent pole is the “mental pole” of God, wherein the existence of Eternal Objects is found. As primordial, God is eternal, having no beginning or end, and is the ultimate reason for the universe, a factor that was important to Whitehead.

Despite the transcendent reality of God, God is present in the universe and in all actual occasions, which constitute the physical pole of God’s existence. In this physical pole, God experiences the world and the actualization of Eternal Objects within Actual Occasions. Because of God’s physical pole, God can be affected by and experience actuality. Thus, Whitehead’s God experiences and grows in a dynamic relationship with the created universe.

Subsequent interpreters of Whitehead have made significant changes to his theory, bringing it closer to Christian thought. In particular, Charles Hartshorne, the most important of his interpreters in the United States, thought that Whitehead’s definition of God did not sufficiently reflect God’s personhood. The consequential nature of God (God embedded in physical reality) is conscious and constantly moves creation toward an ideal end, wielding the power of wisdom and love. But God does not direct the course of the unfolding so much as “lure” or love creation (including human beings and human society) toward the accomplishment of the ideal ends for which God created them. In other words, God respects the freedom of his creation, including his human creation, and is affected by every decision the universe and everything in it makes.

Thus, process thinkers envision a God who is both eternal and capable of change, experiencing growth and actualization through an infinite variety of relationships with his creation, including the human race’s creations. This dynamic view of God emphasizes that God is not merely an abstract, timeless being but one who knows and includes the world within Himself—building a deep, loving connection with all within it. Only such a loving, active God can be truly complete and responsive, embodying love through real, personal relationships.[7]

Justice, God, and Transcendent Ideals

Whitehead uses the term Eternal Objects to refer to what other philosophers call universals. Regarding universals like “justice,” which is the primary purpose of these blogs, I think of them as what I have called “transcendent ideals.” These ideals exist as noetic potentialities that can be realized in human society through the diligent search for justice, embodied in institutions such as legislatures, courts, and the legal community as a whole, which seek a better, more harmonious society. These ideals exist in the eternal being of God yet are unfolded over time by the actions of human actors, some of whom are inspired by the ideals of the transcendental God and some of whom are not.

At this point, I will become both philosophical and theological at the same time. For example, take the Westminster Confession of Faith and its description of the attributes of God:

There is but one only, living, and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him….[8]

Ultimately, what we call morality and justice is rooted in the eternal, simple being of God, who is the ultimate source of any justice humans can achieve throughout history. God has kindly revealed some of this to us, both in nature, which secular thinkers can accept, and in Christian revelation and tradition. God is slowly unfolding this fundamental embodiment of justice, inherent in God’s being, into the time-bound reality of human societies, including our own. Yet the full extent of God’s being—eternal, invisible, and beyond human understanding—remains a divine mystery.

The great Jewish physicist and philosopher David Bohm offers us a way of thinking about the unfolding of justice in a concrete human society that I find helpful. The eternal essence of justice is “enfolded” in the being of God (or, for secular people, in the transcendental ideal of justice and a just society) and “unfolded” into human reality by human actors as they are drawn into the search for that justice, which is continually revealed to those who search for it, however imperfectly.[9]

Bohm sees the universe as deeply meaningful, full of information at every level of reality—much of which we humans are only beginning to understand. This meaningful aspect is constantly being “unfolded” during the course of universal history and especially within human societies. In simpler terms, both the physical universe and human beings, along with society, are inherently meaningful. These physical and mental parts of reality are interconnected as one whole, gradually revealing themselves within the universe, human societies, and history—both in how they unfold physically and through human actions.

To share this insight, Bohm introduced the term “soma-significant” to highlight the meaningful and information-rich nature of the universe. The term also suggests that the mental and physical parts of reality are deeply connected: soma-significance indicates that the physical (soma) and its mental significance are not separate entities, but rather two sides of the same coin, forming one unified reality. [10]

The universe and all its parts, including human societies and justice systems, are naturally both physical and mental (what I call “noetic”). The core of the universe’s information-sharing is grounded in a somatic order — an arrangement or connection of distinguishable parts within a physical structure. According to Bohm, there’s essentially only one flow in the universe, a flow that is both material and meaningful. Though meaning shifts within that flow, there’s no final line dividing mind and matter. The universe is a single meaningful whole, and while we can analyze and distinguish mind from matter, they are part of the same process.

The flow of the universe, through its organic processes, is a movement of matter, energy, and information in which meaning flows between the physical aspect (“soma”) and the noetic or ideal aspect (significance), yet ultimately they are not separate. The beautiful interconnectedness of the universe means that soma-significance (physical reality) is paired with its opposite, a sign-somatic relationship that Bohm calls “signa-significance” (a noetic reality). This means that, at a basic level, the information and signs that form the universe influence the physical world, as they are closely interlinked. Soma-significance shows that matter affects the mind, while signa-significance highlights that changes in meaning or significance also have physical effects.

This insight illuminates how ideals like justice come to life through the actions of a community dedicated to law and fairness. The deep meaning of justice is woven into the fabric of reality itself—and into the essence of God, who continually reveals it (unfolds its reality) through those who earnestly pursue justice in their communities. This pursuit is not merely abstract; it’s meaningful and tangible, influencing the physical world and shaping the ongoing development of society and legal systems.

Conclusion

Readers, I hope you can see that I’m trying to express an idea I haven’t fully understood. The main principle is actually quite straightforward. Justice isn’t simply a matter that can be reduced to science, as modern thinkers often suggest, focusing on power, relationships, economic factors, or political ties. Instead, justice is unique, independent, and eminently real, though its actual existence in a given society is embedded in its institutions and their decisions. When we seek justice, we can’t ignore the influence of power, political realities, economic laws, or other social and cultural factors present in any society. Seeking justice is about creating a harmonious society where different groups can coexist peacefully and where those who disturb that peace are held accountable and receive what they deserve. Even more importantly, it helps establish cultural norms—such as protecting private property and the obligation to make amends when harm is caused negligently.

From this perspective, it should not surprise anyone that various societies have different legal codes and approaches to legal problems. The power dynamics, relationships, economic realities, political realities, and social and cultural factors differ among societies. For example, Muslim societies are very different from Western democracies, as are Confucian societies, such as China. Nevertheless, despite all of our differences, we are on a common search for justice and can live in a peaceful world order as we seek a just order of the societies of which we are a part.

Copyright, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, ended the Eighty Years’ War and the German phase of the Thirty Years’ War. The treaty, signed in Münster and Osnabrück, involved Spain, the Dutch, the Holy Roman Empire, France, and Sweden, marking a secular shift in European history.

[2] Constructive postmodernism refers to a movement that rejects the nihilistic attack on the foundations of knowledge and morality by what sometimes called the deconstructive postmodernists. Instead, constructive postmodernism proposes a view of the progress of human knowledge that respects tradition, communities of interpretation, and religious and other traditional components of morality and the search for justice. My own views track those of C. S. Peirce, Josiah Royce, Michael Polanyi, Alfred North Whitehead and others of the movement.

[3] A substantial portion of this post is based on an earlier post, see G. Christopher Scruggs, “Whitehead No. 2: God, Eternal Objects, and Persuasion” at  www.gchristopherscruggs.com August 1, 2022 and G. Christopher Scruggs, Illumined by Wisdom and Love: Essays on a Sophio-Agapic Constructive Postmodern Political Theory (Hunt, TX; Quansus Publishing, 2025).

[4] As an aside, I believe that there is nothing inherently contrary to classical Christian belief in the work of the major process thinkers, despite the antagonism of some process thinkers like Charles Hartshorne.

[5] In this argument, I think Whitehead would have benefited from adopting a distinction made famous by Charles Sanders Peirce, namely the distinction between what it means to be real and what it means to exist. Peirce uses the term “exist” to refer to material reality. He uses the term “real” to include things that are not part of material reality but influence it, such as universals like justice. I believe this is the better way to think about a process argument as it relates to the law. Justice exists in past situations (existing reality) where society has found a just solution to a problem, and it serves as a transcendental ideal or a noumenal reality that continually shapes future decision-making.

[6] In what I think was a mistake, Whitehead does not consider God the preeminent being as does traditional thought. Instead, “creativity” is the ultimate metaphysical principle that underlies all actual entities. The universe is characterized by the continual creative emergence of actual occasions and actual entities. Charles Hartshorne rejected this view, returning God to the position of metaphysical supremacy. For Christians, God’s eternal wisdom and outpouring love are the source of this creative advance. “Justice” is one of the results of God’s creative outpouring.

[7] Thomas Hopko, “God and the World: An Eastern Orthodox Response to Process Theology” A Dissertation submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Theology of Fordham University (New York, 1982). 126-127. This dissertation remains worth reading for anyone interested in the potential for dialogue between Orthodox thinkers and process thinkers.

[8] Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, Section 1. The Second Helvetic Confession puts it this way: “We believe and teach that God is one in essence or nature, subsisting in himself, all sufficient in himself, invisible, incorporeal, immense, eternal, Creator of all things both visible and invisible, the greatest good, living, quickening and preserving all things, omnipotent and supremely wise, kind and merciful, just and true.” Second Helvetic Confession, Chapter 3 Of God, His Unity and Trinity, Section 1 (emphasis added).

[9] See, David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London ENG: Routledge, 1980). David Bohm, “the Enfolding Unfolding Universe and Consciousness” (1980) in Lee Nichol, ed, The Essential David Bohm (London, ENG: Routledge, 2003).

[10] “Soma- Significance and the Activity of Meaning” (1980) in The Essential David Bohm, 158.

Society As a Dynamic Process System

Last week, I shared a perspective on our legal system, viewing it as part of a larger ‘world’ composed of various societies. For those who think in terms of processes, the fundamental building blocks—called actual occasions—combine to form enduring entities and communities. This suggests that what we often consider “reality” is, at its heart, social. This encompasses not only the physical universe but also our social and intellectual worlds. Simply put, everything—everything—is fundamentally social, including human beings, our culture, and the institutions we build.

Relativity theory and, at the quantum level, what is sometimes called “spooky action at a distance” or “entanglement” implies that everything in the universe is related to everything else. In other words, the universe itself is a society of sorts. Every subatomic particle, every actual entity, every actual occasion (“momentary event,” “unit of becoming,” or “relational experience”), every person—everything in the universe—is socially related to everything else. To put it bluntly, everything whatsoever, of whatever kind or character in the flow of universal history, has social relationships with everything else.

Our legal system is highly complex, built on a series of laws and principles, starting with the Constitution, which remain steady over time but can evolve. Last week, I shared the idea of “fixed principles” or “fixed decisions” as the legal equivalent of “actual occasions” within the law. For example, Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803, was a groundbreaking case that set the precedent that the Supreme Court has the power of judicial review.[1] This means they can strike down laws passed by Congress that conflict with the Constitution. This principle has been a part of our legal system for over 200 years. While it could theoretically be changed, it’s highly unlikely that Congress, the Supreme Court, or the people through amendments would overturn Marbury v. Madison. It is a fixed decision that reflects a principle of American law and has endured for a long time.

Social Relationships and Law

In recent years, the relatively new discipline of ecology has made it clear that the world consists of interrelated parts not only at the universal and subatomic level but also at the material level of our day-to-day lives. When we consider the natural world as a whole, sustaining healthy relationships among its parts becomes an important goal. At the human level, the principle of ecology is even more important. Maintaining healthy human relationships within a healthy society is an important goal for any society. This is important when considering what kind of society we want to create, what kind of judicial system we intend to have within that society, and the nature of justice itself.

We often speak of the “social environment of a culture.” This implicitly recognizes that every facet of a culture is related to every other aspect and that we experience that social environment in numerous ways. This is not just true on a material level, that is, the level of human beings who run into each other through their social contacts. It’s true on a noetic level as well. Although we have to look at certain immaterial aspects of society as discrete social realities, they’re all related. For example, our judicial system is related to our political culture, which is related to our philosophical culture, which is related to our ideas about who human beings are, which is related to the arts as well as the sciences. For our society to be healthy, all the relationships human beings create must be healthy, not just in isolation but in relation to one another.

As a result, we can’t view a judicial system in isolation from the other aspects of the culture of which it is a part. This, I think, explains some of the problems we sometimes face when religion, morality, and law collide. Some people would like to keep morality and religion completely outside the boundaries of the law. Some people would like to see their moral views enacted into law in a rigid way. Neither of these is the best way to approach the problem of religion and morality. The fact is, our moral views are important and inform our legal views. This is apparent in public debates such as that over abortion; it’s less obvious in other areas.

Despite attempts by some to separate morality and law, it is clear that much of the law in every society, including our own, has a moral basis. Stealing is illegal in most societies, but it’s also widely regarded as immoral. Murder is illegal in most societies, but it’s also widely regarded as immoral. The moral element, to use a technical term, “inheres” in the law as part of its essential reality. Sometimes moral commitments offer clues about how the legal “real world” is or ought to be. Sometimes the legal element of society gives us a clue as to what morality it should adopt. Most importantly, as the widespread social decay evident in some societies illustrates, if the majority of people believe that the leadership or legal system of that society is unfair or immoral, the entire culture experiences dysfunction and decay.

Individuals and Societies

One persistent challenge in our modern world concerns the relationship between individuals and their society. This is true because individuals and the society they live in are not independent, unrelated entities. We develop our sense of self within the context of human society. Every human being is born into a family, community, and culture with unique (and sometimes destructive) norms and traditions. Our civilization is built upon the shared social attitudes that various communities embrace and internalize. Yet it’s important to remember that human beings are not mere automatons driven solely by society. At some point, the character of the mature individual emerges—an individual capable of independent judgment and creative involvement in all the societies of which he or she is a part.

In reality, human societies both constitute individuals and are constituted by them. Society and culture, including political institutions and conventions, shape individuals and are shaped and transformed by them. Thus, there is a constantly unfolding interplay between individuals and society, resulting in ongoing social change. Human society not only shapes individuals’ social behavior; it also gives them the potential to change society.

Over time, infants develop into conscious human actors who can influence the societies into which they were born. This creative human capacity allows people to modify the beliefs and attitudes that shape their sense of self and project those views into the broader communities to which they belong. Thanks to this capacity, individuals can shape and refine their personal growth—their developing self—by influencing and even changing the broader social patterns on which they were initially built. In this way, there’s a continuous, dynamic interaction between the individual and society, with each continually shaping the other. Once again, you cannot reduce societies to collections of independently existing individuals, nor can you reduce individuals to products of the societies that produced them.

Our habit of thinking of individuals as isolated monads, like Newtonian atoms bound together by forces, has fueled a kind of extreme social individualism on one side of political and social thought and an extreme corporatism on the other. It’s my view that both these extremes are wrong and that thinking in this way is no longer the best way to think. We human beings have a separate identity, but that identity is heavily influenced by the culture and society of which we are a part. It’s actually kind of hard to say where social influence ends and individual thought begins. I’ve known many people who considered themselves to be individualistic rebels who, in fact, were simply adopting the views and behaviors of a subset of our society of which they were a part.

Why Tolerance is Important

To use a religious term, it would seem that individuals and societies “coinhere” with one another. We are deeply embedded in a network of relationships, and our self-identity is tied to the identities of those around us, especially those in our families, communities, churches, social groups, political parties, cities, states, and nation. A problem, however, occurs when we over, identify with the social realities to the point where we cannot appreciate other people, their views, and their way of life. If we make our own social group, the absolute source of our identity, we end up, worshiping it and giving it a power over us that is unhealthy not just for us, but for the society of which we are apart.

In a complex, multifaceted social system, like the United States of America, one is daily, brought into contact with people from other places, other races, other moralities, other religions, and other ways of life. One does not have to agree with that way of life in order to respect the rights of those who have it. The basis of the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom was for just exactly this purpose. The early United States was primarily Christian, but, there was a Jewish minority. In addition, there was a division between Protestants and Roman Catholics and among the various Protestant sects that made up the early nation. The founders had experienced in Europe, and primarily in the United Kingdom, the results of the government making decisions about what was and was not religiously acceptable. Many of the first generation of Americans left England because of their persecution for their religious beliefs.

Therefore, they felt it was necessary that Congress should not establish a religion. That is to say, Congress could not establish a religion that was binding upon all members of the society of the United States of America. When they said this, they intended in particular to protect Americans from an established church, like the Church of England had become in the country from which most of them left. However, many of the founders were aware of a Jewish minority in America and they expected these protections to be available to them as well.

This gives us a clue as to how we ought to behave today in a much more complex situation. Today America not only has innumerable Christian groups, but also every world religion and a number of what would have been called religious cults exist in the United States. They occupy the public arena, have access to the media, build religious establishments, and otherwise participate in the society of which we are all a part. There are also people who have no faith at all, and they also participate in the society of which we are a part. It is only if we can all recognize that we are on a common search within our various communities for a kind of religious truth and a way of life that is life enhancing that we can permit those who differ from us to express their views.

This aspect of American culture is different than the experience in Europe and other places in the world. We sometimes are appalled by the kind of religious control that governments in Europe feel empowered to create. We need to remember that there was not a time in Europe when people were religiously free. The government was always in charge of religion, and whatever religious freedoms exist because of a government decision.

This is not the view of religious freedom held in America. In America, we believe that the people are fundamentally sovereign, and the government is limited to the specific powers given to it. The people have the right to restrict those powers by amending the Constitution, which they have done. In fact, before the Constitution was fully put into effect, it was required that the first ten amendments be passed. These amendments prominently included the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and of religion. I hope to do a longer series of blogs on this very important point before the year is over, or early next year at the latest.

We see today in America a generation that has grown up without a full understanding of the unique freedoms we Americans possess and the unique wisdom of our founders in placing restrictions upon the power of the federal government. In addition, nearly every state Constitution has the same or similar restrictions. The notion of our founders was that sovereignty ultimately resides in the people, and that their rights cannot be limited except by the people themselves.

Conclusion

Initially, the blog for this week and next week was combined into one. However, as I tried to keep it to a typical week’s content, the word count doubled! So, I decided to split it into two parts. This week, we focus on the individual and society, while next week, we’ll explore traditions and their role in social stability and preserving our freedoms. I hope you find these discussions engaging!

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs. All Rights Reserved

[1] Marbury v Madison, 5 US (I Cranch) 137 (1803).

For some time, I’ve been trying to think about what a process-influenced judicial theory might look like. Over the next few weeks, I am publishing what is essentially a series of reflections on a process view of reality, as it might be understood to help our judicial system work better, promote the search for justice and social harmony in our society, and, hopefully, help make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren. Unlike most of my endeavors, this blog does not include a bunch of footnotes reflecting research. It is a reflection on research already completed, most of which has already been set out in one or more of my writings.[1] Those who follow me know that I rarely publish anything without research, and the next three or four blogs are no exception.

What is a Process Influenced Judicial Theory

The idea that reality is best viewed as a process is not new. In fact, it goes back to the Greek philosophers. The Biblical writers understood this important truth. They knew that:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.[2]

The Biblical writers were not unaware of the reality of change. The meditations of the prophets on the rise and fall of empires from Egypt to Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome testify to their understanding of the reality of change in the political realm.

From a political point of view, Marcus Aurelius noted that the Roman Empire was subject to constant, and sometimes threatening, change. Thus, he says:

Observe constantly that all things come about by change; accustom yourself to reflect that nature of the universe loves nothing so much as changing things that are and making new things from them. [3]

Nevertheless, Western civilization has been influenced primarily by what might be called a static or atomistic, reductionist view of the world, which results in a reductionistic, power-oriented theory of justice. Plato, represents the classical view that notions such as “justice” were real things, what he called Forms, that existed in a world of Forms, and upon which all incarnations of the Form were based. Put in legal terms, any particular just decision was a physical incarnation of the ideal of Justice.

A Static Material Universe

Beginning with Newton, this earlier, ancient organic view of the universe began to shift toward a material vision of the universe. Part of what drove the rise of modern science was the search for universal, unchanging, and timeless principles that would govern the universe and everything in it. According to early Enlightenment thinkers, the universe was made by God, but the God who created it was more of an absent creator, participating in an overflowing stream of reality.

What might be called “historical Enlightenment optimism” held that moral values were built into the universe and, in a sense, baked into the human personality, which emerged from that material universe and was part of it. Initially, these thinkers believed that all right-thinking people would eventually agree on what was just or moral in any particular situation. The problem was human ignorance. Unfortunately, a consensus on moral, political, and legal issues was never achieved. In the end, this part of the Enlightenment project failed. This, in turn, led to a kind of moral nihilism common in contemporary society. Modern materialists tend to think they’re merely human choices enacted by a power-invested body.[4]

Contemporary materialist philosophers have generally held that there is no such thing as “Justice” per se, except as a label that those who seek a particular outcome place on things that advance their interests, or, for more communal thinkers, on the human community as a whole. The technical term for this view is “nominalism,” i.e., the notion that universal categories like “justice” are merely names we place on certain states of affairs or results that we, our group, or our society approve of.

This development is particularly important for the United States of America because we are the first Enlightenment nation. America was born out of the optimism early Enlightenment philosophers felt about the prospects for a human-oriented politics that would serve the best interests of citizens. It’s also a fact that the decline of that optimism has resulted in a kind of political realism and negative-oriented politics that characterizes contemporary political debate. One of the objectives of a constructive postmodernism is to overcome that realism and its destructive results in political life.

Process View of Reality

Unlike materialist thinkers, process thinkers believe that the fundamental reality lies not in matter and forces acting upon it, but in the unfolding process of the universe.  The quantum physicist and philosopher, David Bohm, describes the process of reality as a “flow.” Skipping the long history of process philosophy, it seems to me that the best way to understand reality is as a coherence among information, energy, and “concretions” of that intelligible energy flow, which we call “matter.” This is where we encounter the work of Alfred North Whitehead.[5] For Whitehead, the fundamental components of the flow of reality consist of what he called “actual occasions,” which, if they retain a stable existence, can become “actual entities.”

In this blog series, I may use the term “Fixed Principle” to describe the core realities within a judicial system. A fixed principle could be anything from a granted motion, a jury or court verdict, an appellate ruling, or an administrative decision—basically, any point at which a legal principle or its application to specific facts becomes settled for a certain period. Throughout American legal history, we’ve seen fixed decisions that have lasted for most of it, as well as some that are quite recent. What’s truly important isn’t how long they stay in control, but that, for a time, they become an accepted part of the objective reality of our judicial system.

I’ve always thought the division somewhat misleading because actual entities are actual occasions that remain stable over time. A mountain is a good example. It might last several million years because the fundamental quantum-physical actual occasions that make it up have a stable form capable of enduring that long. Human beings are the same. I am 75 years old, and my body has remained stable, capable of sustaining itself for that many years. However, because of my constitution, it is not possible that I will last as long as a mountain.

The same is true of social structures, such as a legal system. Every time a judge makes a decision, there is a small change in our judicial system, but the American legal system itself has maintained its identity over time. That does not mean it’s eternal. For example, the Roman Empire had a judicial system that no longer exists. Yet for hundreds of years, there was a distinctively Roman judicial system. Today, the United States and Europe are inheritors of the heritage of that ancient system of laws. Our legal system is, however, not eternally stable. Like all human creations, it must either evolve or die.

This brings us to a concept that is of great importance to Whitehead and to process thinkers. Although human beings can be described as actual entities, and although stable structures have that characteristic, human beings are also societies. In fact, human beings are a particular kind of society known as a “structured society.” Structured societies are composed of nexuses, or simple combinations, and more basic societies, or what he might call “subordinate societies,” which contribute to the definite relationship of the society in question. What makes a society important is that it has a kind of social order that allows it to change and adapt to its environment.

Although this can be hard to get our minds around, as to human societies, it’s fairly straightforward. Human societies are made up of human beings, who are themselves highly complex social structures. The nature of these social structures, particularly the presence of human consciousness and conscious thought, makes these societies especially complicated and especially capable of innovation, adaptation, and growth. It should be obvious that if a human being is a complex society capable of adaptation and growth, then social structures made up of multiple human beings are even more complex and adaptable to human innovation. This is important when thinking about a judicial system, which is itself a highly complex structure.

In the midst of the operation of any particular human justice system, “Justice” is what emerges from a justice-seeking community. Thinkers such as C. S. Peirce and Josiah Royce, along with their followers, view the search for justice as a communal enterprise in which a community seeks to order itself rightly. The term “justice” denotes the concrete achievement of that right order at a particular point in time.

It’s important to remember that for a community to truly achieve justice, it must genuinely be committed to seeking justice. If that community becomes corrupted and turns into a power-hungry group, it can no longer effectively create a fair society. I believe we’re currently facing this challenge. Moreover, there’s always the risk of mistakes along the way. Often, the bigger obstacle isn’t losing sight of justice, but our human tendencies—like self-interest, class consciousness, and other flaws—that can cloud our judgment. These imperfections mean errors are inevitable, even within the most earnest justice systems. Society’s progress isn’t always straightforward; we move forward at times and hit snags at others, but the journey continues.

This is an extremely important point for modern people to grasp. Progress is not inevitable. Not every new idea is progress. Not every social pressure from a particular interest group necessarily leads a society forward. In fact, given human nature, many of the pressures on any society and its justice system would lead to corruption and decay if followed. This means that the justice-seeking community has to be ever vigilant and always willing to admit mistakes.

Noetic Reality of Justice

When I say that a judicial system, as a community of justice seekers, is capable of making mistakes, I’ve reached an important point. Justice is not merely a label for whatever a group of people considers just at any particular point in time. It is something that exists outside of us, and its reality stands over our notions of justice, always critiquing the current state of justice in human society. Justice is what I call a “transcendental ideal.” Human actors can and do make mistakes along the way, but justice itself stands over the human search for justice like an invisible beacon guiding us towards a rational and harmonious solution to our concrete search for justice in our own society.

Understanding that not all real things are physical can be quite inspiring. For example, a judicial system isn’t just about physical buildings or officials—it’s about the relationships and ideas that shape it. This system involves many people—legislators, kings, rulers, judges, lawyers, court staff, police—everyone plays a vital role. While it has tangible parts like structures and personnel, it also has important intangible parts—what I call “noetic” or ideal components, which include the core ideas and values it stands for. These noetic parts are actually even more crucial than the physical ones. A legal system can withstand a corrupt official, but it’s much harder to endure if the fundamental idea of justice is lost.

These ideal or noetic components are just as real as the human actors and physical structures involved. To borrow from Plato, that which is real is that which has the capacity to influence the world. Ideas and concepts, such as justice, are not material, nor does justice exist in a Platonic world of ideal Forms. Yet justice and injustice are real aspects of any social reality. They exist as “noetic realities.” The legal system rests on an enormously complex set of noetic realities embodied in areas of the law we call contracts, torts, property law, tax law, statutory law, and administrative rulings—a host of ideal components that are in constant relationship with one another and with the physical reality they regulate.

Influence and Change

A process view of a judicial system holds that any system, any portion of the flow of reality, is constantly changing. To be real is to be both subject to and influenced by others, and this means being embedded in a constantly changing world system. This is true in the subatomic world, in the material world we inhabit, in the social worlds of which we are a part, and in any judicial system. Every participant in a judicial system, however insignificant, has some influence on the system as a whole. This influence is constant and results in an ever-evolving structure for a just society as it seeks just solutions to the infinite number of relationships of which we human beings are capable.

We sometimes focus on important entities, such as the United States Supreme Court, as shaping the legal system. And it’s true that the US Supreme Court has greater influence on our legal system than, for example, I do. Yet every Justice of the Peace, every attorney appearing in court, every plaintiff or defendant, every policeman making an arrest, every juror in a trial, and everyone else involved in the system has some degree of influence, and any change we make will be embedded in that system for as long as it exists. One conclusion to be drawn from this is that everything we do is important, whether it is highly socially significant or hardly significant at all. All participants in our society are important parts of the search for justice.

An American Application

I am at a stage in my study of American constitutional law and political philosophy where I am approaching a time to discuss the issue of freedom of religion. In our society, the First Amendment protects freedom of religion. Early on, Thomas Jefferson made some ill-advised comments about the separation of church and state, meaning that we should not have a theocratic state. Those words have been used to support the view that religion should have no impact on our legal or political systems whatsoever. This is not what Jefferson was trying to say, and it’s not true. Once again, since we understand that reality is relational and that all of society is interconnected, we also understand that religious views are fundamentally important to the legal system. They bear upon it in important ways. Conceptually, they must be kept separate, and the law in America should not establish a national religion, but that does not mean that there should be an “iron wall” between religion and politics.

From this perspective, attempts by secular people to remove the Ten Commandments from courthouses are somewhat misguided. They ignore the fact that our judicial system has been profoundly shaped by our Judeo-Christian heritage, of which the Ten Commandments are a fundamental part. This doesn’t mean other components aren’t important or that we mindlessly embody the Old Testament law in our legal system. Our legal system is also based on the works of great non-Christian thinkers, such as Cicero. I would have no problem with the courthouse displaying a few quotations from Confucius, the greatest Islamic thinkers, or anyone else who has seriously considered the nature of justice. The fact is, our legal system is profoundly shaped by this great religious heritage, which finds its way into our culture.

Some readers might worry that I believe morals or religion should control politics or law. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our moral systems and religious communities are part of the broader culture, even a world culture, of which we are a part. But they are not the only part of the culture, and they frequently disagree. Therefore, they can’t be the sole controlling factor in every decision. It’s not possible to have a legal system in which these two irreconcilable views are both enacted into law as their most ardent proponents hope. What we can hope for is a degree of social harmony and human respect for others amid our disagreements.

Consensus and Justice

This brings me to another concept, which I will call “consensus.” When it comes to making decisions, whether as individuals or as a society, there comes a time when we have to decide. Our society, and in particular our political systems, is dominated by a view of decision-making that relies on power. Courts, legislatures, administrators, business executives, and many others believe they get to make the decisions and that their decisions are justified by the power they have to make them. That is not the view I want to defend.

I believe it’s important that we all work together harmoniously to keep our society running smoothly. To do that, we need to find some common ground about what steps to take next. Implementing laws, holding elections, and making decisions are essential parts of this process. But when the pursuit of power and the desire to keep one’s own group in control become the main focus, it can gradually erode our ability to compromise and make fair, wise choices. If I believe that my own success is crucial to my life’s stability, I will be tempted to treat others unfairly.

We tend to think of these decisions as final. If we happen to be on the winning side, we hope they are, but they’re not. A person who has read enough history knows that laws, political structures, conventions, and other things change over time. In law, we seek a decision that can remain stable over an appropriate period of time, which requires a kind of consensus among those who believe it’s the best possible decision, an acceptable decision, or a completely unacceptable decision. Such decisions are always open to further critique and a new consensus. They are fixed decisions only for a period of time.

Pragmatic philosophers often say that truth is what a community accepts as a proper description of reality over time. When they say community, they don’t mean just any community. For example, I don’t get a vote on whether quantum physics is the best explanation of reality. Only highly qualified quantum physicists get to vote. In a legal system, it is primarily legislatures, courts, executives, and administrative agencies that make such decisions.

This place is a significant responsibility for those in a position to form a consensus. It means they need to listen to everyone and distinguish good advice from bad. It also means they have to be able to make decisions that may not align with their particular social group but that seem best for society. Above all, it means we must be willing to compromise. Without the ability to dialogue, share information, evaluate options, and compromise, it’s impossible to have a functional social system, particularly in a society as diverse as the United States of America.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] I have written a number of blogs on aspects of process thinking at www.gchristopherscruggs.com. In addition, I published a book examining the major pragmatically inclined process thinkers, titled Illumined by Wisdom and Love: Essays on a Sophio-Agapic Constructive Postmodern Political Philosophy (Hunt, TX: Quansus Press, 2025). The title is pretentious because it was intended as the “senior essay I never wrote because it wasn’t required, but I should’ve been required to write it!” One of our children demanded that I do the research.

[2] Isaac Watts, “O God our Help in Ages Past” in Psalms of David (1719), which finds its inspiration in Psalm 90, with its recognition that human life is short and passes away more quickly than we realize when we are young.

[3] Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” in Marcus Aurelius and his Times; The Transition from Paganism to Christianity, tr. George Long (New York, NY: Walther J. Black, 1945), pp 11-133), 40.

[4] The purposes of this essay, the modern world begins with the work of Descartes and John Locke, and the emergence of modern Democratic societies. By the middle of the 19^th century, with the work of Darwin, Nietzsche, and others, the modern world begins to take on a postmodern form, which finally emerges, in my view, in the post-World War I era. As with all labels, there is a certain subjectivity to when one period of history ends and another begins. For example, if you read my other writings, you will see that I believe the state we are in is not truly postmodern but rather something like “hyper-modernism,” the frantic end of the modern world.

[5] For those who are interested, there are three books that are extremely important for understanding Whitehead. Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought.

Anyone who reads the news understands that Great Britain is in an almost impossible budgetary situation. Years of uncontrolled domestic social spending and failure to invest in needed military maintenance have left it nearly bereft of its historic military capacity and deep in debt. Much of Europe is in the same or a similar situation. In Britain, successive Conservative and Labor governments have increased spending on domestic priorities while insufficiently funding defense. In the process, they created a set of social expectations that cannot be met over the long run and, at the same time, a situation in which the long-term viability of their country could be in danger. We often hear criticisms of Great Britain without considering whether the very same thing is happening in the United States. The sad truth is that it is.

The story of collapse of the British Empire and its impact on the UK’s finances is long and complex, but there are some lessons that resonate with what’s happening in the United States today. At the beginning of the 20th century, the British pound was the world’s primary reserve currency. Britain was the world’s preeminent military, and especially naval. power. The sun never set on the British Empire. Two World Wars and the end of colonialism changed everything. Britain lost its empire. It ivested heavily in social spending. It nationalized industries that rapidly became uncompetitive.  Britain’s enormous public debts, the shift of industrial and economic power to the United States, and increasing dependence on social programs and social spending marked the end of its economic dominance.

The United States isn’t immune to these challenges. The US emerged from World War II as the world’s dominant economic and military power. Since that time, we’ve been involved in several wars financed by debt, and, like others, we’ve seen our industrial strength come under pressure from China and other countries. We’ve also built a large public social welfare system that can be costly and difficult to sustain. Like Britain during the first half of the 20^th century, the US faces ongoing concerns about maintaining the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency. Especially since the COVID-19 crisis, the standard of living in the US has declined, and the national debt has increased dramatically. In other words, the same policy threats that led to the collapse of the British way of life threaten our own economy and way of life.

Our Debt Situation

In this article, I want to set out a reasonably neutral account of the situation in the United States, along with a suggestion for how to get ourselves out of it through a constitutional amendment. I’m not going to talk about specific spending cuts. Frankly, without a mechanism that forces spending cuts on our government, and a trade-off between defense and domestic spending, we can’t escape our growing financial problems. Congress and successive presidents have proven themselves incapable of addressing the issue because of the political consequences of doing so. Therefore, the citizens themselves have to act. If they do not, the United States is doomed to decline.

Because of years of poor financial discipline, the United States has an enormous national debt, and increasing interest costs to finance this deficit will lead to future problems, lowering the standard of living and security for our children and grandchildren. It will also impact our national security. The day will come when we simply cannot afford a military of the size to which we have become accustomed.  If we do not want this to occur, today’s generation must take steps to ensure that America is put on a long-term, secure financial footing.

What is the deficit? Quite simply, the deficit is the difference between the funds that the Treasury Department receives in any given year and federal spending against those receipts. If the number is positive, then the United States government has a surplus. If the government spends more than it receives, it runs a deficit. It’s just as simple as that. When there is a deficit, the government has to borrow money in public markets and pay interest on that debt.

Tracking the Federal Deficit: May 2026 

 For much of American history, deficits were not a problem because our country ran a surplus. Unfortunately, since the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the emergence of the United States as a permanent military power with a significant welfare state apparatus, this has changed. Set out below is a chart showing decades of spending growth in the American economy and the impact on federal spending:[1]

As of today, the total gross national debt of the United States is somewhere around $39.2 trillion. If one assumes that the United States has about 150 million taxpayers, that would be about $290,000 per household. Since many households do not pay any taxes (and in any case could not fund a $290,000 debt repayment), the burden is going to fall somewhere else.

The impact of increased social welfare spending on the budget is recorded in the following chart:[2]

The chart debunks a common assumption: that defense spending is the culprit. This is untrue. Social spending is the largest contributor to federal spending, with rising interest costs an increasingly significant factor. It should be obvious that any sustained attack on the deficit involves straightening out social spending. (This does not mean that the defense budget should escape scrutiny or cost savings.) Finally, our financial situation indicates that taking advantage of uncontrolled federal spending for political or fraudulent purposes to enrich elected and other officials needs to end. We cannot afford it.

How Big is the Problem?

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that the federal deficit will probably increase by nearly $25 trillion over the next decade. Health and retirement programs are expected to grow faster than the economy and population, which is a cause for concern because our costs are already high by world standards and these costs impact our competitiveness in the world economy. As the US borrows more, interest costs will rise sharply, potentially taking up half of the federal income-tax revenue. There is a risk that Social Security might become insolvent within six years, which would involve a federal subsidy of those costs. In almost any conceivable situation, spending on social and defense programs would be seriously constrained. More importantly, if we don’t find a solution soon, the savings and financial security of many Americans—both now and in future generations—could be deeply affected, which is something we should all be worried about.[3]

Here is what the future holds for America in terms of budget deficits if nothing is done:[4]

Average voters must understand uncontrolled deficits impact the value of our money, savings, retirement security, and other assets. In the end, deficits could lead to a dollar collapse similar to the pound collapse Britain experienced. This could result in a depression deeper than any our nation has experienced—and wipe out the savings of millions of Americans. Deficits impact the standard of living of the middle and lower middle class disproportionately because of their inability to “hedge” the decline of the value of their money.

What to Do

It should be clear to all Americans that Congress needs financial constraints in order to put our fiscal house in order. Tough choices are necessary, such as cutting spending, setting appropriate tax rates, deciding how Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid should be self-funded, and determining how to distribute costs fairly across groups and generations.

I won’t dive into all the specifics here, but my general idea is that each federal program should become more or less self-sustaining over time. We need to set fair tax rates, and everyone should contribute. Deductions, especially those that distort consumption or favor uneconomic business, need to be minimized. Above all, everyone needs to contribute to meeting our national financial obligations. If only the wealthy pay taxes, they end up controlling our country in the long run. This means that our democratic institutions would be threatened by the reality that most people are not contributing to social spending. Therefore, all Americans must come together, work as a team, and figure out how to row the boat together.

There have been a number of proposals from cutting spending to increasing taxes dramatically, and everything possible in between.[5] Most proposals would have a beneficial impact if enacted, but as a friend of mine says, “Congress does not intend to do a thing about the problem because they know any solution involves pain to some group of voters. They know we are on a pathway to disaster, but they do not have the courage or ability to act.”

Financial Responsibility Requirements

Public spirited citizens have attempted to create various incentives for Congress to balance (or at least reasonably control) the national budget. The last president to try to do so was George W. Bush, who quickly learned that it’s difficult to find a political consensus on this issue. (This is especially true when your Vice President is foolishly telling people that deficits don’t matter.) Without some kind of financial constraint on politicians accustomed to buying votes, it is nearly impossible see how our financial house can be put in order.

There have been many balanced budget amendments, some of which have come fairly close to being enacted. Some of these amendments would imply a very dramatic and quick change in public spending—a risky strategy. It seems to me that the better way forward is to gradually solve our financial problem over time, with the likelihood that both major parties would be in power during a portion of the phase in time. Therefore, here is one possible solution:

Financial Responsibility Amendment yo the Constitution of the United States of America

Section 1: The financial records of the Government of the United States of America shall be kept in accordance with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Section 2: Except as provided for in Sections 2.4 and 2.5 of this amendment, financial outlays of the Government of the United States of America for any year shall not exceed receipts. In order to carry out the requirements of this amendment:

Section 2.1: Prior to each fiscal year, Congress shall adopt a budget for that fiscal year in which total anticipated outlays are no greater than total anticipated receipts, plus any spending to be funded from accumulated surpluses and reserves. Congress may amend such a budget during any fiscal year, provided that revised outlays do not exceed revised receipts. It shall be the duty of Congress and the President to ensure that actual outlays do not exceed the outlays set forth in such budget.

Section 2.2. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, liabilities for Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, or other recurring social entitlement payments, including federal pensions, must be accrued and funded year-by-year within the federal budget; provided that Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and other recurring social entitlement payments accrued or vested prior to the date this amendment is ratified shall not be required to be so funded, but the cost thereof is subject to the balanced budget provisions of this amendment. Each year, the budget shall show an accrual of, and contain adequate provision for, payment of these items, and the Government Accounting Office and the Office of the Budget shall certify to Congress that taxes levied for payment of these items are adequate to fund such benefits.

Section 2.3. In order to carry out the purposes of this amendment, the budget for each fiscal year shall contain a statement certified by the Congressional Budget Office certifying the reasonableness under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) of the estimated receipts and expenditures for the budgeted fiscal year.

Section 2.4. Congress may, by a two-thirds vote, waive the provisions of this article for any fiscal year in which a declaration of war is in effect and hostilities are ongoing. In addition, whenever three-quarters of the whole number of both Houses shall deem it necessary, Congress may provide for a specific excess of outlays over receipts for any fiscal year.

Section 2.5. This amendment shall take effect in the next fiscal year after the year of its ratification. In order for an orderly transition in the economy, during each of the following twelve fiscal years, the federal deficit calculated as set forth above shall be reduced by no less than one-twelfth of the average deficit for the three fiscal years ending immediately preceding adoption of this amendment. Thereafter, this amendment shall be fully implemented.

Section 3. Beginning on the date this amendment is ratified, Congress may no longer require the states to engage in activities without appropriating funds from the federal budget equal to the additional costs imposed by any such mandate.

Section 4: The President of the United States may veto any line item in any piece of legislation that, in his or her considered opinion, might result in the budget for any year becoming out of balance.

Section 5: Congress may pass no law creating benefits for, or responsibilities on, citizens of the United States of America that do not apply equally and uniformly to all citizens, including members of Congress.

Section 6: Members of Congress shall be liable to recall for any failure to adopt the budgets required by this amendment in any year in which it fails to do so. In addition, no Speaker of the House or Majority Leader of the Senate may continue in such office from and after any year in which there was a failure of Congress to meet the requirements of this amendment, and no member of Congress may be reelected to office who voted for an unbalanced budget in any year.

Conclusion

I’m not so naïve as to think I’ve got the solution to the problem our country faces, but I felt it necessary to at least suggest a possible solution. If anyone has a better, simpler, or more politically viable solution, or any other solution, I’d be happy to hear about it. In the meantime, I think that for the future of our democracy, some kind of balanced-budget and financial-responsibility amendment is the best approach.

As a matter of fundamental public philosophy, I think changes are better done slowly, carefully, and with attention to the potential that a particular strategy is not appropriate. More importantly, I believe that solving the budget problem cannot be done without a conversation and dialogue between our national leaders from both of the major political parties. The problem we face is not a republican problem or a democratic problem. It’s an American problem. Therefore, our leaders need to come together to solve the problem, even though both parties will find some of their priorities constrained by any reasonable solution.

Throughout my years in law, business, and leading churches, I’ve learned that no challenge can be overcome without energy, purpose, and a readiness to face discomfort. This is especially true for issues we’ve let slide for too long, which then cause financial and other difficulties that are tough to fix. In my experience, delaying action on problems right in front of us isn’t a wise choice. Problems won’t improve on their own—they tend to grow without deliberate action. Applying this perspective to our national debt is simple and straightforward: This problem has been increasing while we’ve been hesitant to act. It’s time we stop watching the problem get bigger and start addressing it.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] US Government Spending.com at https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/debt_deficit_history (downloaded June 18, 2026).

[2] Bipartisan Policy Tracker, Deficit Tracker, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/deficit-tracker/ (downloaded June 18, 2026).

[3] See, The Cato Institute, “Here’s the Solution to the Deficit. Hint: It Isn’t Taxes” (March 13, 2026) https://www.cato.org/commentary/heres-solution-deficit-hint-it-isnt-taxes (Downloaded June 30, 2026).

[4] Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, “CBO’s February 2026 Budget and Economic Outlook” February 11, 2026) https://www.crfb.org/papers/cbos-february-2026-budget-and-economic-outlook (Downloaded June 30, 2026).

[5] See Congressional Budget Office “Options for Reducing the Deficit 2025 to 2034” (December 12, 2024), https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60557 (downloaded June 30, 2026).

As many readers know, the recent case of Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al.,) the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey.[1] The effect was to put an end to nearly half a century of federal supervision of abortion availability in the United States. Just as Roe created an uproar and much opposition among opponents of abortion, Dobbs has had the same impact on supporters of abortion. Whatever one thinks of the outcome, I think that the case illustrates an important conceptual divide among modern jurists.

Facts of the Case

Dobbs arose as follows. In 2018, the State of Mississippi passed what the legislature called the “Gestational Age Act,” which provided in part that, except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality, a person was prohibited from intentionally or knowingly performing or inducing an abortion if the probable gestational age of the fetus was determined to be greater than fifteen (15) weeks. [2]

Subsequently, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an abortion clinic, and one of its doctors challenged the Act in Federal District Court, alleging that it violated the constitutional right to abortion established under Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (“Casey”).[3] The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of respondents and permanently enjoined enforcement of the Act, reasoning that Mississippi’s 15-week restriction on abortion violated applicable precedent forbidding states to ban abortion before viability. The Fifth Circuit affirmed. Originally, it was thought that the case might further narrow Roe, but in the end, it resulted in its overturning.

In Dobbs, the Court revisited its prior decisions in Roe and Casey and the critical question of whether the Constitution confers a right to abortion. Casey’s controlling opinion had sidestepped that question and reaffirmed Roe on the basis of stare decisis. The Dobbs Court declined to continue upholding Roe and revisited Roe’s underlying logic and continued viability. In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion and overruled Roe and Casey, returning responsibility and power to deal with this contentious issue to “the people and their elected representatives” (i.e., the states).

Abortion Prior to Roe

The majority decision in Dobbs notes that before Roe and for the first 185 years after the Constitution was adopted, states had the freedom to address this issue based on what their citizens believed was right. At the time of Roe, about thirty states entirely banned abortion. In the years leading up to that ruling, about a third of the states relaxed their laws, but Roe abruptly halted that incremental process. Rather than leaving it to the states, Roe established a uniform constitutional restriction nationwide and effectively nullified individual state abortion laws.[4] In 1973, when the Court decided Roe, Justice Byron White, in his dissent, described the decision as an “exercise of raw judicial power,” which ignited a heated national debate and deepened divisions in our political culture, among religious groups, and across society at large.[5] The majority in Dobbs stepped away from the exercise of that power. In the end, one explanation for Dobbs is that the Court realized that Roe involved the improper use of judicial power.

The Court started by pointing out that the Constitution doesn’t explicitly mention a right to obtain an abortion, and that several constitutional provisions had been suggested as the basis for an implied right. Roe held that the right to abortion was part of a “right to privacy” rooted somewhere in a “penumbra” of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In Dobbs, the Court rejected all these sources for Roe, stating that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences.” The Court also observed that, “far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.” The majority noted that after nearly half a century, Roe continued to produce and inflame national debate, bitterly dividing the nation.[6]

Substantive Due Process

Casey was important because in it the Court dismissed the vague reliance on a vague right emanating from named and unnamed constitutional provisions and based its decision on the theory that the right to obtain an abortion is part of the “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, thus clearly embracing a Substantive Due Process approach to abortion litigation. Dobbs overruled Casey on this point:

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely—the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That provision has been held to guarantee some rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, but any such right must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”[7]

I cannot be sure, but I believe the Dobbs Court wanted to move away from substantive due process in 14^th Amendment cases.

Impact on Similar Rulings in Other Areas

In overturning Roe and Casey, the court was careful to characterize abortion as a unique situation. Dobbsdoes not completely end the possibility of using the 14th Amendment to protect certain privacy rights, but any such future application must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” In so doing, the majority opinion carefully examined its past decisions in the area, specifically the dangers inherent in any move to incorporate a “right” into the Constitution that is not either expressly contained in the Constitution as amended or so “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” that such right must be recognized.

According to Dobbs, Roe failed to meet that standard because, prior to the late 20th century, there was no legal support in the U.S. for a constitutional right to abortion. No state constitution had ever recognized such a right, and until just a few years before Roe, neither federal nor state courts had acknowledged it. Even scholarly writings failed to address the subject before the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s. In fact, for much of U.S. history, abortion was illegal in every state.

Similarly, under common law, abortion was considered a crime at various stages of pregnancy and was seen as unlawful, carrying serious consequences at any point. American law followed these traditional principles until the 1800s, when a wave of new laws made criminal offenses of abortions, increasing penalties. By the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, about 75 percent of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy.[8] The result is that Roe was decided with very little, if any, historical or judicial precedent. In some cases, Roe either ignored or misstated the relevant history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.[9]

Stare Decisis

Having decided that the Constitution’s substantive provisions do not support a constitutional right to abortion, in response to the dissenting justices, the Court argued that stare decisis did not require continued acceptance of Roe and Casey. Stare decisis encourages courts to adhere to prior case law and established legal principles to create continuity and predictability in the legal system. It applies only to the decision itself, not to what is called obiter dicta or dicta of a case.[10] According to Dobbs, stare decisis is intended to protect the interests of those who relied on previous decisions. The doctrine also “reduces the motivation to challenge established precedents, which saves parties and courts from the costs of ongoing legal disputes.” [11] It “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process”[12] and restrains judicial hubris by respecting the judgment of those who grappled with important questions in the past. But stare decisis is not an inexorable command, and “is at its weakest when [the Court] interpret[s] the Constitution,”[13]

However, stare decisis does not prevent overturning of wrongly decided cases—and it should not, for continuing an injustice harms the legal system more than changing a prior decision. In fact, some of the Court’s most important constitutional decisions have overruled prior precedents.[14] The Court’s cases previously identified factors to consider when determining whether a precedent should be overruled:

1. The seriousness of the court’s error
2. The quality of the court’s reasoning.
3. The workability of the court’s solution.
4. The impact on other related areas of law.
5. The impact on those who rely on the precedent.

The majority in Dobbs did not believe that any of these factors favored not overruling Roe and Casey. [15]

In the end, the majority in Dobbs held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. This meant thatRoe and Casey were overturned, and the power to regulate abortion was returned to the people and their elected representatives. Although the decision itself expressly states that it is limited to abortion, it is easy to see that there are other areas in which the Court has simply invented rights and disregarded generations of Western legal tradition and the Constitution’s specific limitations on its powers. Dobbs was a good beginning and an undoing of some of the worst decisions of recent courts.

Concurring Opinions

In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas repeated his often-stated view that “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.”[16] He based this view on the notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only ‘process’ before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words.”[17] In Thomas’ view, the resolution of Dobbs was straightforward: Because the Due Process Clause secures only procedural rights to due process of law, not substantive rights, it could not ever provide a reasonable basis for a right to abortion. The quagmire that the Court entered in Roe was, according to Thomas, no different from the problems the Court encountered when it created substantive property rights in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thomas agreed with the Court’s decision and its statement that Dobbs does not alter the broader principles of substantive due process or its application in other contexts. Therefore, cases like Griswold v. Connecticut[18] Lawrence v. Texas,[19]and Obergefell v. Hodges,[20] are not directly challenged by the decision in Dobbs.[21] Nonetheless, Thomas believed the Court should revisit all its substantive due process precedents, including these cases, because he views any such ruling. as demonstrably erroneous.[22] This is, I believe, one of the reasons for the language of the dissenting opinions and for Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion.

Justice Kavanaugh, in concurrence, pointed out that Dobbs cannot be read as outlawing abortion. It merely refers the matter back to the states:

To be clear, then, the Court’s decision today does not outlaw abortion throughout the United States. On the contrary, the Court’s decision properly leaves the question of abortion for the people and their elected representatives in the democratic process. Through that democratic process, the people and their representatives may decide to allow or limit abortion.[23]

Chief Justice Roberts, in his concurring opinion, agreed with the judgment of the Court, but felt that the majority opinion went further than the case required. In his view, the Court only needed to answer the question as to whether a state could regulate abortion after fifteen weeks, to which his answer is, “Yes.” In Roberts view, the question the Court granted review to answer—whether the previously recognized abortion right bars all abortion restrictions prior to viability, such that a ban on abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy is necessarily unlawful. In his view, the answer to that limited question is no, and there was no need to go further to decide this case.[24]

The Dissents

Justices Breyer, Kagin, and Sotomayor dissented. These three justices would have upheld the fundamental rulings of Roe and Casey that the Constitution, by implication, gives to women a qualified right to abortion. The dissent relies on the role it believes stare decisis should play in this situation. In their view, Roe and its progeny constituted “established law,” though many of the decisions they cite are themselves fairly recent.[25] In one emotional section, the dissent writes:

Either the majority does not really believe in its own reasoning. Or if it does, all rights that have no history stretching back to the mid-19th century are insecure. Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy, or additional constitutional rights are under threat. It is one or the other.[26]

I believe the dissent brings to light a significant controversy in current American jurisprudence. More liberal justices, who accept the implications of “A Living Constitution,” treat cases like Griswold, Roe, and Casey as simply a more modern interpretation of the Constitution’s text and the entire historical Western legal tradition, which judges are entitled to make, even though there is little or no historical or judicial precedent for the decision. These justices are more likely to view current decisions, such as Roe, as indicative of the best current thinking. More conservative justices have a much longer view of history and the development of the law.

More conservative justices, more closely tied to the text of the Constitution and the history of Western jurisprudence, believe the reasoning behind Roe, Casey, and other cases since Griswold is at odds with traditional judicial principles and relevant history. The fact that Roe overlooked nearly 2,000 years of Western history and the established legal practices in most states at the time doesn’t seem to weigh heavily in the dissent’s language. Instead, what appears to matter most is the current progressive members of the court’s personal views on what should be recognized as a right.  In a more traditional view, there is something suspect about modern judges creating new rights where they did not exist in the relevant history.

The Dobbs dissent acknowledges that the Court has frequently reconsidered various aspects of Roe,narrowing it considerably over time while maintaining the overarching right to an abortion.[27] The dissent seems to believe that only the Court’s makeup has changed, undermining the majority opinion as based on the same kind of political decision-making that characterized Roe.

In my last post, I noted that one indication that the Court has entered dangerous waters is when changes in its composition produce incompatible results. This was true during the Great Depression in the area of economic regulation and, more recently, in the COVID-19 cases. Where the Court is clearly and uncompromisingly divided along political lines, it may be that it should carefully consider whether it should deal with an issue.

Conclusion

The majority opinion in Dobbs adopts a view I believe is essentially correct: Courts in the 21st century should interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in continuity with the intentions of those who wrote and ratified it. The majority’s position simply means that courts should not read into the Constitution anything that isn’t there. The Fourteenth Amendment was primarily about ending slavery, and perhaps its interpretation should remain focused on that intention. If the people who ratified it didn’t see reproductive rights as part of the freedom it aimed to protect, then an unelected Court should not be empowered to read that into the Constitution. Changes that are essentially political should be adopted through the means the Constitution provides—an amendment ratified by the states.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v.Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. , 597 U.S. ___ (2022).

[2] Miss. Code Ann. §41–41–191.

[3] Roe v. Wade 410 U. S. 113, hereafter “Roe,” and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), hereafter “Casey.”

[4] Dobbs, at 1.

[5] 410 U. S., at 222. I mentioned the social implications of Roe in a prior blog on that decision.

[6] Id, 68.

[7] Id, 5. Roe was vague as to its precise grounding in the Constitution, a flaw the Casey court tried to remedy by clearly grounding its decision in the 14^th Amendment.

[8] Id, 16.

[9] Id. I have had prior occasion to mention that the majority decision in Roe made many historical and factual errors in order to justify the decision.

[10] Black’s Law Dictionary Revised Fourth Edition (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1968). 1577-8, 1222. Obiter refers to passing or incidental language, and obiter dicta refers to the wording of a prior opinion not necessary to the decision of the case.

[11] Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC, 576 U. S. 446, 455.

[12] Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U. S. 808, 827

[13] Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U. S. 223, 233; Agostini v. Felton, 521 U. S. 203, 235.

[14] The classic case is Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S. 483, 491, which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U. S. 537.

[15] Dobbs. at 39–66.

[16] Johnson, 576 U. S., at 607–608; see also, e.g., Vaello Madero, 596 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 3) (“[T]ext and history provide little support for modern substantive due process doctrine”).

[17] McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 811 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also United States v. Carlton, 512 U. S. 26, 40 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).

[18] 381 U. S. 479 (1965) (which confirms the right of married couples to access contraceptives);

[19] 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (affirming the right to private, consensual sexual activity);

[20] 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (recognizing the right to same-sex marriage)

[21] This is a view also recognized by Justice Kavanaugh in his concurring opinion.

[22] Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7). With due respect to my friends who support these decisions, for the very reasons Thomas gives, I believe that the Court has been led into a moral and legal wilderness by its substantive extension of the concept of Due Process into areas previously governed by state law. I trust that, if these matters were returned to the states, legislatures and state courts would eventually find wise solutions applicable to their state and its culture.

[23] Dobbs, at 597 U. S. ____ (2022), 3.

[24] Id, at

[25] Id, at 4 ff.

[26] Id, at 5.

[27] Id, 9.

The Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was a controversial decision reversing long-standing campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend virtually unlimited money to influence elections.[1] Many observers believe that Citizens United has contributed to a vast increase in the capacity of private and corporate contributions to influence national elections. Others believe that some of the corruption of government and the loss of faith in our institutions can be traced to Citizens United.

In Citizens United, the United States Supreme Court revisited two prior decisions, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission.[2] Prior to Citizens United, corporations and labor were prohibited from using general treasury funds to make direct contributions to candidates or to make independent expenditures that expressly advocated the election or defeat of a particular candidate through any form of media.[3]

Citizens United arose in 2007 when a conservative nonprofit organization challenged campaign finance rules that stopped it from promoting and airing a film criticizing then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. A part of the film’s distribution was funded by corporate contributions. The District Court denied Citizens United’s motion for a preliminary injunction on the grounds that prior law prohibited corporations from making such contributions.

The Supreme Court narrowly held that Citizens United had First Amendment rights to spend its money to disseminate the film. In so doing, the Court struck down century-old prohibitions on corporate “independent” spending — money that doesn’t go directly to a candidate or party.  This applied to labor unions as well.[4] The end result of Citizens United was to invalidate almost all fundraising and spending restrictions for groups that purport to be separate from candidates, many of which are today known as “super PACs.” The result has been a vast increase in the influence of wealth on American political decision-making.

Prior to Citizens United, while the Court recognized that the First Amendment applied to corporations in certain circumstances, it also recognized that the danger of corruption justified campaign finance restrictions on corporations.[5] In Citizens United, the Court held that “Although the First Amendment provides that ‘Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,’ §441b’s prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech, backed by criminal sanctions. It is a ban notwithstanding the fact that a PAC created by a corporation can still speak, for a PAC is a separate association from the corporation. Because speech is an essential mechanism of democracy—it is the means to hold officials accountable to the people—political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it by design or inadvertence.”[6]

I believe Citizens United was unsound and rested on weak or perhaps more properly Machiavellian First Amendment arguments. It’s important to remember that corporations and wealthy individuals shouldn’t have the power to spend unlimited amounts of money to sway public decisions. Instead, we need to put stricter rules in place to limit the influence of wealth in our democracy. One example is the extent to which, in Texas, candidates with little or no political experience have been funded almost entirely by wealthy out-of-state interests. This should not be possible. Finally, in Citizens United, the Court once again substituted its judgment for that of Congress, which is elected to make such decisions, a dubious exercise of judicial power.[7]

The First Amendment

To understand Citizens United, it is important to look at the First Amendment itself, which provides that:

 Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [8]

As to speech, the First Amendment protects five basic liberties: (i) freedom of religion, (ii) freedom of speech, (iii) freedom of the press, (iv) freedom of assembly, and (v) freedom to petition the government to redress grievances against it. These were the guarantees that the Anti-Federalists complained were notably absent from the new Constitution. None of these rights is absolute. For example, even though freedom of speech is protected, there is no right to incite a riot.[9]Nevertheless, freedom of speech is an important right under our Constitution.

Thus, as Citizens United notes, the “right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.”[10] However, a basic question arises as to what constitutes citizenship sufficient to warrant protection and whether giving money a form of protected speech. The Court relies upon a long line of cases to support its argument that corporations have constitutional rights.[11] The fact that corporations have certain rights under US law does not mean that they should have constitutional rights under the First Amendment that are not there. For example, no one doubts that press corporations have some protections under the freedom of the press clause.[12] Finally, giving money should not in any case be considered speech. The First Amendment was designed to protect political speech, not the right to make campaign contributions.

Justice Stevens, in his dissent, makes the following point:

The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. The Framers thus took it as a given that corporations could be comprehensively regulated in the service of the public welfare. Unlike our colleagues, they had little trouble distinguishing corporations from human beings, and when they constitutionalized the right to free speech in the First Amendment, it was the free speech of individual Americans that they had in mind.[13]

The First Amendment was designed to protect human speech, not corporate campaign contributions. Furthermore, the founders would have taken for granted that state legislatures and Congress could give or restrict any kind of activities by corporations. There is simply no possibility that the founders believed corporations have any inherent right to speak, for they cannot speak without human actors. Thus,

“As a matter of original expectations, then, it seems absurd to think that the First Amendment prohibits legislatures from taking into account the corporate identity of a sponsor of electoral advocacy.”[14]

What the corporate form can do is amplify the power of the human actors who happen to control the corporate entity. This is exactly what reasonable legislation restricts.[15] Justice Stevens does not think (and I agree) that the majority is correct in concluding that the First Amendment protects corporations from reasonable restrictions, including campaign finance restrictions.

Conclusion

I don’t think there’s any doubt that Citizens United created a distortion in the American political system. Since the case was decided, the role of money in politics has increased exponentially. It is widely felt that congressmen spend most of their time raising money, and that money is used to purchase political favors from the corporations and individuals that give it. It should be obvious that, in my view, campaign contributions are not a form of speech. They’re not part of the political debate, and they should not be exempt from reasonable regulation. Perhaps more importantly, and this is where I need to say it, I don’t think the Constitution gives any kind of unrestricted right to campaign contributions, not to corporations and not to individuals. Our political system is being distorted by the ability of wealthy corporations and individuals to donate unlimited amounts of money nationwide.

Major donors have a resident of some city, county, and states. I believe they should be able to contribute to local and statewide elections in their domicile. They shouldn’t be allowed to donate money outside the places where they live, especially at a local level. U.S. citizens should have the right to support national candidates, such as the President and Vice President, but they shouldn’t influence who other states elect.

If they are granted rights to make contributions under state law, the same applies to corporations: having an office in a state shouldn’t necessarily give them the right to donate money there. Under Citizens United, the very wealthy and corporations have the right to influence elections nationally—and increasingly, we see foreign actors taking advantage of our misguided laws. This reality deeply distorts our political system. The Constitution was created to protect its human citizens, not corporations formed under state law. It also aims to safeguard people’s political speech. (I’ll discuss concerns about the press in a different blog.)

I have little hope that my views will prevail, but I think I am correct.  However, I give the final word to President Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1905 annual message to Congress, as quoted by Justice Stevens:

All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it went, an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.[16]

These words are as true today as they were a century ago.

I do not necessarily have a strategy for the cases I choose to review. Several weeks ago, I reviewed Roe v. Wade.[17] I criticize that case for the extent to which the Court majority was unwilling to be guided by a long judicial tradition, casting doubt on the wisdom of the decision, in order to follow a contemporary movement. Most liberals supported that decision, and most conservatives opposed it. Now, I have reviewed Citizens United, a case generally supported by conservatives and criticized by liberals. Both of these cases illustrate the dangers of constitutional interpretation that ignores a long tradition and calls into question the contemporary court’s views. In both cases, from different areas of constitutional law, we see the damaging impact of the modern judiciary’s lack of respect for history, tradition, and an essentially organic view of the law. I will have more to say about this in the future.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Citizens United v Federal Election Commission, 558 US 310 (2010), hereinafter “Citizens United.”

[2] Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce 494 US 652 (1990), hereinafter “Austin.”
and McConnell v. Federal Election Commission 540 US 93 (2003), hereinafter “McConnell.”

[3] Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 2 U. S. C. §441b (2000 ed.); McConnell, supra, at 204, Federal Election Commission v Massachusetts Citizens for Life, Inc. 479 US 249 (An86), hereinafter “MCFL.”

[4] Citizens United, 3

[5] Id. 4.

[6] Id, 3

[7] An example of this substitution is the Court’s conclusion that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Id, at 5.

[8] U.S. Bill of Rights. U.S. Const. Amend. 1 (1791).

[9] See, Terminiello v Chicago, 337 US 1 (1949). I am oversimplifying because there does need to be a clear and present danger of violence, and the Court has limited the scope of this exemption. I will deal with these in future posts.

[10] Citizens United, 23, citing Eu v. San Francisco County Democratic Central Commission, 489 U. S. 214, 223 (1989); Monitor Patriot Co. v. Roy, 401 U. S. 265, 272 (1971).

[11] Linmark Associates, Inc. v. Willingboro, 431 U. S.  85 (1977); Time, Inc. v. Firestone, 424 U. S. 448 (1976);

Doran v. Salem Inn, Inc., 422 U. S. 922 (1975); Southeastern Promotions, Ltd. v. Conrad, 420 U. S. 546 (1975); Cox  Broadcasting Corp. v. Cohn, 420 U. S. 469 (1975); Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo, 418 U. S. 241 (1974);  New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U. S. 713 (1971) (per curiam); Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U. S. 374 (1967); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254; Kingsley Int’l Pictures Corp. v. Regents of Univ. of N. Y., 360 U. S. 684  (1959); Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, 343 U. S. 495 (1952)); see, e.g., Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. v. FCC520 U. S. 180 (1997); Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U. S. 727 (1996); Turner, 512 U. S. 622; Simon & Schuster, 502 U. S. 105; Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U. S 520 U. S. 180 (1997); Denver Area Ed. Telecommunications Consortium, Inc. v. FCC, 518 U. S. 727 (1996); Turner, 512

1. S. 622; Simon & Schuster, 502 U. S. 105; Sable Communications of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U. S. 115 (1989); Florida Star v. B. J. F., 491 U. S. 524 (1989); Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc. v. Hepps, 475 U. S. 767 (1986); Landmark Communications, Inc. v. Virginia, 435 U. S. 829 (1978); Young v. American Mini Theatres, Inc., 427 U. S. 50 (1976); Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc., 418 U. S. 323 (1974); Greenbelt Cooperative Publishing Assn., Inc. v. Bresler, 398 U. S. 6 (1970). One can easily see the difficulty the court facees in dealing with corporate rights related to this or any issue given the huge number of cases.

[12] New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U. S. 713 (1971)  (per curiam); Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U. S. 374 (1967); New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U. S. 254 )1964)

[13] Citizens United, Kennedy Dissenting, 37. See footnote 55 to the dissent, where I think Kennedy makes a convincing argument that the founders could not have envisioned the kind of corporate speech the majority protects. I have added the emphasis.

[14] Id, 39.

[15] As an aside, it is my view that freedom of speech means exactly that and should have no application to campaign financing.

[16] Citizens United, Stevens dissenting, 42. See, United States v. Automobile Workers, 352 U. S. 567, 572 (1957) (quoting 40 Cong. Rec. 96).

[17] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, (1973),

Last week, I introduced the Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.” This week, I want to discuss the practical benefits of the prayer. A common complaint about this and other contemplative prayers is that they’re really for monks and people who don’t live in the “real world.” This involves a misunderstanding. While there are monastics and professional priests who are deeply involved in contemplative prayer, including the Jesus Prayer, many ordinary people practice it in their daily lives. On and off throughout my professional life, I have been one of those people. My goal was not to become a monk or reach nirvana. My goal was to be a better lawyer, pastor, or leader.

The Practical Purpose of the Jesus Prayer

The purpose of the Jesus Prayer is not to enter into some kind of mystical state. Experienced practitioners often say that highly emotional, mystical experiences are not signs of spiritual accomplishment but of an inexperienced or adolescent spiritual life. Those who practice the prayer most effectively are those for whom it becomes simply a part of who they are as they go about their day-to-day lives. Even for monks who practiced the prayer for long periods of time, mystical teachers suggest that part of each day should be spent in manual labor. This indicates that material reality and our material need to work to make a living should not be separated from our spiritual need for meaning in life and a connection with ultimate reality.

The Prayer of the Heart is designed to overcome the division in our culture between the body, emotions, and the mind, or, in more traditional spiritual vocabulary, between the head and the heart. In our culture, this becomes even more important because one of the symptoms of our culture is a division between minds and bodies (the head and the heart) that encourages people to develop fairly serious neurosis and even psychotic symptoms. One of the purposes of the Jesus Prayer is to reintegrate our minds, bodies, and emotions into a unity.[1]

We Cannot Divide our Psychosomatic Unity

One characteristic of the modern world is the division between mind and body. The philosopher Descartes spoke of material things (‘res extensa’) and mental things (‘res cogitans’) as distinct. This encourages a division in which the head, or what we would call the mind, and the heart, or what we would call the body, are considered separate and unconnected. This does not align with the best explanation of what we can see in our world. Modern physics, for example, discerns a mental element all the way down into the quantum world. Wherever we go, we find meaning. The physicist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead took this to mean that there was a mental element to reality “all the way down” into the subatomic world. For Whitehead and those influenced by his insights, there is a mental pole and a physical pole to one integrated reality. [2].

It is never bare, thought, or bear existence that we are aware of. I find myself as essentially a unity of emotions, enjoyments, hopes, fears, regrets, valuations of alternatives, decisions – all of them subjective reactions to the environment as an as active in my nature. My unity –Descartes “I am”—is my process of shaping this welter of material into a consistent pattern of feelings.[3]

Put another way, it’s not as easy as some people believe to separate minds, bodies, and emotions. Mind and matter seem to be two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, when it comes to emotions, we realize they are deeply connected to our minds and the way we think. The reverse is also true. Our minds affect the kinds of emotions we feel. And of course, we all know that our bodies affect both of these things. If I’m sick, my emotional life is impacted, as is my mental life and ability to reason properly. In other words, in some way, it’s not possible to divide our minds, our bodies, and our emotions. In fact, I believe it’s dangerous and unhealthy to do so. That’s the reason we live in a culture that finds it so easy to be neurotic. We’ve done this for about 300 years in a very unhealthy way. The Prayer of the Heart is designed to help us reintegrate ourselves into our relationships with God, our fellow human beings, and creation itself.

Results of Division

From the foregoing, it is clear that, from a purely practical point of view, we human beings have a problem acting with wisdom and love because we struggle to integrate mind, body, and spirit into a healthy unity. The Greek language uses a word that implies the needed unity—nous—often translated as “mind” or “heart.” We do not have an English word that quite captures the full meaning of nous. Most of us who begin to think about what is sometimes called “Orthodox Healing” have a hard time grasping the notion that we have a capacity to understand or perceive truth that is not merely the result of what is called discursive thought or “thinking things through with our minds.” The nous is not merely our minds, for it includes our hearts and emotions as well. It includes our capacity to “put things together,” perceive reality correctly, and rest in that truth with our entire being.

From a spiritual point of view, our ability to perceive and respond to reality, whether accurately or not, is shaped by our self-centeredness and tendency toward selfishness. We are sometimes anxious and inclined to act out of fear and other negative emotions. Finally, we are inclined to make decisions that are not in our own best interest. The Orthodox believe that this is not “sin” in the sense of something we inherited, but rather a brokenness or lack of health that we have developed by immersion in a social context in which all of those around us act in just the same way, and we are inclined to do. If we call this our sin nature, that is fine, but we need to remember that it translates into our personal inability to act with wisdom and love by which we distort ourselves and others.

The Jesus Prayer reconnects us with the life of God, enabling us to embody the Christlike wholeness for which we were created. In simple terms, think of the Jesus Prayer as a healing tool. It helps us restore our natural ability, as unified beings, to live in God’s presence, filled with His life, and to see and respond to the world as the Eternal One envisioned. One way it does this is by creating space between us and the flow of thoughts, what the Greeks called logismoi, so we can stand outside them and respond without being controlled by negative thoughts arising from anxiety, fear, or unhealthy desire, which can lead to a false reaction.

Reintegration

I want to return to last week for a moment. In that blog, I wrote about four stages of the spiritual life, the final two of which are:

• The Intermediate State. In this stage, which most people strive to reach, human beings have good sense and good judgment and can rightly assess the moral and spiritual consequences of most situations. However, in this stage, we are still, in some sense, pragmatically interested in the faith that works for us. We are still, in some ways, captured by our own human nature.
• The Transcendental State. In the final stage, which the orthodox believe few attain, human beings achieve a kind of transcendental enlightenment in which a person acts according to the perfect judgment that only those who have escaped the control of their passions can attain.

Notice that in neither case do we assume that the practitioner has escaped the duties, temptations, and difficulties of everyday life, nor the responsibility to act in the world. This responsibility is assumed to continue, but it is now transformed by the indwelling Spirit of God, with the cooperation of the human actor, who has become someone who acts according to wise, loving, godly judgment. While it may be somewhat more common for those with a monastic profession to achieve the fullness of the spiritual life, I do not think it is impossible for the rest of us. It will just look a bit different.

Knight of Faith and Prayer of the Heart

When I think about the goal for those of us who are not monks and do not have either the time or the inclination to devote our entire lives to the Prayer of the Heart, I am reminded of Soren Kierkegaard and his description of what he calls the “Knight of Faith:”

The moment I first set eyes on him, I thrust him away, jump back, clasp my hands together and say half a loud: “Good God! Is this the person. Is this really him? He looks just like a tax gatherer.” Yet it is indeed him. I come a little closer, watch the least movement in case some small, incongruous optical, telegraphic message from the infinite should appear, a glance, expression, gesture, a sadness, a smile betraying the infinite by its incongruity with the finite. No! I examine him from top to toe, in case there should be any crack through which the infinite peep out. No! He is solid through and through. His stance? Vigorous, it belongs altogether to the finite, no smartly turned out townsmen taking a stroll … on a Sunday afternoon, treads the ground with surer foot, he belongs altogether to the world, no petite bourgeois belongs to it any more. …This man takes pleasure, takes part, and everything, and whenever everyone catches him occupied with something, his engagement has the persistence of the worldly person whose soul is wrapped up in such things. He minds his affairs. To see him at them, you would think he was some pen pusher who had lost his soul to Italian bookkeeping, so attentive to detail is he. He takes a holiday on Sundays.  He goes to church, no heavenly glance or any other sign of the incommensurable betrays him: if one didn’t know him, it would be altogether impossible to set him apart from the rest of the crowd, for at most his hardy, lusty Psalm singing proves that he has a good set of lungs. In the afternoon, he takes a walk in the woods. He delights in everything he sees…. You would think he was a shopkeeper having his fling, such as his way of taking pleasure; … Toward evening, he goes home, his step tireless as a postman. On the way, it occurs to him that his wife will surely have some special little warm dish for his return for example, a roast head of lamb with vegetables. … As it happens, he hasn’t a penny, and yet he firmly believes his wife has that delicacy waiting for him.[4]

The purpose of heartfelt prayer is to help us become the sort of person Kierkegaard describes. Of course, some will enter a religious profession, take up prayer, and pursue a kind of spiritual perfection. But this does not mean the rest of us should not take up the habit. Our goal is to become fully and completely what we are called to be, which may be, as Kierkegaard mentions, an accountant, a tax collector, a construction worker, a small business owner, an employee of a large company, or whatever. Whatever it is, there should be something different about us—and that difference is not “otherworldliness.” Instead, it is the capacity to live in the concrete world of our daily life, allowing God’s life to permeate our ordinary, day-to-day life in a world-transforming way. The goal of the Prayer of the Heart is to help us become “knights of faith,” filled with the Spirit of God.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved 

[1] As with last week’s blog, this week is substantially based on Frederica Mathewes Green, The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God (Brewster Mass: Paraclete Press, 2009-2010).

[2] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York, NY: The MacMillan Company, 1929, 1957), 128.

[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York, NY: The Macmillan Company, 1938, 1966), 166.

[4] Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, tr. Alastair Hannay (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1985), 68-69 (emphasis added). I have taken small liberties to make Hannay’s translation more readable.

Recently, I’ve renewed my interest in what’s known in the Orthodox Church as “The Jesus Prayer.” It’s interesting to see how, in some ways, the Jesus Prayer resembles what some Western mystics call Centering Prayer, which uses a word, phrase, or image to guide and focus the mind of the person praying.[1] I have written about Centering Prayer in the past because, many years ago, I was introduced to this kind of prayer and, for a long time, was a practitioner through a group that met monthly at a local Episcopal Church near the one I served. I found that Centering Prayer was a way of opening my mind to listen receptively for and to God and to receive a kind of calm openness to God, especially in trying circumstances and when making difficult decisions.

The Jesus Prayer

The Jesus Prayer is much older than the Centering Prayer Movement. References to the prayer appear in the writings of the Church Fathers, and it has been practiced throughout the ages. In Orthodoxy, the Jesus Prayer is usually a variation of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (Luke 18:38). Some people use a shorter version that simply goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Others, including me, use a slightly longer version that goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I find that adding the phrase “living God” helps me focus on the fact that God is personally alive and present in my life. The precise wording is up to the practitioner and his or her spiritual guide.

Most people who begin practicing the Jesus Prayer do so with very little or limited instruction. In my case, I read a little book called The Way of the Pilgrim, and from that book I began to practice on my own.[2] Later, I read part of what is known as the Philokalia, a selection of the wisdom of the great fathers of Orthodox mystical prayer.[3] (I’m not sure this is the best way for most people. The Philokalia can be complicated, and some translations are archaic. I think a modern introduction, like Frederica Mathewes Green’s The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God, is both more readable and more understandable.)[4] Only after some time was I able to talk to an Orthodox priest who himself practiced the prayer.

Some practitioners suggest gently synchronizing the prayer with your breathing. When practicing the Jesus Prayer, you might find it helpful to associate the first part (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God”) with your inhale and the second part (“have mercy on me, a sinner”) with your exhale. As you breathe in and out, the prayer can gradually feel more natural and even seamless, until the words fade and your breath itself becomes the prayer. This is why the prayer is often called the “Prayer of the Heart.” The idea is to learn to “pray without ceasing,” as Paul says in his letter to the Thessalonians: “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-17).

A second aid in praying the prayer is the use of a prayer rope. A prayer rope is a loop made of woven knots, often in the shape of a cross, with thirty-three (the years of Christ’s earthly life), fifty, or even up to 100 knots. It is used to keep track of repetitions of the Jesus Prayer and often helps keep one’s mind from drifting (at least this is true for me).

Building a Relationship with Christ

The Jesus Prayer connects with the entire point of Orthodoxy discipleship,  which is developing a deep transforming relationship with Christ. The Orthodox have a doctrine they call “theosis.” It is similar to what Protestants call “Sanctification,” but there is a difference. The idea of theosis is that the believer will not merely become like Christ or be somewhat conformed to Christ’s character in our actions, but will, in fact, become deified to the extent a human being can by inviting God in Christ into their life.

In other words, the prayer “Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” is designed to transform us from sinners into the image of God revealed in Christ. This is part of a process in which our darkened human nature is restored to God’s original intent in creating the human race. Theosis involves a progression in the Christian life.

1. The Carnal State. We begin in a situation where we simply act according to our instincts and are driven by the passions of the flesh. In this situation, we are incapable of truly good judgment because we’re under the control of what Paul refers to as the powers and principalities of our fallen world. We are captured by the darkness.
2. The Beginner’s State. In a second phase of our spiritual life, we have accepted Christ and developed a relationship with God, but we are only capable of halting, beginner’s progress toward moral and spiritual maturity.
3. The Intermediate State. In the third stage, which I think is where most people strive to be, we have good sense and good judgment and are able to judge rightly the moral and spiritual consequences of most situations. However, in this stage, we are still, in some sense, pragmatically interested in the faith that works for us. We are still, in some ways, captured by our own human nature.
4. The Transcendental State. In the final stage, which the orthodox believe few attain, we obtain a kind of transcendental enlightenment in which a person acts according to the perfect judgment that only those who have escaped the control of their passions can attain.

In the first state, we have not even begun to seek Christ and the spiritual life. We act carnally and unnaturally and have very poor judgment. In the second stage, we are able, to some degree, to overcome our passions and desires, but we are still beginners in the spiritual life. In the third stage, we have good sense and judgment and, as far as we are capable, can act in our own best interests and the best interests of others. In the final stage, we have stable spiritual judgment about the things of this world and of God—but we are capable of seeing things from what might be called “a God’s-eye point of view.”

In a beautiful passage, two authors of the Philokalia give the following description of the four stages:

The first is like a traveler in the deepest night and impenetrable darkness. Wandering in unrelieved blackness that envelops him on all sides, he neither sees himself nor judges himself; he does not even understand where he is going or where he puts his foot. As the Savior says: “He that walketh in darkness does not know where he is going” (John 12:35).

The second is like a man walking on a clear night lit by the stars. In their feeble glimmer, he walks slowly, often stumbling over the stones of injudiciousness and constantly falling down. This man sees himself and judges himself a little, but as in deep shadow, as is written: ‘Awake you that sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light’ (Ephesians 5:14).

The third is like a man walking on a calm night when the moon is full. Guided by the moon’s light, he walks more surely and moves forward. He sees himself as in a mirror and judges himself as well as his fellow-travelers, as it is said: ‘Ye do well that ye take heed’ (to the word of prophecy), ‘as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts’ (2 Peter 1: 19).

The fourth is like a man who walks at clear noontide, in bright sunshine. Such a man sees himself clearly, as in the light of the sun, and judges with full truth both himself and many others.[5]

This is a good place to introduce another term associated with the Jesus Prayer, Hesychia. The term refers to stillness, rest, or quiet. The goal of the Jesus Prayer and, indeed, of Orthodox spiritual disciplines is a state of quiet before God. Through the constant repetition of the Jesus Prayer, the practitioner can be brought to a state of deep inner quiet in which union with God is achieved. The Jesus Prayer is as old as the Desert Fathers, who practiced it in their desert retreats. The technique was used and refined on Mount Athos by the monks who lived and worshiped there. In the fourteenth century, a monk named St. Gregory Palamas defended it when its practice became controversial. His views were ultimately adopted by the church.

The Biblical Basis

Evangelical believers and others sometimes ask whether the practice of the Jesus Prayer is “biblical.” If one reads the Philokalia, one finds numerous references to the Old and New Testaments on nearly every page and certainly by every author. In the New Testament, we often see Jesus going off alone to pray in the wilderness. In Matthew, a woman comes to Jesus and cries out for healing, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David” (Matthew 15:22). In Luke, we see the prayer offered by someone asking Jesus for healing, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ (Luke 18:13). In the letters of Paul, he urges us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). In the Way of the Pilgrim, it is this verse about “praying without ceasing” that begins the anonymous writer’s account of the pilgrim’s journey into the prayer, and it is often cited as the foundational basis for the practice.

The Jesus Prayer and Faith

Protestants and others often ask whether the practice of the Jesus Prayer and other spiritual disciplines is a substitute for faith? The answer is a clear “No.” Throughout the ages, practicing any spiritual discipline, including the Jesus Prayer, is not a substitute for faith. It is a response to faith. This is why the authors of the Philokalia make the distinction between the common person who has no interest in spiritual things and the stages of a disciple’s development who takes the call to become like Christ seriously. St. Maximus puts it this way:

The cause of the bestowal of one or another Divine gift lies in the measure of every man’s faith. For as much as we believe, so we have the power of zeal to act according to our belief. Therefore, a man acting according to faith reveals by his actions the measure of his faith and receives grace in proportion to his faith. And a man who does not act according to faith reveals the measure of his unbelief in proportion to his idleness and, owing to his lack of faith, is deprived of grace.[6]

Each person receives a spiritual gift, including the gift of praying without ceasing, because through faith that individual is given the spiritual ability to receive it from God, along with the gift and the mercy it brings. Those without faith do not receive spiritual gifts, and no amount of practice can replace God’s own action. Therefore, faith is necessary. Practitioners of the Jesus prayer respond in acts of faith to the faith they have in Christ. The prayer is a kind of work of faith.

There are dangers in practicing the Jesus Prayer, as with any spiritual gift or practice. There is always the danger of misuse, pride, and using the prayer in ways contrary to God’s love and wisdom. For this reason, almost every book on the Jesus Prayer recommends having a spiritual director or priest to whom one is accountable in the practice of the prayer and to whom one reports one’s experiences. Accountability is always the best way to avoid misuse of any gift.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved 

 ¹ The work of Thomas Keating and his associates to reintroduce contemplative prayer into the West is well known. For a good introduction to Centering Prayer, see Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Wakening (Cambridge, MA: Crowley Publications, 2004).

[2] Anonymous. (1991). The Way of a Pilgrim; and, The Pilgrim Continues his Way (R. M. French, Trans.). Harper San Francisco. (Original work published ca. 1800s). There are many fine translations and editions available.

[3] See, Writings from the Philokalia on the Prayer of the Heart translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. Palmer (London, ENG: Faber and Faber), 215-216. Once again, I recommend a modern translation. I am using this shorter, Russian abbreviation rather than the multivolume set often referred to today and by scholars.

[4] Frederica Mathewes Green, The Jesus Prayer: The Ancient Desert Prayer that Tunes the Heart to God (Brewster Mass: Paraclete Press, 2009-2010).

[5] This and the entire section is from the Monks Callistus and Ignatius, “Direction to Hesychasts” in Writings from the Philokalia on the Prayer of the Heart translated by E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. Palmer (London, ENG: Fabier and Faber), 215-216. I have reformatted and modernized the language just a bit for clarity.

[6] Id, 211.

Roe v. Wade, perhaps the most debated and in some quarters, vilified Supreme Court opinion of the 20th century, arose from appeals in Texas and Georgia challenging their state abortion laws.[1] In Roe, the Court recognized (or created) a right to abortion, building on its earlier decision in Griswold v. Connecticut.[2] The majority opinion, written by Justice Blackmun, acknowledged the abortion debate’s emotional and moral dimensions. In the end, however, the majority ruled both the Texas and Georgia statutes unconstitutional. Because the Texas and Georgia laws were similar to those in most states at the time, the decision effectively created a universal right to abortion in the United States.[3]

Before I begin, I want to say a word to those who support Roe. I intend to write two blogs on Roe and its overturning. In the second blog, I promise to give due credit to those in the minority, as I have done here. By this, I do not mean to apologize for my views on Roe, which I am well aware some readers will reject and have a right to do so.

Controversy and Impact

To say the decision was controversial is to understate its impact. Supporters of abortion rights hailed the decision.On the other side of the argument, Roe immediately led to the creation of a “pro-life movement” determined to overturn it. It has been and remains an issue in state, local, and national elections. Politically, the decision led to a realignment within the Democratic and Republican parties, as each became more uniformly aligned with one side of the debate, losing members to the other party who disagreed with their position on Roe. The result was an increase in the political polarization we see today.

The decision’s impact was felt among American religious groups as well. What are sometimes called “the Mainline Churches” largely embraced the decision, giving rise to pro-life ministries within every mainline church. Evangelical groups generally opposed the decision on moral grounds and became home to many departing mainline members. Roman Catholics and evangelicals, once suspicious of one another, united in their opposition to Roe and its results.

Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey and Beyond

Following Roe, the Court entered a period of both upholding and limiting the decision’s scope, allowing greater flexibility for states to regulate abortion. As I shall point out, the Court was forced by its own decision to engage in case-by-case decision-making as it weighed questions such as when life begins, when a fetus is viable, what rights parents and spouses might have, and other consequences of Roe. In the end, the fundamental incoherence of the Court’s initial decision caused the entire edifice to fail.

Numerous subsequent Supreme Court decisions in the area of abortion did not create a consensus as to the scope of Roe or the parameters of local state power. Finally, in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, the Court upheld Roe, clearly grounding Roe’s justification in the 14th Amendment and attempting to find a way to resolve the conflict Roe had created.[4] Casey granted the states more leeway by also holding that states have a “substantial interest in potential life,” leading to the conclusion that not all regulations were prohibited. Casey instituted an “undue burden standard” as the appropriate means of reconciling the State’s interest with the right created by Roe.[5]  While these decisions upheld the central holding in Roe, they returned considerable power to regulate abortion to the states.

Over the years, in case after case, the scope of Roe was gradually reduced as the Court was faced with the necessity to review numerous attempts by state legislatures to restrict abortion, which disagreed with the open-ended nature of the decision. Just a few of these include:

• Planned Parenthood v. Danforth(1976), blocking a law requiring spousal consent for abortion.
• Maher v. Roe(1979) permitting states to exclude abortion services from Medicaid coverage.
• Colautti v. Franklin(1979) striking down an unconstitutionally vague Pennsylvania law requiring physicians to try to save the life of a fetus that might have been viable.
• Harris v. McRae(1980), upholding the Hyde Amendment, a federal law that proscribed federal funding for abortions except when necessary to preserve life or as a result of rape or incest.
• In  v. Matheson(1981), upholding a law requiring parental notification when the patient is a minor living with parents.
• City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health(1983), invalidating a wide range of limitations on abortion, such as a waiting period, parental consent without judicial bypass, and a ban on abortions outside of hospitals after the first trimester.
• Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists(1986) striking down a law that required informed consent to include information about fetal development and alternatives to abortion.
• In Webster v. Reproductive Health Services(1989), upholding rules requiring doctors to test for viability after twenty weeks and blocking state funding and state employee participation in abortion services.
• Rust v. Sullivan(1991) upheld a ban on certain federal funds being used for abortion referrals or counseling.
• Hill v. Colorado(2000) upholding a law limiting protest and leafletting close to an abortion clinic.
• Stenberg v. Carhart(2000) striking down Nebraska’s ban on the dilation and extraction abortion procedure.
• In Gonzales v. Carhart(2007), upholding a federal ban on the dilation and extraction procedure. [6]

In the end, however, none of the Court’s decisions created legitimacy for Roe, and states continued to register their opposition by creating various regulatory schemes that narrowed the impact of its earlier decisions. Politically, neither side in the debate was completely happy with the ruling at any stage of its modification. Recently, in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court overturned its previous decisions in Roe. [7] I will deal with Dobbs in a subsequent post.

Substantive Due Process and Roe’s Rationale

The majority in Roe based their decision on a kind of “substantive due process” test and rationale, (though failing to clearly articulate it), finding a right to abortion implicit in the 14^th Amendment via the kind of right to privacy it had previously discerned in Griswold.[8] The classic substantive due process test is whether there is a rational relationship between the law and a valid legislative objective:

Substantive due process asks the question of whether the government’s deprivation of a person’s life, liberty or property is justified by a sufficient purpose. Procedural due process, by contrast, asks whether the government has followed the proper procedures when it takes away life, liberty or property. Substantive due process looks to whether there is a sufficient substantive justification, a good enough reason for such a deprivation. [9]

In other words, if the Constitution protects a substantive right (such as freedom of speech and religion), that right can be abridged only if there is sufficient justification for such a taking. Procedural due process asks only whether the proper procedures have been followed. In Roe, the majority, drawing on Griswold, found in the 14th Amendment and other vaguely referenced provisions of the Constitution a right to abortion. Leaving aside the much-criticized reasoning of Griswold, having “found” this right in the “penumbra of privacy,” the Court needed to identify a reasonably unassailable basis for doing so. It failed to do so.

A continuing problem with Roe concerned its reasoning. The majority decision reviewed the history of abortion, making certain claims that proved historically dubious and ultimately helped those who opposed the decision. At the time, Justice Rehnquist pointed out some of these inaccuracies, which became more numerous as time passed.[10] Eventually, in Dobbs, the majority stated:

Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe was handed down, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise of which we are aware. And although law review articles are not reticent about advocating new rights, the earliest article proposing a constitutional right to abortion that has come to our attention was published only a few years before Roe.

Not only was there no support for such a constitutional right until shortly before Roe, but abortion had long been a crime in every single State. At common law, abortion was criminal in at least some stages of pregnancy and was regarded as unlawful and could have very serious consequences at all stages. American law followed the common law until a wave of statutory restrictions in the 1800s expanded criminal liability for abortions. By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, three-quarters of the States had made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy, and the remaining States would soon follow. Roe either ignored or misstated this history, and Casey declined to reconsider Roe’s faulty historical analysis.[11]

Justice Blackmun, who wrote the decision, had prior experience with the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic and even traveled to a clinic to conduct research while writing his decision.  One common observation about Roe is that Blackmun seemed to be as concerned to protect doctors as their patients, and showed little concern for the fetus or an understanding of family and other dynamics involved. Thus, as one sympathetic commentator puts it, “The most common explanation of how this modest man came to produce such an immodest decision draws on Blackmun’s background as resident counsel for the Mayo Clinic and his admiration of the medical profession.”[12] As one critical commentator puts it:

Justice Blackmun’s amateur dissertation on medical ethics, including the Hippocratic Oath, and on ancient philosophy has been challenged on several points and been revealed as based primarily upon biased pro-abortion sources. The more fundamental question, however, as put by one commentator, is “why Plato and Aristotle should be considered authority for such a controversial moral and political issue, or how the support of philosophers provides a persuasive legal or institutional argument for the Court’s expansion of privacy rights. ” Surely Justice Blackmun did not mean to suggest that, because infanticide also was practiced in the ancient world, a constitutional right to infanticide should follow. And yet, Justice Blackmun offered extraneous non-legal observations of questionable accuracy to justify judicial activism.[13]

Limitations and the “Trimester Approach”

Once the Court identified a right in the Constitution and how it applies under the law, it needed to clarify the situations where states could legislate in this area. This means determining when a state’s interest was strong enough to justify interfering. In Roe, the Court decided that women have a constitutional right to privacy, including the right to abortion, which could not be restricted without good reason. The decision further acknowledged that reasonable limits on this right could exist. However, over time, the approach the Court used to define these limits proved to be increasingly inadequate and often illogical.

One of the most difficult elements of Roe was its setting out a “trimester approach” to dealing with when the state might have a controlling interest in regulating an abortion. Under this approach, the pregnancy period into three trimesters. During the first trimester, the decision to terminate the pregnancy was solely at the discretion of the woman. There could be no compelling state interest. After the first trimester, the state could “regulate procedure” provided there was such an interest. During the second trimester, the state could regulate abortions in the interests of the mother’s health. After the second trimester, the fetus became viable, and the state could regulate or outlaw abortions in the interest of the potential life except when necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.[14]

The courts’ problem with the trimester approach is simple: the viability question is not straightforward. As one expert put it, “Roe v Wade is based on the trimester/viability concept. However, both concepts seem to be biologically ill-founded and are likely to contribute to confusion regarding abortion laws.”[15] In subsequent cases, the Court faced difficult decisions in which the judges’ personal preferences inevitably seemed to influence the outcome. In some, such as Gonzales and Stenberg, the decisions seem to have been motivated not by conviction about justice but by changes in the composition of the Court. This was a clear indication that Roe was ultimately not founded on the language of the Constitution but on the preferences of the unelected members of the Supreme Court on a matter of public policy.

Summary Critique

As I complete this brief review of Roe, I want to return to something mentioned earlier. Roe was really two cases, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton.[16] The Texas case (Roe) represented an older, more restrictive approach, while the Georgia case (Doe) represented a newer, more liberal approach. In other words, Texas and Georgia represented different approaches to the issue. Other states were similarly divided. The Texas case represented an older approach, while the Georgia case involved a newer approach based on the legislature’s analysis of the American Bar Association proposal of the time.

By “constitutionalizing abortion” in the way it did, the Court cut off the power of states to adjust their laws—and their responsibility to do so. The citizens of the United States have the power to propose and adopt amendments to the Constitution, and they have even more power to address their state legislatures. The impact of Roe was to take this right away from the citizens and to take the right to adapt to local circumstances away from state legislatures. In the process, it set off a firestorm of opposition and undermined the Court’s standing for over half a century.

This weakness is closely related to a second weakness: to reach its decision, the court had to weigh the public value of abortion as a legislature might and determine matters of the public interest and the exercise of police powers to regulate the conduct of its citizens, a task for which nine judges in Washington are not well suited. Subsequent to Roe, the court had to abandon the trimester system in favor of Casey’s “undue burden” standard, which further embroiled the court in determining, on a case-by-case basis, what constituted an undue burden. By doing so, it became a kind of federal abortion review agency without the presumption of validity of its decisions to protect it from attacks. As previously mentioned, Blackmun’s historical arguments were immediately attacked by members of the court and others. In some cases, Blackmun had either misstated or understated the historic opposition to abortion, at least since the Second Century.

Finally, and I think most damaging, was that the 14^th Amendment was not intended to address abortion. The 14th Amendment was designed to ensure former slaves’ access to the rights of every other American. In particular, it was intended to prevent states from denying former slaves the voting and economic rights enjoyed by all Americans. Without question, the 14^th Amendment was intended to enshrine the notion that all citizens, regardless of race, color, or socio-economic class, had the right to “life, liberty, and property,” rights that were inalienable.

After the Civil War, the Court mistakenly began to use the amendment to protect corporate property rights. The phrase “without due process of law” almost certainly refers to the fact that people can be executed, imprisoned, and their property taken under certain circumstances if due process of law is followed. Its extension to other matters has consistently led the Court into judicial mistakes on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

As Rehnquist pointed out in his Roe dissent:

To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment. As early as 1821, the first state law dealing directly with abortion was enacted by the Connecticut Legislature. … By the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, there were at least 36 laws enacted by state or territorial legislatures limiting abortion.[17]

When writing these blogs, my intention is always to be fair. In Roe, Justice Blackmun was breaking new constitutional ground, and the Court was intoxicated by the success (as it seemed at the time) of Griswold. As is often the case, he was also convinced of the righteousness of his cause, which may have led him to underestimate both the decision’s political impact and the attacks on his legal reasoning that were sure to come.

In the end, Roe represents a continuing problem with the Court in the area of Substantive Due Process: the extension of the 14^th Amendment beyond the Bill of Rights into areas it could not possibly have anticipated and that should not apply without a constitutional amendment authorizing the right the Court wishes to defend. This lack of textual support for the rights being created makes them nearly impossible to defend over time. In addition, it makes the Court an unelected legislature without the legitimacy of having been elected. Americans have become accustomed to using the Court to achieve objectives that might be difficult to attain through Congress or state legislatures. However, abortion and similar issues should be resolved by those best able to weigh public opinion and accountable to the public for their decisions, not by the Courts.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, (1973), hereinafter “Roe.”

[2] Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), hereinafter “Griswold.”

[3] I will return to this aspect of the case in the conclusion. Roe overturned not only a restrictive law (Texas) but also a law modeled on the ABA model statute.

[4] Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833 (1992), hereafter “Casey.” While the Court would not overrule Griswold, it was obvious that a majority of the Court had come to see Griswold’s logic as flawed.

[5] Id.

[6] Roe v Wade and Supreme Court Abortion Cases: Reproductive Rights in the Untjed States Explained The Brennan Center for Justice(September 28, 2022) found at https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/roe-v-wade-and-supreme-court-abortion-cases(downloaded May 13, 2026).

[7] Thomas E. Dobbs, State Health Officer of the Mississippi Department of Health, et al. v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, et al. , 597 U.S. ___ (2022).

[8] Like Griswold, the Court did not fully articulate the ground of its holding, which is on reason Casey is important. In Casey it embraced the 14^th Amendment as the basis of their decision, abandoning the reasoning of Griswold, which by this time had been critiqued from the left and right. In the author’s view, Griswold should be overturned.

[9] Chemerinsky, Erwin (1999) “Substantive Due Process,” Touro Law Review: Vol. 15: No. 4, Article 15. Available at: https://digitalcommons.tourolaw.edu/lawreview/vol15/iss4/15 (downloaded May 13, 2026), at 1501. In my view, the source of Roe’s incoherence is to be found in the faulty logic of Griswold.

[10] Justice Rehnquist dissenting. “To reach its result, the Court necessarily has had to find within the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a right that was apparently completely unknown to the drafters of the Amendment.” Roe, 174.

[11] Dobbs, at B1. I am quoting this at length, but I do not intend to discuss Dobbs per se in this blog. It awaits a future blog.

[12] Nan D. Hunter, Justice Blackmun, Abortion and the Myth of Medical Independence, 72 Brook. L. Rev. (2006). Available at: https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol72/iss1/6 (downloaded May 14, 2026).

[13] Gregory C. Sisk, Willful Judging of Harry Blackmun, The, 70 MO. L. REV. (2005) Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol70/iss4/6

[14] See Roe, at 164-65 Daniel A Farber, Did Roe v Wade Pass the Arbitrary and Capricious Test 70 Missouri Law View, 4 (2005), 1253.

[15] F. K. Beller & C.A. deProsse, Confusion of Trimester and Viability: Consequences for Abortion Laws in the United States and Abroad 37 Journal of Reproductive Medicine 6 (1992), 537-40.

[16] See note 1 above.

[17] Roe, at 174-175.

John Mirador, who becomes Juan de la Cruz Bardero, appears in all three of the Arthur Stone books. A former special forces officer, Bardero first appears as the “Watcher,” an operative sent into sensitive areas to watch and report. Unfortunately, in Marshland, Mirador is betrayed, nearly killed, and must hide from the government he faithfully served. It is the beginning of a new life.[1] Mirador grew up on a ranch in South Texas of a family of immigrants who came from Mexico in the 1920’s, when Mexico experienced political and economic unrest. Orphaned in his teenage years, he ended up enlisting in the armed forces and served in Viet Nam. A special forces operative, he was still active in the early 1980’s when Marshland takes place.

At the beginning of Marshland, Mirador is betrayed by someone. He was supposed to die during his mission in Mexico but fate saves him. Searching for a safe hiding place, his family in Mexico send him to a monastery outside of San Miguel de Allende, where he becomes an oblate in the Benedictine order while in hiding.  In Marshland, he is part of the uncovering of the connections between events in Mexico and the Texas Savings and Loan Crisis. During this time, he becomes friends with Arthur Stone and Ahn Winchester. After the events of Marshland, Mirador, now Juan Bardero, becomes a business man in San Miguel with Arthur, Gwynn, and Ahn as business partners.

In Peace at Battle Mountain, Arthur is forced to investigate a suspicious death in Los Cabos on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Bardero is the person who is responsible for personally undertaking the investigation. In the process, he meets and falls in love with Maria Mendoza, who appears in Marshland as well. Maria already has a child by a short-lived relationship. He appears again in Leviathan and the Lambs. Now in late middle age, he is called upon to assist Arthur in saving a member of his family.

The Decent Man

In the series, Bardero represents the decent man. He faithfully serves is country, his family, and his friends, often without being seen and without recognition. He is one of countless people who serve their nation and families in good and bad situations, not always agreeing with what is being done, but doing their own part with honor and strength. Not surprisingly, his life is punctuated with drama that others create while he brings a justice and health to the situations in which he becomes involved.

I am writing this on Memorial Day 2026. Memorial Day is a day in which we celebrate the many men and women who placed themselves in harm’s way to protect the liberties we enjoy. As I write this there are many, many John Mirador’s quietly going about the business of protecting our freedoms while decently living out their own private lives. Some of them are far from home and loved ones, a few I suspect are in very dangerous and hostile places, watching.

My Father

On Memorial Day and other days, I remember and celebrate the life of my father. Born in 1921, he was of draft age when World War II began. He served first in the Marine Corps and then in the Navy commanding a small ship as a First Lieutenant. After the war, he joined the FBI where he served for another thirty or so years. After retiring from the FBI he was a City Counselman and then Mayor of Springfield, Missouri. If you put it all together, he served our country in one capacity or another for fifty or more years—all of his adult life. He did not get rich in government or politics. He and Mom struggled to put two sons through college and to pay off debts from an accident that nearly ended both their lives. The driver of the car that hit them was uninsured. John Mirador is a fictional character. Dad was the “real deal,” decent man who did his duty to God, family and country and expected little in return.

Our news today is filled with political stories. One of them that caught my eye is about a candidate for public office who refuses to salute the American flag. I posted a simple reply: “You cannot lead with wisdom a person or organization you don’t love.” There is plenty to be said for developing a critical attitude towards our government and our culture. However, there is a limit. When people no longer love a country, a culture, a business, a church, or whatever, they cannot possibly heal it. All they can do is destroy—and what they build in its place will likely be a harmful monstrosity born of anger and rage instead of love and care for others.

Conclusion

This Memorial Day we are home with one of our children and a grandchild visiting. Soon, it will be June 6. During the seventy fifty anniversary year of D-Day, Kathy and I made a pilgrimage to Normandy. As a student of the battle, I enjoyed seeing the reality of what I had seen on maps and read about in books. But the most moving moment was visiting the cemetery where those who fell that day are buried. Rows upon rows of young men who never had a family, a career, children, or grandchildren. Instead, in terrifying and terrified wave after wave they landed on that beach behind their graves where they died for a nebulous notion of freedom and America’s call to preserve that freedom. My Dad and Grandfather came back from World War II. Today, we celebrate the lives of those who did not.

Copyright 2026, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved 

[1] This blog, as have three recent blogs deals with what I call the Arthur Stone series, written under the pen name,  Alystair West, The books are Marshland (Westbow, 2023); Peace at Battle Mountain (Quansus, 2024); Leviathan and the Lambs (Quansus & Bookbaby, 2026), all written under the pen name Alystair West and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and from other vendors.