The Horse and His Boy is my favorite Chronicle of Narnia. That’s almost certainly a minority position, but I have a soft spot for hidden gems—which may explain why Rogue One sits atop my Star Wars pantheon. It’s so good that it doesn’t even need lightsabers, just as The Horse and His Boy is so good that it doesn’t even need children from our world to capture the imagination. The reason I bring it up is because there’s a scene about halfway through that presents a rather foreign dilemma to we Americans. The story’s intrepid young quartet must enter and pass through the Calormen city of Tashbaan without being noticed and captured. This would be a fairly simple endeavor were it not for the fact that the entire city is surrounded by a wall. There is only one way in from the south, one way out to the north, and the city gates are locked at night. Something of the same difficulty is faced by Jean Valjean when he must gain entrance to Paris without being discovered by the relentless Inspector Javert. And even the rebels in Rogue One could only gain access to Scarif by circumventing its “walls” and gate.

I grew up in The Valley. That is, the San Fernando Valley, on the wrong side of the Santa Monica Mountains. My dad had a small office at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. He often worked late, but he never had to worry about getting locked into or out of the city. Because Los Angeles is not surrounded by a wall. Its “gates” are not locked at night. But that is not the historic norm. It’s a modern and almost uniquely-American privilege. What use is a wall for those who aren’t threatened by attack? C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia while living in Oxford, England, where the remains of a two-mile, 700-year-old wall could still be seen surrounding the city. London was surrounded by a similar bulwark for some 1,500 years, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens with said city under attack. Lewis could appreciate the value of strong defenses. And so could King Solomon, who fortified Jerusalem through the building of a wall (I Kings 3:1).

“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.” That’s the last verse of Proverbs 25. In the chapter before, Solomon speaks of passing “by the field of a sluggard, by the vineyard of a man lacking sense,” and discovering it to be “overgrown with thorns… covered with nettles, and its stone wall… broken down.” The implication is this. Wise men—and wise administrators—properly maintain their walls. Fools do not. Even in today's landscape, when city walls tend to mostly be of the metaphorical variety, a city without walls is still a very bad thing. Unless, of course, you're referring to Tim Walz. It’s ironic that the governor of Minnesota—whose negligence has exposed his people to unprecedented levels of violence, fraud, and abuse—should be named Walz. And ironic (or perhaps sadistic) that he would call Minnesota “an island of decency” in a nation of increasing cruelty. Governor Walz hasn’t noticed, apparently, that the common denominator for the “chaos and disruption” he complains of is Minnesota itself. His is not the only state in which federal ICE agents are operating, but it is the state most likely to throw them under the bus.

I think it’s fair to assume that the reason such a disproportionate amount of violence and unrest is coming out of one particular state is the same reason why that same state has been crippled by such a disproportionate amount of fraud. Poor governance—be it simple ineptitude or outright malfeasance. Whichever the case may be, it would be more accurate to call Minnesota an island of corruption in a nation of increasing fortitude. And while California’s Governor Newsom is quite believable in the role of evil mastermind, Governor Walz is not. To borrow a line from Charles Dickens, he is “a man of rapid passions and sluggish intelligence.” Tim Walz strikes me as an earnest but incompetent man who is vastly out of his depth. In his recent address to the people of Minnesota—just before his “island of decency” quip, Governor Walz offered the following:

Minnesotans believe in the rule of law, and Minnesotans believe in the dignity of all people. We're a place where there's room for everybody, no matter who you are or who you love or where you came from. A place where we feed our kids, we take care of our neighbors and we look out for those in the shadows of life.

Walz’ statement is rife with contradiction, whether he has the wherewithal to recognize it or not. You cannot simultaneously claim allegiance to the rule of law while also welcoming and rewarding those who break the law. And, I’m sorry, there is not room for everybody in Minnesota. Neither physically nor logistically. It might make for a nice soundbite, but the practical ramifications of these nonsensical policies are now coming home to roost. CBS News reports that since 2018, Medicaid fraud in Minnesota could well exceed $9 billion and has been perpetrated almost exclusively by refugees from other countries. Whenever investigations have been mounted, we read in the current issue of Imprimis, “government overseers were easily scared off by absurd claims of racism”—which is the same claim leveled by Tim Walz in his recent diatribe. “Armed, masked, undertrained ICE agents are going door to door,” he declared, “ordering people to point out where their neighbors of color live.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took up the same theme in accusing federal agents of “terrorizing people simply because they're Latino or Somali.”

It’s hard to say whether these men know they’re lying about the administration’s motivation, or if they’re simply that obtuse. Calling it racist to enforce state and federal law is precisely what allowed the Minnesotans who these men ostensibly represent to be robbed of billions of dollars. That’s billions, with a “B.” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who has spent his entire career as a fraud prosecutor, says “the depth of fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.” He calls it “not a handful of bad actors,” but “staggering industrial scale fraud [that is] swamping Minnesota and calling into question everything we know about our state”—that island of decency, as Governor Walz calls it. When Mayor Frey told ICE agents to “get the F- out of Minneapolis,” he was essentially echoing the 60-year-old messaging of those Alabama politicians who really were racists. Walz and Frey no doubt fancy themselves to be carrying the torch of Dr. King, but it’s actually the mantles of George Wallace and Bull Connor they’ve taken up. When JFK deployed the National Guard to forcibly integrate Alabama schools, Wallace and Connor reacted in much the same way as Walz and Frey—doing everything in their power to prevent Washington from enforcing the federal laws that they wouldn’t.

It’s been a few weeks now since professional agitators entered and disrupted a church service at Cities Church in St. Paul—accusing its congregants of being too rich, too white, and too supportive of federal ICE agents. One of the event organizers, Nekima Levy Armstrong, is a former president of the Minneapolis NAACP and CEO of the now-defunct Wayfinder Foundation—a non-profit group “dedicated to giving grants to anti-poverty community initiatives.” I bring this up because the organization received millions of dollars from corporate donors like the Walton Family Foundation, but gave far more of that money to Armstrong herself than to any community projects. By the time it shuttered in 2024, Armstrong was making close to a quarter million dollars per year. “She has also been a key organizer of the (recent) boycotts against Target,” Fox News reports—which seems a fitting use for all that Walmart money. 

The event’s other organizer, Chauntyll Allen—who leads Black Lives Matter Twin Cities and sits on the Saint Paul School Board—said the invasion was necessary and justified. “My mother’s a pastor,” she explained, “so I grew up in Christianity, and one of the things I remember about Jesus Christ himself is that when things weren’t going right in the church, he went in and he flipped tables." What was wrong at this particular church (aside from their spending Sunday mornings in a sanctuary rather than protesting on the streets)? That would be one of its associate pastors, who apparently also works for DHS. Allen’s comments give the impression that she left the church long ago, an assumption bolstered by her school board bio where she boasts of being married to a woman. But like so many who are hostile to Christian teaching and practice, Allen does remember enough to know exactly what Jesus would do in any given situation. And so does William Kelly, the bearded man who wandered through the sanctuary filming and berating church members. These are some of his remarks:

All these pretend Christians… All these comfortable white people who are living lavish comfortable lives while children are dragged into concentration camps. You’re living real nice lives with your lattes doing absolutely nothing for your Latino and Somali brothers and sisters… Why do I not see you out at Whipple every day protesting this attack on humanity? You’re sinners. You’re pretending to be Christians, but we know you’re living easy lives. A very easy life while people are starving. Shame! You come here to (listen to) a man wearing a suit? Did Jesus wear a suit? Did Jesus profit off the words? No! Jesus would dine with immigrants…

It is precisely at this point in the video, while asserting that Jesus dined—or would dine—with immigrants, that someone apparently touched Kelly. “Do not touch me!” he spun around and screamed. “Touch me again and see what happens,” which is an ironic outburst for someone purporting to be the mouthpiece of Christ. Jesus was touched by strangers wherever he went, but I don’t recall him ever issuing such threats. “Touch me again and see what happens” is not something Jesus would say. It’s something Kip Dynamite would say. Did say. William Kelly, I’ll point out, is a white man who is at least independently wealthy enough to travel the country as a circuit-riding rabble rouser. He condemns those in the church for their “comfortable lives,” but it’s hard to imagine many of them make more money than Nekima Levy Armstrong. Their pastor surely doesn’t.

That being said, I am actually sympathetic to the claim that the visible church is full of fake Christians because it’s almost certainly true. I’ve spent most of my adult life fretting over the possibility that I’m a fake Christian—in light of Jesus’ warning that for every three people who hear and accept the “word of the kingdom,” two will eventually walk away. And some additional number more—Jesus calls it “many”—will be turned away on the day of judgment. I’m sympathetic to the idea that Christianity is more about the way you treat other people than where you spend your Sunday mornings and sympathetic to the claim that the average American Christian cares more about lattes and creature comforts than they do about taking up their cross and following Christ. I wrote a book about the church’s reluctance to care for the least of these, but I also happen to know something about Cities Church in particular. Their teaching pastor, Jonathan Parnell, was once on staff at Desiring God, and Desiring God was once a regular promoter of Abort73. Back in 2012, I got an email from Parnell urging me “to keep pressing on in this great work.” Our correspondence would continue off and on for the next few years. He helped publicize Abort73 through Desiring God’s media channels and got my as-yet-unpublished book to someone at Crossway. They would ultimately pass, arguing that books on abortion don’t sell, but that didn’t stop Parnell from lobbying Lifeway to carry my book at the following year’s Desiring God National Conference. In light of their turn down, he invited me to author a guest post for the Desiring God blog.

There are plenty of celebrity pastors who could be credibly accused of being in it for the money. John Piper—Desiring God’s founder—is not one of them. And I suspect Jonathan Parnell is cut from the same cloth. William Kelly referenced the suit Parnell wore as evidence of his unseemly “profiting off the word,” which proves almost beyond a doubt that Kelly has never visited a predominantly-black church. When I walked through the doors of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist back in 2010, I was the only man not wearing a suit. I don’t own a suit, but that’s not something I’m proud of. To my thinking, wearing a suit to church is not a sign of avarice; it’s a sign of respect. And when the NBA stopped requiring its coaches to wear suits—in a strange concession to COVID—it inadvertently cheapened its product in the process. I and most of the country had already stopped watching NBA games by then, but doing away with suits only makes the league look less serious, less professional, and less substantial. Our incessant yielding to comfort isn’t always a good thing. Would’t you agree, Mr. Kelly? I can understand in theory the move from high church to low church. I get the appeal of a more casual and accessible worship experience, but something is still lost in the exchange. When you do away with the sacred and serious, you’re left with something far less compelling. The Spirit of God, I believe, is more likely to be encountered in the silence than the furor.

And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.

The still small voice of God can be hard to hear in many worship settings. And we sometimes seem to forget that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit, not to the loud and boisterous. We purveyors of casual church must guard against approaching the throne of God with too much flippancy. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And wisdom. But you don’t encounter much fostering of fear in the evangelical church today. So if a pastor’s wearing of a suit can help create an atmosphere of reverence and solemnity for his people, I’m all for it. Because sometimes what’s most needed is not easy access. Sometimes the bar for entry isn’t too high; it’s too low. When people are looking for something transcendent, something more than the everyday, they might prefer a church that feels like something more than the everyday. Remember that Jesus has prescribed narrow gates over broad paths. And while broad paths know nothing of walls, narrow gates are entirely contingent upon them.

Wisdom cries aloud in the street (in the streets of Minneapolis!), in the markets she raises her voice… “How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Because I have called and you refused to listen… because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof, I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind… They hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD… therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way, and have their fill of their own devices. For the simple are killed by their turning away, and the complacency of fools destroys them.

Wisdom calls from the street, but wisdom does not suffer fools. And when fools turn their backs on wisdom, by turning their backs on the Lord, wisdom laughs at their calamity. God is merciful; wisdom is not. When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind—which is precisely what we see playing out in Minnesota: The public and private forsaking of wisdom. Sooner or later, there’s a price to pay. We can debate whether the recent deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were justified, but there’s one thing that isn’t up for debate. Their deaths were entirely unnecessary and avoidable, which is what makes them so tragic. Because even if law enforcement should have shown more restraint, their use of lethal force was brought about by Good’s and Pretti’s own belligerence. I’m not saying they got what they deserved, except insomuch as we’re all sinners deserving of death. But they played with fire and got burned. They poked the bear, and the bear bit back. When you try to bait officers into violence, as Pretti had been doing for days prior, you run the risk of being injured or killed by the very violence you incite. These officers are not playing games.

I reread the book of Nehemiah this week since its narrative is so inextricably tied to the sanctity of walls. Nehemiah’s task was to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, so that Israel would “no longer suffer derision,” but Nehemiah was not a soldier or a builder. He was the exiled cupbearer of a foreign king that God used to do the impossible. The first chapter offers a beautiful encapsulation of the gospel: sorrow, conviction, confession, repentance, and faith in the restoring mercies of God. It’s telling that Nehemiah and his followers didn’t start with rebuilding the city. They started with rebuilding the walls, and it was no easy task. Israel’s enemies sought the blood of Nehemiah and the abandonment of his project. His workmen famously held a weapon in one hand and a tool in the other. Nehemiah writes:

Half of my servants worked on construction, and half held the spears, shields, bows, and coats of mail. And the leaders stood behind the whole house of Judah, who were building on the wall. Those who carried burdens were loaded in such a way that each labored on the work with one hand and held his weapon with the other. And each of the builders had his sword strapped at his side while he built.

In the midst of their enemies schemes to “fight against Jerusalem and to cause confusion,” Nehemiah records that “we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night.” And that is a fair encapsulation of the life we’re called to. Prayer and work. It is through both that God’s provision is delivered. Do not passively call out to the Lord, and do not trust to your own devices. Some of us don’t want to build a wall, and some of us don’t want to pray—yet each is integral. We read in the text that the remnant in Jerusalem who had survived the exile were living “in great trouble and (great) shame.” And the culprit for both was the same. Their wall lay in ruins. It was both the literal cause of their capture and a picture of their having lost the favor of God. The absence of walls is not a city’s glory. It’s a city’s shame. And a people whose walls have failed will find their own demise to be close at hand.

In case you noticed that all three of the examples I opened with were stories of walls interfering with the plans of the “righteous,” allow me to clarify something. Walls can be used for ill purposes, but that doesn’t make them unnecessary or evil. I wouldn’t even call them amoral. Walls are a positive good, so we shouldn’t allow the walls of Jericho—or the Berlin Wall—to give walls a bad name (Tim is already doing that). Nor should we call it a virtue that Narnia didn’t have walls. I’m not sure Narnia had anything that could rightly qualify as a city, and perhaps if it had done a better job fortifying its defenses, the country would not have been lost to the Telmarines. Walls are a mercy of God—a manifestation of God’s first directive to mankind: to fill the earth and subdue it. If you doubt that, just imagine your own home without walls. How long would it survive the ravages of man, beast, and nature? Walls keep out the chaos and danger. Israel’s journey through the Red Sea would have been a very different one had God not turned the waters into “a wall to them on their right hand and on their left.”

It is hospitality to invite people into your home, but it is an invasion for people to enter your home unbidden. And that invasion would become qualitatively worse if they refused to leave. Perhaps your family could survive the cost of feeding, clothing, and housing one more person. Lots of families have voluntarily done precisely that through adoption. My own family is one of them. We have adopted one child. It’s an exceedingly small number, but the initial and ongoing cost is still quite high. Lots of bills, and for us, a fair bit of debt. No regrets, but we’re frequently stretched beyond our means. Could we have adopted two children? Probably. Three? Maybe. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, but how about 10? Or 100? At some point, it becomes a problem of scale. At some point, a family, a city, a state, or a nation can’t take in any more people—without ceasing to exist in any meaningful way. Slow organic growth is not a problem. It’s a blessing, in fact. But the massive influx of entire foreign populations is—not because America is racist (I suspect it’s the least racist country in the world), but because so many of the people coming here are racists. They are hostile towards America’s founding vision and hostile towards assimilation.

If you think Jesus didn’t recognize the legitimacy of national boundaries, you may need to read the gospels again. There is no Jew or Greek in the kingdom of God, but there certainly is in the kingdoms of men. And that is not a bad thing. “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans,” Jesus told the twelve, “but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And when a Canaanite woman came to Jesus to beg for the life of her demon-oppressed daughter, he ignored her completely. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he explained to the disciples. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” But rather than taking offense and calling Christ a racist, the woman simply pleaded that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” For her faith and humility, Jesus healed her daughter instantly. To the woman at the well, Jesus proclaimed that Samaritans worshiped God in ignorance since “salvation is from the Jews.” Jesus of Nazareth loved people of all tribes and tongues, but he was not inclusive in any modern sense of the word. He did not negate national distinctions nor does he simply throw the gates of heaven open wide. In the parable of the wedding feast, invitations went out to all. But those who entered the feast in an unworthy fashion were cast into the outer darkness. Just because someone gets in doesn’t mean they have the right to stay in. Many are called; few are chosen. Make of that what you will.

In a sinful world, walls are necessary. This has been true since Eden. Once sin entered the Garden, the walls went up—in the form of a cherubim with flaming sword. Jordan Peterson, in We Who Wrestle With God, calls this barring of the way back to the tree of life “both inevitable and right.” Those still mired in sin “cannot attain the heavenly reward (because) Paradise would simply not be Paradise if it contained anything unworthy.” In the war between good and evil, it is neither loving nor Christlike to roll out the red carpet for evil. In another obscure Narnian Chronicle: The Magician’s Nephew, there is a scene of a sacred walled garden with a golden gate. “Come in by the gold gates,” its inscription reads, “or not at all.” Entrants were invited to take of its fruit for others but were forbidden from eating it themselves. Much like the interlopers in The Pilgrim’s Progress, who came in over the wall rather than through the narrow gate, the White Witch climbed into the garden and then ate the fruit. As the gate forewarned, she found her heart’s desire… and despair. 

When David begs God’s favor in Psalm 58, he beseeches him to “Do good to Zion… (and) build up the walls of Jerusalem.” In Psalm 122, David blesses Jerusalem and wishes her “Peace… within your walls and security within your towers!” But when God is displeased with Israel, he warns through the prophet Isaiah that he “will break down its wall, and it shall be [devoured].” (Is 5:5) Isaiah would later say that “the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall.” (Is 25:4) The storm is chaos. The wall is what holds chaos at bay. Isaiah then compares sin to a breach in a wall (Is 30:13). It compromises our security and defenses. Finally, speaking of a coming future in which “violence shall no more be heard in your land,” Isaiah proclaims, “you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.” (Is 60:18)

When the bad kind of Walz heaps scorn upon the good kind of walls—insisting that Minnesota is open to all comers (no matter their history, intentions, or legal standing), he appeals to Christian virtue. Walz referenced care for neighbors no less than five times in his televised address, but isn’t all leftist social policy merely a perversion of the divine call to love your neighbor? Those who reject virtually every tenet of the Christian faith but preach “love for neighbor” as the basis of all their diabolical, God-forsaking schemes are attempting to climb into the garden over the wall rather than through the narrow gate. It’s an effort to game the system, an attempt to wear the garb of Christianity—and get the moral credit for doing so—without having to yield to any of its more exacting demands. They want the fruit, but they don’t want to pay the price.

The clearest evidence that this is moral posturing rather than legitimate concern for purported victims like Pretti and Good is the fact that whenever innocent people are unequivocally victimized by those who have entered the country illegally, virtually nothing is said about these neighbors. These, apparently, are not the neighbors Jesus cares about. And when Iryna Zarutska, the Ukranian refugee, was fatally stabbed in the throat on a Charlotte train, progressives did not erupt in protest. Despite checking off two of their favorite boxes—Ukrainian and refugee, barely a peep was made. That’s because her killer was a black man, a career criminal with severe mental illness, who’d been continually put back onto the street. He declaratively targeted her for being white, and so there was no political angle in which they could profit from her death. 

We each of us begin our lives surrounded by walls. The uterine walls. There is one way in and one way out. And those walls are remarkably adept at protecting us from the chaos and danger that exists beyond them. Except, of course, when those sacred walls are penetrated by the steel or poisons of the abortion industry. The left’s commitment today is to accept all comers, except for those comers that you actually have a moral obligation to protect and provide for. It is moral subversion in the highest order. It is calling evil good (abortion) and calling good evil (protecting your borders). Virtually everyone who utters the nonsensical slogan, “No human being is illegal” supports the right to kill human beings in the womb. This is nothing less than sophistry.

I made reference earlier to Crossway’s disinclination to publish my book, Love the Least (A Lot)—since books on abortion don’t sell. “Most evangelical Christians already [know],” their representative explained, “(that) abortion is dead wrong.” I do not disagree with that assessment, but here’s what evangelical Christians may not know—which happens to be what my book is about. Failing to do something about the horrific evil of child sacrifice not only risks the survival of our nation, it risks the survival of our souls. I know I shouldn’t say things like that. Plenty of dear brothers have warned me against it, but Jesus did say things like that. What you fail to do for the least of these, you fail to do for me. And the penalty for that failure appears to be a severe one.

“Keep my commandments and live.” That’s Solomon’s declaration in Proverbs 4:5. We want the living part; we’re not so keen on the keep my commandments part. We want the pleasant fruit that comes of obediences without the moral inconvenience of having to actually obey. Karl Marx famously said that everyone should be provided for “according to his needs,” but Jesus said that everyone will be provided for—ie judged—“according to his works.” Does that mean we’re working our way to Paradise? Yes. But it doesn’t mean we’re earning our way to Paradise. Because the work we do is simply a manifestation of the faith we have (or don't have). “Show me your faith apart from your works,” James declared, and I will show you my faith by my works.” And the work isn’t simply or even mostly fighting against the sins of our nation. It’s the daily putting to death of our own personal sins. That is a far more difficult task, but God’s people must defend their borders—their physical borders and their spiritual borders too.