The Law of Moses might be the most misunderstood set of laws in all creation, as it combines moral law with civil and ceremonial law, without always specifying which is which.
The civil law in the Law of Moses governed the ancient nation of Israel. The ceremonial laws were designed to separate the Israelites as God’s Chosen People. There are Jewish people today who abide by the ceremonial laws, but the ancient state of Israel no longer exists and the civil portion of the Law of Moses is no longer applicable as a result.
Many of the criticisms people use against the Judeo-Christian moral order stem, not from moral law, but from civil or ceremonial law.
Dietary restrictions are a common example. Critics point to prohibitions on pork or shellfish in Leviticus 11 as evidence that Biblical morality is arbitrary and outdated, ignoring that these were ceremonial boundary markers meant to set Israel apart, not universal moral commands. The New Testament explicitly sets these aside (Mark 7:18-19 and Acts 10:9-16).
The same mistake appears as mockery of rules against mixed fabrics in Leviticus 19:19, which functioned as symbolic purity laws rather than as anything related to morality.
A more serious error occurs when critics cite the civil penalties of ancient Israel as though they represent moral law. Passages such as Leviticus 20:13 (death for homosexuality), Deuteronomy 22:20-21 (death for a woman losing her virginity before marriage), or Exodus 21:17 (death for cursing parents) are invoked to portray Biblical morality as inherently brutal, without acknowledging that these were civil statutes governing a specific theocratic nation, and were not designed to be universal. Things that may have made practical sense in societies several thousand years ago may not make sense in the modern world, and it is impossible for us to understand how societies functioned when we are thousands of years removed from them.
Even within ancient Israel the application of civil penalties changed, as seen in John 8:3-11, where Jesus refused to carry out a stoning. The same pattern holds with Sabbath enforcement in Numbers 15:32-36 and with ritual purity laws in Leviticus 15 and Leviticus 12, which are frequently read as moral judgments when they are in fact symbolic or civil in nature. In each case, the criticism lands not on the enduring moral law, but on categories of law that the tradition treats as contextual.
For Christians and non-orthodox Jews, only the moral law remains, and the moral law really is designed to be permanent and enduring.
Jesus summarized the moral law with what has been called the Golden Rule, in Matthew 22:37-40: love God above all things, and love others as much as you love yourself. Note however that Jesus was applying God’s moral law only to people and not to nations.
Applying individual morality to nations causes problems, and these problems are not abstract. As we shall see, this is a lesson Pope Leo would do well to learn.
The distinction between personal morality and public authority is built into the structure of Scripture and preserved in the Christian tradition. The commands given to individuals, such as mercy, forgiveness, and turning the other cheek, govern personal conduct in the face of personal wrongs. They are voluntary acts of virtue.
A man may choose to absorb an injury rather than retaliate, and in doing so he reflects a higher moral calling, but that cannot be applied to a nation without consequences, as a nation is a governing authority charged with protecting others. The government of the United States protects 340 million people within the United States, and is also the backbone of NATO and the primary partner in a host of other defense treaties, with friends and allies around the world. When deciding whether or not to ‘turn the other cheek,’ the President of the United States has to think not just about his own personal beliefs, but also about the well being of everyone his decisions will impact, both today and into the future.
The difference between personal morality and national governance relates to obligations that individuals do not bear. A private citizen may forgive a thief; a government that refuses to punish theft abandons its duty to maintain order. A person may choose not to defend himself; a state that refuses to defend its citizens is negligent, and inviting attack.
Romans 13 describes governing authority as bearing the sword to restrain evil and protect the innocent. That is not a concession to sin, but part of the moral structure of justice in a fallen world, and this is why Christian tradition developed a doctrine of just war rather than one of abolishing war outright.
Based upon the things Pope Leo has said, he does not seem to see any war as moral.
War is not treated as good in the Bible, but nor is it treated as inherently bad. It is treated as conditional, permitted under strict criteria such as legitimate authority, just cause, and proportionality. That framework understands that the aggressor and the defender are not morally equivalent. Moral responsibility remains with the one who initiates harm.
Nor is the aggressor always the first to strike. The Bible is full of stories where the just side started an inevitable war before an enemy was ready to strike. Whether looking at Joshua 6:1-21 covering Jericho during the conquest of Canaan, 1 Samuel 15:1-3 covering Saul’s attack at Amalek, David’s campaigns in 2 Samuel 8:1-6 and 10:6-19 against the Philistines, Moabites, and Arameans, or in Numbers 25:16-18 followed by Numbers 31, where Israel is instructed to attack Midian, the action is offensive, but justified to remove imminent threats.
If a nation is told to apply the ethics of personal forgiveness to acts of aggression, deterrence weakens and crime explodes. What appears as moral enlightenment becomes a form of moral confusion, with the state no longer judging between right and wrong in the defense of its people, but being asked to ignore judgment completely.
Mercy is a wonderful trait for individuals to have, but when practiced by the state, mercy needs to be tempered with justice, as mercy detached from justice becomes framed, by the criminal, as permission.
All individuals should welcome foreigners, but when a nation becomes overly welcoming, its culture fractures, and particularly if the immigrants have standards of morality that are incompatible with that of the host nation.
If a nation brings in immigrants faster than it can increase the supply of housing and other necessities, more people end up competing for the same resources, causing prices to explode. This is particularly true if the people immigrating are doing so not for economic opportunity so much as for generous welfare benefits, for which the host nation must then tax its populace.
Zohran Mamdani claims that New York City is in a more dire economic crisis than during the 2008 fiscal crisis, or during Covid-19. This is not because we have less food or fewer houses, but because under President Biden, we allowed millions upon millions of people to enter our nation illegally. These people compete with those already here for places to live and food to eat, and that pressure is greatest in places like New York City that declared themselves ‘Sanctuary Cities’ and promised to provide migrants with the necessities of life, paid for through tax dollars.
Of course New York City is broke. They cannot afford the promises they’ve made.
If an individual is called to give generously, he or she gives from their own pocket, but when the state attempts to enforce generosity through compulsion, the recipient sees it, not as charity, but as an entitlement that they have a right to receive. Also, as people begin to see charity as a state function, they cease being charitable as individuals, which is why charitable giving is much higher in the United States than in Europe, and much higher among Republicans than among Democrats.
The difference is not that Republicans, or Americans are better people, but that they have not outsourced their generosity to others. Also, people who donate are being generous with their own money instead of only with other people’s money. There is nothing more generous than a progressive promising money they do not have, and as Mamdani is finding out, promises are far easier to make than to keep.
Tim Walz and Ilhan Omar did not care about the fraud in Minneapolis welfare programs as those receiving fraudulent funds supported their campaigns, and neither Walz nor Omar bore any personal cost. The same is true of Gavin Newsom in California, where the ‘solution’ to independent journalism exposing fraud was to ban such journalism from taking place.
This is not just a Democrat problem, either. The Congressional Budget Office tells us that there are hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud, waste, and abuse, every year. If we include improper payments, some studies go as high as a half a trillion dollars in Medicare alone, and yet before DOGE nobody lifted a finger to stop it. Even after DOGE, it does not appear many people care.
The mistake of applying personal morality to the governance of nations is becoming more and more common, as well as more and more costly, and as mentioned, this is a lesson Pope Leo has yet to learn.
When the Pope says, “In our time, we still experience too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, fear of others, and by an economic model that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest,” he is suggesting that free markets cause harm. The truth is that free markets have been the biggest boom to living and working conditions in human history, reducing extreme poverty from about 45% of the world population in 1980, to about 8% today.
If we follow Pope Leo, we will reverse that trend and subject billions of people who no longer face starvation with the same kind of extreme poverty their families only recently escaped. Pope Leo may be a true believer of socialism, but that does not prevent the policies he supports from causing tremendous harm.
When the Pope said, “Jesus does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war,” it was a direct rebuke of Trump for bombing Iran. This came after Iran killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, and though the Pope eventually also condemned Iran for killing protestors, apparently the Pope believes that killing your own people should carry no consequences.
The Pope also ignores that the Iranian regime has a 47 year history of promising to wipe Israel from the face of the Earth, of making “Death to America” its national chant, and of calling nuclear weapons “The Sword of Allah” from within a religion that insists on spreading itself by the sword (Qur’an 9:5 and 9:29). The Mullahs of Iran hate Christendom, and have missiles that can hit the Vatican. Perhaps the Pope should think about that.
When the Pope offers his “deepest sympathy to the Palestinian people in Gaza, who continue to live in fear and to survive in unacceptable conditions, forced, once again, from their lands,” he ignores that Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip and uses it not to build a nation, but as a base of operations for killing Jews. Children in the Gaza Strip are taught as children that killing Jews is a moral imperative. The Pope says nothing about changing that and without changing the culture in the Gaza Strip, his calls for peace ring hollow.
Israel would love to live in peace. The people in Gaza, according to polls, do not.
The Pope treats Islam and Christianity as sibling religions, but in doing so he ignores that the central tenets of the two faiths have inverted moralities, as I discussed in detail on White Rose Magazine.
Christianity and Judaism both base their morality on the moral laws within the Law of Moses, summarized as loving God above all things, and loving other people as much as you love yourself. Islam’s moral base is that of submission to Allah’s law (Sharia), and of forcing others to submit, even against their will (Jihad). One could not make two moral systems more different if they sat down and tried.
Christianity is personal from the ground up, with no rules for the running of the state, and Jesus made this explicit (John 18:36, Matthew 22:21, Luke 17:20-21), whereas the Qur’an specifies that Sharia is for all mankind, and that only Allah can make laws (Qur’an 12:40, 6:57, 5:44, 42:10, 34:28, 7:158,21:107).
In Islam, any laws made by man are null and void.
Individual Muslims can of course live in ways that are compatible with a secular society, but to do so they have to ignore some of the central tenets of their own faith, including the tenet that anyone not practicing Islam ‘correctly’ has been taught the truth and rejected it, the only remedy for which is death (Qur’an 3:85, 4:115, Sahih al-Bukhari 6922, Sahih Muslim 1676).
There is no Constitution under Sharia, and no civil rights (Qur’an 5:44, Qur’an 33:36 ). Women are considered half as valuable, half as smart, and half as honest as men (Qur’an 2:282, Sahih al-Bukhari 2658). If a woman is raped, she has to prove that she did nothing to invite it or the rape is considered her fault, and the stain of her shame can only be erased from her family through an honor killing. This is not directly written into the Qur’an, but is a side-effect in most Muslim countries, based on women needing four witnesses to counteract the allegations of the man who raped her (Qur’an 24:4).
Rape of anyone captured in Jihad, or in the furtherance of Jihad, is explicitly allowed under Islam (Qur’an 4:24, 23:5-6, 33:50, 70:29-30), which is why Grooming Gangs were allowed to gang-rape thousands of underage girls across England for several decades, and why in parts of Germany and Sweden, the rape of native girls is referred to as ‘misunderstandings.’
Not enforcing rape laws is how Europe decided to square Islam with secularism, and if that sounds horrific, it is. Islamophobia is apparently a greater sin than rape.
I can understand atheists looking at all religions as false, and then blowing off all tenets of all religions as silly perversions of truth. I disagree with that contention, but I can at least logically understand it. The problem is that believers tend to follow the tenets of their religion, whether silly or not, and the more fervently one holds their belief, the more closely they are apt to follow those tenets.
I expect the Pope, of all people, to know that.
Jews and Christians are apt to try to love their fellow man more, as they deepen their faith. Muslims are apt to become more radicalized into Jihad as they deepen their faith, and this is not driven by Muslims being bad people so much as by their religion being incompatible with other ways of life.
Qur’an 3:54 celebrates Allah’s willingness to lie: “And they deceived, and Allah deceived, and Allah is the best of deceivers.” Pair this with Revelation 12:9: “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…”
Is Allah Satan? Morally speaking, to the Judeo-Christian world he is. And in Islam, the Judeo-Christian God is. The moral systems are inversions of one another, so of course they find one another evil, and while individuals should always strive to live in peace and tolerance, nations have to be honest about incompatibility between faiths.
When the Pope applies individual morality to nation-states, he commits a very serious error, but when he equates Islam to Christianity as morally equal, he commits something much closer to blasphemy, and ironically, it is blasphemy under Islam as well.
The Pope is not alone in making such critical errors. Europe is providing a master-class in civilizational suicide, and there are plenty of Americans who want to follow along. The Pope is unique only because he is supposed to be the torch-bearer of the Judeo-Christian moral order.
The Law of Moses is misunderstood because it contains different kinds of law, applied to different kinds of people, in different kinds of contexts. When those distinctions are ignored, the result is confusion. Ceremonial law is mistaken for moral law and civil law is mistaken for universal truth.
That same mistake is now being made at a much larger scale.
The Bible did not confuse the morality of the individual with the responsibilities of the state, and it did not pretend that mercy could replace justice, or that peace could exist without the willingness to defend it. It understood that nations have obligations that individuals do not, and that failing to meet those obligations is negligence.
When modern leaders collapse those distinctions, they are not elevating morality. They are destroying it.
That is the error at the heart of the Pope’s statements. By applying individual moral commands to nation-states, he strips governments of the tools required to protect their people. By treating fundamentally incompatible moral systems as though they are variations of the same truth, he obscures the reality that not all moral frameworks are the same.
Misunderstanding the Law of Moses leads to bad theology. Misapplying moral law to the governance of nations leads to something far worse. It leads to policies that reward aggression, punish restraint, and place entire populations at risk. As we see in Europe, the result is civilizational collapse.
If the United States follows Europe’s lead, there will be no coming back.
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