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Anti-ICE protests and the partial government shutdown: American governance and the path to our best future · The Daily Article

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good day, and welcome to the Monday, February 2nd, 2026 edition of Denison Forms, Daily Article Podcast, authored today by Cultural Theologian Dr. Jim Denison.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Chris Elkins, narrator.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: anti-ice protests were staged in cities across the U.S. over the weekend.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bikers also participated in memorial rides for Alex Pretty, who was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Over 200 such rides took place across 43 states.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other news, the U.S. government partially shut down over the weekend as dozens of federal agencies saw their funding lapse at 12 a.m. Saturday.
• 0:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and President Trump named Kevin Wash to become federal reserve chair, but the process for confirmation by the Senate may be endowed.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's what these stories have in common.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They illustrate features in American governance, not bugs.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the fact that matters far beyond its political implications.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Public demonstrations have long been a part of the American story as the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the recent March for Life in Washington, D.C., illustrate such events stand in marked contrast to the recent massacre of protesters in Iran and the 1989 murder of demonstrators in Tiniman Square by the Chinese Communist Party.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our partial government shutdown
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: occurred because the Senate approved a funding package late Friday, but the House is not expected to vote on it until tomorrow at the earliest.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mr. Warsh's confirmation by the Senate may be blocked by Senator Tom Tillis, not because he is opposed to the President's nominee, but because he wants an investigation into the current Fed Chair Jerome Powell to be, quote, fully and transparently resolved first.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: In each case, we are seeing the juxtaposition of America's founding declaration that all men are created equal and the constitutional provision of checks and balances against unaccountable power.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Citizens can seek to persuade our leaders and otherwise catalyze change through lawful protests and public gatherings.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The various branches of government.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: can also leverage their influence toward the common good, and even individual serving in leadership can have an outsized role in our governance.
• 2:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This system has helped an amazingly disparate and diverse nation achieve a level of solidarity and progress that few Europeans foresaw at its birth, but no nation's future is guaranteed including ours.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have long appreciated the work of New York Times columnist David Brooks.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do not agree with all he writes, but I appreciate the reason why he seeks to advance his vision of American flourishing.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was therefore surprised on Friday to read that he is leaving the times after 22 years.
• 2:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In his final column, he diagnosis our cultural condition once more.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: quote, four decades of hyperindividualism, expanded individual choices, but weakened the bonds between people.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better, but subjectively worse.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have widened political freedom, but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of shared moral order.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Without shared standards of right and wrong, it's impossible to settle disputes.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals, and when that goes away, anxiety,
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: in quotes.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: In other words, we want the benefits of consensual governance without the necessity of a consensual morality, but human laws cannot change human nature.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: At best, they can restrain some of us from harming others some of the time.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: They cannot produce the shared moral order that leads to flourishing our founders' envisioned for us.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: What can?
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: At this point, you probably expect need to recommend biblical morality as our essential cultural foundation.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here's the problem.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Such morality requires our unconditional commitment.
• 4:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Bible calls us in Mark 12 verse 32.
• 4:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
• 4:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: When did you last spend a day
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm just as tempted by partial obedience as you are.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is appealing to have my cake and eat it as well, so to do what God requires to obtain his blessing, but no more.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: CS Lewis observed in his last sermon.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are, in fact, very like honest, but reluctant taxpayers.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: We approve and income tax in principle.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: We make our returns truthfully, but we dread a rise in the tax.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary.
• 5:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we hope we very ardently hope that after we have paid it, there will still be enough left for us to live on.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In quote, But partial obedience can lead only to partial benefits.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The more unconditionally we are committed to our marriage, our children, our work and our friends, the more we experience the best the relationships can offer.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the same with God.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Our Father cannot bless what harms his children, and anything outside his will is sin, according to James 417, that enslaves us, stated in John 8, verse 34, and from James 1, verse 15, brings forth death.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Lewis noted in his sermon, quote, when we try to keep within us and area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Have then can we give him all?
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jesus promised, in John 1415, if you'd love me, you will keep my commandments.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Love translates agape, the unconditional commitment to place the other before ourselves.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we love Jesus like this, he said, you will keep my commandments.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not might.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But will.
• 6:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the good news.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: A gap A is a fruit of the Spirit according to Galatians 5, verse 22, not of human effort.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when we submit ourselves to him daily, taught an Ephesians 5, 18, he produces this fruit in our lives daily.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Spirit thus enables us to love our Lord so fully that we naturally and inevitably keep His commandments.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: as the pastor and author are when let's serve noted.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you surrender your will to God, you discover the resources to do what God requires, in quote, and doing what God requires, positions us to experience his best in and through our lives, advancing the shared moral order that Brooks identified as foundational to our cultural future.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Charles Spurgeon testified, I have now concentrated all my prayers into one, and that one prayer is that I may die to self and live holy to him."
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us make this one prayer hours today to the glory of God.