Romans 13 is usually dragged out when someone wants to remind Christians to pay their taxes or keep quiet about bad laws. But Paul’s point was bigger: government exists as God’s minister to protect the innocent and restrain those who would harm them. The sword is not ornamental. It is meant to be used. That responsibility is not limited to catching criminals after the fact. It includes keeping the unstable and dangerous from terrorizing the community in the first place.
That is why earlier generations accepted asylums as a normal part of civic life. However crude or imperfect, they were based on the recognition that liberty without reason is not liberty at all. A man who is enslaved to hallucinations or violent delusions is not free, and his neighbors are not safe until he is restrained. Confinement was not about cruelty. It was about keeping order and offering care when families could not manage it themselves.
WHEN REAGAN DID THE BAD THING
When Ronald Reagan gutted much of America’s asylum system in the 1980s, conservatives celebrated it as a triumph of freedom and small government. It was nothing of the sort. The burden did not disappear. It just shifted. The mentally ill went from hospitals to homeless encampments, from long-term care to prison cells, from medical supervision to police standoffs. What looked like savings on a budget line turned into blood on the streets.
The problem is that many conservatives let libertarian theory do their thinking for them. They treated government’s only legitimate job as refereeing contracts and building roads. By that standard, shutting down “funny farms” sounded like victory. But biblically and historically, that is not how civil order works. Rulers are not supposed to sit back until disaster strikes. They are supposed to restrain evil before it spreads. Pretending that delusion is private and harmless was always a lie.
The evidence is everywhere. Families are helpless when loved ones descend into psychosis. Police are forced into the role of social workers and psychiatrists, usually with a gun as their only tool. Jails have become the nation’s largest mental health facilities. Cities buckle under the cost of homelessness fueled by untreated disorders. What Reagan actually did was not shrink government, but make it dumber. The state still spends billions dealing with the mentally ill, but it does so in the worst and most destructive way possible.
HISTORY IN PERSPECTIVE
Older societies were not confused about this. The Puritans built hospitals for the insane because they believed civil order depended on it. Nineteenth-century Protestants fought to reform prisons and establish more humane treatment because they knew the state’s duty was to protect the weak as well as restrain the violent. Even medieval rulers, with all their faults, did not imagine that leaving the deranged to wander the streets was justice. They may not have had perfect systems, but they understood the principle.
The principle is simple: when madness threatens neighbor, government must act. To restrain the insane is not tyranny. To confine them is not oppression. It is a necessary use of public authority to protect both the patient and the community. The alternative is what we have now: schizophrenic men shoving strangers onto subway tracks, addicts screaming at families in city parks, and untreated psychotics ending up in shootouts with police. We call it freedom, but it is chaos.
Conservatives have been too quick to baptize this chaos as liberty. They think any rollback of government is automatically godly. But liberty without order is just license, and a ruler who refuses to protect the public from delusion is not honoring Romans 13. He is betraying it. The point is not to create a sprawling welfare state or turn every eccentric into a ward of the state. The point is that true freedom requires sanity, and sanity sometimes requires confinement.
That is the duty we have forgotten. We can call it institutional care, hospitals, or asylums, but the label matters less than the principle. A just government does not let dangerous delusions run unchecked. It restrains them. It protects families who cannot. It takes responsibility for order rather than leaving chaos to fester. Until we recover that, we will keep reaping the same bitter harvest, violence in our streets, prisons full of the mentally ill, and communities forced to live in fear of neighbors who should have been helped and restrained long ago.
TRANSGENDERISM AS A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS
I work in the downtown area of a small Bible Belt city, and out my office window I see a virtual parade - every single day, all day long - of one mentally ill person after another, most homeless, wandering the streets in conversations with themselves. At any given time, looking down the street, I see police engaging them in conversation, powerless to do anything about them unless laws are broken. Despite being perpetual nuisances, and tinder boxes waiting to explode, there’s nothing in our legal system that allows anything to be done about them until they do. Police just sit hovering, waiting for them to get into trouble, like municipal baby-sitters unable to intervene without a discernible crime (which there inevitably will be). And coming home just last night, I took a photo of one crossing the street in front of me, a bald man of 6’4 and 300lbs, wearing a pink, silk nightie (just because).
If untreated schizophrenia leads to people raving on sidewalks and eventually snapping in violence, untreated gender delusion leads to the same chaos but dressed up in rainbows. What past generations would have recognized immediately as a mental health crisis, ours has rebranded as liberation. Instead of treatment, we give affirmation. Instead of restraint, we give hormone cocktails. Instead of acknowledging delusion for what it is, we write it into civil rights law. The result is a society less safe, less sane, and less able to protect its own children.
Conservatives once laughed at liberal attempts to normalize transgenderism, assuming it was a fringe oddity that would never make it out of the margins. That was a serious mistake. What was tolerated as eccentric has metastasized into policy. Schools hide “gender transitions” from parents. Judges strip custody from mothers and fathers who refuse to play along with pronouns. Pharmaceutical companies push puberty blockers and mutilating surgeries on confused minors. Politicians compete to wave the rainbow flag hardest. A society that once institutionalized people who could not distinguish fantasy from reality now applauds them, elevates them, and builds legislation around their delusion.
This is not compassion. It is cultural malpractice. Imagine a man convinced he is Napoleon. In the past, such a person would be treated, supervised, and possibly confined. Today, if that same man insists he is a woman, he is given surgery, a parade, and a seat on a corporate diversity board. Both are delusions. One gets a straitjacket. The other gets celebrated.
WHEN DELUSION TURNS VIOLENT
The problem is not just the delusion itself. It is what happens when you normalize it. Encouraging society to treat fantasy as fact creates an environment where instability is reinforced rather than healed. Young people who might have grown out of their confusion are locked into it by adults who should know better. Those who might have been treated with therapy are instead given irreversible surgeries. And those whose instability turns violent are shielded from scrutiny because to question their state of mind is labeled “bigotry.” We are reinforcing the very conditions that make public violence inevitable
The transgender shooter in Nashville is a case study. Here was a biological woman living in the fantasy of being a man, encouraged in her delusion by a culture that insists she must be affirmed at all costs. Her instability grew in plain sight, yet no one dared call it what it was. The ideology of affirmation left her untreated, unrestrained, and armed. The result was a massacre of children. How many more examples do we need before we admit that our approach is suicidal?
The truth is that transgenderism is not only a personal crisis but a public health issue. It is a sign of a society that has abandoned sanity. Civil government exists to restrain delusion when it becomes a danger to others. Instead, ours protects it, promotes it, and punishes those who resist it. We have created a system where the mentally unstable are not only allowed to persist in their delusions but are given cultural power to demand everyone else join them. That is not neutrality. That is enforcement of madness.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE
Some conservatives argue that the solution is simply to leave people alone, that if someone wants to live in fantasy it is their business. But delusion never stays private. It spreads, it recruits, and it destabilizes communities. A man claiming to be a woman in his own house is one thing. A man claiming to be a woman in a locker room, a women’s prison, or a kindergarten classroom is another. Once delusion is protected by law, it demands recognition in every public space. There is no way to confine it without the state stepping in. Libertarian rhetoric about leaving people alone collapses here. This is not about private eccentricities. This is about public order.
That is why civil government must take mental health seriously. If society had universal and robust mental healthcare, those displaying transgender delusion publicly would not be rewarded. They would be evaluated, treated, and in cases of danger, confined. Instead of parading confused young men in drag shows, we would be offering therapy. Instead of telling a suicidal teenager that his problem is that he was “born in the wrong body,” we would be addressing the underlying crisis of mind. That would not only protect the individual but also protect neighbors from the consequences of untreated delusion.
Instead, we have built the opposite system. The delusional are empowered. Families are gagged. Critics are silenced. And anyone who dares to call gender delusion a disorder is treated as if they are the dangerous ones. The sword of the state is not being used to restrain madness but to punish sanity. That is how upside down we have become.
This is why transgender shootings are not an anomaly. They are the logical result of decades of neglect, affirmation, and cowardice. When delusion is fed instead of treated, it grows. When instability is protected instead of restrained, it escalates. And when violence erupts, the media scrambles to cover up the obvious. They will blame guns, Christians, or vague social pressures. They will never blame the one thing staring them in the face: a society that called madness normal until it spilled blood.
Christians should be the first to call this what it is. We should not hide behind libertarian slogans about leaving people alone. We should not indulge the fantasy that cultural decay can be reversed without confronting delusion directly. We should insist that civil government has a duty to act, because Scripture does not limit the sword to punishing thieves and murderers. It gives rulers responsibility to protect the innocent from harm, including the harm that comes when untreated delusion is unleashed.
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