We Are All Theologians?

How Theology Silently Informs Modernity

We Are All Theologians?

I love the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and friends finally meet the Great and Powerful Wizard—and he’s terrifying, all smoke and thunder—until Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals it’s just some guy pulling levers.

That’s what I want to do in this series.

Theology isn’t just for the preachy and pious or dusty old academics. Whether we know it or not, we all live inside frameworks built by medieval monks—structures that still shape how we think about law, money, nationhood, even the calendar.

Like in Oz, once you pull back the curtain, things start to make sense—and they’re usually less scary than they seemed. This series is about tugging on those curtains, tracing the hidden theological roots of modern life, and maybe reframing the conversations we’re having about some pretty important stuff.

Our Penal System is from the Dark Ages, Really!

How feudal, Medieval theology still shapes American justice

You’ve probably heard some version of the story: NASA redesigns the Space Shuttle’s external rocket boosters baed on the size of… the backsides of two Roman horses.

The tale goes like this: the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle were built in Utah, but they had to be shipped by train to the launch site in Florida. That rail line passed through tunnels carved over a century ago—tunnels built to fit the standard U.S. railroad gauge of exactly 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Why that oddly specific size? Because it was copied from British railway lines, which themselves followed the width of old tramways, which were laid in the grooves of even older wagon ruts—ruts first carved into stone by Roman chariots. And those chariots? Designed to be roughly the width of two Roman horses. So yes: in a very real way, the width of a the external rocket booster of the space shuttle was constrained by the width of two Roman horses’ asses.

NASA and Horses Butts- watch this google video to see the explanation

Is every link in this chain historically precise? Not entirely. But the broader point stands: decisions made long ago—often for reasons no longer relevant—can quietly govern the present in ways we barely notice.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to infrastructure. It extends to our ideas and institutions. We inherit entire systems of thought—assumptions about morality, justice, success, and identity—that feel natural or obvious but actually trace back to ancient frameworks. These frameworks continue to shape how we govern, how we punish, how we build economies, and how we define who belongs.

In this series, I want to examine three areas where ancient ideas continue to influence the modern world, often under the radar: our justice system, our economic vision, and our national identity, our calendar. These areas seem secular, even scientific—based on law, math, policy. But peel back the layers, and you find centuries of inherited influence. Let’s start with one of the most urgent: how we define justice.

Why We Think Crime Deserves Pain

In America, we’re taught that if someone commits a crime, they owe a debt to society. It sounds obvious. Do harm, and you should pay for it. The bigger the crime, the bigger the debt. The moral scales must be balanced. We rarely stop to ask why this feels so right—so necessary.

But this isn’t just legal reasoning. It’s an inherited idea.

Nearly a thousand years ago, a monk named Anselm of Canterbury helped shape this way of thinking. He argued that sin wasn’t just bad behavior—it was an offense against the infinite honor of God. Humanity couldn’t repay the debt, so Jesus stepped in to suffer on our behalf. Theologically, this became known as vicarious penal atonement: God’s justice is satisfied through substitutionary punishment, and the cosmic books are balanced. In this view, God’s relationship with us becomes penal and transactional.

Yuck!

Anselm didn’t invent that idea; he theologized the feudal logic of his world, casting sin as an affront to a lord’s honor that demanded restitution. That framework—rooted in lordship, obligation, and satisfaction—was taken up and refined by Thomas Aquinas, then sharpened by John Calvin, who framed sin as a legal transgression requiring divine punishment. Enlightenment thinkers like Cesare Beccaria (used extensively by Adams, Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson) secularized the scaffolding, arguing that punishment should deter harm and maximize societal good—but they preserved the basic structure. Justice was still a transaction. Crime still demanded repayment.

That logic—sin as debt, justice as repayment through suffering—didn’t stay confined to theology. It eventually shaped how Western societies came to understand punishment itself. Not just in church doctrine, but in civil and criminal law. Our modern legal codes weren’t built from scratch—they were inherited. Passed down like railroad gauges or rocket booster specs, constrained by ancient assumptions that no longer serve the world we live in.

The phrase “debt to society” echoes that history. A crime is seen as a kind of moral withdrawal, and prison or penalty becomes the payment plan. The point isn’t repair or reconciliation. The point is retribution.

You can see it in the architecture of our justice system: long sentences, punitive conditions, mandatory minimums. And in the staggering scale of incarceration in the U.S.—the largest prison system in the world. We’ve built a society that treats justice not as healing what’s broken, but as making someone pay what they owe - in prison. And here is the thing it doesn’t reduce crime.

The US has the highest incarceration rare in the world. Despite representing about 4.2% of the global population, the U.S. accounts for approximately 20%. Louisiana has one of the highest incarceration rates in the US. If “take the key and lock them up” worked I would live in the safest area in the world - but I don’t. Not even close.

A Different Kind of Justice Is Possible

Restorative justice—the kind that centers healing, reconciliation, and real accountability—exists. It’s not a fantasy. You can find it in schools, youth diversion programs, and some community-led initiatives. And here’s the thing: it works.

Restorative practices reduce recidivism rates by up to 30%. They consistently report high satisfaction from both victims and offenders. They cost less than incarceration. And they build stronger communities instead of fracturing them.

So why aren’t they everywhere?

Because the problem isn’t just policy. It’s culture.

We’ve inherited a framework that equates justice with pain. The retributive model is so deeply baked into our collective instincts that alternatives feel soft, strange, even unjust. But that instinct isn’t natural. It’s theology—hardened into instinct, passed down through centuries, and dressed up as common sense.

Until we see that inheritance for what it is—a set of ancient ideas baked into modern systems—we’ll keep calling it “common sense.” We’ll keep mistaking punishment for justice. We’ll keep locking people up and calling it balance.

When Jesus addresses lex talionis—“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”—he doesn’t just question it; he reverses it entirely.

Rather than affirming retribution, Jesus calls his followers to non-retaliation, mercy, and radical forgiveness. He doesn’t just reject vengeance—he upends the entire logic of symmetrical punishment as the foundation of justice. In its place, he offers something deeper: justice as restoration, reconciliation, repair.

I’m not trying to proselytize. I’m trying to pull back the curtain on something massive, unsettling, and mostly invisible. This isn’t a historical footnote—it’s a live wire running through some of our most urgent debates. These inherited ideas aren’t background noise; they’re the operating system. Penal judgment, retribution, and moral balancing are still baked into our systems—and into our collective instinct. They shape how we punish, how we legislate, even how we parent. And we keep doing it in the name of a logic most of us have never stopped to question.

And when you do pull back the curtain? You don’t find the Great and Powerful Oz.You find Anselm of Canterbury. A medieval monk with the feudal imagination of his time and his context. Pulling the levers of the system we inherited.

And if it doesn’t work, then we might want to ask the question:

What might we build instead?

Thanks for your support. I hope you can start to see the shape of this project: to enrich the conversations that we have about life, politics, culture… Next week the series continues by looking at another way theology invisibly influences us. Please invite people to have this conversation with us.