Atlas Shrugged, MAGA Hats, and the God of the Least of These

Reckoning with libertarianism, Christian nationalism, and what Jesus meant by “the least of these.

When I was in college and just out of college, I went through what I’d now call my Ayn Rand phase—which, frankly, is fairly typical for young men.

Atlas Shrugged, in particular, got its hooks into me. It felt electric and transgressive: the heroic individual against the dead weight of society, the celebration of competence and willpower, the sense that the world is divided between “producers” and “moochers.” I wasn’t alone. A bunch of my friends were reading it around the same time, underlining the same passages, quoting John Galt monologues like they were Scripture.

A year or so after college, I was living in a house with a few roommates. One of them is still one of my oldest, closest friends—and he was just as taken with Atlas Shrugged as I was. We didn’t just like the book; we identified with it. We saw ourselves in Rand’s world, or at least wanted to.

One day I was over at another friend’s place, and we decided to have a little fun with that devotion. We had recently learned how to spoof emails—this was back when that felt like a minor hacker superpower—and we got the idea to send my roommate a message from none other than John Galt himself.

So we crafted this email “from” John Galt, packed with cryptic lines and references from Atlas Shrugged, just plausible enough to make you wonder and just weird enough to feel uncanny. Then we hit send and waited.

Later that day I came home. After a while, I heard my roommate come in. I knew the email would be waiting in his inbox, so I stayed put, curious to see if he’d say anything. About ten minutes went by. Then I heard him yell from down the hall:

“Will, come here—you’ve got to see this.”

I walked into his room, trying to keep a straight face. He leaned back in his chair, pointed at his computer monitor, and said, “Read this.”

So I did. I read the entire email that I had written, in character as John Galt, pretending to see it for the first time.

When I finished, he looked at me, absolutely serious, and said, “How did they know about me?”

I still laugh about that moment. It was such a perfect snapshot of where we were: so steeped in Rand’s world that an email from a fictional character didn’t immediately strike him as a prank—it felt, for a second, like the universe had noticed him. He didn’t find out I was the one who sent it for a couple of years.

That little prank captures the mood of that season of my life. Libertarianism—and the wider Rand/Hayek/Sowell universe around it—wasn’t just an interesting set of ideas to evaluate. It was a story we wanted to live in, a way of seeing ourselves as clear-eyed heroes in a world full of parasites and busybodies. And for a while, it seemed to line up neatly with my Christian faith.

Over time, though, the cracks started to show. The more seriously I took Scripture’s emphasis on the poor, the oppressed, and the responsibilities we bear together, the harder it became to reconcile that with the libertarian framework I’d absorbed.

Before I go any further, I need to say this as clearly as possible:

I still have dear friends who are libertarians. I love them, respect them, and see a lot of good in their instincts. This isn’t an attack on them. What I’m wrestling with here is ideas—and specifically, my own growing sense that key tenets of libertarianism simply don’t fit with Christian faith as I understand it.

This is the story of that tension, and why it matters in an age of MAGA hats and Christian flags at political rallies.

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What libertarianism got right for me

There are reasons libertarianism is so attractive, especially to earnest, idealistic young men who read too much.

Libertarianism gave me:

• A healthy suspicion of state power.
  Coming from any kind of Christian worldview that takes sin seriously, it makes sense to be wary of handing enormous power to governments. History is a horror gallery of things done “for the common good.”

• Respect for individual agency.
  The insistence that people are not clay for technocrats to mold—that they own their choices, their labor, their property—spoke to something true about human dignity.

• Appreciation for markets and knowledge limits.
  Hayek’s arguments about the limits of central planning and the dispersed nature of knowledge are still, in my view, some of the most important economic insights of the last century. Prices really do communicate information in powerful ways.

In my mid to late twenties, I didn’t just dabble in this stuff; I marinated in it. I spent a lot of time reading Austrian and Chicago School economists—F.A. Hayek, Thomas Sowell, and others. I wasn’t skimming quotes on social media; I was working through books, charts, and footnotes.

I even corresponded a couple of times with Sowell by email. That was a bit of a turning point—not because we had some major intellectual clash, but because of something small and human. In one exchange, I referenced a point from one of his textbooks. He shot back a fairly curt response pointing out that I was citing the previous edition rather than the latest. It wasn’t the end of the world, but the tone stuck with me—sharp, dismissive, more interested in correcting my citation than engaging the substance of what I was asking.

It was a minor moment, but it became one of the hairline cracks that, over time, widened.

For a while, I could squint and make libertarianism feel perfectly compatible with my Christian faith:

• God made humans with freedom and agency → libertarian emphasis on liberty.

• Human sin makes concentrated power dangerous → limited government.

• People are responsible for their choices → personal responsibility instead of a bloated welfare state.

If you lined things up just right, libertarianism felt like Christian anthropology with charts and graphs.

But over time, three tensions grew too large for me to ignore.

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1. The poor and oppressed were always in the footnotes

The first tension was this: in most libertarian frameworks I’d absorbed, the poor and oppressed were always present—but mostly as an afterthought.

The structure was usually:

1. Establish strong individual rights and property rights.

2. Argue that free markets and minimal state intervention will, over time, make everyone better off.

3. Mention the poor in a closing chapter about private charity and voluntary generosity.

But when I went back to Scripture, that ordering was reversed.

The Bible doesn’t treat care for the poor, the foreigner, the widow, the prisoner as a “nice to have” once the system is set up. It makes them a central test of faithfulness.

The prophets don’t say, “As long as no one initiated force or fraud, the wealth distribution is fine.” They rail against rigged scales, land-grabs, neglect, and the way the powerful use technically legal means to crush the weak.

And Jesus doesn’t say, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did as a private individual, but don’t you dare let that affect your view of public life.” He simply says, “Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me.”

I tried, for a while, to stretch libertarianism until it could fit that. If we just had truly free markets, I told myself, the poor would be better off, and then private charity could handle the rest.

But the more I listened to real stories—of generational poverty, redlining, unjust labor practices, predatory lending—the more that felt thin and theoretical.

The framework I had simply didn’t have a thick enough category for structural injustice. It focused almost exclusively on direct coercion: don’t punch, don’t steal. Scripture was talking about something wider and deeper.

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2. Property rights became more absolute than biblical stewardship

The second tension was around property.

Libertarian thought, especially in its purer forms, treats property rights as almost sacred: once you have acquired something justly, any forced redistribution is a violation of your liberty. Taxation for anything beyond minimal state functions becomes morally suspect. The non-aggression principle hovers over everything: no one should take your stuff without your consent, full stop.

But the more I read the Old Testament law and the prophets, the more that jarred.

• The land ultimately belongs to God, not Israel.

• There are built-in mechanisms like gleaning laws, sabbatical years, and Jubilee that carve out margins for the poor and prevent permanent underclass formation.

• There’s a constant drumbeat: you don’t get to hold what you own in a way that ignores your neighbor’s basic survival.

Scripture absolutely condemns theft and affirms real property—but it doesn’t talk like a system where “I earned it, therefore I can do whatever I want with it” is the highest moral principle.

The Christian view of property is closer to stewardship than ownership in the libertarian sense. What’s in my bank account is really mine and also not mine: I’m accountable to God for how I use it, especially with respect to the vulnerable.

Libertarianism has trouble expressing that tension without collapsing it back into, “Well, yes, generosity is nice—but it must always be purely voluntary, and the state must never, under any circumstances, legislate any form of redistribution.”

At some point I had to ask an uncomfortable question: Is my primary fear the abuse of taxation, or the abuse of wealth?

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3. Individualism couldn’t carry the weight of Christian community

The third tension was anthropological: libertarianism assumes a certain picture of the human person.

The libertarian “self” is a radically autonomous individual:

• Self-owning

• Self-starting

• Fully responsible for his/her own lot in life, provided no one initiated force or fraud

Christianity knows something about responsibility and agency, but it has a much thicker picture of who we are:

• We are born dependent.

• We are formed by families, neighborhoods, cultures, and systems we didn’t choose.

• We are accountable not just for our personal choices but for what we build together—laws, economies, institutions, habits.

When I started taking that seriously, libertarianism’s moral mathematics felt too simple. “If no one directly coerced you, and if a contract was signed, then everything is fine” doesn’t hold up well in a world where entire communities have been structurally disadvantaged for generations, where “choice” often happens inside extremely narrow constraints, and where the fallout of greed shows up collectively.

It isn’t that libertarianism is wrong to care about non-coercion. It’s that it’s insufficient as a full account of justice.

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What I still appreciate—and where I’ve had to let go

I haven’t swung from libertarianism to “the state should run everything.” I still think Austrian and Chicago voices have crucial warnings:

• Centralized planning really is dangerous.

• Bureaucracies really do ossify and fail the poor.

• Politicians really will use “the poor” as a prop while serving their donors.

I still want limited government, robust civil society, and strong protections for conscience, speech, and association. I still worry about laws that expand the state in ways that can later be turned against the church or other minorities.

But I’ve had to let go of the idea that libertarianism, as an ideology, can be my home as a Christian.

At best, it can play the role of a helpful critic:

• It can remind me that utopian schemes to “fix” society can become monsters.

• It can keep me alert to how quickly states slide into controlling those they claim to protect.

• It can defend the dignity of individual conscience against totalizing political tribes.

What it cannot do is supply a full Christian account of justice.

And in the Trump era, that limitation has moved from theory to the front page.

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From John Galt to MAGA Hats: Why This Matters Now

When I look back at my John Galt email prank, it feels almost quaint. We were young men fixated on a fictional architect-hero and debating Hayek over coffee. The story we told ourselves was simple: we’re the ones who see clearly; if we can just get government small and markets free, things will sort themselves out.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and the political right I once associated with “limited government and individual liberty” looks very different.

The rhetoric is still there—freedom, small government, drain the swamp—but the practice has often looked like:

• Aggressive state intervention in markets through broad tariffs and trade wars.

• Punitive immigration policies that treat vulnerable families and asylum seekers as threats to be crushed rather than neighbors to be discerned and, when possible, welcomed.

• A casual attitude toward executive power and the norms that restrain it.

• A personality cult around a strongman leader, complete with messianic language and Christian symbols draped over explicitly partisan rallies.

As someone shaped by libertarian suspicion of the state, I watched those years with a kind of double vision. On paper, many of the same people who once talked about the dangers of big government were now cheering for a leader who openly relished using state power to punish enemies, reward friends, and bend reality around his ego.

And as a Christian, I felt another, deeper tension: the Jesus who warned about the love of money, who identified with the stranger and the prisoner, who refused to seize power through violence or deceit, simply didn’t fit the banners and slogans I was seeing.

The cracks I’d already noticed in libertarianism—about the poor, about property, about individualism—widened into a chasm when combined with Trump-era politics and a rising tide of Christian nationalism.

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The new right and the temptation of Christian power

For a long time, I thought of the American right as a loose coalition:
traditional conservatives, libertarians, and religious folks who mostly wanted to be left alone.

The Trump years exposed something else: a powerful current that doesn’t actually want a limited state at all. It wants a strong state that will enforce its cultural vision, punish opponents, and restore a mythologized past—often in explicitly Christian language.

For the libertarian in me, that’s a nightmare.
For the Christian in me, it’s worse.

Because now the story isn’t:

“We disagree about the size and role of government.”

It’s:

“We’re willing to baptize almost any use of power—as long as it’s our side wielding it.”

The same ecosystem that once produced think pieces on the dangers of executive overreach and the beauty of spontaneous order now produces applause lines for:

• Threats against political opponents

• Attacks on independent institutions when they refuse to bend

• A willingness to wink at or downplay political violence

• Open flirtations with authoritarian leaders around the world

And stitched into that, sometimes literally, are Christian symbols: crosses, Bible verses, hymns, prayers. The God who emptied himself and refused to call down legions of angels is now invoked as the guarantor of our tribe’s permanent political dominance.

If libertarianism asked too little of us—reducing justice to “don’t hit, don’t steal”—this newer fusion of populism and Christian nationalism asks the wrong thing entirely:
Give us a champion. Give us power. We’ll figure out the ethics later.

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What I wish Christians on the right would notice

I don’t write any of this as someone who has all the answers. I write it as someone who has been wrong before—about libertarianism, about the inevitability of markets fixing everything, about my own motives.

From that place, here is what I wish more of us who name the name of Christ—especially on the right—would notice:

• How quickly “small government” talk collapses under the weight of fear.
  When we are afraid, we suddenly want a very large government to crush our enemies, silence critics, and secure “our way of life.” Our theology of sin should make us cautious about handing that kind of power to anyone, even—and maybe especially—someone we like.

• How selectively we apply our principles.
  We say we believe in the rule of law, until the law inconveniences our preferred leader. We say we care about character, until character becomes an electoral liability. We say we care about the unborn, but show little concern for the immigrant child at the border or the poor family crushed by medical debt.

• How much of our “libertarianism” was really about protecting our own comfort.
  When “freedom” always seems to mean lower taxes for me and fewer constraints on my tribe, but rarely means standing up for the rights of unpopular minorities or political opponents, it’s worth asking what story we’re actually living in.

• How far all of this is from Jesus.
  Jesus never promised his followers political dominance. He never endorsed lying for the sake of the cause. He never blessed violence in his name. He identified with the least, not the most powerful; with those on the margins, not those at the center of the rally.

If my politics, whatever label I slap on them—libertarian, conservative, moderate—cannot survive honest contact with the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and “whatever you did for the least of these,” then it’s my politics that need to move.

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A word to my libertarian friends

Some of the people I love and respect most still identify as libertarian. They care deeply about the poor. They give sacrificially. They’re often more generous in their personal lives than some who loudly support every new government program.

I don’t write any of this as a moral high ground speech. I write it as someone who was shaped by the same books, the same arguments, the same instinctive suspicion of the state—and who, over time, realized that my faith was asking harder questions than my political framework could answer.

The Trump era didn’t start that process for me, but it did expose just how fragile our ideological frameworks are when they’re stressed by fear, resentment, and the lure of power. It showed how easily “liberty” talk can be co-opted by movements that are neither truly libertarian nor remotely Christlike.

If anything, my hope is twofold:

• For Christians who have uncritically baptized libertarianism or MAGA politics as “the Christian view of politics,” I hope this nudges you to re-examine that assumption.

• For those outside the Christian faith who only see Christians as either theocrats or partisans, I hope this signals that there is space for a different kind of wrestling—a politics shaped by Jesus that is neither about domination nor withdrawal.

I still like a good Hayek quote. I still think Thomas Sowell has made important contributions, even if his email etiquette left a bit to be desired. I still think the state can be dangerous and markets can be powerful tools for good.

But I can’t pretend anymore that liberty, as libertarianism defines it, is enough—or that draping Christian language over a quest for power somehow sanctifies it.

The God who became poor for our sake, who preached good news to the marginalized and judged nations by how they treated “the least of these,” simply asks more of me than that.

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If you’ve walked a similar path—from John Galt to Jesus, or from Ayn Rand to an uneasy view of the Trump-era right—I’d love to hear your story in the comments.