The Measure – Part IV: The Wrong Question

What if the most important question isn’t about America at all? For much of this journey, I believed I was wrestling with a political question: Is America becoming a Christian nation? But after years on the bench—and months reflecting on Vice President J.D. Vance’s call to recover Christian values—I came to an unexpected realization. I had been asking the wrong question. In this fourth installment of The Measure, I explore one of the most important lessons I learned as a judge: justice begins not with answers, but with asking the right questions. Courts do not decide cases based on labels or sincere intentions. They examine evidence. That same principle eventually led me to ask a far more personal question: If I profess to follow Christ, what evidence does my life provide that I actually do? Drawing from courtroom experiences and the teachings of Christ, this episode examines the distance between profession and practice, challenging all of us—regardless of our faith or philosophy—to measure our lives not by the values we claim to hold, but by the way we live them. This is not an episode about judging others. It is about allowing the mirror to turn toward ourselves. Because perhaps the greatest danger facing any moral tradition is not criticism from the outside... but the growing distance between what we profess and how we practice it. Whether your deepest convictions come from Christianity, another faith tradition, Human Secularism, or no religious tradition at all, the invitation remains the same: What evidence does your life leave behind? This episode is part of The Measure, a seven-part series exploring justice, constitutional government, moral formation, and the responsible exercise of authority. Each installment moves beyond political debate toward a more enduring question—not simply what kind of nation we hope to become, but what kind of people we are becoming. Because justice never asked what we claimed. It asked what the evidence revealed. Get full access to Justice ReDesigned at steventeske.substack.com/subscribe