I was raised in a Christian home where my father faithfully taught me the Bible for 1-2 hours daily, plus church on Sunday, plus Wednesday night Bible studies. I thought this was normal. In the course of reading the Bible, we read through all sorts of laws, some that made perfect sense and are widely practiced today. But there would always be ones that didn’t make sense, sounded foreign, no one practiced, and we didn’t discuss them as much. As children so often do, I learned by example. Since there was no one to model many of these laws for me, I just assumed that there was some reason that no one obeyed these laws anymore. I assumed there was some detail that I just didn’t yet understand that would eventually explain it.

In my mid 20s, I started work in media documenting law enforcement. I had a co-worker ask me what I was reading one day. I started sharing some things I was learning from an economic commentary on the Bible, and he looked at me like a deer in the headlights. That was a defining moment for me. I realized in that moment just how neglected the Bible was in government. I’ve gotten the same reaction from Christian leaders as well. Christians see government work as “dirty,” and government workers acknowledge that they don’t have an ultimate framework for what’s right and wrong.

Over the next decade, I began raising local awareness and support for privately funded programs to give local counties alternatives to incarceration for offenders they agree would best not be handled by the court.