On April 21, Governor Abigail Spanberger is asking Virginians to ratify a redistricting scheme engineered to turn a competitive commonwealth into a 10-1 Democrat delegation. Let's call it what it is—a naked power grab designed to silence rural Virginia.
Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to a tarmac in Bridgewater on Saturday to plainly say so, flanked by former Governor Glenn Youngkin, former Attorney General Jason Miyares, and Rep. Rob Wittman.
Their warning to the Shenandoah Valley was simple. This map was drawn in the back rooms of Richmond and Northern Virginia to erase the voices of every farmer, veteran, small business owner, and pastor from Winchester to Wytheville.
This move is consistent with the left's ideology. Their worldview says that your dollar is theirs, your children are theirs, your schools are theirs, and your speech is theirs. Now, if Spanberger gets her way, your vote is theirs too.
Christians paying attention should see this for what it is. Not just a bad map. A confession of faith.
The secular humanist left has no God above itself, no moral law it must answer to, no fear of the Lord to restrain its appetite. What it has is a will.
And a movement that bows to nothing higher than its own desires will always reduce every question to the same question. Who has the power, and how do we get more of it?
Consider the naked hypocrisy in this latest move. For a solid decade, Democrats lectured the country that partisan gerrymandering was a threat to democracy itself.
They sued. They sermonized. Eric Holder raised tens of millions of dollars preaching the gospel of "fair maps," and every editorial board in America thundered amen.
Now Spanberger holds the pen, and the sermon has gone silent. The mortal sin of yesterday is the civic duty of today. Jason Miyares said it plainly at Saturday's rally: Democrats are spending enormous sums because they have to deceive voters.
This is the oldest story in a fallen world. When a man or a movement crowns itself, principle becomes a costume. Put it on when useful. Take it off when it's inconvenient.
Isaiah saw this class of people three thousand years ago and spoke the judgment that still stands over them. "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5:20).
That verse was written for the ruling class of ancient Judah, and it fits the ruling class of modern Virginia like a tailored suit.
Judges 21:25 gives the whole secular humanist creed in one line. "In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes."
Strip away the NPR vocabulary about progress and equity and the living constitution, and that is what you have left. A political class doing what is right in its own eyes and demanding the machinery of the state to enforce it.
The callused-handed people of the Shenandoah Valley, the men who fix the trucks and raise the cattle and frame the houses and fly the Gold Star flag on the porch, exist on Spanberger's map as an inconvenience to be engineered away. Not neighbors. Not citizens. Obstacles.
Scripture is not neutral about this. Government is a gift from God, ordained for the restraint of evil and the protection of the good (Romans 13:1-4).
That vision presupposes exactly what the secular left denies. There is a moral order above the state, and the state itself is accountable to it. Take that conviction out of a government, and the government stops being a servant under God and becomes a club in the hand of whoever can grab it.
That is what Saturday's rally was really about.
The question of whether Virginia will still be a commonwealth of self-governing people under God, or whether it will be a managed province ruled by the wealthy, the credentialed, and the contemptuous.
Our Lord gave us a test that cuts through every political fog. "Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them" (Matthew 7:12).
Apply that standard honestly to Spanberger's map and it collapses on contact. If Glenn Youngkin had attempted the mirror image of this scheme, every one of these same Democrats would be on cable news in tears about the death of democracy.
We know this because they did exactly that, for years, over maps far less aggressive than the one they are now pushing.
The rule is not the rule. The rule is the outcome. Power is the virtue, and everything else is marketing.
A movement that answers to no Lord above itself will never stop redrawing the line, rewriting the rule, or renaming the sin. It cannot. Power is all it has.
This is exactly why Virginians must reject this map outright. Why conservatives need to show up at the ballot box in November. The left ran as moderate in Virginia, then governs radically. The same fate awaits the rest of the country if we hand them power back.
We also still have hope because Jesus Christ is King. Caesar is not. The rich men north of Richmond are not either. Virginia, on April 21, remind them. Then the rest of us must do the same come November.
Daniel Hayworth is a conservative writer, U.S. Army veteran, and lead pastor at Vintage Church in Harker Heights, Texas.
