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Faithful, Not Guaranteed: Why “We’re Not a Theocracy” Doesn’t Settle Amendment 3

· October 22, 2026

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God has never asked His people to guarantee outcomes. He has asked them to be faithful. That is the question underneath Amendment 3, and it is the one the “we’re not a theocracy” argument quietly steps around.

The argument we’re answering

As the November 3 vote approaches, many pro-life Christians are being told some version of the same thing: Missouri is not ancient Israel, Christians are only one group of voters among many, and so we cannot hold civil law to God’s standard. Take what can pass. Anything stronger is impossible.

State Sen. Joe Nicola made the case plainly at Monday’s Amendment 3 debate at Mizzou Law. “We live in a representative republic of imperfect people where Christians and people of every belief get to vote,” he said. “When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, he was forming a new nation with a theocratic form of government where all the people had one God. God did not give those ten commandments to the other nations.” (debate video, 19:35)

Later in the evening he put it more bluntly: “We don’t have a theocracy where God gives the laws. We have a representative republic that is made up of all kinds of people with all kinds of belief. And we have to put something on the ballot and get people to vote for it.” (2:12:42) And on what’s possible: “Complete abolition is not an option in this election.” (16:03)

Senator Nicola is a sincere man making a serious argument, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a slogan. Here is ours.

Yes, we’re not a theocracy. That settles less than it seems.

Grant the premise. Missouri is not Israel under the Mosaic covenant, and no one at Act for Missouri wants a state church. But “we are not a theocracy” does not mean “God’s moral law has no bearing on how a Christian votes.” Those are two different claims, and the argument only works if we let the first slide into the second.

Senator Nicola himself grants the key point. “God’s moral standard does not change,” he said, and “Christians should live according to God’s command.” We agree. But a vote is something a Christian does.

If God’s standard binds my conduct, it binds my ballot.

The question is not whether our unbelieving neighbors will live by God’s law. It is whether I will put my own name to a text that contradicts it.

Daniel never lived in a theocracy. He served Babylon faithfully and honored its kings. Yet when the king’s food would defile him, he refused it (Daniel 1). When the law forbade prayer to anyone but the king, he kept praying (Daniel 6). Living under a pagan government did not lower God’s standard for Daniel’s own conduct. It only meant he would often be outvoted.

The apostles stood before a council that did not share their faith and said, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Christians submit to civil authority (Romans 13), but that submission was never permission to put our own hand to what God forbids.

So pluralism changes what we can expect from our neighbors. It does not change what God expects from us.

When a Christian marks a ballot, the Christian is still the one acting, and still answers to God for what he or she affirms.

What about Moses and divorce?

Senator Nicola’s strongest biblical argument is Jesus’ answer about divorce: Moses permitted it “because of the hardness of your hearts” (Matthew 19:8). If God’s own law made room for human sin, the argument goes, so can ours.

But look at what Jesus did with that concession. He did not hold it up as a model. He pointed past it: “from the beginning it was not so.” And notice what the Mosaic law never conceded. Even under that law, God allowed no exception for shedding innocent blood: “ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer” (Numbers 35:31), and “thine eye shall not pity him, but thou shalt put away the guilt of innocent blood from Israel” (Deuteronomy 19:13). Hardness of heart was never grounds for declaring innocent life open to taking.

“Let us do evil, that good may come”

Scripture has a name for the idea that a good enough result can justify setting God’s command aside. Paul’s critics accused him of teaching it, and he called the charge slander: “Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just” (Romans 3:8). Paul does not say the principle is acceptable if the benefits are large enough. He rejects the reasoning itself.

Spurgeon put it bluntly: even if all the good in the world could come from one evil act, that would not give permission to do it.1

The Bible also shows us what this reasoning looks like in a leader.

Saul was told to spare nothing of Amalek. He carried out most of the command, but kept Agag and the best of the livestock. When Samuel confronted him, Saul first claimed he had obeyed, then said the animals were for a sacrifice to the LORD, and finally admitted the truth: “I feared the people, and obeyed their voice” (1 Samuel 15:24). Samuel’s answer still stands: “to obey is better than sacrifice” (15:22). Saul’s problem was not that he did nothing. It was selective obedience, presented as faithfulness, driven by fear of the crowd.

Aaron faced a restless people who wanted something they could see. He collected their gold, made the calf, built an altar, and announced, “To morrow is a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5). He did not reject God by name. He attached God’s name to what the people demanded. When Moses confronted him, Aaron blamed the people and said the gold went into the fire “and there came out this calf” (32:24).

The pattern in both stories is the same: the leader yields to public pressure, then gives the compromise a religious explanation. Political success does not turn a compromise into obedience, and attaching God’s name to a popular demand does not make it faithful.

Senator Nicola was candid about his own view. “I disagree with those exceptions,” he said, “but Missouri voters rejected a more restrictive law just two years ago and we cannot ignore that reality” (18:36). We respect his honesty, and we don’t doubt his sincerity. That doesn’t make him Saul. But it is exactly the reasoning 1 Samuel 15 asks us to examine: a leader who believes something is wrong, and accepts it anyway because the people won’t support more.

Why this isn’t ordinary incrementalism

To be fair, not every incremental law is “evil that good may come.” Faithful Christians disagree about strategy, and a statute that protects some children while failing to reach others is not the same as endorsing what it fails to reach. A legislator can honestly say, “This law stops what it can; it approves nothing.” We don’t question the faith of Christians who vote yes. We are questioning an argument.

Amendment 3 is not that kind of law. It does not simply protect some children and stay silent about the rest. It writes a permission into the Missouri Constitution: “An abortion may be performed or induced upon a woman in cases of medical emergency, fetal anomaly, rape, or incest,” with rape and incest cases allowed through twelve weeks (HJR 73 text via Ballotpedia).

Medical emergencies belong in a separate conversation. Treating a mother whose life is in danger, where the child’s death is not the aim, is a different moral question that most pro-life Christians have long recognized. The other exceptions are different in kind. They make a child’s protection depend on how the child was conceived or on the child’s diagnosis. A child conceived in rape is no less a child, and no less made in God’s image, than the child in the next room.

That is the line between “we couldn’t stop it yet” and “we declared it permissible.” The first is a limit of power. The second is a statement of principle, written into the state’s highest law, with a Christian’s vote attached. You cannot build equal protection by first putting unequal protection into the Constitution.

There is an incremental step we could support. Amendment 3’s first move is to repeal the 2024 amendment entirely. If it had stopped there, it would not have ended abortion in Missouri; we don’t believe it would stop any woman determined to get one. But it would have removed an evil from our Constitution without writing a new one in its place. That is incrementalism a Christian can sign: taking ground without giving up the principle. Amendment 3 doesn’t stop there. It repeals one permission and replaces it with another.

Supporters at the debate cited Exodus 23, where God promised to drive out the Canaanites “by little and little” (23:30). Gradual progress is biblical. But read two verses further: “Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods” (23:32). Israel could take the land a little at a time. It could not sign a treaty letting the enemy stay. A clean repeal takes ground. Amendment 3 signs the treaty.

The same goes for the lifeguard analogy Senator Nicola offered: if two people are drowning and you can save only one, save the one you can. Of course. But a lifeguard who pulls one swimmer out doesn’t post a sign declaring that the other may lawfully be left to drown. And he certainly doesn’t post one telling every lifeguard who comes after him that they may not go in after her either. That is what a constitutional permission does. Once the Constitution says abortion “may be performed” in these cases, any future law protecting those children would run straight into the Constitution itself, and undoing it would take another statewide vote. Rescue every child you can. Just don’t write into the Constitution which children may be lost.

The final text also dropped the earlier requirement that a rape be reported to police, and it includes no verification or penalty for a false claim. Whatever one thinks of the strategy, voters should be clear-eyed: Amendment 3 makes this permission constitutional, and most of the safeguards around it depend on laws future legislatures may or may not pass.

“Impossible” is a prediction, not a fact

Senator Nicola is right that complete abolition is not on this ballot. But it is worth asking why. Voters did not take it off. The legislature decided what voters would see. HJR 73 passed the House 103–51 and the Senate 21–11 in 2025 (Ballotpedia). The same Republican supermajorities could have sent voters an amendment that protects every child from conception.

Personhood has been on the floor before. In 2016 the Missouri House passed then-Rep. Mike Moon’s personhood amendment, HJR 98, and sent it to the Senate with about a week left in the session (St. Louis Public Radio). Now a senator, Moon has filed it every session and brought it back again this year. It got a Senate committee hearing in March 2026, with more than 20 witnesses in support (Missouri Independent). The Senate has never brought a personhood amendment to the floor for a vote. “Impossible” has not been tested. It has been assumed.

At this week’s debate, Sen. Moon said he wrote a letter to Gov. Mike Kehoe asking him to call a special session on personhood. “No senators signed on to it,” he said. “We had a few House members who said, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign it.’” (debate video, 2:30:44) Signing would have cost nothing, even for a senator who believed the Governor would never act. When no one else in a Senate supermajority will put their name on that request, it is fair to ask how many of them really want the goal they say Amendment 3 moves us toward.

There is a difference between “the votes aren’t there” and “we never asked for the votes.” Until legislators go on the record, no one knows what a principled, unified pro-life coalition could pass, in the legislature or at the ballot box.

And Scripture is not impressed by the math. Jonathan went after a Philistine garrison with only his armor-bearer, saying, “there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few” (1 Samuel 14:6). God cut Gideon’s army from 32,000 to 300 so Israel could not boast that its own strength had saved it (Judges 7). “The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the LORD” (Proverbs 21:31). Christians should count the cost, but we should never let our vote count make God’s command smaller.

God asks for faithfulness, not guaranteed results

The deepest problem with the “take what can pass” argument is that it makes the outcome our job. Scripture consistently puts the outcome in God’s hands and the obedience in ours.

  • Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego told the king that God was able to deliver them from the furnace. “But if not,” they said, they still would not bow (Daniel 3:17–18). Their obedience did not depend on a good result.
  • Esther went to the king without being called, knowing it could cost her life: “if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).
  • The watchman in Ezekiel is responsible for sounding the trumpet, not for whether the city listens. If he warns and they ignore him, he has “delivered [his] soul.” If he stays silent, their blood is on his hands (Ezekiel 33:6–9).
  • Paul said, “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6), and “it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2). Faithful, not successful.

This is not a call to ignore consequences. Christians should care deeply about how laws affect children, mothers, and families, and prudence matters. But prudence works within God’s moral boundaries. It does not get to move them. Sometimes God delivers His people in ways no one saw coming, as He did for Jehoshaphat (2 Chronicles 20). Sometimes He sustains them through loss. Either way, He has never needed His people to disobey Him in order to accomplish His purposes.

“It’s impossible” may be an accurate forecast. It is never a moral permission.

“Voting no abolishes nothing”

Senator Nicola’s strongest line is this one: “Voting no on Amendment 3 abolishes nothing. Instead, it leaves in place a law allowing abortion for any reason through viability.” We won’t pretend otherwise. A no vote leaves the 2024 amendment in place, and that is a real and grievous cost. Act for Missouri opposed that amendment, too.

But voting yes abolishes nothing either. It trades one constitutional permission for a narrower one, and it asks Christians to sign their names to the new one. The 2024 amendment was written by others and adopted over our objection. Amendment 3 would be adopted with our votes.

That is the difference between suffering an injustice and affirming one.

The faithful path is not to sit still. It is to refuse the bargain and then go to work: demand that the legislature put a personhood amendment or a clean repeal to a recorded vote, and hold every legislator accountable for how they cast it. If the legislature is unable or unwilling to deliver, then it may be time for a citizens’ initiative petition. Senator Nicola made that point himself at the debate: “Any citizen can go to the Secretary of State with any idea they want and file” (2:30:05). If it fails, we will know who stood where, and we will keep going. That is what being found faithful looks like.

We are not a theocracy. But we are still God’s people, and He has not asked us to win every vote. He has asked us to obey Him in the ones we cast.

Act for Missouri opposes Amendment 3. We encourage every Christian voter to weigh it before God, read the text for themselves, and vote their conscience on November 3.

Notes & Sources

  1. C. H. Spurgeon, The Spurgeon Study Bible: Notes (Nashville: Holman, 2017), 1515, on Romans 3:8. ↑

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.

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