The Heart Curved Inward

If we hope to have any success in fixing our broken political institutions, we have to start with understanding human nature itself. People consistently look to political leaders to use centralized force to establish justice, protect our communities, and restrain bad actors. Yet almost every major intellectual discipline, from theology to psychology, acknowledges that humans are deeply flawed, self-interested, and prone to corruption.

This creates a fundamental paradox: If we know that humans are inherently biased and selfish, why do we assume that gathering a group of these same humans inside a Capitol building and giving them a monopoly on physical force will magically lead to justice?

If we misunderstand human nature, the political structures we build will inevitably reflect that misunderstanding. If we want to understand why coercion consistently fails and voluntary paths hold more promise, we have to understand the relational origins of humanity, and how that relationality has been distorted into self-justification and perceived scarcity.

Trinitarian Theology and the Relational Nature of Reality

The Christian narrative begins with a foundational assertion: “In the beginning, God…” (Genesis 1:1). Contrary to popular cultural depictions, the biblical God is not a solitary cosmic dictator ruling over creation through sheer force like Zeus, Marduk, or Odin. Instead, Christian theology reveals a God who is fundamentally relational.

Christian orthodoxy views God as a Holy Trinity – a dynamic communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Within the Trinity, God is interactive, self-giving, dependent, and mutually honoring (John 5:19, John 6:38, John 17:4-5, Philippians 2:6-7). The primary Hebrew name for God in Genesis (Elohim) is grammatically plural, pointing to a reality far deeper than a single, isolated ruler.

Theologians often describe the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as a “sacred mystery,” a divine reality that exceeds full human comprehension while remaining central to the Christian faith. For Christians, anything we understand about reality is dependent on this foundational trinitarian understanding of God. However, modern social and physical sciences point toward the exact same foundational truth: reality at its core is relational rather than isolated.

• Relational Quantum Mechanics: In theoretical physics, subatomic particles do not have permanent properties in isolation. A particle’s traits are only formed through its relationships with other systems.
• Enactivism: In cognitive science, the mind is not an isolated computer locked inside your head. Consciousness constantly forms through our ongoing relationship with the environment.
• Symbiogenesis: In evolutionary biology, complex life did not evolve just through ruthless competition. Major evolutionary leaps actually happened when different organisms cooperated and merged together.
• Ubuntu Philosophy: In African social philosophy, human identity is captured by the principle “I am because we are,” recognizing that personal existence is inextricably bound up in community.

Whether you view reality primarily through a theological lens or not, the structure of reality reveals that nothing is designed to exist in isolation. Reality is fundamentally relational.

Human Freedom and the Imago Dei

If God/reality is fundamentally relational, humans were designed to mirror that same relationality. Before creating Adam, God announced: “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26-27). Being made in the Imago Dei (the image of God) means that humans are hardwired with an outward relational orientation toward God, neighbor, and creation. In fact, the only thing in creation that God explicitly pronounced “not good” was human isolation: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

Relationships cannot logically happen without genuine human freedom. In the Trinity, there is no coercive hierarchy between Father, Son, and Spirit. Divine love is, by definition, freely and reciprocally given. For human beings to reflect that divine nature, our relationships must also be voluntary. Love, communion, and cooperation cannot be programmed or coerced. If there is no freedom to refuse a relationship, there is no true capacity for love.

C.S. Lewis captured this reality in Mere Christianity:

Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.

While theologians debate the nuances of how human free will interacts with God’s sovereignty, any framework that treats humans as deterministic automatons undermines the core biblical understanding of voluntary love. Freedom is the essential foundation of human dignity. When political systems attempt to force moral outcomes through threat of punishment, they substitute robotic compliance for true moral agency.

Original Sin and the Shattering of Relational Trust

While freedom makes authentic love possible, it also introduces the potential for betrayal. Our awareness of this potential makes us prone to suspicion.

In Genesis, humanity’s downfall begins not with brute physical violence, but with a subtle campaign of suspicion orchestrated by an adversary identified in Scripture as the Accuser (ha satan in Hebrew). The serpent in Genesis 3 does not force humanity to disobey God. Instead, he plants a simple seed of accusation regarding God’s motives: “Did God really say…?” (Genesis 3:1).

By planting this doubt, the Accuser reframes God from a generous Father into a withholding rival. In the terms of modern psychological attachment theory, this shattered humanity’s “secure base” – the foundational anchor of safety and trust from which humans operate.

Once humanity lost trust in God as a reliable secure base, they defaulted to self-protection: fear, hiding, self-covering, and blame-shifting. When confronted, Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent. The outward orientation toward relationship was shattered and replaced by defensive self-preservation. When relational trust dies, coercive power steps in as a counterfeit substitute for safety.

The Psychology of Self-Justification and Cognitive Bias in Politics

Theologians and social psychologists describe this psychological shift in remarkably similar terms. Saint Augustine and Martin Luther famously described the core of human sinfulness as incurvatus in se – humanity turned inward on itself.

We didn’t lose our natural drive for relationship; rather, that drive was hijacked by fear and repurposed for defensive self-preservation. This inward turn creates what modern cognitive scientists call self-serving bias – our amazing capacity to excuse our own actions while harshly judging those same actions in others. Jesus confronted this double standard in the Sermon on the Mount: “Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but fail to see the beam of wood in your own eye?” (Matthew 7:3).

Cognitive psychology has developed precise terminology to identify how this double standard works. For example:

• Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to excuse our own mistakes based on external circumstances, while attributing malice or bad character to others for the exact same mistakes. For example: When I cut someone off in traffic, I justify it because I am late for an important meeting and experiencing a stressful day; when someone else cuts me off, I immediately judge them as a reckless driver who deserves to lose their license.
• Confirmation Bias: The subconscious habit of looking for and remembering information that validates our preexisting beliefs, while filtering out or ignoring evidence that challenges us.

In The Righteous Mind, psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains that human moral reasoning functions less like an impartial judge evaluating evidence, and more like a partisan lawyer hired to defend our actions at all costs. Social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson further demonstrate in Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) that self-justification acts as a protective shield to defend fragile egos from admitting foolishness or wrongdoing.

This becomes dangerous when combined with political power. In modern politics, when a politician on “our side” breaks an ethical boundary, voters immediately search for context, noble intentions, or political necessity. But when an opposing politician does the same thing, it is seen as definitive proof of corruption.

When an inward-turned heart creates a mind geared towards self-serving bias, political engagement ceases to be about pursuing objective justice. Instead, it becomes a quest for coercive power. Rather than addressing the beam in our own eye, we attempt to capture the enforcement tools of the state to forcibly remove the specks from our neighbors’ eyes.

The Scarcity Mindset and the Competitive Jungle of Political Power

These efforts at self-preservation distort how we perceive the world. When our hearts are turned inward, we lose sight of God’s abundant provision and fall victim to the illusion of scarcity.

The Garden of Eden was a world of abundance. The Tree of Life provided continuous access to everything humanity needed without fear or shortage. But when trust in an abundant creator was severed, humans shifted to zero-sum thinking – the belief that one person’s gain is inherently another person’s loss.

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann described this mental shift as abandoning the “liturgy of abundance” to embrace the “myth of scarcity.” While God’s reality is rooted in generous provision, an inward-turned humanity views the world as fundamentally limited.

In Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, behavioral scientists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir explain how a scarcity mindset changes the way we think. The fear of scarcity consumes our attention and fuels anxiety, pushing us away from mutual cooperation and into a cutthroat mindset of survival.

Social psychologist John Duckitt has shown that when we lose relational security, we default to a “Competitive Jungle Worldview.” We no longer view life as a cooperative community made up of neighbors, but as a relentless struggle over scarce resources. The neighbors who were once fellow eikons (image-bearers) to be loved instead become potential threats who must be neutralized before they take what is ours.

This competitive struggle is the primary engine of political polarization. When we are driven by perceived scarcity, elections become zero-sum existential battles. If our political rivals win, we lose our livelihoods, values, and security. The government is merely a defensive weapon used to protect our group’s share of the pie while penalizing competitors. Once we start viewing life as a struggle for survival in a competitive jungle, we start to see restraint, grace, and cooperation as unaffordable luxuries.

Restoring Biblical Justice Beyond Political Coercion

If our distorted, inward-turned nature is inherently prone to self-justification and zero-sum competition, the most dangerous thing we can do is build structures that concentrate physical force into fewer hands.

Centralized authority doesn’t restrain human fallenness; it magnifies it. Giving an elite group a legal monopoly on violence doesn’t remove their self-interest; it gives that self-interest institutional immunity. This is the exact reality God warned the Israelites about in 1 Samuel 8 when they demanded a king to rule over them. God reminded them that centralized coercive systems inevitably extract, expand, and oppress, regardless of a ruler’s initial intentions.

To break out of this cycle, Christians must re-align our view of governance with the reality of human nature. Justice and societal flourishing cannot be manufactured through state coercion. Real peace requires abandoning the illusion of political dominance and embracing voluntary frameworks.

A society built on voluntary agreements, peer accountability, mutual aid, and non-coercive dispute resolution reflects both the relational nature of the Imago Dei and the practical realities of human fallibility. Rather than concentrating force in centralized institutions, voluntary networks distribute accountability across society, turning self-interest against itself to prevent any single group from dominating another.

Jesus explicitly modeled this non-coercive approach to power. He rejected the “power-over” models of earthly rulers who lord their authority over others, establishing instead a “power-under” model rooted in service, voluntary cooperation, and restorative justice. Until we stop looking to the sword of the state to solve problems rooted in the human heart, we will remain trapped in the self-destructive cycle of centralized power.

Additional References

• Saint Augustine, Confessions and City of God (discussing incurvatus in se).
• Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515–1516).
• Walter Brueggemann, The Liturgy of Abundance and the Myth of Scarcity, The Christian Century (1999).
• John Duckitt, A Dual-Process Cognitive-Motivational Model of Ideology and Prejudice, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (2001).

Source: https://libertarianchristians.com/2026/09/12/the-heart-curved-inward/