Christian Year End Review 2025 — 3 Lessons on Faith, Politics, and What Actually Matters
If 2025 left you exhausted by politics, you are not alone — and that exhaustion might be telling you something important. This Christian year end review from the LCI Greenroom doesn’t just recap what happened. It asks harder questions: Did Christian and libertarian political engagement this year actually move the needle? What does faithfulness look like when the outcomes disappoint? And what are Christians supposed to do with the gap between the world they want and the world they have?
Jacob Winograd and Norman Horn, executive director of the Libertarian Christian Institute, sit down on New Year’s Eve to work through three lessons from 2025 that every Christian thinking about politics, culture, and the church needs to hear. These aren’t hot takes. They’re the kind of honest reckoning that LCI exists to do — taking scripture seriously, taking liberty seriously, and refusing to let either one get swallowed by the political moment.
What follows is a breakdown of the core arguments from the conversation, from the illusion of political access to the power of sphere-appropriate action.
A Christian Year End Review: 3 Lessons from 2025
1. Political Access Is Not the Same as Influence
Lesson one from 2025 is the one that stings the most: a seat at the table does not mean your ideas are shaping the meal. Many Christians and libertarians entered this year with real optimism. Ron Paul-style economics seemed to be getting a hearing. DOGE looked like a vehicle for genuine spending cuts. The coalition felt meaningful. By year’s end, the results were far more ambiguous than the access suggested they would be.
The year-end review is clear on this point: you have to measure impact, not just proximity. The release of Ross Ulbricht was a genuine win. But this same administration continued creating the very conditions that produce more cases like his. Political access doesn’t resolve that contradiction — it just lets you feel better about it temporarily.
2. Following Incentives Beats Trusting Character — Mostly
Norman’s story about the TSA fight in Texas is one of the most instructive parts of this conversation. Working with then-representative David Simpson, a man he describes as genuinely trustworthy in a political landscape almost entirely devoid of that quality, made the effort viable. The relationship worked because Simpson’s character and incentives aligned. That combination is extraordinarily rare.
The lesson isn’t that you can never work within the system. It’s that you cannot assume the people you work with share your integrity just because they share your talking points in a given season. Politicians follow incentives. When the incentive to attack a former ally appears, most of them will take it — and the same people who cheered Simpson’s TSA bill later ran fabricated smears against him in a Senate primary. Trust is earned through demonstrated behavior over time, not through political coalition membership.
3. Fear Narratives Will Set Your Moral Priorities If You Let Them
Lesson two from the year-end review is that the Christian right — in multiple factions — has been letting threat narratives do the work that theology is supposed to do. Whether it’s the Christian nationalist wing or the Bush-era conservative holdovers trying to rebrand, the operating logic is the same: we do what wins, not what’s right. We prioritize outcomes and then retrofit scripture to justify the means.
That is exactly backwards. Christians are not people who chase ends and hope the means work out. The chief end of man — to glorify God and enjoy him forever — is not achieved by securing the right electoral coalition. The means matter. They are not negotiable. And when fear is driving your moral priorities rather than scripture, you will make compromises that you will spend years trying to explain away.
4. Acting in Faith Doesn’t Guarantee the Results You’re Measuring
There is a version of Christian political engagement that functions almost like a prosperity gospel for public life: pray hard, vote right, build the coalition, and God will secure the outcomes. When the outcomes don’t arrive, the temptation is to either double down or despair.
The year-end review pushes back on both responses. Acting in faith is right. But if your measurement of whether faith is working is electoral outcome or policy win, you have the wrong metric. Jesus’s promise to grant what is asked in his name is not a blank check for political agendas. It’s a promise tied to asking within the will and kingdom purposes of the Father — which looks different, usually much more local and relational, than winning a federal election.
5. The Ends Don’t Justify the Means — Full Stop
Both libertarian ethics and Christian ethics are ethics of means. This is the convergence point that LCI has always argued, and 2025 made the case for it more forcefully than any abstract argument could. You do not get a pass to do wrong because your goal is good. Scripture is unambiguous: we are never to do evil so that good may come.
The political temptation is always to find the exception — the moment where the stakes are high enough that the normal rules bend. But the rules don’t bend. The rules are the point. What distinguishes a Christian witness in the public square from just another interest group is the refusal to cross those lines, even when crossing them looks like it might work.
6. Politics as Religion Is the Real Replacement Theory
One of the sharpest observations in this year-end review is the parallel between church and state. The institutional church is where Christians do things together in pursuit of kingdom-oriented goals. Politics has been positioning itself as a substitute for that — the place where meaning, community, and moral purpose get worked out. That substitution is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.
When political engagement replaces the church as the primary vehicle for Christian action in the world, you end up with Christians whose moral intuitions are shaped by cable news cycles and electoral calendars instead of scripture and the community of believers. That is a discipleship failure, not just a political miscalculation.
7. Your Sphere of Influence Is Closer Than You Think
The most actionable lesson from 2025 is also the simplest: change starts with the one improved unit — you. Not because politics doesn’t matter, but because the impact you can actually have is far more concentrated in your immediate sphere than in the national political arena.
For most Christians, the people they can genuinely move are in their church, their neighborhood, their family. LCI’s entire mission is to equip those people — not to produce the next Ron Paul, but to make sure that when questions about faith, freedom, and government come up in your small group or around your dinner table, you have something real to say. The year-end review makes the case that this kind of ground-level equipping has a higher ceiling for lasting change than almost anything that happens in Washington.
8. Joseph Couldn’t Skip to the End — Neither Can You
The Joseph narrative is invoked toward the close of the conversation, and it lands. Joseph did not get to skip from the pit to the palace. The slavery, the false accusation, the imprisonment — those were not detours from God’s plan. They were the plan. The suffering formed the man who could handle the position.
The same applies to Christians with big visions for cultural change. The work in front of you right now — faithfully, in your actual sphere of influence — is the training for whatever comes next. You cannot shortcut the formation. And the temptation to skip to the end is usually the temptation to bypass the thing that would actually make you ready for it.
9. LCI’s Year-End Numbers Tell Their Own Story
Before the lessons, the episode opens with a milestone worth noting in any honest year-end review: LCI exceeded its $15,000 matching challenge goal, reaching nearly $32,000 in November and December donations. More than that, LCI reached over two million people across more than 100 countries in 2025 — including significant growth in China and Africa.
That kind of reach, achieved without a single full-time staff member and with careful financial stewardship visible in their public 990s, is itself an argument for the model. Dollar-for-dollar, LCI is making the case for Christian liberty at a scale that most organizations with far larger budgets can’t match.
Conclusion: Christian Year End Review — Faithfulness Over Outcomes
The year-end review Jacob and Norman deliver here is not pessimistic. It is realistic in a way that is actually more hopeful than the alternative. The hope built on political access, the right coalition, or the right candidate is a fragile hope. It depends on things you can’t control and people who don’t share your commitments.
The hope built on faithfulness — doing what is right, working within your actual sphere of influence, and trusting that God’s ends will be achieved through means that honor him — that hope doesn’t collapse when the election goes wrong or when the administration disappoints.
2025 was the year a lot of Christians learned that lesson the hard way. The gift, if they receive it, is that they don’t have to learn it again.
Additional Resources
Biblical Anarchy Podcast
LCI Greenroom
External Reads
- Provoked by Scott Horton — Mentioned directly in the episode as the subject of an LCI book club series covering U.S. foreign policy from the end of the Soviet Union to the present. Available at the Libertarian Institute.
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776) — Referenced in the episode in connection with the 250th anniversary of American independence. Available free at EconLib.
- Faith Seeking Freedom by Norman Horn and Dick Clark — Mentioned as a core LCI resource and touchstone for the ideas discussed throughout the episode. Available at libertarianchristians.com.
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