Justice Quote by Richard Land

Land’s line drapes itself in piety while doing something intensely practical: handing the state a sacred job description. By calling the “civil magistrate” “ordained by God,” he’s not merely praising law and order; he’s laundering political authority through theology, turning coercion into a kind of delegated holiness. The phrase “punish those who do evil” sounds modest, even commonsense, but it’s the rhetorical blank check in the middle. “Evil” is elastic. Whoever gets to define it gets to aim the baton.

The intent is twofold. First, it reassures Baptists who are often stereotyped as suspicious of centralized power that supporting state punishment isn’t a betrayal of faith but an expression of it. Second, it preemptively frames resistance to certain policies as resistance to God’s arrangement, not just to a politician. That’s a powerful move in a culture war environment: it shifts debates from prudence and rights into obedience and sin.

The subtext also tries to settle an old Baptist tension: a tradition with strong instincts for religious liberty and church-state separation still wants moral outcomes in public life. Invoking “civil magistrate” borrows older, almost antiquarian language that makes the position feel rooted and doctrinal, not reactionary.

Contextually, Land (a prominent Southern Baptist public voice) is speaking from within American evangelical politics where “order” talk often rides alongside anxieties about social change. The sentence offers a tidy moral hierarchy: God -> state -> punishment, with little room left for dissenters to claim conscience without being cast as indulgent toward “evil.”