Leadership Quote by Gary North

North’s line strips the Ten Commandments of their stained-glass aura and recasts them as a political technology: not divine poetry, but operating instructions. Calling them “a strategy” twice is doing work. It’s insistence-by-repetition, a way of preventing the reader from drifting back into the comforting idea that morality is merely personal. He’s arguing that law is never neutral; it’s an instrument that builds a social order, then defends it.

The charged word is “dominion.” In Christian Reconstructionist circles (North’s home turf), dominion isn’t a vague metaphor for stewardship. It’s a mandate: society should be brought under biblical rule, with civil law mirroring Old Testament prescriptions. Read that way, the Decalogue becomes less about individual conscience and more about jurisdiction: Who gets to define theft, blasphemy, sexuality, family authority, public worship? “Dominion” signals the target is governance itself.

The subtext is combative and strategic. North implicitly rebukes a privatized Christianity that treats commandments as self-help maxims. If the commandments are strategy, then believers are actors in a campaign, and the battlefield is legislation, education, courts, and culture. It’s a framing that converts piety into program.

Why it works rhetorically is its audacity: it drags a sacred object into the realm of power analysis. To sympathetic readers, it feels clarifying, even bracingly honest. To critics, it reads as a confession: theocratic ambition with the politeness removed. Either way, it forces the uncomfortable question many public moral appeals try to dodge: whose dominion, enforced how, and at what cost.