The answer to civilizational confusion is not retreat. It is faithful obedience.…Live like reality is real. Because it is. Live under Christ’s authority in ordinary ways. Be faithful in a world that is forgetting what faithfulness even looks like. Christians must remember that the hard soil is still God’s field.

There are ideas so absurd they once belonged safely in satire.

Imagine telling your grandfather—a man who hunted, farmed, and fed his family from the land—that one day a political movement would treat killing animals for food as moral barbarism. Explain that raising livestock, fishing in rivers, and harvesting game in season would be criminalized.

He would not debate you. He would laugh. And yet here we are.

Oregon’s Initiative Petition 28 (IP-28) moved in precisely this direction, redefining animal abuse in ways that would effectively criminalize hunting, fishing, slaughter for food, and ordinary animal husbandry. Beneath the policy language is a deeper claim: that man possesses no unique moral authority over animals.

That is not reform. That is confusion, codified.

Many Christians instinctively recognize this as madness. But fewer understand why it is madness. The answer begins in Genesis. Not Genesis as mythology. Not Genesis as “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Genesis, which describes our world—the world beneath our feet, the world after judgment, the world God preserved after the flood.

If we misunderstand Genesis, we will misunderstand reality itself.

Civilizations that reject God’s order do not become enlightened—they become inverted. And when that confusion hardens into law, societies eventually find themselves writing legislation against creation, reason, and the grain of reality itself.

The Foundation of Civilization

The story of civilization after judgment begins in an unexpected place—an altar.  After the flood, when Noah steps off the ark, he does not build infrastructure, draft policy, or organize society. He first builds an altar, then he worships (Genesis 8:20–21). That is not a decorative detail. It is a civilizational order. Culture rises from worship. And every society has an altar. The only question is what—or who—is on it.

Modern Oregon is not neutral. Neutrality is a myth people tell themselves while switching gods. It has merely exchanged altars—like a river attempting to run uphill against the grain of creation. The worship of God has been replaced with the worship of self, desire, autonomy, and emotional sentimentality.

And once self becomes god, confusion is not a possibility—it is guaranteed.

Male and female become negotiable. Children become burdens. Marriage becomes optional. Truth becomes subjective. And eventually, even mankind and animals are forced into the same moral category.

When God is removed from the center, reality does not disappear. It collapses.

This is where movements like IP-28 come from. The issue is not ultimately animal welfare. The issue is worship. Worship determines how a civilization understands the created order.

Dominion: What God Actually Said

After the flood, God renews humanity’s original mission. The world had been judged, but mankind’s purpose had not been cancelled. God actually reasserts it.

“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth”
(Genesis 9:1).

“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you”
(Genesis 9:3).

These verses are deeply inconvenient for those who reject created order. God does not apologize for meat. In fact, He authorizes it—explicitly, publicly, and covenantally. This is not a strange Old Testament exception tucked into ceremonial law. This command comes within the Noahic covenant—the covenant governing ordinary human civilization after the flood. In other words, it governs our world.

This means hunting is not barbarism. Fishing is not oppression. Ranching is not exploitation. Animal husbandry is not moral evil. A father teaching his son to hunt is not rebelling against creation order; he is participating in it. God gave animals into humanity’s hands—not for cruelty, but for stewardship, nourishment, cultivation, and dominion.

The word “dominion” makes modern people nervous. Largely because we no longer know what it means. Biblical dominion is stewardship under authority. We steward as vice-regents under God (Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8:4–8). We cultivate fields, raise livestock, preserve habitats, restrain predators, harvest responsibly, and exercise wisdom in the use of created things.

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