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The Fourth Branch: How Conscience and Civic Vigilance May Save the Republic
Ordinary citizens, lower courts, military officers, advocacy groups, and artists together form a novel “fourth branch,” acting as a moral immune system of the body politic, sustaining its health when power itself has become a vector of disease.
Oct 13, 2025
With the executive overreaching and the judiciary acquiescent, the Republic’s immune system strains under political and institutional dysfunction. The legislative branch, meanwhile, toggles between paralysis and performative outrage, its constitutional authority weakened by partisan spectacle. When the formal organs falter, the Republic depends on the dispersed actors of the “fourth branch”—a novel, emergent moral network—tasked with upholding civic and constitutional integrity.
Ordinary citizens, lower courts, military officers, advocacy groups, and artists together make up this fourth branch of government, sustaining the body politic when power itself becomes a vector of disease. Like any living organism, the Republic survives only if parts of its system remain healthy, responsive, and attuned to threat. Two hundred fifty years after the nation’s founding, that resilience appears to reside outside the glare of public office and the ceremonial pomp of political power.
The organs of government—the executive, legislature, and judiciary—were built to temper ambition with accountability. The executive pursues policy goals and national leadership, yet is held in check by congressional oversight, the threat of impeachment, and the Senate’s advice and consent powers. The legislature advances laws and represents constituents, but its ambitions are restrained by the separation of powers and judicial review. The judiciary interprets laws and shapes precedent, yet its authority is bounded by norms, constitutional limits, and the actions of the elected branches that carry out its rulings. In this delicate interplay, each branch’s drive is held in tension with the others, forming a dynamic system of mutual restraint—a mechanism of civic immunity that preserves the Republic’s health whenever power tempts corruption.
When those formal checks falter or are stretched to their limits, other actors step forward. Among the first responders to constitutional stress and executive and legislative overreach are the lower courts. Their judgments, often meticulous and unnoticed, resist the infection of unchecked power, preserving both legal precedent and the vitality of constitutional norms. Historical examples—from district courts enforcing Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to federal judges upholding limits on executive overreach during Watergate—show that judicial restraint and principled decision-making act as vital lymphocytes in the body politic. In recent years, lower courts have repeatedly pushed back against attempts by both parties to expand executive power, reaffirming the judiciary’s enduring role in protecting constitutional norms and maintaining systemic balance.
The individuals of the fourth branch embody resilience, restoring the Republic not through office or ceremony, but through conscience, vigilance, and mindful, ethical action.
Equally critical is the principle guiding the military. Officers sworn to uphold the Constitution function as nodes of resilience. When orders risk undermining constitutional norms, restraint and adherence to lawful principle operate as systemic immunity, ensuring coercive force is not deployed toward corruption or authoritarian consolidation. From Union officers defending constitutional principles during the Civil War to the US military’s post-World War II commitment to civilian control, such principled restraint has protected the Republic from abuse. It has also reinforced societal stability during periods of extraordinary national stress.
Advocacy groups and civic organizations form a diffuse network of immune cells, detecting threats, mobilizing responses, and maintaining transparency. From the NAACP’s legal challenges during the civil rights movement to investigative journalism exposing abuses of power, as well as contemporary grassroots advocacy and sustained public protest, these actors function as a persistent, often invisible immune surveillance, preserving the health of the body politic. These efforts exemplify the kind of decentralized vigilance and ethical engagement that underpins the emergent “fourth branch,” helping sustain systemic stability even when formal institutions falter.
Similarly, artists and curators participate in this moral immune system, using cultural production to expose injustice and inspire civic engagement. From Picasso’s Guernica, which revealed the horrors of war, to the Mirror Shield Project by Cannupa Hanska Luger—created in 2016 for the Indigenous-led protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation—art serves as a tool of ethical witnessing. Luger’s mirrored shields, intended as non-violent instruments of protest and protection, exemplify how creative interventions confront corruption and violence, mobilize empathy, and sustain the body politic’s vitality. Other contemporary examples include Ai Weiwei’s installations highlighting human rights abuses and forced migration, Mel Chin’s environmental advocacy and socially engaged art projects, and Theaster Gates’ community-driven work in Chicago that engages citizens in social and political renewal. These artistic acts, like investigative journalism or civic advocacy, function as moral lymphocytes, detecting societal “infection,” prompting reflection, and inspiring collective action.
Yet the deepest layer of defense resides in ordinary citizens. Democracy isn’t merely a formal arrangement of offices; it is sustained by conscience and participation. Every jury that renders judgment according to law rather than ideology; every community that organizes to defend the vulnerable; every voter in presidential, midterm, state, and local elections; and every citizen who peacefully protests or refuses to normalize corruption and injustice contributes to the body politic’s immune function. Herein lies the lifeblood of the fourth branch: a novel, emergent moral structure whose collective actions preserve health and resilience in the face of institutional illness and degradation.
As Montesquieu famously wrote in The Spirit of Laws (1748), “That anyone who possesses power has a tendency to abuse it is an eternal truth.” He emphasizes balance and vigilance in those who hold office, a caution echoed by Hannah Arendt’s warning against thoughtless compliance and the banality of evil, and by Immanuel Kant’s assertion that moral law—accessible through reason alone (his Categorical Imperative)—guides action even under pressure. When the organs of governance are compromised, these insights become urgent guides for ethical engagement, illuminating the vigilance demanded of the emergent fourth branch.
The metaphor extends further: Like any organism, the body politic is vulnerable to fatigue and infection. Judges may falter. Officers may waver. Citizens may grow indifferent. Yet recognizing systemic vulnerability can catalyze meaningful action. Just as immune systems strengthen in response to challenge, civic vigilance grows in response to institutional illness. The Republic’s health depends on persistent engagement, not the passive expectation of heroic leadership—a principle perfectly captured by John F. Kennedy in his 1961 Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Citizenship isn’t merely a document; it invites—and requires—active participation in the nation’s health and well-being. This can mean resisting authoritarian forces or preventing private interests from capturing public institutions. Such engagement takes many forms: at town halls, shareholder meetings, voting booths, or even the checkout counter.
History demonstrates that resilience often emerges from unexpected quarters. The quiet rulings of lower courts, the disciplined adherence of officers to constitutional oaths, the tireless work of advocacy groups, and the conscientious refusal of citizens to acquiesce in corruption sustain the body politic. Their work is seldom glamorous, yet it is indispensable. The fourth branch enables the Republic to heal and resist, ensuring that liberty endures even when formal organs of power succumb to illness. Democratic health is measured not by office, rank, or visibility, but by the vitality of this dispersed moral network. These actors collectively form the body politic’s immune response, detecting threats, containing infection, and restoring systemic balance.
Benjamin Franklin’s warning—“A republic, if you can keep it”—has never been more urgent. Its keepers are often neither powerful nor celebrated, but those whose acts are small, disciplined, and principled. Acting as the lymphocytes, macrophages, and antibodies of the body politic, they preserve democratic health when governance structures fail. The individuals of the fourth branch embody resilience, restoring the Republic not through office or ceremony, but through conscience, vigilance, and mindful, ethical action. We may never know all their names, yet we may still sense their impact—and feel gratitude for it.
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Reclaiming God from Empire: Nonviolence in an Age of Religious Nationalism
The world doesn’t need more interfaith conferences. It needs a defiant, loving, spiritually alive army saying, “No” to every lie told in God’s name and “Yes” to every human being whose dignity is at risk.
Aug 27, 2025
I didn’t set out to study nonviolence. Like many, I stumbled upon it in fragments, quotes that refused to leave me, the persistent sense that some ancient wisdom was trying to cut through the noise of our modern world.
Over time, through teaching, crisis counseling, community organizing, and meditation, I’ve come to a radical realization: Nonviolence is not merely a political tactic or a personal ethic. It is a global resistance movement against the fusion of religion and empire. It is how we reclaim God from the powers that abuse the sacred to justify violence.
We live in an age of rising religious nationalism. From Hindu majoritarianism in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India, to Christian nationalism in the United States, to theocratic impulses behind Israeli settler expansionism, to Islamist authoritarianism across parts of the Middle East, violent ideologies drape themselves in sacred flags. Across continents, politics does not just use religion, it deifies power itself.
These movements, despite differences in theology, share a dangerous logic: God belongs to the nation-state. Dissent is heresy. Violence in defense of faith is holy. From Trump rallies invoking Jesus as a warrior against “wokeness,” to mobs in Sri Lanka attacking Muslim businesses under Buddhist banners, the message is the same: We are the faithful, and they are the enemy.
This is not faith. It is idolatry.
Nonviolence is not weakness, it is moral imagination.
The through line is the same everywhere: Political machines manipulate our spiritual longing—our desire for meaning, belonging, and moral clarity—into instruments of fear. Fear of invasion, moral decay, the other. Religion fused with nationalism offers an intoxicating narrative: You are chosen, your suffering righteous, your violence divinely sanctioned.
The consequences are stark: genocide in Myanmar, insurgencies in Nigeria, mass protests in Iran led by women chanting “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi”—Woman, Life, Freedom.
Yet, wherever God is weaponized, people of conscience rise to reclaim the sacred.
The prophets of scripture were never courtiers to kings. Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah, Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Guru Nanak—they stood outside the gates, shouting warnings. They taught that God is never found in empires but in the poor, the exiled, the occupied.
Jesus did not die because he preached love; he died because he preached a love that refused Caesar. His nonviolence was not meekness; it was resistance. To “love your enemies” was to forgive Roman soldiers, tax collectors, collaborators, a revolutionary courage that unsettled empires.
Mahatma Gandhi understood this deeply. His weapon was truth; his discipline, nonviolence. His target: the British Empire, which fused God, king, and commerce into one colonial theology. Gandhi’s Ahimsa was a spiritual rebuke to every religion that justified oppression in God’s name. He was not just a nationalist, he was an exorcist.
The world has changed. Weapons are faster. Propaganda is louder. Failures now risk climate catastrophe, nuclear war, genocide. Yet the core dynamic remains: Empire seeks to baptize its violence. In President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Orthodox priests bless missiles. In Gaza and southern Israel, both Hamas and Israeli extremists quote scripture to justify massacres. In the US, Bible verses are wielded to demonize LGBTQ+ communities and suppress reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the poor remain poor, the Earth burns, and God’s name is dragged through bloodied streets.
Resistance requires more than interfaith talk or symbolic gestures. We need a global, spiritually rooted movement connecting every site of conscience. Pastors, imams, rabbis, monks, Indigenous elders, atheists, spiritual seekers, anyone refusing the false choice between extremism and moral apathy.
Such movements exist, though rarely in headlines:
- In Iraq, Muslim and Christian activists march together for water rights and anti-corruption.
- In Nigeria, interfaith committees interrupt cycles of revenge violence.
- In the US, Jewish and Christian leaders occupy Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, practicing faith in action.
- In India, Dalit Buddhists and Sikhs resist Hindutva ideology with solidarity, not hatred.
- In Brazil, Afro-Brazilian religious practitioners confront evangelical persecution through ritual, music, and protest.
These are the prophets of our time, not famous, not always safe, but always faithful.
Nonviolence may seem fragile in a world of drones, deepfakes, authoritarian surveillance, beheadings, bombings. Hunger strikes against indifferent governments can feel meaningless. Yet, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the “Frontier Gandhi,” organized 100,000 Pashtun men into a nonviolent army, declaring, “It is cowardice to kill. It requires courage to be nonviolent.”
I recall historical images of Black Panthers feeding children, monks lying before tanks in Myanmar, Standing Rock, grandmothers chaining themselves to border fences, Iranian women burning hijabs in defiance. Nonviolence is not weakness, it is moral imagination. It refuses empire the power to define our dignity.
It is difficult. I fail daily. My thoughts are not always peaceful; my rhetoric sometimes sharp. I am still unlearning the myth that power requires domination. Yet we must try. The alternative is annihilation.
As a counselor and teacher, I witness the spiritual devastation of religious violence, not only physical, but emotional: shame, fear, exclusion. A woman fleeing an evangelical cult. A gay teen rejected by his mosque. A veteran praying for forgiveness nightly after deploying drone strikes.
Reclaiming God is urgent. Pastoral. Political. Global. The world doesn’t need more interfaith conferences. It needs a defiant, loving, spiritually alive army saying, “No” to every lie told in God’s name and “Yes” to every human being whose dignity is at risk.
Yes to Palestinians and Israelis. Yes to Muslims and Hindus. Yes to atheists and fundamentalists. Yes to victims—and, if they seek it, to the redeemed.
The God I follow does not wave flags. Does not draw borders. Is found in the faces of those who show up unarmed. If faith is real, it must be revolutionary. If God is just, God must be liberated from every flag, every bomb, every distorted sermon.
This is the work. And it requires all of us.
Nonviolence or nonexistence. Gandhi and King made their choice. What will ours be?
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Let Our Youth Vote!
Making it easier for young people to vote is a great way to increase participation, making our democracy live up to its ideals.
Aug 26, 2025
With democracy under attack in the US, a worldwide movement to lower the voting age is growing. This July, the United Kingdom announced it would lower the voting age from 18 to 16 in general elections. When the bill passes, the UK will join Brazil, Austria, Cuba, Argentina, Nicaragua, and Ecuador as nations which already allow 16-year-olds to vote. In others, including Greece and Indonesia, the voting age is 17.
While there is no clear partisan advantage in lowering the voting age, collective benefits abound—including a more engaged democracy judged by civic engagement and political attitudes.
Voting habits are established early, and support in the classroom can make a big difference. But, when the voting age is 18, fewer voters are in school during their first election. Depending on the election cycle, many will not have the opportunity to vote in a national election until they are 21. Thus, many first-time voters lack vital resources and thus face higher barriers to entry. The case is true in the United States. Nearly a third of unregistered voters between 18-29 say they were simply too busy to go through the registration process.
As political scientist Joshua Tucker explains, “If you vote when you’re young in the first three elections, [for which you are eligible] that’s likely to predict you continue voting.” If you don’t, “you’re less likely to vote for the rest of your life,” and “even one failure lowers the chance of voting later.” So, the stakes are high and opportunity during the early years can have lifelong impacts.
Here 16- and 17-year-olds drive, pay taxes, work unrestricted hours; yet they cannot exercise the fundamental, democratic right to vote.
Nations lowering voting age have experienced an increase youth activism. Argentina, for example, lowered voting age in 2012. Then in 2015, years before the surge of the #MeToo movement, the Ni Una Menos (Not one less) movement in Argentina began. Through mass protests and strikes, it aimed to combat and bring awareness to gender-based violence.
Another youth-led action—the Marea Verde (Green Wave) Movement—pushed to legalize abortion and significantly influenced development and passage of a 2020 national Argentine law that did just that.
Here, too, young Americans have stepped up for a stronger democracy, even helping to spark two of the most influential Supreme Court cases. In 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns, a student in a segregated school in Prince Edward County, Virginia, took action. Her school held over twice as many students as was legally permissible, used second-hand supplies, and lacked adequate bathrooms or heating. So, Johns led her peers in a school assembly and ultimately organized a student-body strike. With the support of the NAACP, her courageous efforts turned into one of the five legal cases of Brown v. the Board of Education that declared public school segregation illegal.
About a decade and a half later, five students in Des Moines, Iowa came together to protest the Vietnam War, each wearing an armband to school. For this they were suspended, but they fought back. Their fight eventually made its way to the Supreme Court and what would become Tinker v. Des Moines defining public-school students’ First Amendment rights.
In a more recent example of the power of student activism, a survivor from the Parkland shooting, high school junior Cameron Kasky, organized the March for Our Lives protests in 2018. In a fight for gun control, they would become one of the largest in US history, with a million participants—mostly students—taking the streets to fight for gun control.
These formidable young people offer inspiring evidence that an early understanding of civics, along with the experience of political empowerment, can ripple out to make history. These stories underscore our responsibility to bring these principles and opportunities to all young Americans, not only with better civics education but also by lowering the voting age, and thereby affirming their voices matter.
As data from the most recent election confirm, states with the least restrictive voting had the highest turnout among young voters, while the opposite was true in the more restrictive states. Thankfully, we are making progress: In a third of US states, 17-year-olds can now vote in primaries if they turn 18 before the general election. Even more exciting are the dozen cities where 16-year-olds can now vote, either in school-board elections or all local elections.
The facts are clear. Making it easier for young people to vote is a great way to increase participation, making our democracy live up to its ideals. Here 16- and 17-year-olds drive, pay taxes, work unrestricted hours; yet they cannot exercise the fundamental, democratic right to vote.
Let us step up to join our peer nations and change that now.Keep ReadingShow Less
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