A conversation about religion, moral foundations, and why people of faith should care about Congressus
Jacob and I don’t always agree. That’s actually one of the things I value most about talking to him. He pushes back. He finds the holes. And a few weeks ago, sitting around going through the Congressus framework, trying to break it, he said something that stopped me cold.
“You know what your moral floor basically is? It’s Christianity. At its core.”
My first instinct was to push back. Congressus is deliberately non-religious. It doesn’t favor any tradition, doesn’t privilege any faith, doesn’t require any belief. That’s by design. But Jacob wasn’t done.
“I’m not saying you copied it from Christianity. I’m saying you arrived at the same place Christianity was trying to get to before everything got complicated.”
I sat with that for a while. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. Not just about Christianity either.
What We Were Actually Arguing About
We were stress-testing the Foundation Floor. That’s the constitutional layer of Congressus: the set of protections that no negotiation, no majority vote, no government decision can override. The things that are simply not on the table, regardless of what anyone wants.
The list includes things like: no one can be denied food, water, or basic medical care as a political outcome. No torture. No permanent dehumanization. Children must be protected. Justice must include a genuine path to rehabilitation, not just punishment. Every person has the right to make decisions about their own body and life without the government imposing someone else’s beliefs on them.
Jacob read through it and said, “This is the Sermon on the Mount without the supernatural framework.”
And I thought — he’s not wrong. But it’s also the core of Islam. And Judaism. And Buddhism. And every indigenous ethical tradition that has sustained communities for thousands of years. Every single one of them, developed independently, on different continents, by people who never spoke to each other, arrived at essentially the same place.
Don’t harm the innocent. Feed the hungry. Care for the sick. Protect children. Show mercy. Hold the powerful accountable. Treat others the way you want to be treated.
That’s not a Christian idea. That’s not a Muslim idea. That’s not a secular humanist idea. That’s a human idea that every tradition discovered separately, which tells you something important: they were all finding something real.
Religion Was Never Really About the Rules
Here’s what I said to Jacob that day, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
I think religion, at its origin, before the politics and the institutions and the centuries of interpretation, wasn’t really about commandments and rituals and the specific rules. It was about solving the hardest problem early human communities faced: how do you get a large group of strangers to trust each other enough to cooperate?
Think about what early civilization actually needed. You needed people to agree on basic behavioral standards. You needed a way to enforce those standards even when no one was watching. You needed stories that could transmit wisdom across generations before anyone could read. You needed something that could make people feel connected to each other even when they had no other reason to.
Religion solved all of that. Brilliantly. The shared moral code, the idea of a witness who sees everything whether you’re watched or not, the stories that carry meaning across centuries, the community that forms around shared sacred identity: that was the infrastructure that made civilization possible.
The moral teachings weren’t arbitrary rules made up by someone to control people. They were humanity’s accumulated discoveries about the conditions that allow communities to survive and flourish. Feed the hungry because a community where people starve is an unstable community. Don’t torture because a community that tortures erodes the trust that holds it together. Protect children because a community that fails its children has no future.
Every commandment, at its root, was pointing at something true about human life. The religion was the delivery system. The moral content was the message.
What Happened to the Message
Jacob is a devout Christian. He holds his faith sincerely and lives by it. And when I said all of this, he didn’t argue with me. He said, “You’re describing what it was supposed to be. Not what it became.”
That’s the honest conversation we need to be having.
Over the centuries, every major religious tradition has undergone the same transformation. Genuine moral insight emerged. Then it got institutionalized: priests, hierarchies, buildings, texts requiring authorized interpretation. Then the institution accumulated power: land, money, political influence. Then the institution started using the moral framework to protect itself rather than the people it was supposed to serve.
The original message, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, protect the weak, seek justice, got buried under layers of politics, territorial disputes, power struggles, and fear. Not because the people who carried it were all bad. But because institutions follow the same patterns regardless of what they were built to serve.
The result was something the founders of every tradition would barely recognize. Faith communities where the fear of punishment replaced the genuine desire to do good. Where following the rules mattered more than embodying the principles. Where protecting the institution became more important than protecting the people.
The most sophisticated teachers in every tradition recognized this and said so. Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible kept insisting that God wanted justice and mercy, not burnt offerings. The Buddha warned against attachment to doctrine as a substitute for genuine practice. Every tradition, at its best, kept trying to recover the original intent.
What Congressus Is Really Doing
When Jacob called the Foundation Floor “Christianity at its core,” what he was actually pointing at is this: we went looking for the moral principles that are genuinely universal, the ones that show up in every tradition, that every human culture has arrived at independently, that are grounded in something real about what human beings actually need to flourish, and we built the system around those.
Not around any one tradition’s specific theology. Not around any particular set of rituals or doctrines. Around the underlying moral content that every tradition was pointing at before everything got complicated.
The Congressus Floor doesn’t ask anyone to believe anything. It doesn’t require any particular faith or any faith at all. What it does is say: here are the conditions that human beings across every culture and every era have recognized as necessary for communities to survive and flourish. Here is the evidence. Here is the reasoning. You can examine it, challenge it, and propose improvements.
That’s not less than what religion was offering. In some ways, it’s more, because it doesn’t require you to accept it on faith. It invites you to look at it clearly and see if you agree.
A Message to People of Faith
If you are religious, genuinely, seriously, in the way Jacob is, I want to say something directly to you.
The moral foundations of Congressus are your moral foundations. Not a version of them. Not an approximation. The actual core: protect the vulnerable, feed the hungry, pursue justice, care for children, treat others with dignity, hold power accountable. These are what your tradition has been trying to teach since the beginning.
If you believe that your faith calls you to love your neighbor, then you should support a system that makes it structurally impossible to deny your neighbor food, water, or medical care as a political outcome.
If you believe that your faith calls you to seek justice, then you should support a system that measures justice by whether it actually reduces harm, by recidivism rates and rehabilitation outcomes, rather than by how much it punishes.
If you believe that your faith calls you to protect children, then you should support a system with absolute, non-negotiable protections for children that no majority can vote away.
If you believe that your faith calls you to speak truth, then you should support a system built on radical transparency where every decision is made in the open and every piece of reasoning is published for anyone to examine.
This isn’t me trying to co-opt your faith for a political project. This is me pointing at what your faith was originally about before it accumulated centuries of institutional distortion, and saying: here is a system that takes those original values seriously and builds them into the actual architecture of governance.
Going Back to the Beginning
There’s a concept in many religious traditions of return — going back to the original, uncorrupted source. In Islam, it’s the idea of returning to the pure teachings before they were distorted. In Protestant Christianity, the Reformation sought to return to scripture before institutional accretion. In Buddhism, it’s the emphasis on the original teachings of the Buddha before later schools added complexity. In Judaism, it’s the prophets calling people back to the covenant’s original meaning.
Every major tradition has within it a movement to recover what it was before politics got in the way.
Congressus is something like that — not for any specific religion, but for the moral project that all of them were part of. It’s an attempt to take what every tradition discovered about how human beings have to treat each other to build something worth living in, strip away the institutional politics that buried it, and build it directly into the infrastructure of how we govern ourselves.
Not through commandments. Not through fear of punishment. Not through any single tradition’s authority. Through transparent reasoning, democratic consent, and a Floor that makes the essential things non-negotiable because they were always non-negotiable. We just kept finding ways to negotiate around them anyway.
What Jacob Said at the End
After we’d been going back and forth on all of this for a while, Jacob said something I keep thinking about.
“The problem with religion isn’t the values. The values are right. The problem is that people stopped choosing them and started just performing them. They follow the rules because they’re afraid or because it’s expected, not because they genuinely believe this is the right way to live.”
That’s the thing we’re trying to solve. Not just in governance. In everything.
A system that makes the right choice also the rational choice. You don’t have to be a saint to do good. Where the structure itself makes cooperation more valuable than conflict, where trustworthiness compounds into real advantage, and where protecting people is what gets rewarded rather than what gets punished.
That’s what every religious tradition was pointing at when it was at its best. A world where people do good not because they’re afraid of what happens if they don’t, but because they genuinely see that it’s the right way to live.
We’re trying to build the infrastructure for that world.
Jacob thinks that sounds like what his faith has always been about.
I think he’s right.
Congressus is an open project. The Foundation Floor, the complete white paper, and all documentation are publicly available. No single entity owns it. It belongs to everyone it serves.
If this resonated with you, whether you’re religious or not, whether you agree with everything here or just some of it, we’d love to hear from you. The best governance systems are built by the widest possible range of voices. Including yours.
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