Why do you stop at a red light, even when no one is watching?

Most people would say it's easy. It's just safe. It's just smart. But think about it a little longer. You didn't pick that rule. You didn't sit down and decide, all on your own, that this exact corner needed this exact rule. Someone else made that choice. And somewhere along the way, without even noticing, you agreed to follow it.

Now think about how many other rules work the same way.

We follow rules we never really looked at. We fear people we've never met, just because someone told us to. We say things like "the law" as if that phrase explains everything. But "the law" is really just a pile of choices other people made. We treat it like it's sacred, and most of the time we never stop to ask why.

Here's the strange part. A lot of us think that's just fine. We think someone has to be in charge. We think most people are too selfish or too foolish to make good choices on their own, so someone else needs to make the big decisions for us.

But where did that idea come from? Did you choose to believe it? Or did it get planted in you before you were even old enough to ask questions?

That question sits under this whole episode. It's not really about which political side is right. It's something much simpler, and much bigger: why do we keep believing that someone has to rule over us?

That question isn't just an idea in a book. It shows up in real moments, in real people's lives.

This episode of The Bad Roman Podcast is a little different from most. Craig isn't talking with someone who slowly changed their mind about church and politics. He's talking with Larken Rose and Amanda Rose. They're two well-known voices in a small world of people who believe no human being should rule over another. They're getting ready for an event called Approaching Humanity in Sedona, Arizona. Larken isn't even a Christian. He says so right out loud, in his usual blunt way.

But what starts as a conversation about an upcoming event turns into something bigger. It becomes a dialogue on where our beliefs really come from, who put them there, and what it might feel like to finally notice.

What We Never Chose to Believe

Larken tells a story about a woman who once challenged him on speaking about a Bible verse. She asked if he was a Christian. He said no. She pushed back. If he's not a Christian, what gives him the right to talk about what the Bible means?

"I’m not," he said, "but I can read."

It's a funny line. But it's also a small earthquake. Hidden inside her question was an idea she probably never thought about: that only certain people, with the right badge or the right membership, are allowed to understand certain things. Larken didn't need a badge. He just needed the words in front of him and the will to actually look at them.

That idea runs through the whole episode. It's not about "here is the one correct answer." It's more like: what happens when we stop assuming we already know everything, and we actually take a real look?

Amanda tells a story that hits even harder. She wears a shirt to church. It shows Jesus being arrested by ICE agents. A few people compliment it without really thinking about what it means. But one woman can't move past it. She keeps a stiff smile and says, three separate times, that it concerns her. Amanda explains why she wears it: Jesus was from the Middle East. He didn't look like the people cheering on the raids. If he walked around today, some of the very people so sure he'd be on their side might be the ones putting him in handcuffs.

Nobody in that story changed their mind right away. That's not really the point. The point is the flinch. Something in that woman noticed a wall in her own mind, a wall between "people who get arrested" and "Jesus," that had never once been allowed to fall.

A lot of us are carrying walls just like that one. We just haven't seen our own shirt yet.

What Jesus Actually Refused

There's a story that people love to use to prove Jesus stayed out of politics, or even that he backed the people in charge. A group of religious leaders sends men to trap him. If Jesus says don't pay taxes to Rome, he's a troublemaker. If he says pay them, he looks like a friend of the soldiers crushing his own people.

Jesus asks for a coin. Whose face is stamped on it? Caesar's. So, Jesus says, give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. And give God what belongs to God.

Read fast, it sounds like Jesus is just being safe. Read slow, and it's not safe at all. Everyone listening that day knew something we've mostly forgotten: nothing really belonged to Caesar in the first place. His whole empire was built by taking things from other people. So when Jesus says "give God what's God's," he's not handing Caesar a slice of anything. He's quietly saying the whole pie was never Caesar's to begin with.

That's not a political policy. That's a trap turned right back on the people who set it. They walked away amazed, and they got nothing to use against him.

It still cost him everything. Not because he broke some rule. Because he refused to bow down to power just because power said he had to. Rome didn't kill Jesus because he stayed quiet about politics. It killed him because his kingdom worked by a totally different rulebook: mercy instead of control, serving instead of ruling, truth instead of the easy lie that some people are simply born to rule over others.

Earlier in his life, after Jesus fed a huge crowd with just a little food, the people tried to grab him and force him to be their king. He didn't take the deal. He didn't ask for smaller terms. He walked up a mountain by himself and let them figure out that this wasn't a game he was going to play.

Sit with that for a second. He was handed the chance to rule, a huge crowd, full stomachs, people ready to follow him anywhere, and he walked away.

You don't have to agree with everything Larken Rose believes to notice something. That same refusal sits under his main idea, too: that no human being has the right to rule another. Jesus didn't argue about which policy was best. He walked away from the mountain.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Larken doesn't spend a lot of time telling people what to believe. His real project, the one behind his new book, Unbound, and behind the whole Approaching Humanity event, is smaller and stranger than that. He wants to know if people are actually living by the things they already say they believe.

"Are you being consistent with your own moral code?"

That's the whole challenge, in one line. Not "come believe what I believe." Just: does what you do match what you say is true?

Ask most people if it's wrong to steal from a neighbor, and they'll say of course it is. Ask if they've ever voted for a program that takes money from a neighbor who didn't want to give it, and something shifts. The answer gets longer. A "well" creeps in. A "we" creeps in too.

Amanda talks about running a class built around watching that shift happen, over and over. They'd bring people in, friends, family, even strangers paid fifty dollars for fifteen minutes of their time, and ask a few careful questions. Every single time, the same pattern showed up.

"They don't know what they don't know. It's an actual blind spot."

People don't dodge the question because they're lying. They dodge because part of them senses a hole in the floor and doesn't want to look down. It's scary to admit there's a whole area of your own beliefs you never really chose, and never really checked.

Larken has his own way of describing what happens when we skip that check, and just let someone else decide for us without ever noticing.

"They don't even recognize the chains wrapped around their own brains."

It would be easy to think this is only about politics. It isn't. It's really a spiritual question wearing political clothes. Every faith that takes the idea of repentance seriously is describing the same thing: waking up to a chain you didn't even know was there, and choosing, on purpose, to take it off. The Bad Roman Project has a phrase for this: "no king but Christ." Larken, starting from a totally different place, calls it noticing the blind spot. Different words. A strangely similar discovery.

Different Roads, Same Clearing

What makes Approaching Humanity interesting isn't that every speaker agrees. They don't. But they all ended up in almost the same place anyway.

There's David Hathaway, a real sheriff, someone most people would expect to defend "the system" without question. Instead, Craig says Hathaway ran for the job for one main reason: he didn't want a tyrant sitting in that office. He's not there to praise police work. He's watched what happens when power has no limits, and decided he'd rather stand in that door himself than let someone worse walk through it.

There's Patrick Smith, who took the opposite road from most guests on this show by leaving Christianity and becoming an atheist. From a completely different direction, he still landed on the same refusal to bow down to the state that Craig found from inside his own faith.

There's Brittany, a homeschooling mom and comedian. Her whole talk is built around one simple idea: kids are people. Not animals to be trained. Not lumps of clay to be shaped into perfect obedience. People, with their own growing sense of right and wrong, the very same thing every other speaker at this event is trying to protect in the grown-ups in the room.

There's Rebecca Anzini, who once watched someone build a so-called "freedom community" while quietly running it like a cult. She learned the hard way that the words "freedom" and "liberty" can be worn like a mask, hiding the exact same hunger for control they claim to fight against.

None of them needed the same books or the same prayers to see it. They just needed to pay close enough attention to their own lives for the chains to become visible. As Amanda puts it, nobody set out to end up somewhere so unfamiliar. They were just thinking things through, one honest step at a time, until one day they looked up and asked, "How did I get here?"

That's not really about ideas or politics. That's what a real change of heart looks like, in whatever words a person has to describe it.

Larken's hope for the event isn't that everyone leaves agreeing on doctrine or economics or theology.

"I want everybody to be themselves, unbound by weird manipulations and lies."

You don't have to agree with his conclusions to notice that this sounds a lot like what Jesus wanted too. Not a room full of people who all think and act exactly alike. People who are finally free enough to be exactly who they were made to be.

Approaching Humanity

The name of the event says it all. Approaching Humanity. Not approaching a new law. Not approaching a political party. Not approaching AI for president. Humanity, the thing we lose every time we hand our conscience over to someone else and let them decide who deserves kindness and who deserves suspicion.

Amanda and Larken joke through most of the episode. Salsa. Arizona heat. Hot peppers. There's even an old bit about a group of friends debating whether to use a powerful, dangerous ring "for good" instead of just destroying it. It's funny because it's so backwards, you don't gather people together to talk about breaking free from control, and then hand the ring right back to somebody at the end. But the joke has a real point behind it. So many movements built around freedom quietly end up rebuilding the very throne they said they wanted to tear down. Just give me the ring. I'll use it the right way. Put me in charge. I'll fix it this time.

Jesus was offered that same kind of deal. Once on a mountain, after he fed thousands of people with almost nothing. Once again out in the wilderness, before his work had even started. Both times, he said no. Not because power itself is evil, but because his kingdom was never going to be built that way. Mercy doesn't grow bigger by force. Truth doesn't need an army to protect it. Love for your neighbor falls apart the second you try to force someone else into it at gunpoint, no matter how good your reasons sound.

That's the humanity this event wants people to walk toward. Not a better system. Not a stronger fence around the "right" kind of freedom. Just people, finally taking an honest look at the chains they never chose to wear, willing to sit with how uncomfortable that is, instead of smiling through it the way that woman smiled through Amanda's shirt.

Craig doesn't need Larken to become a Christian for this conversation to matter. He needs him to keep asking the question neither of them can fully escape: is there really any person on this earth fit to rule over another? Jesus never answered that question with a new law or a new policy. He answered it by walking away from a crown. By washing the feet of the very men who would abandon him by morning. By dying rather than pretend that any earthly power, however much it borrowed religious words, deserved his loyalty more than the God he called Father.

"No king but Christ" was never meant to end an argument. It's an invitation to keep asking who you've really been listening to your whole life, and to notice, maybe for the first time, that you were always free to stop.

Guest Bio

Larken Rose has spent over two decades making the same simple, uncomfortable argument: no human being has the right to rule another. He's the author of The Most Dangerous Superstition, the novel The Iron Web, and creator/co-writer of The Jones Plantation (novel and film). His new book, Approaching Humanity, releases alongside the live event of the same name. He also created Candles in the Dark, a seminar that teaches people how to talk to friends and family about authority without turning it into a fight. Larken isn't a Christian — he says so plainly in this episode — but he and Craig keep landing in the same place anyway.

Amanda Rose is Larken's wife and partner in both life and work. A voluntaryist since 2012, she's a writer and public speaker who has appeared at Anarchapulco, Anarchovegas, and Anarchizona, and she co-hosts The Rose Channel alongside Larken.

Together, Larken and Amanda are hosting Approaching Humanity, a full-day event and book launch on Saturday, July 18, 2026, at the Sedona Performing Arts Center in Sedona, Arizona.

Links

The Rose Channel: therosechannel.com
Larken Rose's personal site: larkenrose.com
Candles in the Dark seminar: attendcandles.com
Larken on X: x.com/larken_rose
Larken on YouTube: youtube.com/user/LarkenRose
Approaching Humanity event tickets: therosechannel.com/humanity
Approaching Humanity pre-order the book: therosechannel.com/humanitybook

Also Mentioned in This Episode (Approaching Humanity Speakers)

Sheriff David Hathaway: Sheriff of Santa Cruz County, Arizona; previously featured on The Bad Roman Podcast, Episode 53, “Love at the Border with Sheriff David Hathaway”
Jason Bassler: co-founder of The Free Thought Project and founder of Police the Police
Patrick Smith: host of Disenthrall
Mark Maresca: host of The White Pillbox
Carey Wedler: voluntaryist content creator; former editor-in-chief of Anti-Media
Derrick Broze: journalist, author, and founder of The Conscious Resistance Network
James Corbett: independent journalist, The Corbett Report, joining remotely from Japan
Rebecca Anzini: speaker on the hidden dangers inside “freedom-minded” intentional communities
Brittany: homeschooling mother, comedian, and past cast member of The Jones Plantation

Highlights & Takeaways

We often follow beliefs we never really chose.

Most of us are shaped by rules, fears, and loyalties we picked up along the way, and we rarely stop to notice the difference.

Being consistent shows what we actually believe.

Larken's big challenge isn't "believe what I believe." It's "does what you do match what you say you believe?"

Jesus turned down power more than once.

Both on the mountain after feeding the crowd, and later before Pilate, Jesus refused to build his kingdom through force.

"Give unto Caesar" is not a blank check for obedience. It's actually a trap turned back on the people who set it, built on the truth that nothing ever really belonged to Caesar at all.
Different starting points can still lead to the same place.

A sheriff, an atheist, a homeschooling mom, and a Christian podcast host can all land on the same idea, that no one has the right to rule over another person, even coming from totally different directions.

Discomfort is often a sign that something true is being noticed.

The people in this episode who flinched or froze or smiled too hard weren't bad people. They were standing at the edge of something they didn't know was there.

Even freedom movements can rebuild the very thing they meant to tear down.

The temptation to say "just let me hold the power, I'll use it responsibly" shows up almost everywhere, even inside movements built to fight against it.

Listen

Listen for how many different words are used in this episode to describe the exact same discovery, "unbound," "the blind spot," "no king but Christ," and notice how closely they line up.

Reflect

Think of one belief you've never really chosen, something you just picked up along the way. What would it cost you to take an honest look at it?

Read

Read Matthew 22:15–22, John 6:14–15, and John 18:33–37. Notice what Jesus turns down in each story, and what he offers instead.

Practice

Try Larken's question on one belief you hold strongly: are you really being consistent with it? Or have you carved out a quiet little exception for the parts that are inconvenient?