Who Gets to Speak for God?

By Cliff Potts
Editor-in-Chief, WPS News
Sunday, April 19, 2026

There is a pattern that repeats itself in churches across denominations, regions, and generations, and it is rarely named out loud.

People live much of their lives with little moral restraint—sometimes merely indifferent, sometimes openly destructive. They drink hard, cheat freely, boast recklessly, and treat consequences as punchlines. Then, somewhere in their thirties or forties, often after personal collapse or social exhaustion, they “find religion.”

The conversion story follows a familiar arc. The past is recounted with humor. Sin becomes anecdote. Damage becomes color commentary. What should be confession is treated as entertainment. The testimony is not offered with trembling or grief, but with bravado, as if recklessness itself were evidence of depth.

And then something more troubling happens.

These late converts do not remain witnesses to grace. They become authorities. They instruct. They dominate. They correct. They preach down to people who have lived quietly, consistently, and without spectacle for decades.

This is not a theological accident. It is a sociological pattern, and it deserves scrutiny.

The Prodigal Son Problem

The parable of the Prodigal Son is often used to justify this inversion of authority. The story is meant to illustrate grace—that forgiveness is not earned and that return is always possible. That part is not controversial.

What is controversial is how the parable is routinely misused.

In practice, the prodigal is elevated above the faithful son. The one who stayed—who worked, endured, and remained—is treated as invisible. His life leaves no dramatic arc, no conversion story, no applause line. Quiet faith is erased in favor of spectacle.

The parable becomes a license not merely for forgiveness, but for dominance. Grace is quietly transformed into rank.

That was never the point.

Grace Is Not Authority

Grace explains forgiveness. It does not confer expertise.

Redemption restores relationship. It does not automatically produce wisdom.

Authority—moral or theological—is not created in an instant. It is formed over time, through study, restraint, doubt, failure, consistency, and the unglamorous labor of living with one’s beliefs year after year.

Long-formed faith does not shout. It hesitates. It revises. It remembers what it does not know.

Late-life conversion often produces the opposite posture: certainty without wrestling. Scripture is quoted without being endured. Conviction is mistaken for depth. Confidence replaces humility.

This is not spiritual maturity. It is spiritual acceleration without formation.

The False Confidence of Sudden Certainty

Those who arrive late to belief often arrive with answers already decided. They have not lived long enough inside the questions. They have not carried belief through decades of disappointment, unanswered prayer, institutional failure, or moral ambiguity.

They have not had time to learn restraint.

As a result, theology becomes rigid. Scripture becomes weaponized. Complexity is dismissed as weakness. Anyone who questions is accused of backsliding or compromise.

The tragedy is that this confidence feels righteous while being profoundly shallow.

When Religion Becomes Power

The most dangerous turn comes when late conversion moves quickly from personal meaning to public control.

Religion is fused with political identity. Faith is recruited as enforcement. God is invoked not as mystery, but as mandate.

In this phase, belief is no longer about conscience or transformation. It becomes a tool of domination—coercive, punitive, and anti-human in its effects. Mercy is framed as weakness. Restraint is mocked. Doubt is treated as betrayal.

History is filled with movements born this way, and none of them end well.

The Cost of Loud Faith

The cost is not abstract.

Communities fracture. Thoughtful believers withdraw. Those who lived faithfully without spectacle are pushed aside by those who speak the loudest. Faith becomes performance. Certainty replaces care. Power replaces responsibility.

Religion loses its capacity for moral restraint and becomes another engine of absolutism.

That is not renewal. It is corrosion.