You Cannot Out-Ideologize Creation
That was the deepest takeaway from my conversation with Mollie Engelhart.
Mollie was once a successful vegan restaurateur in Los Angeles, running multiple plant-based restaurants, building a brand, and living inside a moral framework that felt coherent: protect animals, reduce harm, save the planet, do better.
Then she went to the land.
And the land argued back.
Not on social media.
Not in theory.
Not in a seminar.
In compost. In death. In pests. In breeding cycles. In soil. In waste. In crops being eaten. In animals living because other things die.
And what she discovered was blunt enough to offend almost everyone:
You cannot out-ideologize creation.
The problem with modern life is not that we have too few ideas
It’s that we trust our ideas more than we trust reality.
We build moral systems in climate-controlled rooms.
We create identities detached from the body.
We imagine food without death, freedom without limits, sex without consequence, abundance without ecology, and human flourishing without obedience to anything outside the self.
Then we wonder why everything feels unstable.
Mollie’s story matters because she didn’t just change her opinion. She let reality correct her.
That is increasingly rare.
The laboratory corrects the curriculum we write for ourselves
One of the ways I’ve been describing this across recent interviews is through the difference between curriculum and laboratory.
God gives curriculum: revelation, wisdom, pattern, law, order.
But He also gives a laboratory: creation itself.
The problem is that many of us now try to write our own curriculum and then refuse to test it in the lab.
Mollie did the opposite.
She got close enough to the land to let it expose her abstractions.
She discovered that “vegan purity” collapses in contact with actual farming. Why? Because there is no such thing as eating without death. There is no food system untouched by sacrifice. Life feeds on life. Compost feeds on death. Soil builds from decay. Fields are protected by killing pests. Crops are sustained by losses we usually don’t see.
You can hide that truth from consumers.
You can’t hide it from farmers.\
Death is not a glitch in the system
This is where the conversation got really uncomfortable.
Mollie said something modern people are trained not to say:
Death is not a failure of the system.
It is part of the system.
Again, that doesn’t make cruelty good. It doesn’t mean industrial abuse is acceptable. It doesn’t mean suffering is trivial. But it does mean this: modern fantasies of innocent consumption are exactly that—fantasies.
We want to believe we can live without cost.
Eat without sacrifice.
Consume without consequence.
Exist without limits.
We can’t.
And once you understand that, a lot of modern ideology starts to look less like compassion and more like denial.
Polarization is designed to keep you stupid
One of Mollie’s most useful phrases was “weapons of mass division.”
That’s what many of today’s culture-war issues have become.
Take a real issue.
Attach it to a tribe marker.
Drop in a trigger word.
Watch half the country recoil before thinking.
That’s not discernment. That’s conditioning.
And it means one of the first casualties of polarization is often the good idea hidden inside the wrong tribe.
Mollie’s point wasn’t “everything is true.”
It was: stop reacting so fast that you can’t think.
That may be one of the most countercultural disciplines left.
Because if all someone has to do is attach the wrong label to a worthy idea in order to make you reject it, then you are not thinking freely. You are being managed.
Stewardship is not “damage now, offset later”
This was another major point.
Modern systems love this formula:
- Violate creation.
- Monetize the violation.
- Create a moral narrative about “offsetting” it.
- Keep going.
That is not stewardship.
That is domination with paperwork.
Real stewardship means working with creation, not against it and then pretending the damage can be spiritually or bureaucratically reimbursed later.
Genesis gets this exactly right.
Adam’s first job is not to exploit the garden.
It is to dress and keep it.
That means dominion is not domination.
It means abundance and restraint belong together.
It means there are limits built into the world, and sanity begins by respecting them.
Children still understand reality if we let them
One of the strongest moments in the interview was Mollie describing her daughter learning from simply watching cattle.
No ideological seminar.
No abstraction.
No theory.
Just reality.
Male and female.
Fertility and timing.
Life and death.
The way the cycle actually works.
And that’s the thing modern people keep forgetting:
Children placed in honest contact with reality often understand more than adults trapped inside ideology.
The problem is not that reality is unclear.
The problem is that we increasingly build whole systems designed to teach against it.
Psalm 2 is happening in real time
As I listened to Mollie, I kept thinking of Psalm 2:
“Let us cast His bands asunder.”
That is the project now.
Throw off the limits.
Burst the boundaries.
Rewrite the structure.
Reject the givenness.
Call rebellion liberation.
And yet creation keeps refusing to cooperate.
Bodies still matter.
Sex still matters.
Death still matters.
Food still comes from somewhere.
Limits still exist.
Nature still tells the truth, even when institutions don’t.
That’s why this matters so much.
Because if we keep trying to organize civilization against creation itself, the bill eventually comes due.
Final thought
Mollie Engelhart’s story is not really about veganism.
It’s about what happens when a person gets close enough to reality to be corrected by it.
That is harder than it sounds.
Especially now.
Especially when your reputation, income, tribe, and identity are all tied to the old story.
But it may be one of the last honest paths left:
Bring every idea into contact with creation and ask,
Does it hold up?
Because you cannot out-argue, out-brand, out-market, or out-ideologize the world God made.
Eventually, the laboratory answers back.
Sneak Peek
Next on Created in the Image of God, we continue exploring what it means to live truthfully and humanely in a fractured world.
On Sunday, October 11 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Misha Boyett—author, youth pastor, and Down Syndrome advocate—about rest, disability, and our culture of achievement, and what it means to recognize the inherent belovedness of every human being. From confronting perfection and performance to discovering a more grace-filled vision of wholeness and flourishing in Jesus, it promises to be a needed conversation.
Then on Tuesday, October 13 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Adi Kanda—author, spiritual guide, and founder of World Without Fear—to explore the inner work of facing fear, uncovering the patterns that hold us back, and how deeper self-awareness can open the way toward transformation.
