I’m writing this on a Saturday morning, just before a historic snowstorm is set to descend on Louisville, Kentucky—one projected to bring as much snow as almost anywhere in the region.
There is something about snowstorms (or more broadly, in time of emergency) that reliably makes me marvel. In ideal conditions where government is acting as it ought, government springs into action in the face of hazardous weather: roads are pre-treated, plows are deployed, and—more broadly—conditions are created for ordinary life to continue as uninterrupted as possible.
I admit that I am generally impressed with how the various layers of government in my area work together with notable coordination. Officials hold press conferences, stream them across major social media platforms, and explain in detail what crews and city departments are doing to prepare the city for days of potential hardship.
I am also genuinely grateful for—and honor—the brave first responders who will make themselves available to assist citizens in moments of real need.
But this brings me to the deeper question: why does any of this happen in the first place?
If you really stop and think about it, it is something of a miracle. Especially after Genesis 3, human beings ought to live with the expectation of regression and decline. That there is any sustained social coordination at all—much less effective coordination during turbulent weather—is what Christian theology has long described as common grace.
More narrowly, the idea that a people can come together, confer a form of derived authority on government, and empower it to oversee the maintenance of civil society—laws, roads, trust—is deeply tied to a Christian theory of government.
At the heart of this is what political theorists call the coordination problem: How can diverse actors and institutions within a society work together to care for one another when everyone has limited resources and time? It is the idea of securing the political common good—goods, like plowed roads, that everyone believes must be held in common that allow members of society to reach their proper end—namely, their flourishing.
Abraham Lincoln captured this insight well:
“The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves—in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.”
Lincoln’s formulation explains why I find myself so appreciative of government doing what government is uniquely designed to do: preserving order through law by a rightful authority. I cannot ensure that every road across Louisville is plowed. I could, in theory, pay a private contractor to clear my own street, or perhaps help a neighbor or two. But I cannot, in my individual capacity, coordinate the plowing of an entire city. Why? I don’t have the legitimate authority to do that and someone may disagree with my own personal preferences on how best to plow and in what order and magnitude. I would apply that same thought to my fellow citizen—what authority do they have to oversee an action that they were not given public trust over?
For that reason, a society requires an entity whose general task—under rightful authority—is to provide certain public goods through the shared powers of taxation to which citizens contribute and receive equal benefit from.
Why does this matter for Christian thought? Because Scripture in Romans 13 is clear that government exists for a purpose: to preserve order through law by a rightful authority. There will always be debates about the proper scope of that task, but biblically speaking, government is competent to do a relatively small number of things well. It can tax, it can arrest, and—in situations like this—it can plow roads.
Plowing roads is not playing the role of a parent, a pastor, or a counselor. It is a modest public good ordered toward external affairs—roads that allow individuals to travel safely and attend to their families’ needs, whether that means getting to work or making a necessary run to Kroger for food, batteries, and water ahead of a storm. Even here, there will be prudential debates on how best to go about the task of plowing by a city government. These are not questions that I believe Scripture gives us absolutely finite and granular detail on how to apply, so it requires reason and prudence.
I am always interested in the practical implications of Christian thought. If you are grateful for public plowing services, if you are thankful for governing officials who can oversee the maintenance of a city’s most critical services during hard times, it is because the idea of tranquil order—what Augustine called tranquillitas ordinis—flows from the very mind of God himself, who is the ground of order, intelligibility, and truth itself and who confers a limited, derived authority for government to act.
In the meantime, stay warm—and stay safe.
This article originally appeared at X on January 24, 2026.
