An0maly recently posted on Facebook about Brad Parscale — former campaign manager for Donald Trump — now officially registered as a foreign agent for Israel.
It got me thinking.
A foreign agent is, in essence, a double agent — a figure straight out of a James Bond movie, but far more consequential in reality. A double agent is someone who pledges loyalty to one entity while secretly (or even openly, when it’s dressed in legal formality) serving another — usually for personal gain.
In intelligence terms, it’s someone playing both sides, pretending to serve one master while advancing the interests of another. But in moral terms, it’s much deeper. It’s a manifestation of divided allegiance — loyalty for sale, conscience replaced by calculation.
“I also worked for President Trump. Does that matter when I was paid to run his campaign?” — Brad Parscale
That single line exposes a worldview: loyalty ends where the paycheck does.
This is where Kohlberg’s stages of moral development become profound.
From Payoff to Principle: Making Kohlberg Practical
Kohlberg’s ladder bites because it’s blunt:
Stage 1 & 2 (Obedience / Self-Interest):I do what rewards me or protects me. Fear/punishment and benefit/pleasure steer the wheel.
Stage 6 (Universal Ethical Principles):I do what’s right—especially when it costs me. Conscience guided by timeless norms (justice, human dignity, truth) overrules payoff.
What makes this profound isn’t the theory—it’s how often we mistake Stage 1–2 for maturity.
How Stage 1–2 Disguises Itself Today
Image management: “Is it good?” becomes “Will it trend? Hurt my brand?”
Rule-keeping-as-insurance: Obey to avoid trouble, not because the rule is just.
Tribal loyalty: “My side right or wrong” = safety and perks, not principle.
Cost–benefit morality: Integrity until it threatens status, revenue, or comfort.
Tell: When the incentives flip, so do the “convictions.”
What Stage 6 Actually Looks Like
Universalize it: You’re willing to live under the rule you’re about to apply to others—even to enemies.
Intrinsic duties: People are ends, not tools. You refuse to use a person to win a point, a sale, or an election.
Costly consistency: You keep promises that now disadvantage you; you tell the truth when a lie would “work.”
Tell: You can point to recent choices where you lost status, money, or comfort to do the right thing.
Moving From Payoff to Principle (Habits That Build a Spine)
Name your non-negotiables. Write the few principles you’ll obey at a loss (e.g., tell the truth; keep confidences; no dehumanizing).
Practice micro-costs daily. Take the honest hit in small things—crediting others, declining shady wins. Muscles grow under load.
Use the universality test.Would this be just if my opponent did it to me? Would I endorse this rule if I were the weakest person under it?
Choose correcting communities. Stay near people who love you enough to say “no” and who prize repentance over PR.
Sabbath from the scoreboard. Regularly step away from metrics (likes, sales, polls) so they stop feeling like gods.
Keep a moral ledger. Record decisions where you paid a price for principle. Review when compromise looks “reasonable.”
Quick Diagnostics
Would I still do this if no one knew? (exposes vanity)
Would I still refuse if refusing costs me? (exposes cowardice)
Does this use a person as a means? (exposes expediency)
Am I obeying because it’s safe—or because it’s true? (exposes fear)
Why It Matters
Stage 1–2 people are easy to buy, bully, or flatter. Stage 6 people are hard to move—and therefore trustworthy in families, firms, churches, and states. In an age of incentives and outrage, you won’t drift upward. You must decide, ahead of time, which losses you’re willing to take.
Do that, and you trade a life of calculation for a life of conscience. You’ll sleep better. Others will breathe easier around you. And the world will have one more person who cannot be rented by reward or ruled by fear.
When people like Parscale treat national allegiance as a revolving door — one day managing a U.S. presidential campaign, the next collecting millions from a foreign government — it’s not just politics. It’s moral regression. It’s a fall backward from principle to opportunism, from conviction to calculation.
Their god is not truth — it is money. And in that worship, they become instruments of whoever pays most, not servants of what is right.
The Bible calls this being “double-minded — unstable in all ways” (James 1:8). A double-minded person cannot be trusted because their compass changes with the wind. They confuse skill with integrity, contract with covenant.
And that’s the deeper tragedy: They become the perfect servants of corporatism and the deep state — useful, talented, but empty — because they have no fixed center.
In short: A double agent is not just dangerous strategically — they are dangerous morally. They hollow out trust itself, the foundation of civilization. And that is why Stage 6 moral development — universal, principled conscience — is the only true antidote to corruption disguised as professionalism.
History gives us another name for the double agent: Benedict Arnold. He, too, traded honor for ambition. He, too, found that worldly rewards come quickly — but judgment follows surely. For double agents, the ultimate reckoning is not political — it’s eternal.
The Spiritual Double Agent
The spiritual double agent wears the uniform of faith but carries the weapons of the flesh. They profess loyalty to truth, yet their allegiance changes with social pressure, profit, or pleasure. They pray for guidance, but choose convenience. They speak of God, but live for comfort. They appear faithful, but every decision is negotiated through the question:
This is the war between spirit and flesh, between covenant and comfort — the same battle that determines not only the fate of nations, but the destiny of every soul.
This duplicity doesn’t happen overnight — it grows from moral immaturity. In Kohlberg’s moral framework, it’s living forever in Stage 1 (Fear of Punishment) and Stage 2 (Self-interest and Exchange) — “I do what’s right if it benefits me or avoids pain.” But spiritual maturity — Stage 6 (Universal Principles) — calls us higher: “I do what’s right because it is right, because my conscience is bound to truth.”
This duplicity doesn’t happen overnight
The double-minded soul refuses that call. They stand between both worlds, trying to serve conscience without losing comfort. But the result is not balance — it’s paralysis. “A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.” (James 1:8)
Double-mindedness is the habit of holding two incompatible loyalties at once—public promise and private exit plan—and switching between them as convenience requires. Once it takes root, it poisons every covenant because covenants run on trust, not tactics. A “yes” that secretly means “until it hurts” corroded Rome, cracks families, hollows churches, and trains citizens to prefer optics over oaths. As an ancient warning puts it, the double-minded person is “unstable in all his ways” (Jas. 1:8).
Here’s how the rot spreads—and how to resist it.
How Double-Mindedness Undermines Our Covenants
Marriage: It seldom starts with a blowup; it starts with small evasions—private DMs, “just-friends” emotional hedges, off-ledger money and messages. The drift becomes affairs and secret accounts, then lawyers—and too often, parental alienation that turns children against their father. The inner script whispers, I deserve to be happy, which soon hardens into, My vows are negotiable when they cost me. A covenant shrinks into a transaction—benefits for performance—until one hard season “voids” the deal.
Friendship: We replace thick loyalty with thin networking. Friends become “contacts,” presence becomes “availability,” truth becomes flattery. We say, “I’m here for you,” but add silent terms and conditions: “as long as it’s convenient, on my timeline, if you keep agreeing with me.” Trust evaporates; everyone keeps receipts.
Community & Work: Committees ask for candor and reward conformity. Teams preach “psychological safety” but punish dissent. Leaders preach “family” while writing policies that assume betrayal. People learn to signal virtue in public and speak honestly only in side chats. The result is a low-trust equilibrium that requires surveillance, NDAs, and PR to keep the wheels on.
Citizenship: We boast, “I’ll speak the truth,” and then hedge when the truth costs likes, clients, or invitations. Parties become tribes and rivals become heretics. Principles bend to polls; “process” replaces conscience. We outsource courage to influencers, then rage when they disappoint us.
Faith: We pledge, “I’ll follow God—unless He interferes with my plans.” Devotion becomes a lifestyle accessory. We keep the rules that cost least, quote texts that flatter our preferences, and rename disobedience as “authenticity.” Performative religion thrives; repentance withers.
The Mechanics of the Drift
Self-talk that absolves:“It’s not lying; it’s managing.”“It’s not betrayal; it’s self-care.”
Stalled mission. Energy that should go to purpose gets rerouted to politics and posture.
Civically (public life)
Permanent performance. Speeches float free of commitments; statements are crafted for applause, not truth.
Outrage markets. Without conviction, attention becomes currency. Performers sell heat because they can’t offer light.
Polarized fragility. Tribes demand loyalty oaths precisely because no one trusts anyone’s word.
How the trap tightens
Hedging → hiding → hollowing. The more angles you manage, the more masks you need; the more masks you wear, the less substance remains.
Short-term wins, long-term loss. You dodge immediate costs but incur compound interest in stress, suspicion, and squandered credibility.
The way out (re-single your mind)
Name your North Star. Write the few non-negotiables you’ll keep when it costs you.
Make one hard alignment. Tell the truth you’ve been trimming. Close the DM. Return the money. Apologize in full.
Shrink the gap. Aim for the smallest possible distance between what you profess, what you post, and what you practice.
Choose covenants over contracts. Re-commit to relationships and missions that outlast moods and metrics.
Accept the cost. Integrity is expensive up front and cheap over time; duplicity is cheap up front and ruinously priced later.
Single-mindedness doesn’t add exits; it adds direction. And direction—more than optionality—is what turns effort into peace, affection into trust, and public life into something sturdier than theater.
The Cure: Single-Hearted Practices
You don’t drift into integrity; you train for it.
Pre-commit your non-negotiables. Write the few promises you’ll keep at a loss (truth-telling, marital fidelity, no dehumanizing, no secret ledgers). Review them weekly.
Practice costly micro-honesty. Credit others publicly. Refuse shady wins. Keep small promises on time. Moral muscle grows under load.
Burn escape hatches you shouldn’t have. Delete the back-channel, end the flirty thread, close the anonymous account, put finances on one ledger, submit to shared calendars where appropriate.
Let your “yes” be yes—out loud. Use clear words and deadlines. Stop saying “maybe” when you mean “no.”
Invite correction that can actually cost you. Give two trusted people permission to ask anything and to slow you down.
Renew covenants ritually. Rehearse vows (anniversaries), refresh team charters (quarterly), revisit church membership promises. Ritual keeps memory honest.
Tell the truth early. Confess small breaches before they become patterns. Repair quickly; restitution beats reputation.
Sabbath from the scoreboard. Regularly step off platforms and out of metrics so applause stops feeling like oxygen.
What You Get Back
Single-heartedness won’t spare you loss; it prepares you to bear it. But it gives you a clean conscience, relationships that can carry real weight, institutions that need fewer locks, and a civic life where disagreement is possible without contempt. Most of all, it returns your freedom: when you are no longer split, you cannot be bought cheaply or bullied easily.
Choose which promises you’ll keep before it hurts. Then keep them when it does. That’s how covenants survive—and how people become whole.
This is the spirit of moral relativism — the religion of self-justification. It produces moral chameleons who change colors with their environment, calling compromise “compassion” and cowardice “wisdom.”
The tragedy of our age is not simply that evil exists — it’s that so many of the good have become double agents in their own souls. They profess freedom but live enslaved to the world’s applause. They speak of truth but edit it for comfort.
The War Within: Spirit vs. Flesh
Paul described this internal civil war in Romans 7: “For the good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.” This is the eternal struggle of divided allegiance — the conscience calling heavenward while the flesh clings to earth.
The spirit calls us to principle. The flesh bargains for pleasure. The conscience says “stand.” The ego whispers “survive.”
Each decision, each moment of compromise or courage, determines which master we serve.
The Call to Singleness of Heart
To heal the double agent within, one must choose. Not once, but daily.
To serve one master. To live one truth. To love without duplicity. To honor covenants, even when they cost.
Freedom begins when the soul stops negotiating and starts obeying. As Elijah cried to a divided Israel: “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him.” (1 Kings 18:21)
Final Reflection
The world trains double agents. God trains disciples.
One bends truth to survive; The other dies to self to live.
And in that dying — to ego, to comfort, to moral relativism — the soul finally becomes free. That is the essence of moral adulthood, spiritual integrity, and covenant fidelity in an age of deception.
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