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The ancient Hebrew idea of mishpat, a gradual, long-term "sifting-out" by an all-holy God as the one who saves and judges sinful human beings within his creation, provides Keillor with his key hermeneutic tool. Unlike modern conceptions in which divine action and natural causality are assumed to be mutually exclusive, Keillor follows Scripture and traditional Christianity in seeing God's action in and through ordinary historical processes; without making it explicit, Keillor seems to operate with a Thomistic framework of divine causality, at one point stating that "Visible means and observable (secondary) causes do not remove an invisible actor." In Jesus mishpat was not superseded but rather denationalized and concentrated: he became its focal agent as the Son of Man, "very God descending to a criminal's cross and ascending to God's right hand as Lord of the universe," a sinless servant atoning for the sins of humanity. Beginning with the incarnation, God's winnowing purposes in history are identical with Christ's: those who believe in him and his gospel will be saved, those who reject him will be judged. This applies to nations as well as individuals, an idea nowhere rejected in the New Testament. Although Scripture does not explain exactly how the risen Christ exercises his power in history prior to his "curtain-dropping" Last Judgment on the nations, "[w]idespread acceptance of the gospel can contribute to peace and order in a society and thus slow the pace of history (major, tragic events)." Conversely, sinful rejection of the gospel on a large scale invites divine retribution, as God "uses historical events to punish collective, national evil."
This framework can be tested by its ability to make sense of major events in American history. Clearly unafraid of controversy, Keillor opens his book by inquiring whether the terrorist bombings of 9/11 might be understood in this way. He first considers secular and Christian reactions to 9/11 across a wide spectrum, showing how particular commitments yielded predictable readings, from Susan Sontag to Jerry Falwell. As a hedge against bias, Keillor's method is to identify overlap between "major actions or features of the United States and the West that anger radical Islamists the most and then to see if any might also anger a holy God." After patiently considering multiple possibilities, he concludes with a "cautious, cause-restricted interpretation of September 11 as possibly God's judgment on us for our materialism, our cultural exports seducing others into immorality and our use of terroristic guerrilla units against the Soviets" in the 1980s in Afghanistan. Turning to the 19th century, Keillor shows how the British invasion of Washington in 1814 might be seen as God's judgment against a self-satisfied, deistic political elite out of touch with its citizenry, many of whom were beginning to embrace the gospel in the Second Great Awakening. Vastly more cataclysmic was the Civil War, which Keillor—like Lincoln in his second inaugural address, but in great detail—interprets as the culmination of God's punishing mishpat on the nation for its failure to end slavery before the advent of Whitney's cotton gin made the peculiar institution integral to the southern economy and hence to the nation's politics. All three cases are developed with a professional historian's judicious combination of evidence and interpretation. All three cases carefully delineate pervasive, sinful human behavior when judged according to the gospel.
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