For about a thousand years when someone died, we all said the same thing. It didn’t matter if you were a prince or a peasant, a saint or a total disaster. When the breathing stopped and the heart stopped pushing blood through our veins, we said: “Rest in Peace.”

The phrase didn’t start as “Rest in Peace” but as the Latin “Dormit in pace” which means “He sleeps in peace.”

It wasn’t just a nice thought; it was a theological statement that the person had died “in the peace of the Church.” In short, he’d fallen into the arms of Christ.

It was a simple phrase. A humble phrase. An acknowledgment that the struggle of life, the bills, the arguments, the vanity, the sheer exhausting noise of being a human being was finally over. You were handing the reins back to the Creator. You were entering a realm where the politics of this world no longer mattered.

But now, somehow in the last few years, the people who run our culture decided that wasn’t good enough. “Peace” was too quiet. Too passive. Too… religious?

So they gave us a new one: “Rest in Power.”

Have you heard this? I saw it today concerning the death of Renee Good, the woman who attempted to flee from ICE officers and nearly ran one over before being shot. The phrase is everywhere nowadays, especially for the social justice crowd. But have you ever stopped to think about what it actually means?

“Rest in Power.”

It’s an oxymoron. A contradiction. The whole point of “rest” is the absence of power. It is the realization that I am not the fulcrum on which the universe turns.

Power is about exertion. It’s about force. It’s about the ability to make others do your will.

If you’re “resting in power,” you’re not resting at all. You’re still on the clock. You’re still a tool for someone else’s political agenda. You’re being drafted into a permanent, ghostly protest march that never ends.

What a horror that is.

You have to stay “powerful” so they can use your memory to win an argument in the combox or on cable news.

It’s the ultimate expression of the modern secular religion. In this worldview, there is no afterlife. There is no God to judge you or comfort you. There is only the “movement.” There is only the collective. And if the collective decides your death is useful for the cause, you don’t get to rest. You get “power.”

But here’s the thing: Power is what we’re supposed to leave behind.

The most fundamental truth of Christianity is that you are not God. And thank God for that. You aren’t in charge of the universe. When you die, your influence, your bank account, your Twitter followers all evaporates in an instant.

And that’s the mercy of it! The “peace” we talk about is the peace of finally being powerless. It’s the realization that the heavy lifting is being done by someone else. Those united to God in the afterlife can pray for the living but that doesn’t mean they have power. It is precisely the opposite. Only by acknowledging and loving the all-powerful God can you find your way into Heaven. We kneel before God.

By replacing “Peace” with “Power,” the people in charge are telling you exactly what they value. They don’t care about your soul. They don’t even believe you have one. They care about your utility. They want to politicize the cemetery. Hey, the dead already vote so why shouldn’t they politicize too?

It’s a symptom of a society that has lost its mind because it’s lost its connection to anything eternal. If you believe this world is all there is, then “power” is the only currency that matters. Even when you’re dead.

It’s depressing. It’s shallow. And it’s a lie.

You don’t want to rest in power. Nobody does. You want to rest in the arms of something much bigger than yourself. You want to rest in the truth.

And the truth is, this earthly struggle eventually ends. For everyone. Even for the activists. But don’t tell them that. They’ve got a rally to get to.