John Thomas is an educator, a church elder, and the Libertarian candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, running alongside gubernatorial candidate Ken Krawchuk. A man who has spent his life inside both the church and the liberty movement, he is exactly the voice this week's history called for.

On the eighteenth of April, 1521, a thirty-seven-year-old excommunicated monk stood alone in a crowded hall at Worms and refused an order backed by the two highest powers on earth — the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. Posterity gave him a ringing phrase he almost certainly never said. What Martin Luther verifiably declared was quieter, and far more radical: that his conscience, captive to the Word of God, would not recant — because it is neither safe nor right to go against

The lesson of Worms was not the lesson Luther meant to give. He meant to defend the Word of God against a corrupt Church. He taught, instead, that no earthly authority is beyond the judgment of a conscience answerable to something higher — and that lesson, once learned, could not be confined to the Church.