Tolstoy argues in the early sections that governments and institutional religion have distorted Christ’s essential teachings to justify violence and war, emphasizing that the command not to resist evil is not a moral suggestion but a fundamental law capable of transforming human life, while explaining that people fail to follow it because they are trapped in social conditioning and fear, revealing how church and state cooperate to dull human conscience, and asserting that when an individual begins to follow the truth within, conflict with existing systems becomes inevitable yet marks the beginning of genuine spiritual freedom.
