The rage and hatred being exhibited in America right now isn’t something that just suddenly sprang up and pushed itself into our society by its own power. If our country was filled to the brim with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a vibrant Church, there would be no massive moral void for these anarchists and nihilists to expand their territory; nor would there exist the spiritual oxygen to fuel their fiery bitterness and spark their Marxist revolution.
No, these angry agitators easily found their stronghold in the vacuum being created in the West by the retreat of Christianity and in some areas, the complete collapse of Christian influence. What we are witnessing right now is a spiritual crisis coming to a head in America.
How can this be, you might ask. How can a radical sociopolitical movement led by Antifa protesters and other radical leftist organizations find its power within the abandoned territory of a failing Christianity? Isn’t there a clear difference between issues of Church and State, or theology and democracy?
The answer may somewhat surprise you: This isn’t primarily a political uprising we are seeing, but a new secular religion spreading an alternative gospel of socialist ideology in opposition to the traditional belief systems that sustained America as “one nation under God” for over 200 years. The seditious words and violent deeds of these social justice zealots show all the hallmarks of a religious fervor intent on establishing their one true “faith.” And those who stand in the way of their moral crusade will either bend the knee or be destroyed.
See how they display the characteristics of a pious religion, similar to how Satan often appears as an “angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15). According to columnist Frank Miele of Real Clear Politics, “The Dictatorship of the Politically Correct is ascendant… The radical left will cleanse dissident voices, impose a regime of absolute obedience and collect tribute from the corporate elites who owe them their safety to those who control the mob.” Indeed this new leftist religion has already established an orthodoxy to indoctrinate us, demanded tithes and offerings to secure one’s salvation, and ordained a priestly class of Hollywood celebrities to mediate until the people conform to its new commandments.
But how will we all fare under this new consecrated authority?
In the Church of the Politically Correct, there are “sinners” who must repent of the “Four Olds”: old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits. A subversive concept first created by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, the Four Olds are long-held traditions that must be removed because they interfere “with the creation of a modern socialist society,” which is the Utopia of the new faith.
Don’t worry if you don’t know what sins you’ve committed; the religious elites of this new sect will let you know. Your current level of affluence, the pigment of your skin (or lack thereof), your sexuality, your cultural heritage, and your religion will all factor in on how badly you’ve fallen from grace in their eyes. Repent publicly of these sinful things (if you can), and you might be safely brought into the fold. But even such self-reproach isn’t a guarantee of acceptance when your social class and outward appearance doesn’t fit their model of conformity.
Next we have the “heretics” that are rooted out and exposed in the Church of the Politically Correct. These are the people who at one time appeared to be in the “social justice” camp or at least their allies. But then one of these honorary members makes a slip in something he says or does that falls outside of the orthodoxy. This is where the “woke” mob finds them out, exposes them for their heterodoxy, and “cancels” them.
J. K. Rowling knows this all too well. She was once the darling of the Left: She had given them Harry Potter, a better, more acceptable Christ figure, who brought fantasy and magic that could transform you into anything you wanted to be, regardless of reality. She even suggested that some of her literary characters might be gay. But then (gasp!) she defended the biological concept of two genders in sexual activity, and her true form was revealed: a “transphobic” wolf in sheep’s clothing. Now she has been labeled a heretic, and therefore she must be ostracized and her status and livelihood taken away. Even other authors in her literary firm have now abandoned her in fear of their own cancellation by the mob. Once a colleague is exposed as a heretic, you better cut ties with them quickly or soon bear the guilt by association.
Last but not least, you have the “infidels” that oppose the Church of the Politically Correct. These are biblical Christians who refuse to bend the knee to anyone but their God. Their beliefs are informed by the Bible and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and as such, they deny that true justice can be culturally defined or socially constructed with the same authority as those that are derived from Scripture and the biblical standard of righteousness. They are considered infidels because they have committed blasphemy for not abandoning their faith and practice for the true religion of the Cultural Revolution.
These infidels have no hope of redemption in this rising cult. “Unbelievers” won’t just be canceled from society; they must be destroyed. The angry mob sees themselves as the Moral Ones; and thus, the infidels are immoral and spiritually dangerous no matter how harmless they may be. In their eyes, infidels and their Biblical convictions are synonymous with Hate because they are diametrically opposed to the mob’s humanistic definition of what constitutes pure, untainted expressions of love, inclusion, acceptance, and tolerance.
The reality is, however, the angry mob of this new secular religion are self-confessed “trained Marxists” who are actively displaying true hatred these days. They hate social conservatives, they hate the Constitution, they hate Christians, they hate the Bible, and even worse, they hate God. They label their opposition as Nazis and Fascists, but then they themselves act like those very entities by their power-hungry brutality and bloody “Brownshirt” tactics. They say they speak for the oppressed and yet act like the oppressor to those outside their faith. They rail against self-righteous hypocrites, but then establish themselves as the new Pharisees of the Left.
Like the Pharisees of old, they have set themselves up as morally superior, separated from those they consider religiously unclean. Like Pharisees, they are adept at public “virtue-signaling” to prove their righteousness and gain approval from the masses. Like Pharisees, they have established themselves as a religious-political party opposed to Jesus Christ and His Kingdom. And like the Pharisees, they seek to stone to death (or even crucify) those who sin against their Law of Political Correctness.
Historically, every time this kind of secular religion has found a foothold in a nation or region of the world, they have followed a similar agenda in establishing their church. First, they infiltrate the traditional institutions of society that promote the old ways (the Four Olds), then retool them from the inside-out and take control. They control speech so that no one will be allowed to criticize or offer alternative viewpoints. They control schools so that their indoctrination can be unhindered by the pesky facts of history, science, or other classical schools of thought. They control the media so that their disinformation and propaganda can be relentless and overwhelming in the molding of minds to accept their way of thinking.
Are we not seeing this play out in America right now? Under the protection of the sympathetic left-leaning establishment, the woke mob of the Politically Correct has freely moved from simple protests to riots, peaceful demonstrations to physical violence, and from toppling statues to toppling people. Their malevolent progress has seen little push-back from most of our cherished institutions, including some so-called Christian denominations and organizations that mainly preach a “social gospel” derived from the ever-shifting values of secular culture in order to retain their tenuous position in the world.
Do you think that the woke mob won’t soon turn their full attention to Christians, regardless of their level of compromise and appeasement, and seek to exterminate us once and for all? History and the Bible tell us to expect this religious persecution at any moment. Christian statues and buildings are already being vandalized by the mob, so the next step of silencing the faithful with physical violence or death is inevitable. Did our Lord not say it would be so?
Truly, we are at a crossroads in the battle for the soul of America, the West, and sadly, the world. This isn’t a sociopolitical issue where Christians might be confusing the kingdoms of earth with the Kingdom of Heaven and wrongly seeking salvation through political reformation. This is clearly a spiritual battle where Satan has produced a counterfeit religion through the mechanisms of secular institutions to defeat Jesus Christ and His Church. And the reason we are at this point of crisis is because many Christians today have failed to see it as a rising cult intent on capturing souls and putting them into another level of sinful bondage.
To make matters worse, the visible Church in Western society has shown little interest in fully trusting in the supernatural power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to establish righteousness and bring reconciliation with God through repentance and faith. Too often, Christians have focused instead on weak temporal remedies: seeker-sensitive entertainment, social justice initiatives, and feel-good “love is acceptance” sensibilities promoted by the rising influence of progressive Christianity. They have carved out a safe haven for themselves that exists only in their personal piety, while turning a blind eye to the spiritual realities of the world where bold evangelism and discipleship might actually wake people up to see God’s truth and come to Christ. Why have some Christians so quickly turned away from him who called them by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel of culturally-based social righteousness?
This is the spiritual wasteland that American Christianity has created in its effort to appease the world and show its commonality with it. What did these progressive Christians expect to happen when they replaced the reality of Christ found in God’s word with a weak imitation created in the image of human mythology, psychology, and philosophy? By doing so, they played right into the hands of the Antichrist secularists who were busy fashioning a counterfeit god in the same worldly way, and doing so with much more success because such vain creations always appeal to fallen humanity. Is it any wonder that a new religion has taken up residence where Christianity once stood and indoctrinated the masses with their fantasy version of a savior as found in the Utopian idol of cultural Marxism?
The sad thing is, too many professing Christians have forgotten that the Gospel will always triumph over a counterfeit message founded on human speculation and the flesh. Indeed, Marxist ideology is based on the fantasy of human apotheosis, and so it must appeal to mankind’s flawed imagination to find its cult-like power. The philosophical system that buoys their radical agenda can never explain reality, nor present it in any concrete form because then it would lose its metaphysical authority to attract religiously-zealous converts. Therefore, the only way they can compete with the reality of Jesus Christ is through abstract psychologically-refined counter symbols to impress itself into the collective consciousness of its victim target group.
This new religion depends solely on their ability to create a stylized bigger, bolder hyper-reality designed to thwart one’s perception of truth and extract a deep spiritual connection with their false gospel of social perfection. In essence, they are not trying to distort the true Gospel as much as they are trying to establish the framework of a new reality that appeals to people whose thin-skinned emotions have been altered by constant exposure to fantasy and other alternatives to reality found in the mesmerizing entertainments of our Western culture.
As Christine Folch explains it in an article for The Atlantic, Americans are far more enthralled with science fiction and fantasy movies than the rest of the world because we, more than any other people, have become “disenchanted” with the “explainable, predictable, and boring” realities of their affluent lives, and can only find hope “in a world of mystery and wonder” (Why the West Loves Sci-Fi and Fantasy: A Cultural Explanation, June 2013). This growing addiction to enchantment, however, will soon fail them.
Why, then, have we Christians, who have the wonderful truth of the Gospel, conceded any ground to this fantasy cult of hate and destruction? It is all smoke and mirrors put forth by Satan to deceive the masses and control them through a spiritual manipulation that attempts to speak to their souls’ overwhelming need for some mystical, fairy-tale justice. Yet it is a lie destined for the pit of hell that will only bring more pain and heartache when they realize their very own sins will still condemn them without God’s gracious intervention. Social justice will never solve the world’s sin problem, governments will never be able to legislate the sin problem away, and escaping into fantasy will certainly not make our sins suddenly disappear by merely wishing them away.
Only Jesus Christ and His work of salvation offer the real solution for this sin-soaked world, for there is no other name under heaven given among men where by we must be saved (Acts 4:12). “In Him,” the Bible tells us, “we have redemption through His blood” (Ephesians 1:7).
Sadly, because of Christianity’s fearful silence or malpractice, a rising generation of confused and angry souls have never heard the message that could bring them the hope of spiritual reconciliation and redemption they are really seeking. What if instead of listening to a rabid revolutionary leader spewing out Communist propaganda, these young people sat down to hear the bold, soul-stirring words of a man from Nazareth named Jesus who centuries ago stood up in a synagogue as God in the flesh to make an unprecedented statement to the world:
The book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and recited the passage where it was written,
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.
And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon Him. And He said to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:17-20).
The hate-filled secular religion trying to bring destruction to our life and liberty here in America is no match for the true love and freedom found in this earth-shattering proclamation of Jesus Christ; nor can the angry mob ever stop Christ’s faithful disciples from living out that Truth for the glory of God and the salvation of men and women from every tribe, tongue, and nation. This is the Gospel of grace that truly breaks the chains of sin and death and sets the captives free. This is why Stephen, the first disciple to be martyred, boldly preached the Gospel to the angry mob despite his imminent death by a slow and cruel stoning. He sacrificed his life in the hope that those listening might find forgiveness through faith in Jesus Christ by his fearless witness of God’s truth.
In light of Stephen’s moving example, the question must be asked of today’s Christians: Why would we ever surrender our spiritual ground to the enemy and capitulate to the world’s worthless political rhetoric when we have the most impactful, revolutionary message of all time?
