This essay builds upon my recent WND column which addressed the false choice of “progressive” vs “conservative” political affiliation, and exposed it as a tactic of psychological-manipulation-through-rhetoric by the Marxists, designed to trap the people of God into a “tide of history” mind-set, in order to neutralize our resistance to their campaign to replace Judeo-Christian civilization with a “Socialist Utopia.”
The best way to break free from a trap is to know how it was constructed, so today’s column delves deeper into political history.
The origins of left/right progressive/conservative polarization come from France during its revolutionary period that started in the 1790s. The French Revolution, like the American Revolution, was ultimately a war by the “lower classes” against the top-down rulership of European monarchies.
Crying “No King but Jesus,” the children of the First Great Awakening (1740s) in America (many of them Christian clergy of the “Black Robed Regiment” https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/24635 ) won that war in 1776, creating the world’s first, best and longest lasting constitutional republic: a non-sectarian Bible-based model embraced by theists and deists alike that ended both rule by Monarchy and formal class distinctions.
The French, however, associated Christianity with the corrupt Roman Catholic system then undergirding the French monarchy and thus rejected the Judeo-Christian framework of the American model. Instead, they invented a new humanistic state religion that blended paganism and occultism with deism, allowing them to justify a demonic orgy of mass murder of aristocrats, clergymen, and others, called the Reign of Terror.
The French Republic which emerged from the revolution was forced back under Catholicism by Napoleon and pursued a pre-Marxist proto-socialist agenda (which Pope Francis would probably have loved). That ended with the “June Insurrection” of 1848 in which ten thousand unemployed workers were slaughtered by the government for protesting a subsistence-level “welfare” program.
Two facts from that period are critical:
First, the Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles was translated to French and published in Paris a few weeks before the June Insurrection.
Second, the French parliament in 1848 was a political battlefield pitting the “Party of Movement” (progenitors of the progressives) against the “Party of Order” (the pro-Royalist “conservatives”). The Party of Movement sat on the left and the Party of Order sat on the right in their assembly hall.
So the framework for the Marxist “tide of history” narrative in which they play the “progressive” heroes fighting for freedom and liberty for the oppressed, and we’re the “conservatives” defending the status quo of privilege for the rich and powerful, embodies the spirit and perspective of the French Revolution, not the American Revolution.
What is the primary difference between the two revolutions that produced such stunningly different results? Allegiance to the God of the Bible!
Americans overwhelmingly prospered by aligning ourselves to God in our constitution and culture until 1947 when our Supreme Court replaced the Bible with Secular Humanism (the religion of Marxism) as our religious foundation. Since then our freedoms and culture have been smothered by ever creeping (sometimes leaping) Socialism.
Now, just as identifying as “conservatives” ensnares us in the Marxist trap of being “foot-dragging defenders of the status quo” instead of proactive visionaries of a God-honoring “Shining City on a Hill,” so does our blind and unqualified defense of “capitalism” (as the term is used today) ensnare us in the role of shielding the globalist super-rich from scrutiny and accountability.
Socialism vs Capitalism is a self-defeating false choice for “conservatives” because it frames the public policy debate in Humanist terms. Both Socialism and Capitalism reflect Darwinist premises: Socialism emphasizes human-driven evolution toward utopian perfection (measured by the advance of egalitarianism), while pure Capitalism emphasizes hands-off economic “survival of the fittest” as the alternate path toward the same goal (measured by technological advancement). Both reject the notion of God’s active guidance of humanity in favor of the Humanist doctrine of human-self-perfectibility.
Both Socialism and Capitalism contain enough elements of the Biblical worldview to lure well-intentioned members of the religious left and religious right into fighting about their respective merits and shortcomings. Thus, once again the Humanist elites use the tactic of polarization to divide and conquer the masses by getting us to believe that predatory corporatism and governmental socialism are our only choices: always keeping public policy debate focused on the fight between the two camps (both of which they control at the top level). It’s just another version of the Dem Blue Team vs GOP Red Team tactic of the Purple Uniparty that we fall for every election cycle.
In contrast, the Biblical model of economics assumes all wealth is God’s and the duty of every human being is ethical stewardship of whatever portion He puts in our hands, to maximize the blessing for all. And the Biblical legal principles for preventing multi-generational hoarding by self-serving family dynasties are limitations on usury and the cyclical Jubilee system of debt-liberation.
Shamefully, we modern Christians are so Biblically illiterate that most of us can’t even grasp how Biblical economics works, let alone articulate its fundamentals as an alternative to the Socialist/Capitalist paradigm. Indeed, we are so heavily steeped in the Marxists’ corrupt logic that even we Christians will fall immediately into squabbling about “forced redistribution of wealth through taxation” vs “the duty of society to care for the poor and needy” as if those are the only options.
We would never have been engulfed in this swamp of false choices had we not first surrendered the culture to “secularism,” which is just the religion of Humanism by another name. To reclaim America we must stop letting the Humanists define reality for us by submitting to their false logical presuppositions, and instead openly and unapologetically champion Biblical wisdom as the solution to social and fiscal problems. Truth will prevail only if those who know the truth resume our duty to defend and teach it.
