Scott Lively Explains Marxism
In the beginning, Western Civilization rested on the two testaments of the Bible, and its laws and culture followed a Judeo-Christian model. Even its ancient Greek and Roman foundation-stones shared natural law presuppositions – masterfully articulated by such giants as Aristotle and Tertullian. It is likely that Greek monotheism was introduced by Jewish slaves as early as the ninth century BC (Joel 3:6). In any case our steadily maturing civilization with its “rule of law” and high ethical aspirations reflected the Biblical worldview for more than two millennia.
The satanic agenda was always to bring chaos from order by luring humanity away from God’s truth into false beliefs and conduct that would defile and degrade us. The forms of deception Satan used were crude and obvious at first, but in the modern world he perfected his strategy and tactics with what we call Marxism. Marxism is a comprehensive alternative to the Judeo-Christian order of civilization that matches each tenet of the Biblical worldview with a counterfeit alternative, starting with Darwinian evolution as an alternative to God’s Creation, and replacing the reality of a loving providential God with the fantasy of human self-perfectibility.
Marxism teaches that humanity is evolving toward a perfect egalitarian utopia but we can achieve it much faster by destroying Judeo-Christian civilization and starting over.
Four primary forms of Marxism have emerged: Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Cultural Marxism, better known as Secular Humanism. The first three forms worked to subvert civilization through fiscal policy and tactics but were always ultimately overthrown by the societies they conquered and occupied. Learning from those mistakes, Cultural Marxism adopted the strategy of Baalam (Revelation 2:14) and the tactic of spreading “sexual revolution” to unravel society’s family-based infrastructure. Since the 1960s their “globalist elites” have refined and perfected that tactic and nearly conquered the world with it.
This is a religious war they are waging. Secular Humanism is their religion, the tenets of “political correctness” are its moral code, and Marxist narratives are the “scripture” that teach its dogma.
There is no “secular” solution to this crisis, since Secularism is itself a stealth version of Humanism. The only real solution is a restoration of the Biblical worldview among those who have been duped into embracing “secularism” as “non-religious,” and that will only occur if those who hold the Biblical worldview start teaching and modeling it far more assertively than we are now.
Scott Lively on Delegated Sovereignty
The first principle of Christianity is that God is sovereign, meaning that He has absolute authority in all things. He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, meaning He is all powerful, all seeing, and everywhere: “in Him and through Him do all things consist” (Romans 11:36).
Logically, only God can have absolute sovereignty over Creation, but within the Creation people and nations can have limited sovereignty, meaning controlling authority over a specific realm or domain.
From the days of Samuel the Prophet human monarchs have been “sovereigns” over kingdoms, with authority delegated by God. This is the theology and history behind the political doctrine of “divine right of kings.”
And always there was a separate but parallel sovereign over ecclesiastical matters: first the Jewish Sanhedrine, and later “the church.” These “Kings and Priests” were intended by God to govern humanity as “coadjuvants” (cooperating sovereigns) balancing and harmonizing church and state interests and perspectives.
From the time of Christ, people who accept Him as savior became Sovereigns over ourselves, with absolute authority over our decisions, assisted by the always-available guidance of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us and fully backs our choices when they align with His will. “Therefore if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).
Constitutionalism finally replaced the “divine right of kings” when the “common people” adopted the social contract theory of government to assert their own sovereignty and create collective self-government by the rule of law.
The United States is the best example of a sovereign nation, formed as constitutional republic by a generation of people who asserted their own natural rights as individual sovereigns.
We therefore have a government or delegated power that is designed to be accountable to us.
However, our own power to delegate is itself delegated to us by God. If we aren’t being accountable to Him, we literally have no right to demand government accountability to us.
And we have no one but ourselves to blame for the terrible mess our country is in, because the One who granted us limited sovereignty is the same One who clearly explains the “law above the law” in His Word. Deuteronomy 28 is particularly clear on the consequences of obedience and disobedience.
As the great Christian nationalist Ronald Reagan once prophesied: “If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”
But we have not gone under yet, so I urge you to join me in boldly reasserting our collective sovereignty over our government and culture as an act of obedience to God.
Debating ‘Progressives’
God made me a warrior, all glory to Him. He prepared me for battle with a childhood and adolescence that toughened me with opposition and hardship and trained me in the pure logic of the natural law and strategic reasoning (though I would not recognize it until I got saved).
An alcoholic from the age of twelve, I lived on the streets from the age of sixteen, had been jailed twice by the age of twenty, and hitchhiked at least 20,000 miles through the heartland and to all four corners of the continental United States by the age of twenty-five. I’d taken and quit more than forty short term jobs but never held as much as $500 in my hands or learned to drive a car (legally) until I was twenty eight. I lived by my wits – learning by trial and error – surviving by the mastery of critical thinking and rhetoric. Although in my pre-Christian worldliness I was wrong in so many ways, I never “lost” a debate with anyone because street-sharpened skill in “intellectual judo” was what kept me alive.
I was a “progressive” then, without knowing it – a member of the first generation of boys entering puberty in the late 60s and early 70s who were subject to full-on indoctrination in Hedonism, Feminism and Social Justice dogma. When I dropped out of school in 10th grade I was a radical left-wing ideologue with the longest hair of any boy at my school, and wore a button on my tattered denim jacket reading “Smash the State.” I smoked mountains of weed and took any other drug I could get my hands on. I sowed many wild oats in many different ways in many different stops along a never-ending adventure-seeking path. I fully lived the liberal delusion my generation had been taught was reality and it almost killed me.
Writing to you today as a Bible-championing, post-conservative Constitutionalist pastor, lawyer, author and speaker, the patriarch of a strong and stable traditional family with a thirty year history of world-wide front lines pro-family advocacy and activism, I am living proof that God can transform ANYONE into an effective agent of His agenda. Again, all glory to Him – I boast only in HIM because my life under my control was a disaster.
The above is to establish my “street cred” for advising you that debating “progressives” is a waste of time unless you’re doing it in front of an audience containing potentially open-minded people, or you’re simply sharpening your debate skills without expectation of actually converting your ‘progressive’ opponent. If you have any experience at all in this, you’ll recall that whenever you effectively defeat one or more of their debate points, they change the subject, and if you refuse to follow them to the new subject, or agree and then defeat that point too, they fall back on name-calling and back out of the argument. You can’t win, because they never concede.
Why? Because they share a worldview in which logic and reason have no ultimate grounding in objective reality. Their arguments may be internally-consistent like the plot of a science-fiction movie, but only if you leave the underlying premises unchallenged. A great example is when Jewish Creationist Ben Stein got Atheist Richard Dawkins, in a debate about “intelligent design,” to invoke the seeding of earth by space aliens as his only guess at how life here could have begun, without recognizing the supreme irony of his reliance on the aliens’ intelligent design as a cause of origins nor being able to explain the possible origins of those aliens except that it “must have been by Darwinian evolution:” a perfect circular argument in which the conclusion is its own premise.
The Stein/Dawkins debate is a living example of 1 Corinthians 1:22-24 “Jews demand signs and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
In this and other passages, the Bible divides the non-Christian world into two classes of people: Jews and Greeks. To the Jews, our spiritual first-cousins, Jesus Christ is a “stumbling block.” But to the Greeks (the Gentiles), Christ is “foolishness.” What distinguishes them from each the other? Their presuppositions.
Torah believing Jews and Bible-believing Christians share Creationist, Natural Law presuppositions, nearly all of the theological, legal and moral principles of the Bible, and the belief in a Messiah. We differ on whether He has already come in the person of Jesus or whether He has yet to come. To a lesser extent, and with certain caveats, “Muslims” share Creationist and Natural Law presuppositions, as do other Theistic religions.
Greeks are those with an entirely different set of presuppositions that are grounded in Atheism or to a lesser extent fantasy-based Pagan religions. Christ is foolishness to them because there is no intellectual common ground on which He can be discussed and understood.
The Progressives are Greeks in this sense of the term – and that is why it is useless to debate them. Almost everything we Christians believe is “foolishness” to them except for a few common moral principles they stole from Christianity to create the Humanist “Social Gospel” in the early 20th Century as a tool to compete for for the hearts and minds of Americans and lure them away from the Bible as the source of that moral goodness. They’ll agree in principle, for example, that society should provide for widows and orphans but never admit that impulse reflects the heart of God. Indeed, the literal motto of the American Humanist Association is “Good Without God.”
As a Constitutionalist I refuse to waste my time debating and fighting Progressives in the unwinnable, strength-draining slug-fest we were lured into by the Marxist elites. They keep the masses polarized and neutralized so they can rule us without fear of being overthrown.
Instead, I am seeking to identify and unify with the Revolutionary Remnant of Bible-centered Christians willing to serve God as benevolent pro-active stewards of “secular” (meaning non-sectarian but God-fearing) society – reestablishing the Creationist natural law foundations that American law and culture were built upon by the Founders’ generations, by seeking the broadest possible consensus of Americans consistent with the Genesis 1:1 — rallying all Genesis 1:1 Theists to push the Progressives out of power as the most important first step to restoring our Constitutional Republic.
We don’t need to debate the Progressives to beat them, and in fact we can’t beat them that way. We just need get out of the Marxist-owned boxing ring and get back to pursuing our own pro-active agenda.
The Declaration of Restoration
Scott Lively on Winning Impossible Victories
Dr. Lively celebrates the anniversary of his mission to Springfield Massachusetts by showcasing the “impossible victories” that have occurred there from the time of Dr. and Mrs Lively’s arrival by train January 5th, 2008 with just their suitcases and the vague outlines of a plan to create a model for re-Christianizing “post-Christian” cities. He talks about the intense opposition he received from the “progressives” and how God used him to set an example of persistence under persecution in Springfield, and around the state in his two runs for governor.
Scott Lively on Redemptive Weaponry
A Seven Point Battle Strategy for the Revolutionary Remnant Regiment
“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for (2) pulling down strongholds, (3) casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, (1) bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5).
“Do not repay anyone evil for evil. (4) Carefully consider what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone. (5) Do not avenge yourselves, beloved, but leave room for God’s wrath. For it is written: ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord.’ (6) On the contrary, ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink. For in so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.’ (7) Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” Romans 12:17-21.
The Seven Steps to Victory
(1) Discipline your mind to learn and follow the Biblical Worldview under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, confirming each thought, idea, hypothesis, conclusion by testing against the Bible.
(2) Set your mission objective high – pursuing the goal of utterly destroying even the most powerful enemy strongholds.
(3) Begin by discovering, exposing and debunking the lies that contradict God’s Word in your own mind and in the world around you.
(4) Diligently learn and master your understanding of God’s broadest universal values written on the hearts of all men, to win trust and rapport with everyone willing to share that common ground with you.
(5) Work to redeem each adversary by blessing them with the nourishment of love and truth, leading them from the broad universal values toward the purer love and truth of Jesus Christ.
(6) Purge yourself of the motive for revenge and fight to save the people from the snare of the Devil: pacify, disarm and convert the people, knowing each conversion is really a gain of two (minus one for the enemy, plus one for the good guys)
To summarize these points as
(7) Do not use the tactics of the world, which feed and spread the culture of death, but use the tactics of Christ which feed and spread the culture of life.
Our Regimental Motto:
Destroy the Fortresses – Rescue the Captives
Scott Lively on Rescuing Kids from Humanism
A Critical Priority for Constitutionalists of the Revolutionary Remnant Regiment must be to Stop the Enemy from Poaching Our Children and Those of Our Neighbors.
This is an appropriate time to acknowledge the priceless value of homeschooling, which I will address in a separate essay in the future.
In 2008 Anne and I returned from a year-long speaking tour through eight countries of the former Soviet Union to launch an inner-city mission in Springfield, MA called Holy Grounds Coffee House as a model for re-Christianizing post-Christian cities. After seven years we turned the mission over to local leadership and went back on the mission field on a 27 nation personal fact-finding tour to study the anti-globalist revolution.
There is much to share about each of those chapters of our missionary career, but a great success at the Holy Grounds mission deserves special emphasis today. That is the powerful ministry of daily morning outreach to the High School students of Commerce High School, three doors down from the Coffee House.
Early on we launched a daily morning Bible study and Christian discussion group at Holy Grounds that drew street people, the homeless, ex-cons, the mentally ill and people in substance abuse recovery, as well as missionary-minded Christians from the suburbs with a heart for ministering to these groups. Many lives were transformed in that program, which continues to this day.
We noticed that as we would set up each morning for the 7:30 Bible Study that hundreds of High School students would pass by on the sidewalk. So we started a separate pre-Bible Study ministry to these kids (exclusively – no one else but the teens and our team were allowed during this period) – offering them free coffee, hot chocolate, baked goods and other breakfast items – and daily prayer over them for the needs and concerns of their lives and for success in school. Before long as many as 200 kids passed through each morning, and a sizable portion of them wouldn’t leave without being prayed for by our ministry team!
We were later informed by a staff member at the school that the atmosphere at Commerce High was dramatically changed whenever these kids were around. That was all the more gratifying to hear, because Commerce was well known as the worst school in the city. And as time went on former students came back after graduating to testify to the blessing Holy Grounds had been in their lives.
A few years ago a pastor from Mozambique offered to serve at Holy Grounds just when we needed a new leader for the morning Bible Study and he led the Bible study for the next two years.
Yesterday, I received an email from Mozambique, where Pastor Brasio had returned in 2019 to launch his own version of the Holy Grounds mission. His ministry is focusing on morning outreach to school-bound students with bakery carts near the schools.
I was so excited about that development, I awoke early this morning and designed a gospel tract for his use, and wrote “A Prayer for Students” for the back panel.
It dawned on me afterward that this is precisely what we need here in the US as well, and so I offer it to you. And I want to engage you in the completion of this tract by soliciting your suggestions for scriptures that should be listed as bullet-points in the two inner panels, one titled “Scriptures for Success as Students” and “Scriptures for Avoiding the Lies of the World”
If you have graphic art skills and want to offer a suggested design, I’m soliciting those as well.
Lastly, I invite you to join me in helping to fund this mission in Africa – or in Springfield if you prefer HERE.
Scott Lively on Self-Evident Truth
The Biblical worldview recognizes that God has written His truth on the human heart – every person everywhere shares this gift and the vast majority of the world agrees on what we call the natural law: which is simply the most obvious and self-evident truths about how we’re made and how we should live, such as the nature of family and community. Aristotle called the study of these things Teleology, and observed that every created thing has a purpose that can be discerned by its design and function. The Bible goes even deeper in Romans 1 and says the truth of God is so obvious in the created order that humans who fail to recognize Him in it have no excuse.
Rejecting God and His universal values doesn’t come from ignorance but from “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.” Children will naturally learn and embrace these values unless they are deceived by training or trauma into believing something else.
We don’t ever really “teach” truth to anyone, we only help them to recognize the truth they already know by clearing away the accumulation of falsehoods that cover up the truth like layers of rubble obscuring a priceless archaeological treasure.
The great challenges faced by the defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization have very little to do with the fine points of Christian doctrine we focus so heavily upon, but are very much about the universal values of the natural law.
God’s truth is like a pyramid: broadest at the base and narrowing to a pinnacle of refinement achieved by diligent pursuit of attunement with His heart and mind.
Advancing God’s kingdom on this earth begins by first uniting humanity on the basics, and ensuring that society and culture rest on those foundations.
The Humanists have tricked us into agreeing that Atheistic secularism is the norm for society and left/right polarization within that framework is the way to fight for our values.
If we can break free from that trap and start thinking of our true allies as the people who share the universal values of the natural order we can build a mega-majority to reset public policy on the broadest and most stable foundation.
Scott Lively on Christian Nationalism
Restoring America to Constitutionalism means rescuing her from slavery to Marxism. To accomplish that we must first understand our enemy and how he has enslaved us. Many of my commentaries in December addressed this need in broad terms and I will continue to share my observations and insights in ever more specific terms as this series proceeds.
The six most important points to remember are
1) the culture war has always been a war of aggression by the Marxists against Judeo-Christian civilization,
2) it is a religious war pitting Humanism against Yahweh-worship,
3) the Marxist power structure is top-down and centralized in an “elite” strata which depends upon relentless propaganda and psychological manipulation to capture and retain its vast and ever growing army of “useful idiot” foot-soldiers,
4) through their abuse of public education and information systems over the last hundred years the Marxists have duped “conservatives” into adopting an unwinnable defensive strategy on a battleground they control,
5) the most potent weapon of the elites both to undermine conservative resistance and seduce us into slavery is the sexual revolution, and
6) the most critical tactic to preventing the masses from waking up and overthrowing them is jingoism-driven hyper-polarization at the grassroots level.
The seventh and most important point is the counter-point to all of the above:
7) we are a nation created by Christian nationalists, and only through reclaiming that identity can we defeat this enemy.
Here we must be exceedingly scrupulous to define our terms precisely, because the Marxists have preemptively poisoned the well of public opinion against nationalism of any kind – precisely because it is their Achilles Heel. If we shrink from identifying as nationalists out of fear of controversy they win by default.
American Christian nationalism is constitutionalism, and constitutionalism is Christian nationalism. God blessed us with a founding generation of men of true genius and vision, and we need only to embrace and restore what they established for us, adapting its principles and policies to the modern context, and emulating their hands-on pro-active leadership.
Importantly, most conservatives think they understand constitutionalism but they don’t. The Christian nationalism of the founders does not closely align with either modern conservatism or evangelicalism. The founders generation was in many ways far more fundamentalist on New Testament doctrines than we are today, and in many other ways far more invested in Old Testament doctrines and perspectives than we are. They didn’t use the term then, but their Christian Nationalist concept of “secularism” was Judeo-Christian in its breadth, subject, in terms of practical governance, to distinctly Christian control through the then-common doctrine that active “stewardship” of the government was a Christian’s civic duty.
I will explain more fully what I mean by Judeo-Christian in a separate commentary.
For more information visit www.scottlively.net
2020: The final culture-war battle is coming
It may seem surprising that God would choose something not considered essential to the Gospel of salvation as the litmus test for faithfulness to His Word in this generation, but from Genesis to Revelation the He warns that civilization will stand or fall on the issue of homosexuality. Why? Because it represents extreme rebellion against God’s natural order at the most foundational level of human relationships.
Without the one-flesh paradigm of Genesis 1:27 and 2:24 there is no natural family, and without the naturally occurring mutual cooperation and co-dependence of natural families there is no network of self-sustaining organic communities from which civilization can naturally emerge, only dog-eat-dog self-centered individualism: the law of the jungle.
Civilization as we know it was made possible by sexual self-restraint through the institution of true marriage: lifelong, child-nurturing, heterosexual monogamy.
Satan’s strategy is to use the lure of “sexual freedom” to deceive human beings into dismantling civilization ourselves, piece by piece, in the reverse order to which God made it. The “sexual revolution” works from the branch to the trunk to the root like a life-wasting disease.
As I stated in my short-form version of this essay, “Sex is like fire – a great blessing when safely contained, a deadly curse when unleashed: the difference between a campfire and a wildfire.” Satan’s “sexual revolution” results in forests of trees as dead and dry as tinder that today are engulfed in raging forest-fires, burning civilization to ashes.
First we normalized the “sexual freedom” delusion itself — “fornication” – from the root for “furnace” meaning “to misuse the fire burning within you.” That was the purpose of Griswold v Connecticut in 1966 legalizing “contraception on demand.” Discussions on the morality of contraception aside, the true purpose of Griswold was to separate sex from procreation to establish “sexual freedom” as a universal social value.
Then we normalized adultery state by state, by removing its social stigma and legal consequences via a model statute on No Fault Divorce, released in 1967 by the Uniform Law Commission. Divorce law that punished adultery had been both an effective deterrent to infidelity and a powerful cultural affirmation of the importance of marriage. Soon, divorce reached epidemic status and remains there.
Then “abortion on demand” was established with Roe v Wade in 1973 after a tsunami of out-of-wedlock babies, conceived by legions of newly “freed” libertines, threatened to cause a backlash against the sexual revolution. The abortion industry exists to preserve the delusion that “free sex without consequences” is possible, by murdering the witnesses whose birth and childhood would disprove it. Abortion is thus the spiritual equivalent of Old Testament child sacrifice.
Roe v Wade triggered a Christian cultural revival that crested in the 1980’s “Reagan Revolution,” then slowly faded under the suppression of the Bush and Clinton dynasties.
The next major step in deconstruction occurred with Lawrence v Texas in 2003, decriminalizing sodomy, which in Biblical and classical legal terms is synonymous with homosexuality.
That made possible the complete nullification of Biblical marriage norms in Obergefell v Hodges (2015), purporting to establish a constitutional right to “gay marriage.”
This step was pivotal: the end of the social and legal consensus recognizing the phenomenon of “natural community” (woven from the fabric of natural families), as the wellspring of civilization. It was a game-changing triumph of the artificial-reality of the Marxist-driven soft-sciences over the hard science of the natural order; and of the religious dogma of Humanism over Theism. It was the death of the tree back to its trunk – the nullification in our law of Genesis 2:24 “therefore shall a man leave his family and cleave unto his wife and they shall become ‘One Flesh.’ ”
The current stage, normalizating “transgenderism,” is about formally rejecting Genesis 1:27’s precept that we are created “in his image, male and female:” our very identity as humans.
Thus, it is easy to predict that the next step will be an assault on the reality of Genesis 1:24-26, that God separated humans from animals, and animals from each other, as distinct “kinds.”
That is the emerging final battle of the culture war, over “transhumanism,” in which the sciences of genetics, robotics and artificial intelligence are intertwined to create the technology to blend humans with animals and machines.
Transhumanism is Satan’s sledgehammer to destroy the final foundation stone of the natural world, and achieve his goal, begun in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, to persuade humanity to become our own gods.
And indeed, what is transhumanism but humans taking the role of God into their own hands – creating “superior” forms of ourselves – essentially “eating from the Tree of Life,” which God closed Eden to prevent from happening: Genesis 3:22-24.
All of this was made possible only through the theology of Humanism, the religion of Marxism, which I believe is the religion of the Antichrist.
It is Humanism, not Christianity, that is reflected in the 2019 moral retreat of Josh Harris, Chic-Fil-A and Hallmark, and in the sudden embrace of “social justice” by prominent church leaders.
In 2013 I predicted all this would occur.
My prediction today is that this “great falling away” will speed up and intensify in 2020, but that a larger part of the Bible-faithful remnant will rise up in response like we haven’t seen since the Reagan Revolution.
I’m forming my own Revolutionary Remnant Regiment for 2020, just email me at scottlivelyministries@gmail.com if you’d like to enlist.