“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
– John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) [Welcome to 2022.]
“Any country grounded in Judeo-Christian values can’t be overthrown until those roots are cut.”
– Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party, “Prison Notebooks” (1929-1935)
Conservatism is a loser’s game – by design. In concept and practice, conservatives fight to “conserve” the always leftward-drifting status quo, while progressives pursue “progress” toward the Marxist vision of a socialist utopia. In reality, the Marxists stole all their ideas from the true progressive worldview, biblical Christianity, and popularized the “progressive/conservative” paradigm to guarantee that the “tide of history” would always advance their agenda.
The Christian concept of “progress” was showcased by lawyer Winthrop in his famous sermon/essay envisioning America as a model of Christian charity and values. Republican icon Ronald Reagan and Democrat icon John F. Kennedy both invoked Winthrop’s sermon to reaffirm that shining vision as the essential American ideal.
How did the Marxists eventually supplant that vision with their own? First, in the early 1900s, they perverted Scripture to create a counterfeit “social gospel” to divorce “goodness” from God and established a counterfeit alternative moral code we call “political correctness,” which calls good “evil” and evil “good” (Isaiah 5:20). Over time, that code became dogma, enforced ever more harshly by their own version of blasphemy laws, which punish dissenters through such things as “anti-discrimination” policies, “hate speech” codes and “DIE” oaths (Diversity Inclusion and Equity). This very short clip encapsulates the DIE’s goal for Christian America.
They also substituted the Bible’s promise of Christ’s Millennial Kingdom with their utopian fantasy of human self-perfection through social engineering, eugenics and transhumanism. In their corrupt alternative, atheism, statism and sexual anarchy replace godliness, individual sovereignty and the marriage-based natural family. And “progress” is measured by the extent and pace of the transition.
While a significant part of the American population was being secularized by the Marxist “social gospel” strategy, the terms and framework of the cultural/political debate were also being secularized to fit the conservative/progressive paradigm with all of its implicit Marxist presuppositions. The growing plurality of “non-religious-people-with-traditional-values” (and, shamefully, a large number of Christians) were duped into adopting the “conservative” label, not realizing it was a logistical trap that locked them in the role of foot-draggers, forever doomed to eat the dust of the progressive course-setters on an ever-leftward march to utopia. It’s why so many “conservatives” today embrace “gay marriage” while still (temporarily) fighting transgenderism. Almost nobody still fights against sex outside of marriage. I explained this phenomenon more extensively in my 2019 article “The false choice of conservative vs. progressive.”
In my follow-up article, “The false choice of socialism vs capitalism,” I explained that:
“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 … 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. … The French Republic which emerged from the revolution was forced back under Catholicism by Napoleon and pursued a pre-Marxist proto-socialist agenda. … That ended with the ‘June Insurrection’ of 1848 in which 10,000 unemployed workers were slaughtered by the government for protesting a subsistence-level ‘welfare’ program. …”
“[Importantly, the newly published] Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Frederick Engles was translated to French and published in Paris a few weeks before the June Insurrection … [where] 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 [has never changed].”
What HAS changed is that Christians have forgotten that Christianity is the true “progressive” agenda, which imposes an affirmative duty of upon believers to be active stewards of civilization and culture. Ironically, that is also the forgotten core message of John Winthrop’s iconic sermon, whose primary purpose was to exhort believers, whether rich or poor, to voluntarily share their resources for the good of the whole community – the exact opposite of the Marxist confiscation and redistribution schemes that would emerge two centuries later. But he also implied/predicted there would be cultural war between these views.
As he wrote in 1630, “The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways. So that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. … Therefore let us choose life that we, and our seed may live, by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.”
The culture of life and the culture of death have always been in a winner-take-all war. There is no neutral ground, Christian. What Winthrop wrote in 1630 is true today. You must get and stay on the right side of the battle line, and that begins with how you think about Christianity itself. It is not a passive faith, and your job is not to resist change or be submissive in the face of it. The opposite is true. Christianity is about “pulling down strongholds and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God” – in which campaign we are intended to be “more than conquerors.” Conservatives are doomed to failure, but WE Christian Constitutionalists are the true progressives whose proactive evangelical persuasion of the world to live biblically is the solution to every problem the Marxists have caused.
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