What do Marxism, climate change theory, and secular humanism all have in common?
They each have a well-developed eschatology; according to their ideals, they each have a robust vision for how history is unfolding and what it is moving towards. They understand the present through their view of the future, which provides meaning, obligation, and guidance to their daily actions so that they work to move history forward into their vision for the future. Each of the listed ideologies, along with every other worldview, are ultimately pulled forward by their view of the future, otherwise known as their “eschatology”.
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx’s most well-known and influential work, describes a persistent antithesis, or opposition, within humanity: one between those who have, and those who have not. History, therefore, was nothing more than a sequence of revolutions. The have-nots (the Proletariat) become embittered with their impoverished and disadvantaged state, and eventually assemble together to overthrow the haves (the Bourgeoisie), overturning the current social order and establishing a new one; a revolution. Of course, each revolution only served to establish a new class of haves and a new class of have-nots, and the cycle would repeat itself. However, Marx argued two things from this: 1) that revolution is the only means of progress, and 2) that progress would reach its eventual goal: a final revolution, ushering in an age of perpetual peace, abundance, and time offered for human expression, all served by technological advancement. For Marxists, work for revolution was work towards this inevitable eschaton, the final phase of human existence. Present-day decisions about political activism, public policy, and social propaganda were contextualized with this future state in mind. This zeal for the future was precisely the zeal of the Bolsheviks, so convicted of their Marxist ideology that they saw themselves on the precipice of the eschaton itself; one revolution away from ushering in peace and abundance for humanity evermore.
Over 100 million people were killed as a result.
Contemporary collectivists are no less zealous. The climate change narrative being pushed by many actors on the political left, both nationally and internationally, among organizations like the World Economic Forum and individuals like Bill Gates, posits the imminent global destruction of the entire planet. The day-to-day policy decisions of leftist legislators are influenced by the dream of a “sustainable” and “green” eschaton: bans on gas-burning and wood-burning stoves (and now wood fired pizza ovens!); bans on gas and diesel vehicles; forced moves to 100% “green” source of electrical power; the replacement of ordinary human dietary staples like beef and chicken with insect-derived “meat substitutes”; and the ultimate downsizing of human living space, standards, and family sizes, are all incremental steps towards this idyllic future state. These severe limitations of human economy are the collectivist’s attempt to provide a means of atonement; ways to try and cover humanity’s alleged guilt of existing on the planet in ways that they deem are irresponsible, even though God has said they are good (i.e. eating meats, 1 Corinthians 10:31, having many children, Psalm 127:3-5, etc.). They also have their chosen messiah(s), the global autocrats, who they look to for ushering in an utopic age of “owning nothing and being happy”.
Likewise, the eschatology of secular humanism has played itself out in American public schools for decades. The modern public school system is fundamentally, principally, and inescapably a means of socialized indoctrination of children to the worldview of secular humanism; the worldview which ultimately encompasses most aspects of climate change, marxism, critical theory, and other sub-worldviews. The goal of public schools is not to provide children with a base of education to prepare them to be productive citizens, spouses, and parents, but rather to catechize them with a teleology (or purpose to serve) of globalism, a theology of atheism, and a morality of radical self-expression. Humanists like John Dewey and Horace Mann, both being largely credited as the founders of America’s public school system, envisioned a future dominated by these ideals, and were ultimately motivated by it; seeing the education of children as ground zero for what they sought to accomplish.
The fact that the public schools are explicitly designed to lead children towards globalism, atheism, Darwinism, and Marxism is not a conspiracy theory. The Humanist Manifesto I, signed by the aforementioned men who built the modern school system from the ground up, directly records these affirmations, among others:
“Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.
Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.
The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible.
Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man’s life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now.”
– Humanist Manifesto I
Any honest look at the state of American culture today will demonstrate that Dewey and the humanists were radically successful in their implementation.
All three of these worldviews share one common trait: they each involve a view of the future which informs and guides present action. For the Marxist Bolsheviks, it was the notion of a final revolution which motivated their own revolution. For climate change activists like Bill Gates, it is an ideal future state of climate control via human intervention which motivates their mission to severely curtail human economies. For religious humanists John Dewey, Horace Mann, and other architects of the public school system, it was a vision of a day dominated by radical human self-expression which drove them to implement an entire socialized national education system.
In other words, what you believe about the future directly affects what you do in the present. Your eschatology, whether optimistic or pessimistic, righteous or unrighteous, good-hearted or sinister, is the vision which pulls you forward and contextualizes every present moment and action.
Compared to the eschatology of Karl Marx, Bill Gates, and John Dewey, the eschatology of American evangelical Christians is either remarkably underdeveloped or radically pessimistic, with mainstream preachers like John MacArthur dogmatically defending a “we lose” eschatology; and among secular conservatives, the view of the future is even more atrophied and confused. Most evangelicals have been taught an eschatological doctrine known as “premillennial dispensationalism”, in some form or another, which has a pessimistic view of the future and anticipates a global moral decline that culminates in Christians being snatched out of the World before, or during, an immense period of tribulation; a view which has been portrayed to both Christians and the secular world by the “Left Behind” film series. For the dispensational premillennial, good ultimately wins in the end with the sudden reign of Jesus Christ on Earth; but, prior to His reign, the historical timeline of this age in which the Church exists ultimately displays an irreversible and inevitable decline into the abyss.
Like all eschatologies do to their adherents, the aforementioned view has contextualized and steered present actions of the Christians who hold to it. In light of this eschatological outlook, many evangelicals have interpreted the events of the past few years as evidence confirming that the end of the world is coming soon; a practice of calling for the imminent end that has been pervasive amongst Christian teachers for the last century. Chuck Smith, founder of the Calvary Chapel denomination, being one of the more recent preachers in history to make a failed prediction about the imminent end, and many others, such as Dr. David Jeremiah, espousing that we are likely living in “the last days”.
As the forces of darkness continue to assemble, mobilize, and execute their plan for the attempted destruction of the West and the Christian religion, premillennialists increasingly see the fulfillment of their eschatological perspective occurring; it has taught them to simply expect an inevitable and irreversible moral decline in the world, and therefore, by necessity of these expectations, an increasing failure of the Church to succeed in pushing back the darkness in the World as we are commanded to do (James 4:7, Matthew 5:14). Contrasted to the view of the Marxists, climate change theorists, and secular humanists, who all have an eschatology in which they succeed and conquer the World according to their ideology, the Christian premillennialist instead anticipates and expects their own defeat; though they undoubtedly take to heart the Great Commission of Jesus, to make disciples of the World, their eschatology tells them that this mission, as it regards the state of the World and Church, will end in failure, defeat, and tribulation.
The natural ramifications of this view of eschatology are therefore not only a continually compounding anticipation of the imminent end as society’s slide downward intensifies, but also a severe weakening of what it means to be disciples of Christ who complete acts of faith like: “conquering kingdoms”, “enforcing justice”, becoming “mighty in war”, and putting “foreign armies to flight”(Hebrews 11:33-34); all acts of faith which the Apostle Paul celebrates as evidence of the presence of Gospel hope within those who completed them. This weakening of discipleship results in a neutering of what ought to be a more full-natured impetus in the Church for the advancement of Christendom on Earth; ramifications which stem directly from the incoherent idea that the church has been commissioned to fight in order to lose: the exact message communicated by the combination of the Great Commission and John MacArthur’s dogmatic eschatological defense of, “we lose!”
The conundrum presented by such a failed attempt at rationality is obvious by a short meditation on its claim; if we consider being instructed to go fight a fight, believing that we’ve also been told by our Commander that the fight will be lost, we know innately that we would at best function as a schizophrenic mess. We would simultaneously strive to engage in the fight while trying to overcome the emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of the prophesied loss we have been told we are fighting towards; which, rationally speaking, is an oxymoronic, illogical commission. Being told, “fight to lose”, creates a short-circuit within us; it is a contradiction, with contradiction being something that a perfectly logical, perfectly rational God cannot operate in; nor His creatures created in His image. “Fight to lose” doesn’t compute with humans even on a natural, non-spiritual level, let alone for those born of the Spirit. A guaranteed looming defeat would wreak mental, emotional, and spiritual havoc on our human faculties, and any ability to perform the duties required for a fight. We’d be left in a cognitive dissonance between acting in all the ways necessary for winning against our opponents, because after all, that’s what a fight is about, and the apathy and escapism that naturally results in us from believing we’re moving towards an inevitable defeat; as the premillennial asserts.
A fight is a fight, and winning is the only goal of a fight; even if it’s a fight primarily waged with the spiritual weapons of love, mercy, forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion in the Gospel message; all extended to Christ’s enemies as we hold them accountable to His standards of justice. If God has commissioned us to fight for the faith and all that it entails (Jude 1:3, 1 Timothy 6:12, Ephesians 6:10-20, James 4:7, etc.), then He has done so with an expectation that we will believe, through His power, that we can win. In fact, it is through such confident and assuring words of our Commander, like “the gates of hell shall not prevail against” the Church (Matthew 16:18), and “You are my Son … Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth our possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel” (Psalm 2:7-9), that we are fervently motivated to achieve victory in our commission. We are even made ready and so bold as to give our lives to such a progressive march towards success, as Paul was eager to do (Acts 21:13), being confident that his death would contribute towards accomplishment of Christ’s “dashing” of the nations and His enemies being made His footstool (Psalm 110). Such confidence in that future, however, is far from effects and anticipation of the “fight to lose” eschatology of the premillennial.
As a result of attempting to believe contradiction, instead of being 100% focused on adjusting performance and strategy, looking for areas of weakness and failure, such eschatological adherents are actively distracted and actually incentivized to fail; because, then the end that their eschatological beliefs are teaching them to look for can be realized. According to premillennial eschatology, when we find ourselves losing the fight in front of us, everything is going “according to plan”, which also means there is no need for a course correction, because there’s nothing wrong with the way things are going; decline and decadence is to be expected! Thus, John MacArthur succinctly declares: “We lose down here!” The contrast of such expectations with the competing eschatologies of the Church’s enemies could not be more apparent. Our enemies, the Marxists, the Humanists, the Globalists, the Leftists, etc. expect to win and achieve their view of the future, but the premillennial Christian expects to lose in order to achieve theirs. Who could ask for a better opponent than one who literally expects you to win? Worldly and Godless people couldn’t be happier that their enemies, Christians, expect defeat!
In a Church already sick with metastatic cancers like CRT, feminism, and secular humanism, despair and pessimism have also become contagious. In a time when God’s truth about marriage and family is so vital, and when the clarity of God’s law is so needed to enlighten issues of justice, civility, and the limits of government, and, when God’s gospel is so necessary to wash away the vast oceans of guilt that our culture has accumulated, we have either capitulated, surrendered, or are in a full-blown retreat. The American evangelical eschatology has ultimately created a negative feedback loop: as darkness abounds, evangelicals retreat, and as evangelicals retreat, darkness abounds even more. In this way, premillennialism is a self-fulfilling prophecy; a pessimistic future which robs the present of all hope of gospel victory within history itself.
One of the artifacts of this pessimistic retreat is a base of “secular conservatism”, a movement which is completely emasculated and impotent to fight the downward slide of western civilization. While the Marxists, humanists, and environmentalists seized the opportunity presented in the years following 2020 to rally the troops and advance their own agendas with a formidable blitzkrieg, neo-conservatism showed itself to be completely useless in resisting the secular state. This is no surprise, given that neo-conservatism is a dead movement largely absent from any honor or obedience given to God or His word, any coherent worldview, or any consistent set of principles beyond the limited application of so-called “traditional values”. Unguided by any principles or eschatological objectives of its own, secular neo-conservatism is adrift in a sea of worldviews, blown and pushed by the currents and wind of secular culture, usually lagging their supposed “opponents” by only 5 or 10 years.
Mainstream conservatives, republicans, and red-state voters are steamrolled by the left because they have no ground to stand on to fight against the secular tyranny of our world today. Like the evangelicals, conservatives are losers. “Owning the libtards” doesn’t work. It has never worked. While conservative talk radio makes laugh tracks, the left is writing laws, building social media platforms, shutting down churches, arresting pastors, taking away your guns, and indoctrinating your children with their Godless worldview in their government schools. While the Daily Wire is making documentaries like “What is a Woman” which expose the left as fundamentally hypocritical, the left continues in its hypocrisy, and it keeps working. You can’t “debunk” a movement that believes language is fundamentally an oppressive power structure. You can’t change the course of a movement that wants to completely dismantle the past, by appealing to so-called “traditional values”. And yet, this is all the neo-conservatives continue to do. They capitulate to the secularists, write laugh tracks, sell mugs and tee shirts, and pontificate with homosexuals about how much breast milk they need to keep in their freezers in order to qualify as a good parent, while the left captures slaves, builds cities, and loads engines of war.
Christ did not give us “traditional values”; He gave us a Great Commission: “disciple the nations, teach them to obey what I have commanded”. While the secularists build their kingdoms, we are to know that we occupy an everlasting kingdom established by Christ; a kingdom prophesied beforehand that would “become a great mountain and fill the entire earth” (Daniel 2:35); a kingdom of saints who do works of perfect liberty (James 1:25), a kingdom commissioned to enforce God’s justice in the civil spheres wherever it is found (Hebrews 11:33-34, Romans 13:1-7, Leviticus 19:8-18, Mark 12:30-31), and a kingdom that ushers in peace, so far as our neighbors allow for as we obey the Lord in all His other commands (Romans 5:1, 12:18). Where the sins of secularists and false religions enslave men and women to lies and deception, we have good news of the truth of the gospel: that in Christ, the captives are set free. And, that all authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to Christ, who sits at the right hand of his father, and who will not stop at redeeming the World until all of His enemies have been made His footstool. If all of this is true, then why does secularism and false religion continue to gain ground in our day? Why does the darkness of the devil continue to advance in our communities and governments when we are told simply by God, “… resist the devil, and he will flee from you”?
The answer, at least in part, lies in the proliferation of the aforementioned eschatological doctrines of Christians in the past century and a half. Dispensationalism, as a strand of biblical theology, with its distinctly premillennial eschatology, is a theological novum that arose only in the late 1800s with a man named J.N. Darby. Darby posited this radically pessimistic eschatology with a particular formulation of a concept known as the “rapture”, the removal of the church from the earth either before or during the time of the great tribulation. These eschatological concepts, combined with the decline of the America into a civil war and two world wars around the beginning of the 20th century, planted the seeds for the continued eschatological pessimism of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a result, evangelicals largely disengaged from instantiating the morals of Christ’s kingdom in their local communities here on earth via Christian schools, starting Christian businesses, and reigning in the civil sphere. No doubt evangelicals continued to preach the gospel in their churches, camps, and other ministries, but what was lacking in these efforts were the comprehensive and generational moves of applying God’s word to government, commerce, and education; a central reason being the character of civil retreat and withdraw instilled by the negative feedback loop of premillennial eschatology.
Dispensationalism’s doctrine of the imminent “end of the world” precluded making moves that would result in the eventual submission of these spheres to Christ. When it came to individual salvation, evangelicals consistently stayed in the fight; they withdrew from everything else. Secular humanism and government schooling became the dominant mode of child and adolescent schooling. Higher education among schools that were historically Christian, such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, became overrun with Marxism repackaged as “critical theory”, and even outwardly Christian seminaries began to contain professors within their ranks who overtly affirm such theories, deny critical doctrines like Biblical inerrancy, and have capitulated to the normalization of grave sins like homosexuality. A similar phenomenon dominated the civil government, as government officials began to see themselves not as men to whom respect to “The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” was due, let alone as deacons serving the one True King of Kings as his servants according to Romans 13. Modern government officials, according to them, answer to no one, not even God, and their rulings and decrees go unchecked, in their mind, by any sort of transcendent standard. They do not see themselves as deacons of God’s standard of good and evil; they see themselves as gods, the sole arbiters of good and evil. As Christians have made similar retreats in work, family life, science, philosophy, justice, and business, secularism has filled the gap. (“The Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” being defined by Sir William Blackstone as God’s divine laws, revealed in the Holy Scriptures, and evidenced in nature’s design; source: “Commentaries on the Laws of England”, Section II. ‘Of The Nature of Laws In General’, Page 39-41)
Such retreat and escapism could not be further from the eschaton that our fathers had in view, nor, as will hopefully become to be seen by many more Christians, the one the Word actually teaches us. Where evangelicals have turned inward to escape from the world, our fathers were not afraid to work to stand upon the Word of God, to attempt to reform Europe, to purify the church of England, or to cross the Atlantic in hopes of founding a New England. Christians throughout history, from the first century to the 21st century, have taken Christ’s words in the Great Commission, “all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” as license to colonize the nations; raising up disciples who contend to see every area of life brought into submission to Christ. Our fathers throughout history, from Paul to the Puritans, believed that they actually could accomplish this, or at least that fighting for the same would have a lasting positive impact. When the future is dominated by optimism, Christians are invigorated by a biblical conviction for kingdom-centered colonization, and take action in their own time by building schools, writing books, educating their children, instantiating just governments, taking risks, and ultimately making moves that are generational in nature. When the future is dominated by pessimism, doomsday, and increased evildoing, Christians relegate themselves to a retreated position of escapism, disregarding the sort of duty and responsibility they have to seek all of life conformed to the authority of Christ.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Puritanism#/media/1/484034/216172
The solution to this predicament we have found ourselves in is not to appeal to “traditional values”, nor to continue to be contented with living in our small Christian ghettos while we wait for the end of the world to come. We must reconsider our eschatological presuppositions and re-evaluate our outlook in light of God’s Word, because the engine of kingdom-colonizing optimism that propels Christians into acts of faith does not run on the irrational fuel of pessimism, supplied by the “fight to lose” mentality of premillennial eschatology. As a careful study of the Word will reveal, it is a pessimistic eschatological position not actually taught by the scriptures; it is doctrinal error. Whenever Christians are led into such doctrinal error, the result is a Church Body mislead from the Will of its Head, Christ, and therefore ineffective wherever such error is applied; as can be seen by Christianity’s retreat from the civil sphere in our World today.
If Christ died to restore this world and the people therein (and He did), then we must work towards that end in every sphere of our lives: the conscience, the family, the church, and the civil sphere. This means not only the winning of souls, but the winning of the whole world, and all that it contains. Yes, we must teach it to believe the Gospel, to repent of sins and worship Christ as Lord, and to therefore be baptized into Christ; but, even over those who reject the Gospel, Christians must see to it that the fear and wrath of God reigns, coercing society through the “sword” of government to civilly obey His standards of justice, just as Romans 13 commissions. This means stopping the success of competing religions and eschatologies in their tracks by regaining a biblically just foothold in the civil sphere and optimistically instantiating Christendom instead; just as Christians have done ample times throughout history in the nations God has placed them.
A foremost example where Christendom rose to nation governing power was in Rome, which, with its history of brutal persecutions against Christians, eventually saw Christianity be declared as its official religion; an accomplishment that was certainly not the result of a pessimistic, retreating eschatology that developed in the 1800s, but was rather the effect of Christians seeing government officials and offices, like the Caesar, as central targets of the Great Commission. After all, it was prophecy of the Lord that sent Paul after Caesar, setting for us a prophetic example of the heights of nations to which He wants us pursuing through acts of faith in His name: “Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar” (Acts 27:24). If the whole world is to submit to Christ, then under His authority and His commissioned purposes for government, we must not only be a teacher to civil magistrates as Paul and the Apostles were, but also raise up civil magistrates from within the Church to disciple and reform our governments to submit to Christ in all things; to govern according to His revealed standards for justice and law of liberty (James 1:25). Truly, these are the “kingdom conquering” acts of faith that disciples of Christ are to strive towards; not a culturally tolerated faith which is accepted by the secular masses as long as it doesn’t actually require them to change their behavior in any way.
Given the momentum now revealed in the competing eschatologies of false religions, all driven by the schemes of the Devil, and the absolute ineffectiveness of the eschatological vision of modern evangelicalism to stop it, Christians across the world must recover the more accurate eschatological doctrines of the Word; the ones which once propelled Christians to resist the Devil and set him to flight, causing Christendom to rise to great heights of achievement and advancement in the World. Christians must re-open our Bibles, re-examine the historical roots of our faith, re-asses the eschatologies we’ve been instruct in, and come alive to the Gospel centered success story that the kingdom we belong to provides us with. A success story where we educate as Christians to shape the world’s presuppositions so that they are biblically ordered and true (2 Corinthians 10:5); where we teach one another and our neighbors to use our God-given faculties of reason, study, and memory to their fullest capacity in and over all areas of life (2 Peter 1:3-11, John 1:1-4); and where we labor as Christians, being diligent, thorough, and tireless workers (Luke 17:7-10), to see the weightier kingdom principles of justice, mercy, and faithfulness applied to our neighbors and the institutions we’re all apart of (Mathew 23:23). And, as we do all these things, having a biblical hope for the future in mind while we diligently pray in the manner Christ taught us, saying: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.
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