*This article is a continuation of our series on Christian strategy
All around the world Christians are finding it harder to practice their faith in the public sphere and increasingly in the private sphere also. Even in formerly Christian nations, now loosely termed ‘the West’, Christians are persecuted for uttering mainstream Christian ethical beliefs. In other parts of the world, the discovery of a person’s Christian faith can lead to them being summarily executed, imprisoned, poisoned, kidnapped and tortured – all manner of nastiness.
The question for Christians is – what to do about it?
- Keep your head down, keep quiet and hope you are not noticed
Chinese-style behavioural monitoring or insistence on Mosque participation makes this very constraining – governmental or community forces are constantly requiring behaviour that goes against a Christian’s conscience. LGBTQ+ ‘neoheathen’ government now requires the same. This is a technique to discourage Christians and crush the Church.
It gets especially difficult within the family and children. The governments’ indoctrination of children is a constant information battle for the Christian parent, charged by God to ‘bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord’ [Ephesians 6:4].
In Islamic societies, communal hazards, such as the kidnap, rape, force-marriage and abusive captivity or murder of teenage Christian girls makes this particularly heart-breaking. These attacks are expressly designed to depopulate the Christian community by the twin methods of sexual aggression against Christian teenage girls as well as extreme aggression against any communication of the Gospel.
The LGBTQ+ neoheathen strategy is going down the same path by socially manipulating girls into become either lesbians or transgender ‘boys’ (already 30% of young women in the USA self-identify as lesbians) while driving any expression of Christianity out of the public space by threats, intimidation and hysterical mob-campaigns to drive them out of employment.
So, just keeping your head down is, in the end, a strategy that is severely limiting for the Church, made all the more oppressive by modern techniques of social control and manipulation through broadcasting, government ‘equality legislation’ (i.e., everyone is equal except Jews and Christians, ‘who can all go and f*** themselves.’
- Leave and go to another place where no-one knows you.
This has been the traditional means of survival of persecuted Christians, as advised by Jesus: “When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next” [Matthew 10:23].
However, in a world where there is intergovernmental cooperation, Big Data and a United Nations captured by both Islam and, ironically, the LGBTQ+/Abortion neoheathen agenda, there are few places to go to that are an improvement on the current situation.
While there is still migration to the West, this is no longer a simple solution to achieving religious freedom and may turn out to be a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire.’ Still, in some more open societies, it remains a way of dodging persecution by local aggressors, who may not have the power to use governmental machinery to discover their target’s new location.
Therefore, fleeing to a new place can be a solution for some, escaping persecution from local communities, but not necessarily escaping from governments.
As the neoheathen agenda steadily is made into oppressive law, this option is closing. The future introduction of the Mark of the Beast may stop this option completely for many.
- Openly preach by any means possible but persecuted to death.
There is a story of a North Korean Christian father who was put in a concentration camp. Concerned for the faith of his children, when they came to visit on one occasion, under the noses of the guards he had simply written on the palms of his hands: ‘Believe in Jesus’. He held up his hands to his children. The guards realized what he had done, took him away and killed him. His children all came to believe in Jesus.
This is a path some saints take, but frankly is too difficult for many Christians. However, church leaders will often have no choice but to take this path, as some state authorities and their proxies will ruthlessly target leaders to disrupt Church growth and life.
In the past, it is precisely these brave souls who challenged the heathen societies in which they lived with the Gospel. For example, the first Christian nation, Armenia, was converted to Christianity partly through the conversion of their king, Tiridates the Great, early in the 4th century. A Christian was imprisoned for his faith by the king in the terrible Khor Virap prison, also known as the ‘Pit of Oblivion’, for thirteen years. Miraculously, he was granted the opportunity to pray for the healing of the king, who had become sick. Miraculously healed, the king converted to Christ and opened the way for the Gospel to be preached and the Armenian Church to be established. Not long after, an Armenian Christian monk invented the Armenian alphabet and translated the Bible into Armenian in their new script, consolidating a distinctly Christian Armenian culture, distinct from Iranian culture that had previously been dominant.
In Britain over the following three centuries, Irish monks preached Christianity to the Celtic people. After the Saxon invasions, Catholic monks converted the Saxon kings. By these efforts, Britain became a Christian-influenced land, surviving the Danish invasions and eventually converting their kings in turn.
Like Armenia, Britain, under King Alfred the Great, put the Church at the heart of government, recognising the importance of government being fully informed of right and wrong to govern correctly [Romans 13: 1-8]. That underpinning, despite many betrayals, has been a cogent force in British political life until after the Second World War. It is now absent, principally because of the strong delusion that the Theory of Evolution has apparently eliminated any reason to believe in a Creator. All the current instabilities the UK now faces are a direct result of this falling away from the Faith.
- A Christian secession
The Pilgrim Fathers of the United States fled persecution from Britain in the early 17th century. The British State had legislated what Christianity should be, an inversion of the flow of moral authority from the Church to the State that had started with the murder of Thomas Becket in his own cathedral by King Henry II and continued and grown with the Tudors and the Stuarts. Turning Christianity into a tool of internal policing is not the purpose of Christianity, and those Bible-believing Christians who are now known as the Pilgrim Fathers knew it.
They also knew that the Reformation had not gone nearly far enough, and the Church of England was compromised, suspended between Protestantism informed by the Bible on the one hand and Catholic tradition on the other, a tradition that had absorbed many unbiblical pagan ideas into itself.
So, in the end they concluded it was impossible to practice their Christianity pure and undefiled, as they saw it, and set sail in the Mayflower to found a new Christian colony in North America, far enough away to permit them the freedom to worship, without being in open rebellion to British rule.
Very quickly they found that the demands of surviving in the new colony made it difficult to stay true to their calling, and some critical errors were made that remain to this day.
One critical error, in my judgement, was to not explicitly use the Old Testament moral law as the guiding principle of their judicial and legal system – it is missing from the Mayflower Covenant, their founding act of civic rule. Instead, they covenanted ‘to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws. . .’ Within a short time, legal decisions that ran contrary to the OT law were established as precedents, and so the weakness of the English Common Law system was replicated in America – this weakness being the tendency of the law to drift with custom and public pressure, rather than stay anchored on the sure and certain Word of God.
(The continental European legal system, founded on Roman Law, has the same problem but for different reasons – principally that Roman and Biblical Law have different objectives: Roman Law is about the stability of the State, whereas Biblical Law is about the stability of the family in its faith community).
This is precisely where we have ended up today – the drift into the neoheathenism of the LGBTQ+/abortion culture and the erroneous assumption that all religions are equal (or rather equally in error) – and the resulting tension between those who wish to have more of this new heathenism, and those who wish for the Law of God to be at least somewhat reflected in the culture and legal approach.
In the end, the Christian secession of the 17th century now appears to have run its course. Unlike the 17th century, there is no new terra incognita to which one my flee.
But is there a case for a new Christian secessionism, not so much to create a single Christian nation in the style of the Franks or the English, but more to create a Christian confederation of enclaves and states, cooperating and assisting each other in a world gone crazy, innovating with Biblical inspiration in a world exhausted of its minerals, its biosphere and its atmosphere? While this would be distinct from the Kingdom of God on earth (that lies within the relationships of love between Jesus disciples), could it be the precursor to the coming Kingdom, a political and economic entity in which its inhabitants are anticipating the coming King and, like in the parable of the Good and Wicked Stewards [Luke 12:42-48], are ensuring that all of its own people are treated well and contribute as much as they are able?
In case you jump to the conclusion I am espousing a fusion of Marxism and Christianity, I am not. I am suggesting, however, that within any market, businesses and business-operating communities should have standards of treatment of its people within these businesses that are worthy of Christ.
- A Christian international secessionism?
Of course, such an entity will, like Israel in 1948, be immediately attacked by all sides. Governments will hate it because it represents a loss of power and control. The LGBTQ+/Abortion power structure – the neoheathen – will hate it because they aim to extinguish Christianity and the Bible forever. The Muslims will hate it because, well, they too aim to extinguish Christianity and the Bible forever, and because it represents a kind of competing Ummah to which they aspire.
It will be poor, it will be ever so contested, it will be ruthlessly fought against. Yet if it survives it will permit its inhabitants to worship Christ and serve Him in freedom, for Christ came that we might be free.
They will attack its settlements, burn its crops year after year, do all they can to prevent its establishment and thriving. They will attempt to infiltrate its institutions and corrupt its officials.
Just as they did to the USA, the first attempt at a Christian secession, so they will try to do to the same.
What would prevent this entity failing? I believe an adoption of Biblical moral law, softened by the mercy of the New Testament, coupled with a deep appreciation and application of the prophetic ‘advice’ of the Old and New Testaments.
- ”You will be hated by all nations’
In this verse, Jesus prophetically spells out the condition the Church will find itself prior to the return of Christ: ‘Then they will deliver you over to be persecuted and killed, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. At that time many will fall away and will betray and hate one another’ [Matthew 24:9]. This is, indeed, our current condition in much of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, although in the West this process is only just getting going. In eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union under Communism, this was commonplace, but mercifully not so much at present.
The canary in the mine when it comes to persecution is the Jews. If the Jews are being persecuted, know that it will not be long before they will come after the Christians.
What is commonly overlooked in that verse is the sense it conveys that the ‘you’ are separate from ‘all nations’. He could have said ‘all peoples’, but He didn’t, He said ‘ all nations’, implying that the Church is or will become distinct from ‘the nations.’
The question is: what is the manner of this distinction? I propose that not only is the separation a spiritual and cultural one, but it is also, in the end, an economic and political one.
- What will propel this separation?
The rise of the cancel culture has spread from the deplatforming of conservative Christian voices in universities to the widespread unplugging of their access to the internet and neoheathen mobs hounding Christians out of their jobs and denying them access to financial services such as bank accounts.
With digital currencies being introduced, it is now a short step to the introduction of the Mark of the Beast, whereby if you do not physically ‘buy-in’ to the governments’ agenda, be it LGBTQ+ or Islam or whatever, you will be unable to buy or sell, run a business, sell your house, drive a car, get on a bus or buy food.
The digitalisation of human interactions under COVID lockdowns has made all this much easier. Equipping Big Brother with Big Data and AI to check on what you are buying, and a Chinese style social credit system to keep you in check, has facilitated much of the infrastructure necessary to implement the Mark.
All it will take is the full implementation of the digitalisation of currency to facilitate the state’s snooping at your financial transactions and an ’emergency’ to justify making the Mark obligatory.
The Christian response is already commanded of us – by Christ: ‘Come out of her, my people, that you be not partakers of her sins and that you receive not of her plagues’ is the command [Revelation 18:4]. Since this ‘Babylon the Great’ is described in terms of an economic entity (not unlike Tyre, described by the prophet Ezekiel in much the same terms) it is also a political entity, rather like Venice in the Middle Ages. Therefore, to ‘come out’ must involve a political as well as an economic independence.
In the light of these rapid developments and His command, pressing is the time to consider what it means to ‘Come out of Babylon the Great’.
We are soon going to have to understand it and then do it, or else starve or give up our salvation. God bless you all,
Graham Ford
President – Jesus Christ for Muslims