Neo Gnostics at the End of the Age
It is no secret that large segments of American society are embattled as the culture struggles for self-definition in a "Post-Christian age." The recent ninth circuit court ruling against the Pledge of Allegiance may seen by generations to come as a pivotal moment in the war for the survival of the American soul. The judges agreed with the plaintiff that the phrase "under God" was unconstitutional. The offensive phrase discomforted atheists, pagans, and others who are our neighbors and co-workers. This verdict forces the question that lurks at the rim of the collective unease over pluralism. The court verdict demands that Americans answer the question: Are we one nation under God or not?
The hapless among us assume that dogmatic Christianity (and its God) is waning in favor of the rising nouveau chic spirituality. Christianity is no longer the common understanding among Americans and its moral principles no longer inform public or private life. Modern secularists hold that Christian teachings are not logically defensible, but are based on "blind faith." These well meaning Americans hope that "we can all just get along" by emptying faith of any absolutes and adopting instead a nice polite, but doctrinally vacant, spirituality: Put some aromatherapy candles around your hot tub and commune with the cosmos.
New Age troops rejoice that America is returning to its indigenous antecedents where "native spirituality" is "naturally" overtaking the flaccid Christian remnant--it is all part of their cyclical view of history. The natural (feminine, gentle) religion of the earth is reasserting itself over the (masculine war-like) dogmatic creeds, claim its proponents: The Age of Aquarius must be embraced; its turn of the cosmic wheel is upon us.
The truth is far more grave: Two worldviews are colliding. Americans are locked in a titanic duel to the death with a powerful neo-paganism --winner takes all. Should Christians fail to rally to the defense of the Cross and the American founding, they will find themselves marginalized and despised, hounded and persecuted in the New Order America built on the ruins of the nation they first established "under God." More than one pundit has suggested that wise Christians begin the hunt for a two bedroom, two bath catacomb before the rush starts.
Rise of the Techno-Pagan
As America was born Europe was losing its moorings. Rationalism abandoned Christian Revelation in favor of a new god, science. Feuerbach (1804-1872) relegated Christianity to man's intellectual past and promoted a "religion of action" focused strictly on improving the temporal world--a forerunner of the "social gospel." Nietzsche's nihilsm pronounced God's death and thus the demise of the moral law, hence, "all things are permitted." The neo pagan elites of Europe believed passionately that science, not God, would solve man's problems. In essence, scientific man became his own god. The modern techo-pagan was born. He assumed god-like powers over life and death. Fastidious about pollution and animal rights, the techno-pagan does not engage in human sacrifices on the solstices, rather he offers human sacrifice daily in test tubes and abortion clinics. Neo-pagans no longer enslave catamites and prostitutes for their temples as the ancient pagan cultures once did; instead they publish studies that discover that incest and "intergenerational sex" is not necessarily harmful to children.
The life issues before modern societies, abortion, population control, euthanasia, cloning, and genetic modification of plants, animals and humans brought a seismic shift in our cultural landscape. If there are no moral laws, no accountability before God and all things are permitted, then "right" and "wrong" is determined by raw power.
Above the puppets of squishy feel good "spirituality" gurus speaking on dozens of television shows, at thousands of libraries, schools, and even church basements there are pragmatic globalists pulling the wires of geo-political influence and the gossamer filaments of mind control. Rather than provoke a revolution around the world, it is far craftier to invoke a counterfeit spirituality to persuade "citizens of the world" that the planet cannot survive unless we band together in a "world community" unified under "global governance." Discussion of that agenda is no longer confined to guarded gatherings of cognocenti but trumpeted by icons of American culture. Walter Cronkite, pin striped shaman of the new order, outlined the plan at the United Nations:
"It seems to many of us that if we are to avoid the eventual catastrophic world conflict, we must strengthen the United Nations as a first step toward world government ...and [empower]police to enforce its international laws and keep the peace...To do that, of course, we Americans will have to yield ...It would take a lot of courage, a lot of faith in the new order."
Such a plan cannot advance in a Christian nation "under God." God's ways are not the United Nations' ways. A new spirituality fostered by religious leaders at the United Nations millennium "Peace Summit" sought to displace Christianity with a synthesized pluralistic spirituality aimed at the global hegemony of the new order.
The new order is a Brave New World of total control: spiritual control (Peace Summit) population control (United Nations' Cairo, Beijing and Earth Summit) environmental control (UN Sustainable Development and Kyoto Protocol to preserve the planet and guarantee "freedom from pollution") to insure "species protection," (UN bio-diversity treaty) "food security" (UN Food Summit) genetic control (no genetically imperfect mommy and daddy--their off-spring will be a drain on the universal health care) thought control (UN mandated educational standards--can't allow the old faith or old freedoms to be taught). Totalitarian utopias envision an utterly perfect world where "peace" is insured by state control of every facet of life. Captive humans will be "free" to indulge in their "rights" to all those vices that entertain and enslave man, but he will not be free to pursue truth or seek God.
The new order cannot co-exit with the old order--they are mortally opposed in goal, motive and method. The "old order" is the Judeo-Christian order. The goal of Christendom was to build societies where man was free to discover truth and pursue holiness in response to God's love. From that purpose the entire patrimony of Western Civilization was built. Western legal tradition, source of the understanding of human rights, rests on the Christian teaching that all men are made in the image of God. In the Christian order, each life is sacrosanct and belongs to God, not the state. Christian societies seek order but never achieve perfection because man struggles against a sinful nature. Christendom held together different cultures and peoples, all--king, knight and knave--were under the authority of God (not state) and His laws. But none sought to avoid that struggle by rejecting the authority of God or His laws.
Globalists mimic the principle: hold the world together under a new religion to displace Christianity--neo-paganism--with new "rights" and laws designed to insure docility toward the totalitarian "new order."
The Roman Catholic Church
One major obstacle to the globalist hegemony is the Roman Catholic Church. Though many Christian denominations and organizations work heroically to foil the onslaught of neo-paganism, the Catholic Church is the most visible unified rebuttal to the new order agenda. In addition, the Church, with one billion members, is the sole Christian organization with an 1800 year old diplomatic history as well an international infrastructure, but no army. The Church cannot coerce, only teach and persuade. This structure and influence as well as its opposition to the globalist agenda make the Church a target for subversion. If the atheist worldview is to triumph, it must first rid itself of Catholic Church. Or better yet, control the massive international organization from within and use its influence and institutions--schools, nursing homes, hospitals, universities--to serve the new world order. The Catholic Church is coveted by the globalists: Substitute a new age, neo-pagan syncretism in place of authentic doctrine, and the world falls into their pocket.
More than a century ago, after the publication of Pope Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors that dissected the errors of liberalism, Marxism, socialism, and state centralization the Church began to suffer the attacks of its enemies. Some assaults were open denouncements, while others were subversive.
Manning Johnson, a former Communist Party official, testified in 1953 for the House un-American Activities Committee. His testimony corroborated the claim of his cohort, Bella Dodd, that the Communist Party recruited radicals to enter the Catholic priesthood. Manning testified that in order to compromise the Catholic Church's moral authority, "it would be necessary to concentrate Communist agents in the seminaries. The practical conclusion drawn by the Red leaders was that these institutions would make it possible for a small Communist minority to influence the ideology of future clergymen in the paths conducive to Communist purposes..." Dodd claimed the changes wrought by this plan would be shocking enough that "you will not recognize the Catholic Church."
By mid twentieth century, before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, powerful forces looked for a means to control the statements that would come from the Council. Most important to the secular humanists (and some were in the Church) was the easing of Church teachings concerning sexual morality. Among the non-Catholics who sought to influence the Church were the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller family's Population Council, both with strong interest in population control. (The Rockefeller's had funded Alfred Kinsey's notorious and discredited "sex studies" designed promote eugenics, a ten percent (US) population reduction and to provide a "scientific" basis to alter American laws and culture on sexual morality. )
Pope Paul VI disappointed the secularists with the promulgation of Humane vitae (1968) which refused to trivialize marriage by permitting artificial birth control. The encyclical upholds the nobility of God's plan that "the two shall be one flesh." The pope warned that misuse of marriage would reap a tragic harvest of divorce, abortion, and abandonment. (Some theologians pointed out that if sex could be detatched from God's design and manipulated for pleasure only, that married persons would have no grounds on which to insist that pre-marital or homosexual sex was immoral. If pleasure alone, and not commitment to family, is the purpose of sex, how can it be denied to unmarried persons? ) By the time the encyclical was released, amoral forces had sparked a rebellion against the Church from without and within.
Parallel to these developments America was grappling with its own sexual revolution. Catholic bishops and priests in America were doubly challenged; first by the liberal factions growing in the universal Church and secondly by the Kinsey/ Rockefeller engineered assault on American sexual morality.
American culture tolerated anti-Catholic outbursts the most extreme nature. Significant to the sexual revolution were the copraphiliac rages of anti-Catholic artists whose displays of crucifixes in beakers of urine or images of the Virgin splattered with elephant dung were underwritten by the American taxpayer. Such violent manifestations of anti-Catholic fervor convinced a certain segment of US Catholics to make some concession to the paganized secular culture.
Many US Catholic clerics had ignored the 1899 warning of Pope Leo XIII to avoid the error of "Americanism" that would accommodate the faith to prevailing American cultural norms. Unpopular as it could be to be persecuted by anti-Catholic groups, American Catholic clergy were to "preach the gospel in season and out." By 1970, however, there were calls for an American Catholic Church, imbued with pluralism and tolerance, that would set about trying to teach the Vatican the truths of American independence as applied to the Church in the US. Dissident theologians like Fr. Charles Curran of Catholic University led gullible American Catholics to abandon the Church's moral teachings in favor of a liberal "tolerant" lifestyle; contraception, abortion, divorce and remarriage, pre-marital sex and homosexuality were not sins; failure to be tolerant of the lives of others was a sin.
In large measure the current clergy scandal in the United States can best be understood as the intersection of the sexual revolution and the spirit of dissent raging within the Catholic Church in America. Social revolutionists have always targeted religion and education as the most effective means of changing a society. Religion is the largest affiliation common to the most number of citizens. The stated agenda of the homosexual movement is to change the cultural acceptance of homosexuality. As an increasingly paganized culture grows ever more hostile to Christian dogma, citizens, including clergy, who are not prepared to evangelize the culture will inevitably accommodate the culture. This accommodation is made manifest in the urge to conform religious teachings to the surrounding de-Christianized cultural and political norms. Nowhere is this accommodation better illustrated than with the issue of homosexuality.
In many Western Nations homosexuality is openly accepted. The link between homosexuality and the "earthy" over-sexualized pagan worldview (and recovered pagan practices) cannot be overlooked. As the pagan assault on the United States advances, the assault on Christian moral values increases. The establishment of a religious homosexual network within all Christian denominations is critical to the cause of the homosexual and pagan ideology. However, the establishment of such a network within the Catholic Church has the added allure of an international influence for the homosexual movement. Imagine that tomorrow the Catholic Church declared certain biblical passages to be ambiguous in modern understanding and thus the Church was neutral on the matter--the international effect would be enormous. The Catholic Church cannot change scripture nor the 2000 years of constant teaching, so the dissidents work to build "parallel church" in which dissidents seek positions of control in seminaries, universities and chanceries.
In numerous quarters Catholic monks, nuns and priests mirrored the confusion and even the debauchery of the American sexual revolution. Psychologist William Coulson would later detail the destruction of religious houses who were taught encounter group techniques, a hallmark of "humanistic psychology" pioneered by Carl Rogers. Under this man-centered system there is no place for God.
"...[W]e went to California.....and found the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the IHM's. They agreed to let us come into their schools and work with their normal faculty, and with their normal students, and influence the development of normal Catholic family life. It was a disaster.... The IHM's had some 60 schools when we started; at the end, they had one. There were some 615 nuns when we began. Within a year after our first interventions, 300 of them were petitioning Rome to get out of their vows. They did not want to be under anyone's authority, except the authority of their imperial inner selves."
Ancient pagan societies were polytheistic and highly sexualized. The worship of multiple gods included goddess worship and orgiastic fertility rites. Homosexual rites designated victims to receive the seed of many men in the belief that potency was thus concentrated in the victim whose own release over fields would insure a miraculous harvest. The Jewish people were commanded not to imitate the practices of the surrounding nations lest they perish. The children of Israel were "a people set apart." The Early Christian Church also fought back the tendency of believers and converts to combine the worship of the local gods with the worship of Jesus Christ. Early heresies attempted to synthesize Christianity with the antithetical principles of surrounding practices.
Modern political and cultural liberalism is easily seduced by paganism. The principle reasons are these:
- Paganism is pluralistic--it accepts your gods, my gods, all gods except the One True God because that would sacrifice the accommodation with a pluralistic society that in turn keeps the civil peace; "You're Ok, I'm Ok," and truth does not matter, only choice..
- Paganism embraces a goddess and priestess--appeals to feminists, pluralists.
- Paganism is pantheistic --deifies nature and justifies "radical environmentalism."
- Paganism gives legitimacy to ritualized sexual immorality.
- Paganism encourages "secret knowledge" (Gnosis) for initiates Thus the coupling of liberal politics and new age, neo-Gnostic pagan spirituality is a predictable and powerful alliance.
Neo-Gnostic assault on the Church
Across America Catholics were being wooed with outright neo-Gnostic practices taught by priests and nuns. The strategy to empty the Catholic Church of its doctrine and to supplant it with a false religion is advanced by several tactics. Primary among them is to amalgamate error and truth under one teaching. Thus "human rights," a truth, is in fact used to insure universal abortion "rights," a perversion of truth and life. By such methods any number of false teachings can be hidden in warm and fuzzy sounding slogans. When the teaching Church opposes the deception, some with "itchy ears" then turn on the Church with a vengeance.
The assault on orthodox Catholic practice can be seen ultimately as the work of The Deceiver, but it must be also be understood in terms of how smoothly it advances the cause of the New Order of global totalitarianism. Feminism, socialism, and the entire liberal agenda (with its homosexual ideology) that seeks to detach humanity from its natural social structures is advanced as "modern" and "enlightened," thus religious "fundamentalists" who oppose it are against man's "progress." The Catholic Church remains supremely aware of the warning in 2 Peter 2:1 "...in the same way false teachers will appear among you. They will bring destructive, untrue doctrines, and will deny the Master...even so many will follow their immoral ways..." The Church specifically defines "modernism" as the "synthesis of all heresies."
Briefly, the encyclical, On The Doctrine of The Modernists, outlines grave errors in philosophy and theology which were gaining momentum at dawn of the twentieth century, including Rationalism and relativism. Mincing no words, Pope Pius X described in vivid terms the magnitude of the threat from "men speaking perverse things", "vain talkers and seducers" who seek to "utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ." The errors of modernism were found even in the "ranks of the priesthood itself" and such men "play the double part of rationalist and Catholic" and were, therefore,
"the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For, as We have said, they put into operation their designs for her undoing, not from without but from within. Hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain from the very fact that their knowledge of her is more intimate."
Catholics in California, New Mexico and Arizona in particular absorbed an alien theology from religious who rubbed against New Age practitioners clustered around the Esalen Institute. Seduction of mind and body is another tactic used to advance the strategy to subvert the Church. At Esalen, in Big Sur, California, rebellious intellects participate in the "Center for alternative education", a "forum for transformational practices, a restorative retreat, a worldwide community of seekers." Esalen bases its "therapy" and research on the Human Potential Movement. Reports of heavy LSD use surfaced from Esalen as well as the open secret that the US government had funded various parapsychology and mind control experiments at the institute.
Still today Esalen purports to study the "evolutionary possibilities of humankind." Esalen is a veritable hotbed of neo-Gnostic esoterica ranging from "meduimship" to "Hylic Pluralism" that explores "possibilities for higher human life and embodiment." Followers of Esalen's "bodily survival" school believes that mankind is on the cusp of a new evolutionary moment, an expectation that is also a key tenet of occultist Madame Blavatsky's theosophical writings. Proponents believe superior mind control (via meditation and channeling) can give birth to a new and masterful body; a super-human body for the superior mind, a Superman, superior to the current model of humanity. Such hopes betray the logical progression of the man who rejects God in order to become his own god.
Examples of this esoteric infiltration into the US Catholic population include the "Christian" channeling and Enneagram retreats where "theologians" taught the occult wisdom of Sufi inspired geometric numerology to uncover one's "true" personality and how to use that gnosis (knowledge) to "better relate to" (control, manipulate) others. Various forms of Eastern mysticism crept into once traditional prayers. Meditation techniques, centered on Eastern occult teachings, gained sufficient adherents to alarm Rome. Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued the "Letter To The Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation," calling Christians back to authentic prayer forms. Cardinal Ratzinger also warned Catholics in a homily to avoid "methods of prayer which are not inspired by the Gospel and which in practice tend to set Christ aside in preference for a mental void which makes no sense in Christianity."
Perhaps the best known New Age apostate from Catholicism is a former Dominican priest, Matthew Fox. Fox frequents dissident Catholic conferences as a guru of a pantheistic "Creation Spirituality." Fox, and New Age priest Tom Berry are votaries of the urbane French Jesuit paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. Chardin, an evolutionist, hypothesized that the final stage in evolution would be a spiritual evolution: Man would be taken into the Mind of God. [His theme that "everything that rises must converge, can be distilled as supposition that in the final stage in the existence of things, there is utter unity (convergence). It was Chardin's mystical marriage of pantheism and futurism that captivated and inspired dozens of imitators from Marilyn Ferguson (The Aquarian Conspiracy) to James Lovelock (Gaia theory--see Henry Lamb article) to theosophist Robert Muller.
Muller, an apostate Catholic, believes that "meta organizations" such as the UN, the State of the World Forum, and the United Religions Initiative will provide the critical public energy for the next stage of human development.
A dominant theme espoused by globalists and pantheists alike is that the earth as an organism has supreme "rights." Globalists insist that the earth's ideal population is one billion people. An optimum lifestyle for this number of humans can be met with current resources. Further, globalists believe that war and other impediments to peace are caused by the fight to control natural resources (water, food, oil). It is for this reason that they seek to impose on the earth population control and sterile practices, such a homosexuality. Once this reduced "human herd" is achieved, peace will reign and mankind's final evolutionary ascent will ascend to the next level of evolution--the spiritual level. Thus, globalist ideology and pantheistic belief in a "spiritual evolution" have converged.
For Muller, the UN is the "global brain" and the "World Soul" (one world religion) is being born as man's consciousness merges with the cosmos--a garbled version of Chardin's hypothesis. A former Assistant Secretary General at the UN, today Muller directs the UN's "Peace University" in Costa Rica and promotes his prototype schools for global citizenship. (There is a Robert Muller School in Texas).
The rise of eco-theology as the main engine of pantheism is running rampant through Catholic and Protestant churches. Eco-theology, or "green theology" is yet another tactic designed to empty Christianity of authentic teaching by focusing "religious duty" on "environmental justice" as a gateway to global control of the earth under the United Nations' plan for Sustainable Development. Sustainable Development grew from the UN's Rio summit in 1992 under the guidance of Canadian globalist, Maurice Strong. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is endorsed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. It pushes on parishes and congregations the concept of earth's "carrying capacity" as determined by Strong and fellow globalist Stephen Rockefeller who is the godfather of the Earth Charter, a Manifesto for the Earth.
Indeed, the Earth Charter was among the main features of the UN's World Summit for Sustainable Development that concluded in early September. The Charter was offered to the world in a breathtaking, blasphemous parody of Moses and the Ten Commandments. The Charter, the globalists new "ten commandments" was paraded through the "wilderness of the world" from Vermont to Johannesburg South Africa, the site of the Sustainable Development Summit, in an "ark" built to house the "sacred covenant of the Charter.
The Charter is presented as a mandate for "sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century" in contrast to the Ark of the Covenant that is God's plan for an ordered world. (See (http://www.ark-of-hope.org/home.html). The pagan ark was carried on poles, just as the Mosaic Ark, but it was covered in pagan, earth worship iconography. Not only is the Charter a pagan idol, it seeks to enshrine the tenets of socialism as a religious duty. The openly socialistic demand of the Charter is contained in this listed principle, "Promote the equitable distribution of wealth within nations and among nations."
Such new-age paganism cloaked in reverence for the earth has invaded Catholicism. By the early 1990's US Catholics were learning of stories where convents were turned into organic farms where "earth renewal" was taught to gullible women. There, too, New Age incantations to the Four Winds were substituted for authentic prayers. Feminism struck once venerable orders of nuns, emptying the convents of dedicated teachers and nurses. Liberated from their vows many such women entered various professions where feminist ideology could be pushed on schools, hospitals and in a myriad of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that worked at the United Nations to deprive the Vatican of its voice at UN conferences.
One World Religion
The strategy and tactics of world ideologues to invalidate the moral teachings of the Catholic Church has been consistent and systematic. At the close of the Second World War, mankind was war weary and sought to prevent wars by inviting nations to talk before launching missiles. Early in the United Nation's history the Vatican had hopes that the international organization would truly foster fair dialogue and promote peace. Pope Paul VI addressed the UN in 1965, at the height of the Cold War, noting that it was perhaps the "last great hope for concord and peace" and he added, "May its authority increase." The Church is learning a bitter lesson, today, at the hands of the same UN that it once hoped would lead nations toward a genuine peace.
Cardinal Ratzinger commenting on the "new anthropology" promoted by the United Nations explicitly named these plans to reorganize the world, "the New World Order." The Cardinal added that "the Christian--and not only him, but especially him--is obliged to protest."
The UN proactively seeks to build a one world religion and world government that rationalizes the culture of death--from promoting legal "rights" to abortion, prostitution, euthanasia, homosexuality to cloning. Vatican delegates stand before the United Nations to oppose the loss of sovereignty for nations, the loss of parental rights. Delegates defend the right of conscience for health care workers who do not want to perform abortions, delegates defend the unborn and the elderly, and remind the world that there are natural laws that cannot be suspended for the sake of an inhuman agenda. The reward is that the UN demonizes the Church and its teachings.
Particular Church teachings are characterized to the public in negative terms because they are in direct opposition to globalist plans. The Church proclaims the truth of Christ, it cannot accept religious pluralism. In 2000, in preparation for the Millennium Peace Summit calling together the religions of the world, the Vatican issued Dominus Jesus . Howls of protest followed. The Church was proclaiming it alone had the truth, the Church was not open to other faith traditions, the Church was not pluralistic or willing to form a consensus from among the many valued religious teachings. Once again, the Church parried a globalist tactic: If the Church is not sufficiently subverted, then dilute the Christian message by inflating the number of religious voices that must be recognized. Dominus Jesus simply restates the 2000 year old Christian truth, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and is there is no other God.
The Catholic Church opposes the one world religion promoted by the United Nations, where the operating principle of "consensus" is applied to all who have a stake in a world religion: World Goodwill (Theosophy),United Religions Initiative and Gobachev's State of the World Forum (see www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=16212). The nations of the world submit their traditions and expect to arrive at Oneness: Animism, B'Hai, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, pantheism. Their goal is not Truth, but consensus.
The Church is now experiencing ominous threats from various world bodies. Recently, with the advent of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United Nations and its affiliated systems have openly spoken of the "criminal" intent of Catholic teachings and policy. It jabs the Church for failing to ordain women and suggests that policy is a violation women's rights. The same "criminal" language is used in regard to the Church's teaching on all life issues.
The United Nations' Convention on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) committee is currently harassing Andorra, a European Catholic country with less than 70,000 citizens for prohibiting abortion, and failing to teach sex education in its schools.
On March 12, 2002 The European Parliament set an agenda to debate a inter-agency report that condemned the Catholic Church for its moral principles and its refusal to ordain women..
Some fear that the ICC, whose mandate is to prosecute "Crimes against humanity," will some day charge the Vatican with "hate crimes" because it preaches against homosexuality. Or, charge the Church with "crimes against humanity" for preaching against abortion which the UN views as an obstruction of "human rights." If the case is made that that a "violation" affects millions of people, then the magnitude of the number trips the ICC jurisdiction and we could have a pope hauled before the ICC for defending life in the womb.
The Catholic Church fights an internal war against those who would subvert its teachings from within while defending its teachings to the hostile post-Christian world. The Church will not compromise with the prevailing zeitgeist. Though its members may dwindle, doctrinal truths will remain, in season and out.
American Christians understand that if the Catholic Church is persecuted for its refusal to compromise the teachings of Jesus, then their own communions are also at risk. Christian doctrine cannot be subordinated to the pressure to "fit in" with the post-Christian drift of Western culture toward a worldwide pantheism enforced by a global government. Such a "dogmatic stance" is often seen as anti-American in its refusal to bend to the great leveling power of pluralism that is a requirement of comfortable citizenship.
A great vise is closing upon American Christians. On the one hand Christians are pressured by their own nation where liberal judges increasingly outlaw in public expression of faith while legalizing every form of immorality. On the other hand, the global juggernaut gathers military muscle and legal powers of crushing scope.
The minions of anti-Christianity have labored diligently for over a century to enthrone their twisted worldview. Christianity is toxic to their worldview. They will not allow Christian practice and witness to undermine their hard fought gains. Americans notoriously seek instant answers to every difficulty. There is no McDonald's drive through for a quick solution the peril American Christians must face: reconvert paganized America or be persecuted by it.
Mary Jo Anderson is a contributing reporter to WorldNetDaily and a contributing editor to many Catholic publications, including Crisis magazine. She is a regular guest and contributing writer to Living His Life Abundantly® International, Inc.
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