Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Why I Left Full Preterism by Sam Frost: A Review

Nov 26, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Preterism was back in the news recently. Doug Wilson and Gary DeMar had another powwow in Moscow on Monday, November 3, this time an official debate. So, the timing is good to bring attention to this little book with big intentions. 

The word preterism comes from the Latin word for past, and it describes certain biblical prophecies having been fulfilled in the past, specifically in the first century. Most Evangelical Christians are futurists, meaning they believe those same prophecies describe future events happening very far into the future, most not even having happened yet. I hadn’t heard the word preterism until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, probably because I didn’t put much stock in eschatology as a recovering dispensationalist. I was an eschatological agnostic.

In my zeal for my new postmillennial eschatology, I was learning everything I could find on the topic. One resource I found was Gary DeMar, whose knowledge of eschatology seemed encyclopedic. I started listening to his American Vision podcast and became a big fan. I didn’t know much about preterism, and nothing Gary said gave me the slightest indication he believed anything out of the ordinary about eschatology. I caught a few things here and there indicating he was supposedly controversial, but even when addressing the topic there were no red flags.

Then last year I went to the Fight Laugh Feast conference, and I mentioned something about DeMar. A number of people I respect seemed to agree he was in fact out of the ordinary eschatologically. Some even used the word heretical, which I found hard to believe at the time. Fast forward to DeMar some months back going to Moscow to meet with Doug Wilson and make an appearance on CrossPolitic. What I saw on the podcast certainly didn’t seem ordinary. Getting him to affirm something definitively is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall, frustrating. Thus, I began my journey down the rabbit hole of full preterism (FP). This interview and DeMar’s trip to Moscow brought out the full preterists on Twitter en mass. It was bizarre. These guys, and it seems they’re all guys, have a certitude about them that makes James White look positively doubt ridden. Ken Gentry wrote a foreword to Frost’s book, and in it says of such preterist zeal, “I have seen immature Christians swallow the system whole, then become intoxicated with a cult-like arrogance.” Surely not all who embrace it are immature, but I experienced a bit of that arrogance as well.

I still had no clue how deep the hole went, but not long after this I came across a Sam Frost interview on YouTube. As soon as he mentioned the book, I had to get it. I’m glad I did because now I know why I’m most definitely not an FP. Frost mentioned something in the interview I found surprising given what I was learning about Gary DeMar. On the back of the book is an endorsement by Gary DeMar! He writes that Frost’s book “is a great starting point in understanding the inherent dangers of a full preterism position.” I wonder what he thinks about that now.

Sam Frost has some credibility in writing a book about leaving FP because he not only embraced it, but taught and championed it, and wrote a couple books about it. He was a mainstay at FP conferences for a number of years until he grew disillusioned and saw what Gentry describes as “methodological errors, positional inconsistencies, and internal fragmentation.” What started to give me that queasy this is just not right feeling was the apparent rejection of 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy.

In the first chapter Frost gives us a short history of FP, and lays out four points on which all eschatological positions agree:

  1. Christ will return bodily . . .
  2. at the end of time and history . . .
  3. and raise our bodies . . .
  4. and bring full judgment to all.

Christians in history have been unified on what Frost calls “these essential matters.” I was shocked when I began to understand they didn’t believe these “essentials.” And it isn’t that they just don’t believe them, but they seek to “undermine them entirely.” How they do this is by claiming that all prophecies, all eschatological events (Matthew 24, Revelation, Daniel, etc.) were fulfilled in the past, and specifically in AD70 and the destruction of Jerusalem. AD70 is the ultimate hermeneutic by which they interpret everything in Scripture. The pretzel logic I encountered on Twitter of people trying to defend this was hard to believe.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, for average Christians to wrap their minds around such a concept. What do you mean Jesus isn’t coming back “to judge the living and the dead”? What do you mean we will not be raised physically, bodily, out of the dust of the earth in resurrected eternal bodies? When I started to grasp what FP is, I thought there is no way Gary DeMar believes such things. Then seeing him on CrossPolitic trying to talk about the resurrection and watching the incredulous faces of the guys encountering this, it seems he does. Like I said, it’s hard to nail Gary down.

The short history of FP Frost recounts goes back to the early 70s. Out of 2000 years a half century or so isn’t much. Yet we’re to believe Christians for all that time completely misunderstood what God was saying about the very nature of redemptive reality, of reality itself? Sure seems like it. One man is responsible for this, Max King, an ex-Church of Christ minister. He published his first book in 1971 called, The Spirit of Prophecy, and as the description at Amazon says, it “shook the foundations of modern Bible interpretation.” It must not have been very high on the Richter Scale since so few have ever heard of it or FP. He wrote another book in 1987 Frost calls his magnum opus, The Cross and the Parousia of Christ. And he adds, this is the first documentation of full preterism, even though preterist ideas are common in church history.

Another thing that is new in church history was the FP antipathy to creeds Frost recounts in a chapter on, “History, Creeds, and Sola Scriptura.” The latter is a Reformation affirmation, and is important in this context because the FPs claim they only reject the creeds at the points which they disagree with Scripture. But I always thought the creeds were based on Scripture. Apparently not. This explains DeMar’s fixation on “show me the verse,” which he repeats ad nauseam when discussing this topic, as if affirmative declarations in Scripture settle anything. Or that inferring something from Scripture that isn’t spelled out is illegitimate. Like, for example, the Trinity. The word doesn’t exist in our Bibles, so “show me the verse” isn’t going to work for something Christians have believed since Christ rose from the dead and Trinitarian orthodoxy agreed upon at the Council of Nicaea.

The problem with such extreme Biblicism is that it contradicts itself. Because God didn’t see fit to give us a textbook or operating manual, spelling out exactly what we’re to believe but rather a story; doctrine must be inferred or derived from the text. The authority of Scripture doesn’t come directly from the text but must be interpreted, and upon that interpretation we stand or fall. FPs are “stuck” with the rest of us interpreters, even though their absolute certitude indicates otherwise. The inevitability of interpretation means they criticize those who do exactly what they do, interpret the text! You would think this obvious reality might engender a little humility, but alas you would be wrong. Absolute certainty for finite creatures like us is an impossibility. Sadly, too many people haven’t realized that.

Another concept I hadn’t encountered before reading Frost is the idea of infinity, in the title of chapter 4. This is truly bizarre. According to FP the world as we know it will never end (remember everything was fulfilled, finished, in AD70), so there will be no end to baby making, or what they call “infinite procreation.” As Frost writes from the FP perspective, “’the Bible nowhere speaks about the end of time, but only of the time of the end,’ which of course was AD 70.’” And if the covenant is eternal, forever, then history must go on eternally. Like I said, bizarre. But what about the elect. There can’t be an infinite number of those because Scripture is clear on this, not much interpretation required. Frost quotes John 6:39:

39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 

Frost writes a chapter on John 6 because it was critical in moving him away from FP.

Also, the concept of the book of life is affirmed throughout Scripture, and the idea is that a certain number of people are in it, not an infinitely expanding number of people. Daniel 12:1, for example, states: “But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered.” Doesn’t sound like an ever expanding book to me.

Frost finishes with a chapter on the reasons he left FP, and some might surprise you. One is that FP and dispensationalism “share a lot in common.” I didn’t see that coming, although he does mention dispensationalism several times. The similarity is that they are both “all or nothing” approaches, and both have a “one time fulfillment” in mind, among other things.

I could write much more, but my objective in writing this is to give you some sense of the bizarreness of this very newfangled eschatology, and the inevitable unorthodox implications that result. It’s worth the read if you’re curious or have someone in your life who is thinking about or embracing FP.

 

 

Charlie Kirk, Christian Nationalism, and the Sword of the Spirit

Charlie Kirk, Christian Nationalism, and the Sword of the Spirit

Nov 12, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

As Christians have said for probably 2000 years, and Jews for 2000 before that, God works in mysterious ways. Why he allowed that young man’s life to be snuffed out at such a young age, and with decades left to continue his work, we can’t know, but we can observe the response to it. I listened to this interview Mark Halprin did with four young people who either new Charlie or were involved in his organization, Turning Point USA. It’s stunning for me, a baby boomer and Christian for 47(!) years, to hear these kids and their boldness for Jesus Christ, and their passion to take their Christian faith into politics and culture, and transform it. I’ve written here in detail about how the modern church was captured by a Pietism that made it politically and culturally anemic. Being born-again in 1978 into such a version of the faith, and having been exposed to Francis Schaeffer a couple years later, I’ve been frustrated ever since.

As Christians have said for probably 2000 years, and Jews for 2000 before that, God works in mysterious ways. Why he allowed that young man’s life to be snuffed out at such a young age, and with decades left to continue his work, we can’t know, but we can observe the response to it. I listened to this interview Mark Halprin did with four young people who either new Charlie or were involved in his organization, Turning Point USA. It’s stunning for me, a baby boomer and Christian for 47(!) years, to hear these kids and their boldness for Jesus Christ, and their passion to take their Christian faith into politics and culture, and transform it. I’ve written here in detail about how the modern church was captured by a Pietism that made it politically and culturally anemic. Being born-again in 1978 into such a version of the faith, and having been exposed to Francis Schaeffer a couple years later, I’ve been frustrated ever since.

I started looking at everything from a Christian worldview perspective, and learned from Schaeffer and others, that we as Christians are to take the implications of this worldview into every area of life. The Evangelical church on the whole under the influence of Pietism and fundamentalism, however, wasn’t interested. The focus always seemed to be our salvation from sin and personal holiness, and by extension personal relationships. Any impact on society and culture was incidental and not all that important. It took negative world and peak woke to begin opening the eyes of Christians, and cultural conservatives in general, that the stakes in negative world could no longer be ignored. The consequences were real. The promise of a neutral secularism negotiating between various worldviews and religions proved to be the lie it’s always been, the myth of neutrality fully exposed. Instead of the peace and harmony secularism promised, we got Christian persecution and debauchery promoted in government and law.

As I explained and argued in detail in my last book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, a Great Awakening started happening sometime in the last 10 years. I believe it started with Donald Trump’s entrance on to the political stage. Here are the first two sentences of the book:

When Donald Trump started his descent down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, there was a rip in the space-time continuum. I’m not sure what that means, but in God’s providence something clearly remarkable happened that day.

I had no idea anything happened on that day, other than the sun rose and set like any other day. And as I say, it was not Trump himself, but the response to him that instigated something we’re now seeing come into full fruition, a Great Awakening. For a number of years starting with the Covid debacle, the awakening wasn’t gospel or Jesus centered, but truth centered. I knew that was something momentous because of he who is the Truth. I believed sooner or later many people who were waking up to the truth about a variety of things would find their way to the source of all truth, the logos, the word made flesh who dwelled for a while among us. I believe this started with Trump’s attempted assassination in July of last year. Everyone knew, whether they believed in God or not, that it was providential the bullet didn’t kill him. And it now seems Charlie Kirk’s assassination did something profound to many people in a way nothing else could. The memorial in Arizona made that abundantly clear.

The Left and Might Makes Right
Something else has become abundantly clear in 2025: the left in America is driven by violence. How else is one to explain an organization that calls itself Antifa, for anti-fascist, using blatantly fascist tactics to advance its agenda? You can’t make that stuff up. Hypocrisy is a job description for a leftist, and projection is a tactic. That word is critical if you want to understand the demonic nature of the Marxism driving the left. When defined psychologically in means:

The tendency to ascribe to another person feelings, thoughts, or attitudes (or actions) present in oneself, or to regard external reality as embodying such feelings, thoughts, etc., in some way.

Everything, and I mean literally every single thing, the left (i.e., Democrat politicians and legacy media) says is projection, meaning what they accuse the right of doing and thinking is exactly what they do and think. It’s so perverse and evil, it’s almost impressive. And they do it all with a perfectly straight face.

If you’re not familiar with the terms left and right in a political context, it goes back to the French Revolution and the seating arrangement in the French National Assembly (kind of like our Congress). Supporters of the monarchy and traditional institutions sat on the right in the assembly hall, while those who favored radical change, republicanism and social equality sat on the left. The radical republicans got their philosophical inspiration from the man who effectively created the modern world, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Simply, he believed man was born pure but corrupted by modern society, so it follows if you change society you will change man. Christianity teaches just the opposite. Man is born in sin, and to change the society you need to change man. The French Revolution embraced Rousseau, and the American Revolution embraced the Bible. The results speak for themselves.

Marx and Engles took the Rousseauian worldview and developed it into an entire political philosophy known as communism. In this Marxist world there is no truth, no God, only ideology, a set of ideas that must drive all action to accomplish some kind of undefinable Utopia on earth. Since Marx and Engles published The Communist Manifesto in 1948, the ideology of oppression became the driving force of leftist politics, and victimization defined everything. Initially, Marxism was economic and class based, rich oppressing poor, but that didn’t work. So in the 1920s and 30s, Marxists developed cultural Marxism, which is identity based, out of which we get racial and sexual oppression, in which white Christian heterosexual married men are the worst of the worst. DEI and transgender madness are just the latest examples.

All of this is convoluted and makes little sense, but the bottom line for our day is that to the left truth is irrelevant, and all that matters is “the narrative.” Since they don’t believe in truth, what drives their action is “the will to power,” in a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, might makes right. So if your opponent won’t submit to “the narrative,” then they must be either discredited or silenced; toe the line or die is their motto. Thus, we get leftist assassination culture. In the last month I’ve learned just how widespread it is. As in, the threat of the leftist death cult stalks anyone who is politically popular and influential on the right. Charlie Kirk, by contrast, used words as his weapons, and had to die for it because he was so effective.

The Sword of the Spirit Verses Real Swords
Here we see the societal implications of two incompatible views of reality in undeniable juxtaposition, side by bloody side. On the atheistic secular left violence is its calling card, while on the Christian right are words and persuasion, real swords verses the Sword of the Spirit. In this fight real swords have no chance. This didn’t appear to be the case from the beginning when the nascent Christian church was up against the Jewish establishment and the Roman Empire. There is no David and Goliath metaphor to capture those odds. Yet, in less than 300 years the Roman Empire embraced the faith it was determined to destroy. This happened again and again in Christian history, often with those claiming the mantel of Christianity trying to silence other Christians. For example, during the Reformation William Tyndale was executed by the government at the behest of the Catholic establishment simply for translating the Word of God into English so lay people could read it. This war, however, is between two diametrically opposed views of reality, and why all Christians of whatever theological persuasion must stick together. There will be time for theological debates later. What Ben Franklin said when the Declaration was signed applies in our cultural and political civil war: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

What made Christianity the world conquering religion it proved to be wasn’t military and political power, but the power of the Holy Spirit through God’s word through God’s people. It transformed everything it touched. This from a book I read recently perfectly captures what I’m saying: “The church on earth is a colony of heaven’s citizens commissioned to heavenize earth.” Part of this is using political power to establish justice in a nation because God gave the state the power of the sword to punish evil doers (Rom. 13). But the church and Christians within it never “wield the sword” to bring justice (only in self-defense). Ours to use is the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, the declaration of Christ as Savior and ascended King in whose authority (Eph. 1:18-23) we battle against “the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12). This can mean engagement in the very messy real world of politics for some of us, but for most it means the power of persuasion in God’s truth in service to others. By contrast, we see the “real swords,” the violence, the enemies of God on the left use almost daily on our screens. For Christians, we focus on the sword of the Spirit with which we do persuasive battle. Persuasion is what Charlie Kirk was doing when he was martyred:

To induce to believe by appealing to reason or understanding; convince.

This is the Christian way, using words because the power of the word of God, Jesus himself. Let’s look at some verses indicating this even if they don’t put it exactly this way. In the Ephesians 6 passage in which we wage battle against spiritual forces of evil, Paul says:

16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

The writer to the Hebrews says of the Word’s power (chapter 4):

12 For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

There are several references to this sword in Revelation. Speaking of Jesus (Rev. 1):

16 In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.

In Revelation 2:

12 “To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:
These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword.

16 Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

And these verses in Revelation 19:

14 The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15 Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.” He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16 On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: king of kings and lord of lords.

21 The rest were killed with the sword coming out of the mouth of the rider on the horse, and all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.

I used to envision a real sword coming out of Jesus’ mouth killing people, but his sword is his word! This is symbolic language of the spiritual battle in which we are engaged, which has real world consequences in this life, in this fallen world. When Jesus ascended to heaven he became king of kings and lord of lords. He began his reign then, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost to begin his conquering mission to take back his creation from the devil through his people. This means real change, real transformation among people. Just compare the fruits of the Spirit with the acts of the flesh in Galatians 5. Which world would you rather live in? I’ll tell you which: a Christian world.

A Christian Nation is Not an Oxymoron
Despite what many Christians think, a Christian nation is not a contradiction in terms. It is not tyranny, as too many Christians believe. I wrote about this in depth last year, so I won’t do that here, but we don’t live in the Middle Ages, and we have 2000 years of Christian hindsight to see what the church got wrong, and really couldn’t have known at the time. We also live on this side the thousand year development of English common law fulfilled in the American Revolution, and on this side of hundreds of years of the development of secularism that turned the American dream into a woke nightmare, one the British Isles hasn’t woken up from yet.

As we can see from the Biden years and peak woke, and what the UK is experiencing now, secularism is a jealous God. It is the all-encompassing, tyrannical nature of secularism against which we fight. In their book Classical Apologetics, R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsley start their 1984 book with a chapter titled, “The Crisis of Secularism.” After 40 years, that crisis has reached a revealing point. Their description of secularism is helpful:

Western culture is not pagan, nor is it Christian. It has been secularized. Western man has “come of age,” passing through the stages of mythology, theology, and metaphysics, reaching the maturity of science. The totem pole has yielded to the temple which in turn has given way to the acme of human progress, the laboratory. . . . Resistance to Christianity comes not from the deposed priests of Isis but from the guns of secularism. The Christian task (more specifically, the rational apologetics task) in the modern epoch is not so much to produce a new Summa Contra Gentiles (an apologetics work of Thomas Aquinas to non-Christians) as it is to produce a Summa Contra Secularisma.

I could not agree more. They call statism “the inevitable omega point of secularism,” and I could not agree more with that as well. Statism means total control of the state, and it is the enemy of liberty, therefore secularism and its inevitable omega point are our enemies.

In the 20th century there was something called the “secularization thesis,” that as science and knowledge progress religion will eventually disappear. It hasn’t quite worked out that way. The world overall is arguably more religious than ever, and the West’s religion is secularism. As we see, America is beginning to break out of that, as are a couple other Western nations like Turkey and Poland, but the West on the whole is completely captured by secularism at the moment. I am convinced that will change as the tide of truth overwhelms the rickety fence of lies trying to keep truth out. This will be no more effective at keeping the truth out than the Berlin Wall was.

The reason Christian Nationalism is supposedly “controversial” and brings out cries of theocracy or “Christian authoritarianism,” is the claim that the state should recognize and formally acknowledge God in Christ, King Jesus. That nations could be Christian was commonly accepted and was not in the least “controversial” in all Western societies of Christendom until the latter half of the twentieth century. It was recognized that the state had a role in promoting what people in the past called “true religion,” which was Christianity. It is obvious today what “true religion” is, and the state is most definitely promoting it, except in November of 2024 America’s state took a U-turn, while most of Europe is still mired in a suffocating secularism. Only with “true religion” and God’s law can there be true flourishing and liberty in the land. This is why those young people Mark Halprin interviewed is such a profound moment in American history. They are indicative not only of the millions of people Charlie Kirk influenced, but also of Christianity as a cultural and political force in America. Maybe, finally, the personalized, pietized Christianity that captured the church long ago, is giving way to a culturally robust Christianity as God always intended it to be.

 

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Christianity is Sociologically True: Personal and Societal Transformation

Nov 5, 2025 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

On Twitter recently I saw this short video of a young British Journalist, Louise Perry, explain why she became a Christian. In 2022 she published a book called, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which indicates like many secularist liberals she had been mugged by reality. It is obvious from the devastation coming in the wake of “the 60s,” and the rejection of traditional Christian sexuality morality, that something is terribly wrong. The rejection of monogamy and the sexual exclusivity of marriage, and yes between a man and a woman, destroyed the foundation of civilization and source of true human flourishing, the family. Not only have we seen the explosion of divorce and single parent households, but we’ve discovered that children raised in such an environment are often emotionally and psychologically damaged. Every study over the last 50 years makes this undeniable. Everyone agrees, even those who reject the primacy of the family, that children do best in a two parent, mother and father family.

Frenchman Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the academic discipline of sociology, which can be defined as “the study of human society, social behavior, and the structures, institutions, and interactions that shape them.” It is clear from such study that certain things work better than others, meaning they bring human happiness, peace, safety, and prosperity, or they don’t. Normal human beings tend to prefer these to misery, war, crime, and poverty, so it makes sense to try to order our lives and society so they produce more of the former than the latter. For Ms. Perry, she saw that the sexual revolution and everything associated with it clearly wasn’t working. I don’t know her story, but she clearly saw a connection between what was working, what could work, and Christianity. So in her studies she came to the conclusion that if Christianity “were supernaturally true you would expect it to be sociologically true.” In other words, for human beings to function optimally in a society, the truth of Christianity could be verified by that, and she found that it is. That realization is happening to a lot of people in this age of Great Awakening. For some reason people prefer harmony over chaos, love over hate, beauty over ugliness, liberty over tyranny. Go figure.

Living in a Christian World: Gospel Influence Everywhere
A journey through Western history allows us to see these contrasts in living color. We can also clearly see this in other countries and their cultures today, but so much of the World is Westernized it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate how unique our Western culture is specifically because it was created by classical and Christian influences. I say classical because both ancient Greece and Rome have had significant influences on the development of the West, but those pagan civilizations were as unfamiliar to us as aliens from some distant galaxy far, far away.

Historian Tom Holland’s journey to an appreciation of Christianity in the development of the West is chronicled in his highly influential book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Here was someone who grew up enamored of everything he thought ancient Greece and Rome stood for, until one day he realized he had absolutely nothing in common with those people. Their moral value system and view of the world was completely, well, alien to him, something he could not relate to at all. Mind you, he’s not a Christian, yet sees the world through Christian lenses, and realizes we don’t have the modern world without Christianity.

Holland’s book was a profound revelation for me, and multitudes of others. We’ve all grown up in a Western culture that is what it is because of Christianity. On some level we know that, but like the air we breathe we take it for granted, as if it’s just the way things are supposed to be. The problem with this is that living in a dominant secular culture, we just assume the blessings we enjoy of living in a modern society just happened for no reason at all. We live with a modicum of peace and prosperity, political liberty, education, health, etc., just because. In other words, they come from chance, just like they think the physical universe came from chance. The “narrative” of the secularist is that the Enlightenment saved us from religious fanaticism and tyranny, and because of science and technology we have the modern world in spite of Christianity, most certainly not because of it. That gets the reality of the situation exactly upside down, as well as inside out.

The ancient world was a brutal place, brutal in a way unimaginable to us now. We see this in movies and literature, but it’s difficult for us to comprehend the realness of it, and how difficult everyday life was for most people. Because of Charlie Kirk’s brutal murder, I’m reading the 1951 novel, Spartacus, from which a movie as made in 1960 with Kirk Douglas. The story is about the slave revolts in the Roman Empire, and a line from the story is apropos for the time, “I am Spartacus,” as other slaves stood up to protect and affirm what Spartacus stood for. A lot of people today are saying, I am Charlie Kirk.

The author, Howard Fast, paints a horrendous picture of slavery and how cheap life was in a way that makes American chattel slavery in the 19th century look like Disneyland. The brutality of it is incomprehensible to us. The story starts with some wealthy patrician Romans taking a trip on the Apian Way, and on both side of the road 6,000 slaves are hung, naked, on Roman crosses as a sign of Roman justice. They had put down the slave revolt instigated by Spartacus, and the book looks back in time at how it all developed. It’s brilliant in the way it depicts the image of God in man struggling to live with dignity against impossible odds. This was the world Tom Holland grew up with and loved so much he became an historian of the ancient world.

What’s powerful about the book is that the slaves are driven by visions of a world they think will never exist, but they are willing to die for a taste of freedom and their Utopian dreams. Spartacus is the inspiration for those dreams. Little could they have known that in a hundred years another man would die like a slave on a Roman cross to free mankind from the sin that enslaves far worse than shackles. In the book Holland focuses on the crucifixion and how absurd it is that such a thing would become the inspiration and symbol of a religion that would take over the world, and make it a better place. What the slaves in the slave revolt missed is that the nature of a civilization cannot be changed by force of arms because unless man is fundamentally changed, nothing else will change. To transform the nations, man must first be transformed, which can only be found in one religion on earth, Christianity. All religions in one way or another require people to confirm to some kind of law to change, whereas Christianity declares the person supernaturally changed by the power of God, and who because of that now wants to obey God’s law. The inner person is changed before the outer person can truly live a different life.

We call this gospel, the good news, man set free so he can live free. Then those set free can live in a way that enhances human dignity in everything they do because now they live according to their natures as created by God, the telos or purposes for which He created them. True human flourishing can only happen in a Christian context. God in the Old Testament reveals to us that obedience to his law is required for blessing, while disobedience incurs His curse. The gospel, the New Covenant, as the Lord tells us in Jeremiah 31, means God’s law has now been put in our minds and written on our hearts. This now spreads throughout society in everything Christians do, and personal transformation allows societal transformation, gospel influence everywhere and in everything.

Transformation and Truth
The contrast of the ancient pagan world, BC, to what the world eventually became because of Christianity, AD, is what prompted Holland to write an almost 600 page book. He was driven to such effort because he had to know what it was that made the modern world in which he lived and embraced and loved so different from the ancient pagan world. What exactly caused the change? Jesus of Nazareth! It’s unfortunate that Holland still hasn’t been able to embrace Jesus as risen Lord and Savior, but he’s on my heathen prayer list, so I trust God will bring him there in due course. Nevertheless, he has done the church a great favor by writing the book, and completely changing the nature of the conversation about Christianity and the modern world.

The book was published in 2019, and it certainly didn’t appear at the time anyone except Christians were buying his argument, especially going into the 2020s as the woke and Covid nightmare took over the world. But something amazing happened on the way to the leftist repaganizing of the world: Jesus of Nazareth! Even the once angry “New Atheists” are proclaiming the benign influence of Christianity on Western culture, when they once declared that “religion poisons everything.” Secularism is proving the feeble lie it’s always been. 

That is the contrast in our day, not to ancient paganism, but to a modern secularism that was just another version of the ancient, barbaric creed. As secularism has come crashing down in this third decade of the 21st century, we’ve been able to see the contrast juxtaposed, side-by-side with Christianity, and secularism is not looking like the dream Utopia our cultural elites promised. It’s in fact just another form of slavery Spartacus and the Romans slaves could have recognized as such. The reason so many are now coming to this realization, and that we’re seeing a Great Awakening among us, is what Louise Perry discovered. If Christianity is supernaturally true, it must also be sociologically true. In other words it is self-authenticating, obviously true, first lived out in an individual’s life, and then in society. If it’s true, it will work. If it claims to be an explanation for reality as we find it, how it got here, why it is the way it is, then it should also tell us how to make it work the way it’s supposed to work. If you want to fix a car engine that’s not working, it’s best to use a repair manual for that specific model, and everyone agrees the world we’re born into is very broken and needs to be fixed.

I’ve listened to hundreds of Christian testimonies in the last handful of years, and the more I’ve listened to the more I’ve realized what a powerful apologetic transformed lives are for the veracity of the Christian faith. The skeptic would chalk up changed lives up to psychology because that’s all they got, but mere human psychology can’t make fundamental transformations of human nature. In other words, thinking good thoughts of sweetness and light and fairy tales, doesn’t mean good results will follow. In fact, each human being knows there is a war going on inside of them, the proverbial angel on one shoulder and demon on the other. Pascal puts it perfectly as he normally does:

Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness.

Positive thinking without supernatural power can never fully address our wretchedness. When you hear enough stories of people’s personal transformation you realize lies cannot do that. Multiply that by entire societies and nations, and thinking lies can do that is every bit as ridiculous. If Christianity isn’t true, then it’s a lie. J. Gresham Machen writes in Christianity and Liberalism that, “Christianity depends, not upon a complex of ideas, but upon the narration of an event.” That event is the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, a man tortured to death on a Roman cross. If that event didn’t happen, if Jesus didn’t come back to life as his followers claimed, and gave their lives for that claim, then Christianity is a lie, all of it. But it is not a lie, and the transformation that inevitably comes in its wake is powerful, even irrefutable, evidence of that.

Constantine the Great’s Conversion and the Beginning of Christian Western Civilization
Because of Pietism and dispensationalism, modern Evangelical Christians are confused about the influence Christianity should have on society and culture. The question confronting us reveals the confusion. Should Christianity’s influence on the culture be the incidental fruit of the gospel? In other words, mostly personal, and society influenced unintentionally because of that? Or is societal influence one of the main purposes of the gospel? Jesus in the Great Commission made it clear that entire nations should be discipled, not only individuals. Since the Second Great Awakening, however, discipling the nations came to mean discipling Christians within nations, not actually teaching entire nations. The word disciple in Greek means to instruct or teach, to become a pupil. So Jesus was telling his disciples that they were to go and teach and instruct entire nations, a foreign concept to the personalized Pietistic Christianity that dominates most modern Evangelicalism. I read something recently that captures the Evangelical mindset perfectly. Speaking of the Great Commission, this person said that “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” No he’s not. God is calling people within nations to Himself to transform those nations, starting with themselves and their families, then their communities, and so on.

Which brings us to Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor in the early 4th century who converted to Christianity and slowly brought Christian influence throughout the empire. Why do you think he thought doing this was an important part of his Christian faith? Or thought that Christianity wasn’t merely about his personal life? Because Jesus’ disciples, the Apostles, taught the world transforming power of Christianity, and the early church embraced that. We must never forget in this debate between Pietistic personalized Christianity and world transforming Christianity, that the declaration, “Jesus is Lord,” was treason in the Roman Empire. It was a blatant political statement. The societal transformation skeptics, let’s call them, tell us that we don’t see any political or cultural engagement in Acts or the New Testament church as if 2,000 years of history hadn’t happened. But most importantly they forget what “Jesus is Lord” meant in that context—Christians were radically political.

Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337, began this transformation not long after his conversion in 312. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 which stopped the intermittent persecution of Christianity throughout the empire, and granted tolerance to Christians, allowing them to practice their faith openly. The process was slow and no doubt imperfect, but his favoring of Christianity marginalized traditional Roman pagan religions, reshaping Roman cultural identity toward Christianity. He also introduced laws reflecting Christian morality such as banning the brutal practice of crucifixion, and ending gladiatorial games, which was just another use of slaves for Roman entertainment. He also enacted measures to protect widows, orphans, and slaves. He realized something that Martin Luther taught over a thousand years later, and Christians have forgotten in our day: law is a teacher. The laws not only reflect the cultural values of a people; they teach the people cultural values. The ancient pagan world was slowly becoming the modern Christian world because of Constantine.

I can hear some Christians complain about my describing the modern world as Christian. You’ll have to read Holland’s book to understand what I’m saying. It was the influence of Jesus through his church, his people, that we have human rights, slavery is outlawed, if not disappeared, the rule of law, the nation-state, science and technology, capitalism and free enterprise, among other blessings. All those Christians complaining about how rotten things are would never want to exchange modern life for life in the ancient pagan world. As you can see, the Christian influence that transformed the ancient brutal pagan world into the much less brutal modern world goes far beyond what we consider “spiritual,” but it is all spiritual.

And speaking of that, this allows me to address the contentious topic of Christian nationalism, or what a Christian nation is. You might be able to infer from what I’ve said about Christian influence in the world, that in a Christian nation not every person has to be an orthodox Christians who confess Jesus as risen Lord and Savior. What they do have to buy into Christian assumptions about the nature of reality, whether they are aware of them or not, or can explain them or not. It doesn’t matter what each individual in a society believes on a metaphysical or religious level, they will benefit if Christianity is the dominant cultural worldview. That doesn’t even take the majority of people to be Christians, although that is certainly what we want.

What counts on a sociological level is what people believe about the ultimate nature of reality. Since we’ve been talking about sociology, let’s use a sociological concept to describe this: plausibility structure. This is the mental and psychological societal structure, a mental map, that defines reality for a people. It makes certain things seem real, the way they are supposed to be; it’s just the way things are. Since the mid-20th century, post-World War II, and especially “the 60s,” the West’s plausibility structure has been secularism. That has proved a complete failure, and now Christianity is rushing in to fill the empty space.

Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Conflict vs. Conquest in Our Fallen World: A Tale of Two Perspectives

Oct 29, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

For my entire Christians life, from the fall of 1978 to August of 2022, I believed the nature of the Christian life in this fallen world was a conflict between good and evil, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. I assumed, but didn’t think much about it, that the conflict was almost between two equal forces. I also believed God is almighty and sovereign, but for some reason allowed the devil the upper hand in our fallen world. I knew this cosmic war into which we were born would eventually be won by the forces of light over darkness, but in this world for the most part darkness wins. There was at least partial victory on a personal level in the process of sanctification, but on a larger societal level victory would have to wait for the Second Coming. Until then things would likely get worse until Jesus returned to set all things right. Most Evangelical Christians see the world pretty much the same way as I did.

Like most Christians, I also believed the gospel would be preached to the entire world, but more people would reject than accept it. In a term familiar to Bible readers of the Old Testament, only a “remnant” would be saved. Jesus seemed to indicate this in his teaching on the wide and narrow gate (Matt. 7):

13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.

This confirmed my basic pessimism about the nature of the spiritual war in which we are engaged. If we’re using a spiritual metaphor of who gets the most points in this game wins, then the devil clearly wins. He gets the most points because he gets the most souls. I learned later to read this passage in its redemptive-historical context, not out of context as if Jesus was speaking about Gentiles and salvation for all of time. No, Jesus was speaking to Jews because he was sent only “to the lost sheep of the house Israel” (Matt. 15:24). Most Jews rejected Christ and judgment came upon them in AD70. The Great Commission would have a very different ending. The gate would now be open wide with the proclamation of the gospel, victory ensured by the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed from Christ with “all authority in heaven and on earth” reigning at the right hand of God.

What I call eschatological pessimism is specifically the fruit of dispensationalism, whether we hold to that eschatology or not, or even know what it is. A pessimistic take on the nature of things just seems obvious and the most realistic. All anyone has to do is open their eyes and they’ll see that righteousness and peace and justice are not exactly marching victoriously throughout the world. Suffering seems to be everywhere, and it appears we’re fighting an uphill battle akin to Mount Everest. I imagine Christians felt that way in the 20th century during the darkest days of World War I and II. Slaughter on that scale had never happened in the history of the world, and not even close. Over a hundred million people lost their lives because of man’s inhumanity to man, because evil is clearly dominant in this fallen world. The 20th century is in fact why the pessimistic perspective came to dominate conservative Protestant Christianity. This is an important part of the story which we’ll explore below.

In my journey I even got to the point of mocking my younger self who believed he could “change the world.” In fact, the entire point of our existence is to “change the world.” But I came to believe that’s a fool’s errand, and only God could do that. Real change would only happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and wiped out evil once and for all. This is true for almost the entire church, that is how deeply engrained eschatological pessimism is. When I embraced postmillennialism a few years back that all changed for me. I was exposed to a completely new way of looking at life. Prior I thought of this eschatology as something of a joke, unworthy of even considering. Now I was eager to learn more because I knew nothing about it.

The Death of Postmillennial Eschatological Optimism
The man who killed postmillennialism lived in the century before it officially died. His name was J.N. Darby (1800-1882), and his aversion to postmillennial eschatology was one driving factor in his development of a completely new eschatology, called at the time, the new premillennialism. Premillennialism, which has been around since the early church fathers, holds that Jesus’ second coming will occur before (pre-) a literal 1,000-year period of peace and righteousness on earth, which is the Millennium as described in Revelation 20:1–7. Darby took this theology of “end times” in an entirely new direction which eventually came to be known as dispensationalism in the late 1920s. I’ve written about that previously, so I won’t get into the details here, but what became dominant because of Darby was eschatological pessimism. No longer was the church marching triumphant through the world, and in fact the church was the problem. It was corrupt and beyond saving.

What drove him was an antipathy to the idea of the church ushering in a “golden age,” something he saw as a secularized perversion of the gospel. The church was a heavenly entity, and it was Israel that would bring heaven to earth in due course. That all would happen only after things got increasingly worse and the church raptured from earth in the great tribulation. Then Christ would return with his people and reign from Jerusalem for a thousand years of peace on earth. That’s skipping over a lot of details, but you get the point. Postmillennialism, therefore, was the enemy.

It so happens he picked the right century to begin to discredit the eschatology that had dominated the church for most of its history. As much as Christians experienced suffering over the centuries, they all believed in ultimate victory on this earth. If not, what did Christ come for? Pietism, which started developing in 17th century Lutheran Germany, would in due course lead to an answer: escape. In this view that developed through first and second Great Awakenings, and eventually into dispensationalism and fundamentalism, the purpose of Christianity was to go to heaven when we die, and while we’re here, personal holiness. The effect of the gospel on society became increasingly less important until in the 20th century it became completely irrelevant.

The 19th century saw the full flowering of several forces that would in due course make Christianity, almost, the non-entity it became in the modern world. The Enlightenment had been growing in influence, and it seemed one of its primary goals was to discredit the Bible and Christianity. In that, it was doing a very good job. Along with this growing influence was the scientific revolution which almost seemed to make God unnecessary. Progress became an obsession for Western man, and he seemed to be doing a rather good job of it. Two other forces developed in the church. One was the Pietism I mentioned, which turned the eyes and priorities of Bible believing Christians to heaven and away from earth, and the other was a liberal version of Christianity that embraced the assumptions of the Enlightenment. Throughout the century these two grew increasingly apart, until the early 20th century when the fundamentalist-modernist controversies erupted. You can easily guess which side won.

Various versions of postmillennialism were dominant into the 20th century given the incredible march of science and technology. It seemed man could accomplish anything he set his mind to, and because the Western world was still culturally Christian, the biblical notion of progress was secularized but retained some Christian terminology. That was soon to come crashing down, and along with it the credibility of postmillennialism. I place the beginning of the end with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. That was a cultural blow akin to a 9/11, but the enemy was an ice berg. Even the name of the great ship implied indestructibility, but destructible it was. A crisis of cultural confidence was on the horizon, but nobody could imagine it would include a war the horror of which was beyond imagination. Then just a decade later a Great Depression, and a decade after that a war far worse than the supposed “war to end all wars.” Amid all this was the rise of communism which would kill tens of millions more, and that golden age postmillennialists were promising looked like a nightmare instead. By the middle of the 20th century postmillennialists were harder to find than a conservative professor in a college humanities department.

The problem with this assessment of postmillennialism as a failure is that it never addresses the biblical case for it. It is always assumed that what it teaches is a notion of the advance of God’s kingdom is only in one direction, forward. It doesn’t seem to occur to the critics that a hundred years in God’s plans proves nothing. It is clear from Scripture that our God is never in a hurry. He, for example, promises Abram that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and it takes 2,000 years for that offspring to arrive! When he finally arrives, accomplishes his mission, then leaves and promises to return, another 2,000 year has passed and he hasn’t returned yet. So presuming we can interpret God’s intentions from historical events is unwise, not to mention unbiblical. His intentions are perfectly clear from Scripture, and now to me about eschatology. I’d rejected postmillennialism without even knowing anything about it, and now I was going to rectify that. Which brings us to the other perspective.

The Biblical Idea of Conquest Over Sin
The first book I read about postmillennialism was The Millennium by Loraine Boettner. I had gotten it seminary but don’t ever remember reading it. After being born-again into the Late Great Planet Earth hysteria of the late 70s, I wasn’t much interested in eschatology at the time. He introduced to me to the idea that the biblical testimony is one of conquest over sin, not mere conflict with it. And most importantly, this conquest is not just for our personal lives but for the entire world of human beings living in societies. Jesus’s Great Commission was to disciple nations not merely individuals within nations; how had I missed that all these years? My eschatological assumptions and the influence of Pietism.

I previously understood Christianity primarily as a personal affair, and whatever effects it had on society was a spillover from Christians living Christianly. Thankfully, Boettner, began changing my perspective, and that when Jesus said nations, he actually meant nations. The point of the gospel isn’t just that individuals would be saved from their sin and go to heaven when they die, but that Christians within a nation would transform it by proclaiming King Jesus and his authority over every area of life within that nation. Scripture proclaims, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34), and, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance” (Ps. 33:12). And what people did He choose for his inheritance? When God chose Abram he specifically promised that through him all peoples, all nations, would be blessed through him. In Psalm 2 we learn the nations will belong to the Messiah:

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

What does verse 9 sound like to you? Conquest! Decisive, unequivocal conquest. That, brothers and sisters, is what makes the Great Commission great, not plucking a few souls out of the nations while good and evil duke it out. The Apostles affirm this when Peter preaches the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 and quotes from Psalm 110, a Messianic Psalm and the most quoted and referred to in the New Testament:

“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
35 until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’

That Psalm too proclaims conquest over the nations:

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.

This crushing and dashing is not for the end of time, as I used to think, butt began when Christ ascended to the right hand of God. A couple quotes from The Millennium explains this perspective well. Quoting my theological hero, B.B. Warfield, he writes:

As emphatically as Paul, John teaches that the earthly history of the Church is not a history merely of conflict with evil, but a conquest over evil: and even more richly than Paul, John teaches that the conquest will be decisive and complete.

And in his own words:

How long the conquest continues before it is crowned with victory—we purposefully use the word “conquest,” rather the “conflict,” for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it—we are not told. . . . This progress is to go on until on this earth we shall see a practical fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth.”

One of the great biblical metaphors is Israel’s entry into the promised land.

The Great Commission in the Conquest of Canaan
Most Christians are familiar with the story of the spies exploring Canaan prior to the Israelites entering the promised land. Coming out of Egypt, they had made a beeline to the border of the land God prepared them to inhabit. The Lord commanded twelve men, one leader from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan (Num. 13). It was a scouting mission. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

They all reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were significant obstacles to taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as insurmountable obstacles to taking the land. The other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel (Num. 14):

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day they explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. Joshua and Caleb trusted God and his promise, and the ten did not. They were the only two of that entire generation who entered the land of promise.

The obvious message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life when all I saw was giants, I now believe this perspective applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. The entire world is our Canaan, the land of promise the Lord Jesus calls us to conquer in his name, and victory is ours to expect because of God’s promises and commands. In fact, in the gospel the victory is already won. We fight from victory, not to it. It is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church.

 

 

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

Sep 10, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Until August of 2022, the year 70 AD was just another year in ancient history to me. It held no special significance other than I knew that a Roman army destroyed Jerusalem, and Jews and Christians were scattered throughout the empire. I could infer God’s purpose of separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all, but in terms of His salvific plans, I didn’t see any connection. And I don’t ever remember being taught in over four decades of my Christian life that there was any redemptive-historical significance to the horrific fall of Jerusalem. And horrific only begins to describe it. The ancient historian Josephus describes it in disgusting, often stomach turning detail. I’m sure I learned something about it in seminary, but whatever it was, it wasn’t memorable.

Then in that fateful month very much to my surprise, as those who read me often will know, I embraced postmillennialism. Up to that day I thought it was a completely discredited eschatological position. I found out I had rejected it for the same reason most others do: I was completely ignorant of what it really taught. If there is a way to know less than nothing about a topic, I knew that much. Yet I thought it was some kind of joke, until I learned it most certainly is not. I’ve learned since then that whatever critics think they know about it is always wrong, and I mean one hundred percent of the time. I have not found one single solitary steel man among those criticizing it. What I find is an abundance of straw men, question begging, and non sequiturs. That’s a lot of logical fallacies! And for whatever reason, postmillennialism lends itself to that. Before we get into the meat of the significance of AD70, let me tell you why I rejected the post-mill position, and every critic I’ve encountered seems to do so for the same reasons.

The Rejection of Postmillennialism
After my Christian youth when I was born-again into the thoroughly dispensational premillennial environment of the late 1970s, I eventually became pan-mill, as in it will all pan out in the end. Up to that point I engaged in “newspaper eschatology,” and all of the predictions about future events supposedly contained therein. Eventually it just came to seem like futile guess work and conjecture. Because of that I came to assume we can’t really know anything definitively about how things will end, so we just need to trust God who apparently didn’t to see the need to communicate that stuff clearly. Oh, how wrong I was! But we learn, hopefully.

Then in 2014 I was exposed to a solid case for amillennialism, and saw that just maybe God did communicate these things more clearly than I had realized. Unfortunately, this perspective on “end times” seemed to make me more pessimistic about the human race and life in this fallen world. The a-mill position teaches that the wheat and tares (weeds) grow up in the field of this fallen earth, and that good and evil are in perpetual conflict until the end. Given the seemingly ever present suffering and misery we see in the world, it’s not surprising I turned into a pessimist, as do most a-mills I’ve encountered. They, like our premillennial and dispensational brothers and sisters, see things growing increasingly worse until , as David Chilton puts it, “Christ returns at the last moment, like the cavalry in B-grade westerns, to rescue the ragged little band of survivors.” That’s basically what I believed because that’s what I thought these positions taught, and what I still think they do.

In studying postmillennialism, I learned something powerful that completely changed my perspective. Lorraine Boettner in his book, The Millennium, contrasts this idea of a conflict between good and evil, with the conquest of good over evil. It didn’t take long for him to convince me the latter is the biblical take on the nature of reality in our fallen world. Christ did not come to earth, die, rise again, ascend to the right hand of God, and send his Holy Spirit, to just pluck a few embers out of the burning fire of fallen humanity. Rather, he came to conquer the sin that destroys everything in His creation. That not only has profound effects on individuals saved from sin, but also in the communities they build, starting with families and extending out from there into society and cultures. Isaac Watts in the great Christmas hymn Joy to the World put it poetically best:

No more let sins and sorrows grow,
Nor thorns infest the ground;
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found,
Far as the curse is found,
Far as, far as, the curse is found.

The entire hymn is about Christ’s rule and reign on earth, not just in the hearts of his people or in the church, but over everything!

Unfortunately, until I learned what it really was, I thought postmillennialism was a late 19th and early 20th century version of liberal Christian and secular progress. Man in his hubris with the light of science and technology would conquer the world and usher in the kingdom of God. It was clear from my pre, pan, and amil perspectives, science and technology could never overcome sin in the heart of man, so postmillennialism was a delusion. William Jennings Bryan echoed what many Christians believed prior to World War I, and what many equate with postmillennialism today:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

After he said this, in the 20th century some hundred million people died or were killed in the name of progress, and postmillennialism was tarred with the Bryan version of “progress.” That, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with a biblically rigorous postmillennialism.

Futurism, Preterism and AD70
Unfortunately, because of the perversion of postmillennialism at the hands of Christian liberals and secularists, the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 eventually turned from being a profound redemptive-historical pivot point, to an historical curiosity.

The growth of the “new premillennialism” of J.N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren would in the 20th century turn into the dominant Evangelical eschatology of dispensationalism. This eschatology necessitated a futuristic interpretation of the Olivet discourse (Matthew 24:1–25:46; Mark 13:1–37; Luke 21:5–36) and the Book of Revelation, meaning the events that Jesus and John spoke about would not happen in the first century Jewish-Roman context, but at some time far off into the future. Amillennialists believe the same thing because when I embraced that eschatology for eight years that’s what I was taught and believed. Now it seems abundantly clear to me from a postmillennial perspective that a preterist interpretation makes the most sense of the texts and the historical facts on the ground.

The events Jesus spoke about, and most of the events John refers to (called partial preterism), have already happened. The word preterist comes from the Latin word for past, so this view is a contrast from the futurist view. Learning about the preterist view can almost cause one a case of intellectual whiplash. It makes my neck kind of ache just thinking about it given how unexpected it was after four plus decades as a Christian.

The debate about Revelation relates to the dating when John wrote it. For most of my Christian life I accepted “the consensus” of a later date, in the 90s AD, because the “experts” all seemed to believe that. I didn’t realize their motivations for deriving that perspective were primarily driven, known or not, by their eschatological assumptions (I wrote a piece last year about this, Eschatological Assumptions and AD70). If one takes a futuristic view of Jesus’ teaching in the Olivet Discourse, then it makes sense to see Revelation in the same way. So whatever evidence there is for the late date becomes dispositive, meaning it’s basically a slam dunk. Then last year I read Before Jerusalem Fell by Ken Gentry on the dating of the Book of Revelation, and I was shocked at how weak the evidence for the late dating was. I suppose a plausible case can be made, but to me the internal evidence, the actual content of the book itself, what John wrote, is dispositive, and slam dunk would describe it well—like a Michael Jordon tongue out in your face dunk. I was kind of shocked, really, not least because I had so easily accepted the later dating all these years.

The debate about the Olivet Discourse turns on how one chooses to interpret this verse in Matthew 24:

34 Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

The debate is over what Jesus meant when he told them that all the things he was describing, not some of the things, would happen in “this generation.” It seems pretty straight forward, that it was the generation of the people he was speaking to when the words came out of his mouth. It’s a stretch to say Jesus meant “some generation in the far off future when these far off future events are going to occur.” It’s crazy to me that very serious people actually try to make that case, but they do and it’s what most Christians believe because of their eschatological assumptions. These people admit some of what Jesus was speaking about happened in the first century, but Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He says clearly, “Until all these things have happened.” So it’s either all in the past, or all in the future; there is no other option. Reading it the way Jesus intended, and his hearers would have understood, points to AD70, no pretzel logic required.

I would encourage anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions and not just take another’s word for it to read Gentry’s book, and for the Olivet Discourse and AD70 I would suggest two other books. The first is a little book from the early 19th century called, The Destruction of Jerusalem by George Peter Holford. He lays out in exacting detail how the historical record proves the preterist interpretation. The other is a book by R.C. Sproul called, The Last Days According to Jesus. Skeptics who have been trying to discredit the Bible for well over 200 years have argued that Jesus was predicting all these events, and since they didn’t happen Jesus was not who he claimed to be. The futurist position is one way to deal with it, but we don’t have to distort the text or Jesus’ words to address the critics’ lies. Preterism will do that nicely. Now let’s move on to some theology.

The Judgment of AD70
Unfortunately, because of the futurist focus on “end times” prophetic passages, the theological significance of the destruction of Jerusalem gets lost in the shuffle. That event, however, was a profound turning point in the history of redemption, of God’s plan to redeem His people and his entire creation. It took me a while on my postmillennial journey to figure this out. Theologically this has to do with God’s judgment upon His people, and what that meant for His redemptive plans.

In the discourse, everything turns on the meaning of the disciples’ question, “what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” People often take the Greek word for age, aión-αἰών, to mean world, so Jesus was telling the disciples about the end of the world. What comes into our minds when we hear that phrase? Likely a dystopian hell we’ve seen in a thousand movies. If one reads Revelation futuristically with that mindset, it certainly appears that way. But that is not what Jesus is referring to. I have a critically important question most Christians seem to miss. To whom was Jesus sent? And for whom was Jesus’ ministry? It was first the Jews, and only after that Gentiles, the rest of us.

The first passage confirming this message comes in Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out the 12.

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.

Jesus confirms this in Matthew 15. The headline of the passage in our Bibles says, “The Faith of a Canaanite Woman.” God is using a heathen woman from a people with a lot of historical baggage for the Jews to make a theological point. She is screaming out for Jesus to heal her daughter of demon possession, and Jesus makes his mission clear:

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice Jesus says “only.” It’s news to most Christians that the gospels are not about us! They are about God coming to His people, sending His anointed one to them, their Messiah. Only when he was rejected did the message extend out to the Gentiles. If you read through the Old Testament, but especially the prophets, this dual message is clear. Yahweh is consistently declaring blessing and judgment on His people, but eventually that blessing is to extend to the nations as he promised Abraham and the Patriarchs. It seems the blessing would not break out to the rest of the world until judgment came.

That judgment to come, what we see happen in AD70, was declared by John prior to the Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3.

7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Given my futurist eschatological assumptions, I completely missed that John is clearly declaring judgment to come upon the Jews. I thought John was mistaken like many Jews were about Jesus. His first coming wasn’t in judgment, but in mercy and grace. Judgment was for his second coming. That’s how I read the Olivet discourse as well, but Jesus is clearly speaking of Jerusalem where “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Yahweh was in a legal covenant relationship with His people with the stipulation of blessing for obedience, and curses for disobedience. We see this laid out in detail in the Pentateuch, and played out in Israel’s history, declared in excruciating details in the prophets. Reading Jesus’ words in the Olivet Discourse from a preterist perspective is not at all a stretch, but in fact fits the entire flow of the historical narrative perfectly.

The Theological Significance of AD70
The Jews were promised salvation from sin and death from the very beginning when God told Adam and Eve the woman’s seed (offspring) would strike or bruise (crush in the NIV) the serpent’s head. When the covenant is revealed to Abraham, Paul confirms this seed refers not to offspring in general, but to Christ (Gal. 3):

 16 The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.

All through Israel’s history, God communicated his redemptive plans in signs and symbols, or types and shadows as the theologians put it. These were concrete illustrations of the forgiveness of sin to come pointing beyond themselves to a greater truth, to the one who is The Truth in which redemption is found. When he came to fulfill all the promises, the Jewish religious leaders who represented the nation rejected the fulfillment for the types and shadows as if they were the thing, as if the blood of bulls and goats could do anything. The entire book of Hebrews was written to convince first century Jewish Christians of the superiority of the New Covenant. In chapter 8 quoting Jeremiah 31, the writer says:

13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

This could be considered a prophecy of the coming destruction of the temple. Hebrews was written while temple still stood because the writer was trying to convince Jewish Christians not to go back to the Old Covenant way of doing things. That was a possibility at the time he wrote. It seems the Jewish nation, including Jewish Christians, would not get the message that a new and superior way of salvation had appeared until God made the message clear. AD70 and the utter destruction of Jerusalem made it undeniably clear.

From that moment the Jewish religion changed completely. It was no longer the Mosaic religion of atonement for sin in sacrifice, but a moralistic religion of works. Jewish Christians now had to realize the former way was dead, over and gone forever; they could never go back. It was either Judaism or Christianity, the law or salvation by grace through faith, man’s works of futility or God’s transformational power in Christ in the human heart. God’s kingdom had now come in a completely different way than any Jew had foreseen. After Jesus had risen from the dead he told his disciples in Luke 24 that the entirety of Israel’s history found in Scripture, our Old Testament, was about him. Once the temple fell, God declared his covenant had been fulfilled in his Son, his kingdom come, His will now being done on earth as it is in heaven. Israel’s futility was ended, and in Christ alone would be found this good news of God (I Cor. 1):

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

Now with God’s law put in His people’s minds and written on their hearts (Jer. 31), God’s kingdom would no longer be limited to a tiny point of light in the Middle East. We read these prophetic words from Habakkuk 2:

14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

 

 

Does America Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?

Does America Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?

Jul 23, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

Since I started getting active on Twitter in early 2024, I’ve come across many on the New Christian Right, or whatever we might be called, who are not fans of the phrase Judeo-Christian, to say the least. It upsets them because it seems to make Christianity a part of Judaism, or confuses Christianity with Judaism, or misses the point that Christianity is the fulfillment of Judaism. I’m not exactly sure, but these are my best guesses. They are, also to say the least, not fans of modern Israel, or the dispensationalism that believes Isreal is still part of God’s redemptive plan. Their animus toward the phrase never sat well with me, and I tended to see it as making something out of nothing. Then I saw this short post from Joel Webbon on Twitter:

Judeo-Christianity is a pernicious false religion.

And this was my response:

Joel, technically it’s not a religion at all, and nobody is claiming it is. People who use it don’t use it as a noun as you do, but as an adjective.

The phrase reflects an ethos, a tradition born of Judaism and it’s fulfillment in Christianity. It’s fine far as it goes, except many people using it assume the myth of neutrality is true, and do not believe a nation should be Christian. That’s what we should focus on, not that Judea-Christian is a religion.

Joel’s statement made me realize the heart of their problem with the phrase was thinking it’s affirming a mixed religion that is not Christianity. I believe dispensationalism has contributed to this because dispensationalists really do believe modern Judaism and the nation-state of Israel are in effect part of the Christian religion and its ultimate eschatological fulfillment. In fact, what’s going on in Israel now is, according to the dispensationalists, part of God’s fulfilling his Old Testament covenant promises to Israel. This is why they will tell us to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” and why they seem to have unqualified support for the nation of Israel. It’s almost as if Israel can do no wrong, whereas people like Joel seem to believe Israel can do no right. I’m in the unenvious position of being somewhere in between these positions.

I was wondering when the term “Judeo-Christian” was first used, and so of course asked Grok:

The term “Judeo-Christian” was first used in the early 19th century. Its earliest known appearance is in an 1821 letter by English writer Joseph Wolff, referring to a “Judeo-Christian” community in the context of religious conversion. The term gained broader usage in the 20th century, particularly in the United States, to describe shared ethical and cultural values between Judaism and Christianity.

That goes back much further than I would have guessed. I suspected it wouldn’t have been used until Israel became a nation in 1948, and the dispensationalists were saying, “See, we told you so!” But there is no doubt since Israel became a nation, and then a stable ally in the Middle East, that phrase became common among conservatives and Christians. I have no problem with it, and I don’t think any Christian should, mainly because it’s an accurate description, as I said to Joel, of the ethos or traditions America inherited at its founding.

Was the Jewish Religion Significant in America’s Founding?
The simple answer is yes, but of course through the lens of a thoroughly Protestant, dominant Calvinistic, culture. The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s was a powerful influence on the social and political life of Americans for it drove the implications of Christianity deep into the American consciousness. Given this move of God’s Spirit was antiauthoritarian and democratic, the Crown would not have been happy about it. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, agrees, saying “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution.

I have a book on my shelf called Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, and it clocks in at just shy of 1600 pages. As I’ve dipped into it over the last ten or so years, many of the sermons are based on Old Testament texts. Christians themselves saw Judaism as integral to building a Christian nation, but of course in a Christian context of fulfillment. We also know that the founders quoted from the Bible more than any other book or thinker, modern or ancient, and Deuteronomy was the book they quoted from most. They also didn’t see Jewish religious practice in any way inimical or contradictory to the spirit of America’s experiment in Republican government. The issue, it appears to me, comes down to religious liberty, and if that concept is consistent with the idea of a Christian nation. America’s founders apparently didn’t think so. Before we explore religious liberty in more detail, let’s look at how George Washington, our first president and arguably the man who made America possible, saw that liberty in practice.

Washington visited Rhode Island in 1790 to acknowledge the state’s recent ratification of the Constitution and to promote passage of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.  When he visited Newport he met a delegation of citizens who read him messages of welcome. One of those citizens was Moses Seixas, the warden of the Touro Synagogue in Newport. Remarkably, Seixas in his welcome would use words Washington quoted verbatim in a letter back to the congregation. Seixas gave thanks to “the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of men” that the Jews, previously “deprived … of the invaluable rights of free Citizens” on account of their religion, now lived under a government “which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Speaking of all American citizens possessing alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship, Washington writes:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

For Washington and the founders, one of our “inherent natural rights” as Americans was to worship as we please, which could not be considered mere toleration. Freedom of conscience was an inviolable right of all Americans of whatever religious persuasion. I’m sure they would have some ambivalence at the breadth of cultural and religious diversity in America today, but it’s reasonable to believe the same attitude Washington had to the Jewish worshipers in his day would apply to others in ours.

Are Christian Nationalism and Religious Liberty Compatible? The Secular Myth of Neutrality
The answer to that question very much depends on what you mean by religious liberty, which for Christians is not as easy a question to answer as you might think—unless you’re a secularist. Unfortunately most Christians are indeed secular. In fact, most Christians and conservatives are liberals, who believe in a kind of pluralism based on the secular myth of neutrality.

According to this myth, there is no preferred religion because secularism welcomes all religions equally. The public square is a place where God is unwelcome, persona non grata. Christianity gets a seat at the table just like any other religion, be it Islam or Hinduism or Buddhism or atheism, but no religion, including Christianity, gets privileged status. I’ll briefly address this below, but I’ve dismantled this myth here previously, many times actually, but the concept of religious liberty today is a thoroughly secular concept that wasn’t fully accepted in America until the glorious 1960s. That’s when the post-World War II consensus of neutrality took over and the privileged status of Christianity was, well neutered. It would be some years before Christianity was treated as a threat to all that is good and decent and right, but in the Biden years that’s exactly where we were, in law and culture. Then Trump 2.0. Mind you, secularism and the myth is still alive and well, but Christianity is no longer the whipping boy it was when woke was king.

The question in a nation with a Christian self-conception is how much latitude in religious practice we allow. Complete carte blanche, do whatever you want? Should Satan worship be allowed? Animal sacrifice? Drug induced “worship”? Only the most radical secularist libertarian would argue that no lines should be drawn; the question is what and where. You’ll notice I said a nation with a “Christian self- conception.” Up until those 1960s most Americans would have said yes, we are a Christian nation. They wouldn’t have obsessed with details, or panicked over, God forbid, a possible theocracy. Every nation in the West prior that time had a Christian self-conception. Just watch the coronation of King Charles in May of 2023, and see how steeped England still is at some level in its own Christian self-conception. At every other level, it is radically secular. All the assumptions that run every aspect of societies in the West are secular. This is slowly changing as nationalist-populist movements with Christian awareness are growing throughout the West, not least in the unashamed Christianity the permeates the Trump administration. That would not have been on my bingo card!

I won’t solve the question of religious liberty in America in such a short space, but it’s something Christians need to discuss and debate and maybe even come to some agreement on as, God willing, Christianity again becomes dominant in America. Getting rid of secularism in the church would be a good start, in fact an essential start. If we can’t convince our brothers and sisters in Christ that neutrality is a myth, then a Christian America is a pipe dream. I know, most see this as the longest of long shots, but I don’t. Secularism is dead, as I argue in detail in my latest book, Going Back to Find the way Forward, and something needs to fill that societal vacuum it leaves as it whimpers away in its exposed futility.

I often use the Berlin Wall as a metaphor for secularism. It appeared so strong and impenetrable, so enduring. Almost everyone except a very few, including Ronald Reagan, thought the Berlin Wall wouldn’t be going anywhere in our lifetimes. In fact, when Ronnie told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” in Berlin in June 1987, I thought, now you’ve really lost it, Ronnie! That ain’t happening. Two and a half years later it did. The reason is that its strength was an illusion. An empire built on lies cannot endure, and secularism is a lie, every bit as much as East Germany was. Why is it a lie? Because it assumes societal neutrality is possible; it is not. Let my quote some thinkers who make the point. R.J. Rushdoony in his book Politics of Guilt & Pity says of the impossibility of neutrality as an undisputable fact:

Modern thinkers to the contrary, law is a product of metaphysics, a cultural expression of a basically religious fact. The contemporary avoidance of metaphysics is by no means its elimination. Men do not dispense with metaphysics merely because they refuse to discuss it.

Metaphysics is a word coined by Aristotle. He wrote a work about the physical world called Physics, which is basically his observations of the physical world. He then wrote a book called The Metaphysics, which is “beyond” or “after” physics, his study into the underlying nature of things. He calls this “first philosophy,” a study of being, of the fundamental principles and causes of all things. In other words, it’s the opposite of secular because God and spiritual things are metaphysical, and law inevitably flows from how we see ultimate reality. In the secular world, our Creator is the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection by random mutation, or chance. Man makes his own rules, his own laws, there is no meta-physics. Those are modern man’s fundamental assumptions. Yes, as Rushdoony says, they cannot be escaped:

Vishal Mangalwadi in his wonderful book, The Book That Made Your World, states an unalterable fact of existence:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

This includes its laws. We can have either a secular nation (or Islamic or Hindu, etc.), or a Christian nation. Whatever that “final source of authority” will determine the nature of that society and it’s culture. In a secular society it is man, the ultimate fulfillment of which is the state, which means there is no recourse beyond the state, and thus tyranny is inevitable.

Liberty of Conscience and Religious Liberty
We can’t discuss religious liberty without considering liberty of conscience, and those two should never be confused. Even in ancient Israel, the theocracy all modern people seem to fear, foreigners were mostly part of the moral and ceremonial lives of the Hebrews, but they were never forced to believe anything. Yet I often hear people claim that a Christian America would be a theocracy like ancient Israel, and people would be forced to believe in Christianity. No they wouldn’t because God never forces people to believe anything, and neither should we. In fact, if you look at Jesus in the gospels, he goes out of his way to get people not to believe in him! He was not interested in making Christianity easy, and often went out of his way to make it hard. But Jesus was not interested in establishing a government but in saving the world. He left the government stuff to his followers once he left the scene for good, and gave us the deposit of his presence in the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

The idea of a liberty of conscience in Western culture, and in fact the entire world, comes from Martin Luther’s confrontation with the establishment of his day. He declared that his conscience was captive to the Word of God, and that “it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” Those who were insisting he recant, or else, could care less about his conscience. They had societies to run and couldn’t allow every person to willy nilly believe whatever they wanted. Who knows what kind of societal chaos would follow if that were allowed. Luther was a dangerous precedent, and he had to be stopped. Gutenberg’s Press made that a futile endeavor, but we come to the wrong conclusion if we think liberty of conscience and religious liberty are synonymous. The former is absolute because God has not given us the right nor the power to coerce human thought. The totalitarians of the 20th century learned that the hard way, speaking of the Berlin Wall. Having said that we come back to lines.

Most Christians and conservatives have been completely indoctrinated into the secular zeitgeist. This spirit of the times in which we’ve lived for the last hundred years tells us America has always been a secular nation. In fact, even Christian historians like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden claim America’s Founders were primarily Deists and Unitarians and “not in any traditional sense Christian.” That quote comes from their book, The Search for Christian America, and one gets the impression they did not find it. In fact, America was in every sense a Christian Nation, even if it was not overtly enough for some of us.

I go back to the phrase I used above, a Christian self-conception. For most of our history, everything about the beliefs and worldview of almost all Americans was Christian. Christian morality, God’s law, the Bible, all were relevant to daily life and the life of government. As is often pointed out, nine of the thirteen colonies had established churches, and they had a religious test for public office. If a man didn’t affirm certain Christian doctrines, he wasn’t allowed to run for office. Nobody saw that as anti-American, or a violation of our modern secular dogma of the “separation of church and state.” Nobody. That isn’t to say we should do the same thing today, only that Christianity was never seen as inimical to the liberty established at America’s founding. In fact, contrary to what most everyone believes today except we “Christian nationalists,” is that Christianity is the foundation and requirement for true religious liberty. Secularism always and everywhere will lead to tyranny and totalitarianism.

Having said this, we must realize that every government and society draws “religious” lines. A “Judeo-Christian” society will not draw the same lines as a Christian society, but lines will be drawn. They always are and always will be. I’ll say it again: Neutrality doesn’t exist. Everything allowed or promoted affirms a worldview, and dismisses others. It’s just the nature of things. Since most of us like America and living in a representative republic, that means we at some level have to convince our fellow citizens about what those lines need to be. We can pass laws that are unpopular, but those will not be enforced unless the people embrace them. The current illegal immigration crisis is a good example. The vast majority of Americans hate it no matter how much leftists and Democrats lie about it. Ultimately, the American people have to be on board or things don’t happen.

The mission, should we choose to accept it, is to first convince our Christian brothers and sisters that the secular nation driven myth of neutrality is a Satanic lie. The American people won’t be convinced until the church is. The myth sounds good on paper, but it always leads to tyrannical results. While a result of hundreds of years of cultural change, the myth of neutrality is primarily a product of what’s come to be called the “Post World War II Consensus.” Thankfully, this consensus is falling apart as populist nationalism and the Great Awakening are moving around the world. Making America Christian Again will allow us to one day escape secularism and practice true religious liberty and freedom of conscience.