If you’re not one of my multitude of fans, all three of them, you won’t know this is the subtitle of the book I published last year, Going Back to Find the Way Forward. As we see things unfolding in Trump’s second term, I’m thinking I might be some sort of prophet. Since most of you reading or listening to this haven’t read the book, you may want to check it out to see the bigger, grand historical context in which our momentous times are taking place.
If we look back through redemptive history we see God working out his plans to redeem His people and His earth even up to this very day. None of what’s happening now should be seen outside of its historical, ultimately redemptive context, even in the grimy world of politics and governing. Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven applies as much there as it does in our personal lives and in our churches. If you don’t believe this, or if that statement rubs you the wrong way, I encourage you to read or listen to three of my previous posts:
- What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means
- The History of Pietism and Cultural Irrelevance
- Pietistic Gnostic Dualism’s Influence on Modern Christianity
Because I now see the Christian faith, mine included, as something grounded and rooted in history, nothing that happens is outside of God’s ultimate redemptive purposes. History is the outworking of those purposes, of which are the subject of my book. Let’s see why I believe everything that is happening is of God.
God, Red Pills, and History’s Dividing Line
As 2024 progressed and Democrats continued to double down on stupid, I became increasingly optimistic, an optimism developing since I first came across Steve Bannon’s War Room after the 2020 election. As a long-time card carrying member of Con Inc., officially from when Reagan was first elected, I had gotten used to conservative losing. Our side talked a good game, but never did anything to actually challenge the progressive status quote, let alone push back. Then Trump.
Democrats will rue the day they did everything in their power to not let Trump win the 2020 election. If he had, his second term would have been mired in controversy and “resistance,” but most importantly the Democrats would not have been able to inflict wokestan upon the American people to the degree they did, which opened the eyes of tens of millions of Americans to their stupidity and lies. They actually believed what they were doing was morally good and the American people were behind them. Lies will tend to make people delusional. As important as the left’s blindness and stupidity, Trump and the people around him would not have had those four years to learn what they did wrong in the first term, and apply it in his second. He’s accomplishing things literally nobody thought possible. Even Democrat analysts are amazed, saying in effect this is truly something new under the sun. Even worse for the Democrats? They pissed Trump off, pardon the French, but trying to kill and put him in prison for 500 years will do that to a guy. The determined, angry, focused Trump is the Democrat’s and left’s worst nightmare.
What explains all this? If God isn’t at the top of your list, you’re not paying attention. As the book developed over ’22 and ’23, I would look at the print on my office wall Washington praying next to his great white steed at Valley Forge. Painted by Arnold Friberg to celebrate America’s bicentennial in 1976, its symbolic meaning would grow in importance to me by the day. I began to realize the odds against the newborn American republic were far worse than ours against the leftist woke Uniparty deep state. America should have been still born against the mighty British Empire, so God explains our founding as He does our potential refounding.
The founders fervently believed their success ultimately depended on the Almighty God revealed to us in Scripture. The supposed Diest, Benjamin Franklin, may have said it best. At the convention where the details of America’s experiment in self-government were being hashed out, he said these words to the august attendees which could come out of the mouth of any fervent Evangelical of that time or now:
I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without His concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel.
In our case the question is, can an empire endure. Only God knows, but more importantly it is only God who determines whether it will or not. As I was writing I believed and hoped that was true, but now I’m suspecting in fact it is. God appears not to be done with the United States of America!
Everyone in the world knew, even the hardcore atheists were tempted to admit it, that Trump turning his head at that exact moment wasn’t chance. And then the raised fist and Fight! Fight! Fight! Are you kidding me? I get chills envisioning it again as I write this. If we didn’t know any better we would think this was scripted by mega reality TV Star Trump, but we do know better, and it was most certainly scripted by Almighty God. Both Reagan and John Paul II believed God saved them from the assassin’s bullet for a reason, and that was so together they could defeat the Godless Soviet Union. Trump too is a man on a mission to defeat the progeny of those same Soviets embodied in our Democrat Party and everything they stand for in American government and culture. Trump is on a mission from God, having said as much, that God spared him to do exactly what he’s been doing since January 20 at noon Eastern Standard Time.
As I’ve often said, this Great Awakening, the one I write about in the book, is not at all like the previous Great Awakenings. Those were primarily spiritual, taking place in thoroughly Christian cultures among Christian peoples steeped in Christians assumptions and a Christian worldview. This Great Awakening is happening in a thoroughly secular culture whose assumptions and worldview are agnostic. Like the ancient Epicureans, everybody believes in God, save the very atheist few, but lives as if God is completely irrelevant to their lives and the world, persona non grata. We call this religion moralistic therapeutic deism, the faith of secularism, a failed several hundred year experiment in Western culture out of whose ashes will come a new Christendom. It so happens that Trump came along right at the time secularism was showing its age, its impoverished worldview leaving an increasing number of people looking for more.
Because this awakening is not only spiritual but broadly culture, red pill experiences are touching people just at the point of what I call in the book, “the dividing line in Western culture: truth.” Whether this is related to politics, or the administrative state, or endless wars and the military industrial complex, or the Uniparty and Con In., or money and economics, or justice and injustice, or health and the medical-industrial complex, Big Pharma and Big Food, or the woke insanity, those whose eyes are opened are those who care most passionately about truth. And I argue that even if these people are not yet Christians, they just haven’t realized their allegiance to truth points them inevitably to the one who is The Truth. As such, truth itself has metaphysical and spiritual implications. I believe this is why Jesus and Christianity in our cultural moment is no longer uncool and “controversial.” I recently wrote a piece about how We Went from Negative to Positive World in One Day! Even the non-Christians know Christianity captures something deeply at the heart of the nature of reality, and it’s now welcome in the public square like it hasn’t been in a long time. They know something about Christianity leads to societal flourishing. We need to build on that.
The Founding of America
Covid was a blessing in disguise. So many things came to light for so many people during those few years it’s impossible to see any chance of refounding America without it. God’s providential sovereign control of all things could not have been displayed any more clearly if an airplane was writing it in the sky. Of course, in the midst of a storm it’s difficult to see anything but the storm, but since life is 20/20 hindsight, we can see His hand all over the place. As for many things in life, the easiest way to see it is in contrast. Holding two things side by side allows us to compare them and see what we’re really dealing with, in this case two contrasting views of human government, views as different as night and day. The founding is our north star contrast.
Which brings us to the story of Babel in Genesis 11. Man in his hubris was building “a tower that reaches to the heavens,” and God understood if he let them continue, “then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” The moral of the story is a simple one sinful human beings seem adept at forgetting; concentrations of power are bad. We can see throughout history how common aggrandizing power is, and how jealous man is of his power once he has it. Man not only wants to be God, he wants to be God over others. In previous ages this could be limited geographically. For example, the Roman Empire and its tyrannical rule could only extend as far as Roman physical power allowed it. In the 21st century, the aggrandizing is global, something we’ve come to call globalism, run by globalists. In the early 1990s George H.W. Bush called this a “new world order,” and many of us thought it was a good thing. We obviously hadn’t learned our lesson from Babel well enough. Then Trump. So much of the red pill times we live in come down to, then Trump. I still marvel, incredulously, that God would use a man I once so despised and thought so little of to do such remarkably good things.
I didn’t know he’d always been an America first populist-nationalist. His timing to run for office in 2015 was perfect because the spirit of Brexit, the nationalist referendum in Britain to leave the EU, was in the air. Globalists by definition hate the nation-state because it gets in the way of their plans to remake the world in their globalist image. They see themselves as an omnicompetent elite who know better than the people they seek to rule what is good for them, but a “rule by experts” always leads to Babel. The progressive movement in the early 1900s started this, and the Trump induced Covid hysteria ended it. With his reelection, for the first time in almost a hundred years, we’re seeing the potential dismantling of the administrative state. In other words, the pulling down of Babel brick by brick, and the left is powerless, both politically and culturally, to stop it. For a conservative like me since 1980 who’s been conned by Con Inc. ever since, this is stunning to behold.
Which brings me to the founding of America. America had been in historical development since Alfred the Great, specifically in the development in England of the rule of law, and the concept of political liberty. It was Christianity alone that allowed this to develop, not some fictional secular so-called Enlightenment. But it wasn’t only a development in Western intellectual history, but simultaneous boots on the ground governance. It developed through Magna Carta in 1215 and over time into the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Virginia had been settled in 1607, becoming the first enduring English colony in North America, and the English Puritans started fleeing religious persecution to the New World starting in the 1620s. Over the next hundred and fifty years waves of immigrants from all over the British Isles would come to America to establish a Christian country with the rights of Englishmen. In due course the unique character of this Christian people would slowly develop. Far from home they began carving out a living in a harsh land, and learned how to govern themselves which would eventually lead to a Declaration of Independence from the mother country, and the founding of the United States of America. As I was writing the book I read A Patriot’s History of the United States, and I highly suggest it. (Put up image) It was the cultural dynamics of this specific people in a specific geography at a specific time in history that God used to create the historically unique American character, and it is that character at our moment in history that gives us the possibility of a refounding.
The question confronting us in 2025 as we fight this war without bullets and bombs, is what exactly we are refounding. In the book I outline three broad perspectives on how the founding is defined: Christian, secular, and cultural Marxism leftism. The latter has for the most part been defeated and discredited, so the debate is whether America was founded as a Christian or a secular nation. All of Americas founding generation believed Christianity was at the heart of liberty. Without it, they believed a self-governing republic was unsustainable. The quote on the Liberty Bell from Leviticus 25:10 reflects this, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants.” The Founders clearly didn’t see a contradiction between liberty and the Bible or Christianity. There wasn’t a secularist in the lot of them! They quoted the Bible, especially Deuteronomy, more than any other book or thinkers as they argued for this new country, believing it was specifically a Protestant Christian people that would enable it to succeed.
Unfortunately, in the increasingly secular 20th century, scholars began to claim most of America’s founders were Deists and the founding primarily secular. The reason they believed this is the same reason most conservatives and Christians today believe America is a secular nation: a Christian nation is not conducive to liberty. Or put the other way round, a Christian nation would be coercive and tyrannical. Only a pluralistic secular society, or so the thinking goes, can avoid the inevitable religious squabbles. I wrote a post last year with a title many conservatives and Christians would answer in the affirmative: Is a Christian Nation an Oxymoron?, a contradiction in terms. They believe this for two reasons. One is misunderstanding the nature of Christianity as the public religion of a nation, and the other is the secular myth of neutrality.
The Refounding of America
The question before us is this: Can America flourish as a secular nation, or was John Adams right when he declared:
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
The reason this is such a critical question is because America was the first government in the history of the world to be one of limited powers, or enumerated in a Constitutional word, over a self-governing people. The spirit of Babel in the heart of sinful human beings made this a rare thing indeed.
For our side of the political and culture football, i.e., we’re not Marxists, it seems all agree we want to get back to an America with a federal government of limited powers per the Constitution. We may be allies and agree on almost everything, or cobelligerents and only agree on some, but we can all agree the Constitution is our north star. At the turn of the 20th century the clouds of progressivism began to obscure the light of that star until the America of our founding became unrecognizable to us. To the progressive mind, the state ruled by “experts” is the essence of “democracy,” and submitting to their guidance like good little sheep for our own good is what America is all about. Then Trump.
In his first term Trump was naive and had no idea what he was up against. For decades Republicans have been the controlled opposition, part of the Uniparty, effectively no different than Democrats. Everyone, it seemed, was on the progressive statist bandwagon. For me, and I’m not alone, many became aware of what we came to call the deep state, but which we know now as the administrative state, the vast sweeping unelected bureaucracy that really runs Washington, DC, and how insidious it really is. The builders of Babel would have been jealous. Then God in his merciful providence and judgment gave the most radical progressives, leftists, Marxists, statists, their every heart’s desire: four years of almost absolute political and cultural power under puppet Joe Biden. They could not control themselves, and average Americans realized the contrast I mentioned previously, and Trump started looking mighty appealing to millions who previously wouldn’t be caught dead voting for the man.
Given almost 250 years have passed since that Declaration amid the massive changes of modernity, we understand America as re-founded will not look exactly like the 1776 or 1787 version, but it will have basic similarities. Instead of Babel and the concentration of power in globalist minded elites, state and local power, or federalism a la Jefferson, will gain the upper hand. It’s a simple matter of governmental tyranny in the hands of the few, or liberty in the hands of the many, what we call self-government. The latter is built into the American DNA, and the newly MAGA infused Republican Party may actually be able to lead Americans in that direction. Culturally, secularism will no longer be imposed by God hating elites, and Christianity will once again be respected as America’s founding religion. Babel will never sleep, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and in the year of our Lord 2025, we have taken it.
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