“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, Presbyterian Minister and Union Civil War Veteran
“Our patience is wearing thin
.” Thus did the imposter-in-chief and son of Antichrist Joe Biden bellow from the lectern on Thursday.
My message to unvaccinated Americas is this: what more is there to wait for, what more do you need to see? We’ve made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The Vaccine is FDA approved [it isn’t, but that’s another matter]. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So please, do the right thing. But don’t just take it from me. Listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds taking their final breath saying, “if only I’d gotten vaccinated! If only!” It’s a tragedy. Please don’t let it become yours.
With his words, this treasonous liar managed, in very short order, to declare war, not just on unvaccinated Americans, but on all the constitutionally guaranteed liberties of all Americans.
Quite apart from the fact that the Covid vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, Biden’s arrogant and threatening words are among the most disturbing, unconstitutional, and unchristian utterances made by any American politician ever. It’s that serious.
There is no provision in our Constitution that allows a president to dictate what medical treatments a person must have. There is no support for such a thing in Scripture.
It only he had stuck with plagiarizing Neil Kinnock.
Now, when speaking as President in 2021, it seems that Biden has raised his game, lifting his ideas from a higher source. In this case, Revelation 13 seems to be where Biden is stealing his ideas these days. There we read, “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
It is not my point here to argue that the Covid vaccine answers to the prophecy in John’s Revelation. With that said, Biden’s threat to the unvaccinated is certainly of that same spirit we find in Revelation. “Do what I tell you, or else!”
It’s also of the same spirit one finds in the Roman Catholic Church, the Great Babylonian Harlot of Revelation. In the middle ages, Rome was all about “do what we say, or else!” If you didn’t believe that Christ really, truly was present in the sacrifice of the mass, well, you were in a whole lot of trouble and would likely find yourself on the receiving end of some nasty business. This is what dogma is. “Believe, or else!” No matter how stupid, absurd, and unbiblical Rome’s pronouncements were. You had to accept what the pope and his henchmen said or suffer the consequences.
Back in 2006 in his essay “The Religious Wars of the 21st Century,” John Robbins wrote, “The Protestant Reformation is indeed over; the respite of peace, freedom, and prosperity it afforded the West from the long history of human brutality is drawing to a close; and the world is about to enter a new Dark Age of slavery, brutality, and war. Only the second coming of Christ or an extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit can prevent religious totalitarians from imposing their will on billions of people.”
Some may have thought Robbins a pessimist when he wrote that. But fifteen years later, his words seem downright prescient.
America is suffering under the government of its second Roman Catholic president. And unlike the first one, John F. Kennedy, Biden not only sees no need to hide his political and economic Romanism, but actually goes out of his way to embrace them.
By political and economic Romanism, I mean the application of the Roman Catholic Church-State’s (RCCS) theology and philosophy to those two disciplines.
Wilton Cardinal Gregory, Archbishop of Washington D.C., is extraordinarily generous with other peoples’ money.
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, Presbyterian Minister and Union Civil War Veteran
As a blogger in the Year of Our Lord 2021, it’s hard sometimes to know what to focus on. Not for lack of topics, mind you. Not at all. Rather, it’s because there are just so many things that that demand attention it’s can be hard to know where to begin.
We have anti-Christian and anti-white Critical Race Theory running rampant, taking over governments at all levels, corporations, schools, universities, and the media. The illegitimate Biden regime has declared war on the deplorables, seeking to brand them all as white supremacist insurrectionists for the crime of political disagreement. Covid vaccine tyranny threatens our civil liberties in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. Our economy is in free fall. The federal government is spending money like a drunken sailor. The Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, is printing money at a fantastic pace to finance that spending and to keep the financial system from imploding. Oh, and then there’s climate change and the Green New Deal. I can’t neglect to mention these frauds.
There’s all that.
And then there’s the illegal immigration crisis at our southern border, a crisis deliberately brought about by the treasonous policies of the Biden regime. A crisis that serves several purposes. At a time when millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed due to the tyrannical Covid lockdown polices favored by the Democrats, this is a gift to the cheap labor lobby. A second purpose is that of importing Democrats, diluting the votes of the historic American nation, and setting up permanent, single-party Democratic rule. The party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion wants to do to the whole nation what it did to California. But a third purpose, and perhaps really the first purpose, is to continue Romanizing America Through Illegal Immigration.
Joseph R. Biden is a Roman Catholic and openly carries out the Vatican’s immigration policy designed to subvert the United States of America by turning it into an ungovernable Tower of Babel, to overthrow the Biblical and Protestant Westphalian World Order (WWO), and to institute the New World Order (NWO), an anti-Christian, technocratic, Satanic form of world government.
But while the Roman Catholic Church-State (RCCS) has openly, loudly, and constantly worked to undermine the WWO through mass migration, hardly anyone seems to notice this. Yet once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
A recent example of Rome’s open assault on the United States – I write here of American, because I’m and American and know the situation here better than I do other places, but make no mistake, what Rome is doing to America, it’s doing to European nations and other nations throughout the world – came from archbishop of Washington D.C., Cardinal Wilton Gregory. In an article titled “D.C. Archbishop: American Must ‘Share Our Abundance” With Illegal Aliens,” the archbishop openly argued that Congress has an obligation to commit treason against the American people by granting amnesty to the approximately 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States.
Said Gregory,
Catholic social teaching upholds the principle that every person has the right to live in his or her own homeland in security and dignity. However, when loss of work forces migration, we must welcome them, protect them and share our abundance with them.
Standing in solidarity with our migrant brothers and sisters means once again raising the question, will we care for our neighbor? After years of delay, the 117th Congress now has an opportunity to be courageous by addressing immigration in a comprehensive and productive way.
Note well Gregory’s use of the term “must.” According to the archbishop, Congress has a moral obligation to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. The granting of amnesty to those who violated American immigration law is not merely a matter of policy, says the archbishop, but an ethical imperative.
The basis for this moral imperative, says Gregory, is that people have a right to migrate or to immigrate. Now it’s important to understand what the RCCS means by this. Rome doesn’t simply mean that people have a right to move from one nation to another, but that the citizens of the receiving state have a moral obligation to shower the newcomers with fabulous cash and prizes in the form of goodies from the welfare state. This is what Wilton means when he says, “we must…share our abundance with them.”
One of the most offensives aspects of Rome’s calls for immigration treason is its coyness when it comes to who bears the cost for its pharisaical moralizing. Just as the pharisees of old tied up burdens heavy to bear on men’s backs but would not themselves so much as lift a finger to bear them, so too does the RCCS hold itself out as some great force for moral goodness while dumping the cost of its pronouncements off on others. In this case, it’s the citizens of the United States who will bear the cost of Wilton’s nonsense. Wilton, like Rome generally, is quite generous with other peoples’ money.
But while Rome usually hides behind the fog of generalities when it comes to who pays for its migrant pronouncements, every now and then a Catholic writer spills the beans. Writing in the introduction to Exsul Familia: The Church’s Magna Charta for Migrants, editor Rev. Giulivo Tessarolo wrote, “In undertaking this work, I took cognizance of a significant social fact of our time; that, due to enormous financial implications, the phenomenon of emigration will find some relief only in the English-speaking countries. The vast influx of immigrants into Canada and Australia confirms that fact.” In other words, Tessarolo thought that only the Anglosphere could bear the enormous costs of mass welfare migration. He was surely right in this.
Note well, Tessarolo’s remarks exclude the U.S., because he wrote in 1962, three years before America opened the immigration floodgates with the 1965 Immigration Act, an Act signed into law by then President Lyndon Johnson. During the signing ceremony, Johnson attributed the Act to, “the vision of the late beloved President John Fitzgerald Kennedy [American’s first Roman Catholic president], and to the support given to this measure by the then Attorney General and now Senator, Robert F. Kennedy [also a son of Rome].”
It was Rome that helped gift American with the welfare state, and it was Rome that the used that weaponized that welfare state to supercharge immigration, migration, and refugee resettlement for the purposes of undermining American and turning from a free and sovereign republic into another cog in the globalist machine. Not only is the historic American nation being dispossessed as it is overrun with replacement migration, but it is also forced to pay for the privilege of its own dispossession. This is truly diabolical and is exactly what one would expect from Antichrist and Mystery Babylon.
One important theoretical point that Cardinal Wilton did not mention in his attack on the American nation is Rome’s unbiblical theory of property call “the universal destination of goods” (UDG). I’ve written extensively about the UDG in this space and will not repeat all that I have said on the subject. One example can be found here. For our purposes today, I’ll simply remark that Rome’s conception of private property is probably not the same as yours. You likely think that your title to property gives you the legal and moral the exclusive right to use and to dispose of the things you own. But Rome doesn’t see it that way. In Rome’s unbiblical economic and political thought, need is the only criterion for ownership. If someone needs an item you possess, it is that person’s right, or the government’s, to take it from you and to give it to him for his use. This, in a nutshell, is the UDG.
A second idea underlying Rome’s theory of immigration is a concept called The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man (FOGBOM). John Robbins explains FOGBOM in his masterful book Ecclesiastical Megalomania, where he quotes John Paul II in one of his encyclicals, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On the Social Concern). Wrote John Paul II, “The teaching and spreading of her social doctrine are part of the Church’s evangelizing mission.” One of the ways the RCCS seeks to “evangelize” the world with its social doctrine in through mass, illegal, taxpayer subsidized immigration. Writing in Strangers No Longer (SNL) – SNL is a 2003 position paper co-authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and their Mexican Conference of Catholic Bishops; essentially, it functions as the bishop’s game plan for subverting the United States of America through mass, taxpayer funded illegal immigration from Mexico and other Latin American nations – the bishops conclude,
As bishops we have decided, in the words of Pope John Paul II, to “put out into the deep” 31 in search of common initiatives that will promote solidarity between our countries, particularly among the Catholics of both countries [America and Mexico]. We are committed to the new evangelization of our continent and to the search for new ways of leading our peoples to encounter Christ, who is “the path to conversion, communion and solidarity” (emphasis mine).
Worth noting in this quote are the words “the path to conversion, communion and solidarity.” These are taken from Pope John Paul II’s 1999 exhortation “Ecclesia in America,” in which the Pope writes, “the Virgin of Guadalupe [Our Lady of Guadalupe] is venerated as Queen of all America.” And by “America,” the Pope means the whole continent, not the nation commonly called America. The Pope goes on to call Our Lady of Guadalupe the “Patroness of all America and Star of the first and new evangelization” …and “Mother and Evangelizer of America.” One of the chief means of evangelization used by Our Lady of Guadalupe is illegal immigration.
Yes, Rome seeks to evangelize the United States with the gospel of a demon called Our Lady of Guadalupe. To borrow a Star Trek reference, it’s as if Rome wants all Americans to become one with the FOGBOM Borg through the lies of a demonic apparition.
So, according to the immigration theory of the RCCS, not only do migrants have the right to barge into your country, immigration laws and economic conditions notwithstanding, they also have the right to take your stuff. And you have no say in the matter. As an American, your only job is to sit down, shut up, and fork it over. To make matters worse, these same illegal immigrants are charged with the responsibility of “evangelizing” Americans with the doctrines of devils, namely, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
So much for the immigration theory of the RCCS.
An estimated 1,000 migrants wait under the Anzalduas International Bridge near McAllen, TX, August 2021. This is what happens when Rome’s evil immigration theory is put into practice.
Rome’s Immigration Practice
Rome is daily, openly, and actively working to subvert the United State of America by promoting the current massive flood of illegal immigration across our southern border. One of the Trump Administration’s few real wins has, in the space of a mere seven months, been completely reversed by the treasonous, illegitimate Biden regime through “la invitacion,” Spanish for “y’all come on up and we’ll give you lots of free stuff!”
In a recent article titled “COVID-19, Catholics and Illegal Alien Charities,” columnist Michelle Malkin, herself a Roman Catholic, exposed some of the wicked, treasonous activities of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grand Valley (CCRGV). It seems that not only has CCRGV actively promoted illegal border crossings, but has put up large numbers of Covid positive migrants in motels along the border.
Citing Fox New reporter Bill Melugin, Malkin writes,
Fox News reporter Bill Melugin reported on Tuesday that “after an incident at a Whataburger, police in La Joya, (Texas,) say they’ve learned illegal immigrants who test positive for COVID-19 are being released from federal custody to a local Catholic charity in the (Rio Grande Valley,) which then places them in local hotels without notice.”
So here we are at a time when actual American citizens are being threatened with new lockdowns, mask requirements, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccine “strike forces,” placement on no-fly lists, etc. all supposedly to save us all from the dread “Delta Variant,” while illegal, Covid positive immigrants brought here by the illegitimate Biden regime and Catholic Charities are released into American cities with absolutely no concern for the health effects on the American people.
To underscore the treasonous nature of CCRGV and its complete disregard for the health and well-being of the American people, Bill Melugin reports that he asked the executive director of CCRGV, a nun by the name of Norma Pimentel, how many Covid positive illegal immigrants were quarantined in local hotels. Pimentel’s response was that she had been advised not to comment.
This nun, who is openly endangering the health of the America people, hides behind a “no comment” when asked about her treasonous practices. Could anything be more typical of the arrogance and irresponsibility of the RCCS than this?
Anyone paying attention to the news knows the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border is terrible. Anyone who actually visits the border discovers it is worse than that.
Here is what is most striking about the government’s response to the unprecedented surge of illegal border crossers: It is entirely improvised. Jury-rigged. Thrown together in a scramble to accommodate thousands of migrants who were not coming just months ago. And the reason it is being improvised is that during his first days in office, President Joe Biden blew up the foundation of the government’s handling of migrants. With a series of executive actions, Biden threw out key policies with nothing ready to replace them. And he did it using rhetoric that invited migrants to rush to the border — more than 172,000 in March alone, including nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children (emphasis mine).
Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. He serves not the interests of the American people, nor does he defend the Constitution. He is a tool of the Vatican and does the bidding of his father in Rome. What you are seeing on America’s southern border is the practice of Rome’s nation breaking theory of immigration.
Rum, Romanism and Rebellion
When Presbyterian Samuel D. Burchard said described the Democrats as the “party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism and rebellion,” he could not have been more accurate or prescient in his remarks. The Democrats were then, and are much more today, exactly that. The current Pope and the popes before him have openly called for mass migration in the name of humanitarianism. But it’s not the good of the world’s poor that is the concern of the occupants of the office of Antichrist. Their goal is world government; migrants are their pawns for achieving that end. And in the United States, the primary channel for the papal Antichrist to work his evil deeds has been the Democratic party. This has been the case for over 150 years.
By flooding America’s southern border with an unprecedented flow of illegal immigrants, the Biden regime, the party of rum Romanism and rebellion, and their supporters in the schools, universities, and the media are working overtime to carry out Antichrist’s immigration policy, see, for example, here, here and here. The ultimate aim of this policy to subvert the United Sates, and, more generally, the WWO and usher in a tyrannical, globalist empire headed by Rome. There is nothing, not one thing, about the Biden regime’s immigration policy that is in any way beneficial to ordinary Americans or to the nation as a whole. But it does serve certain elite interests, in particular that of the RCCS, the Democratic party, the massive governmental welfare bureaucracy, socialists generally, and those who benefit from the cheapest possible labor while offloading the social costs of that cheap labor onto taxpayers.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 8 of the Constitution sets forth the presidential oath of office, which reads, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” There is nothing, not one thing, about Joe Biden’s immigration policy that is consistent with this oath. But his polices and his words have been consistent with carrying out the immigration policy of Antichrist. For this reason alone he deserves to be removed from office. One may well argue that Biden’s immigration policy rises to the level of treason. In the opinion of this author, it does.
The RCCS and the Popes of Rome are wicked beyond what most people can imagine. Time was, Christians understood the evil of Rome and opposed it. Writing in the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon said, “It is the bounden duty of every Christian to pray against Antichrist, and as to what Antichrist is no sane man ought to raise a question. If it be not the popery in the Church of Rome there is nothing in the world that can be called by that name.”
But ask yourself, when was the last time you hear a sermon denouncing Rome as Mystery Babylon or the pope as Antichrist. If you’re like me or like most Christians in Bible believing churches, the answer is never.
Brothers, this cannot be allowed to stand. We must do better. Antichrist and his minions are openly, brazenly, and without opposition destroying America and other nations around the world through mass migration, immigration, and refugee resettlement. Yet our pulpits remain silent in the face of this evil.
I’m reminded or the Proverb, “A righteous man who falters before the wicked is like a murky spring and a polluted well.”
For far too long, Protestants have faltered before the wicked Pope’s of Rome. Things have gotten so bad that many nominal Protestants promote Antichrist as their “brother in Christ.”
America is under sustained attack by Antichrist and Mystery Babylon, the Mother of Harlots. It’s high time Christians repented of their cowardice and called upon the Lord to grant them the courage to expose evil, nation destroying immigration theory and practice of the papal Antichrist and the RCCS. The future of our nation depends on it.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on July 16, 2021 (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members of one another.
Ephesians 4:25
“There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world.”
In the same speech, Obama went on to deny that he was calling for censorship, noting, “The answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say ‘this is reliable’ and I’m still able to argue safely abut facts and what we should do about it.”
Nearly five years later, it’s fair to say that quite obviously Obama and others of his political persuasion were talking about censorship, and this became clear enough last week that even the most ardent deniers of the big government/big tech censorship complex have not excuse for missing the Biden regime’s full-bore attack on the First Amendment.
In the same press conference, Psaki voiced her displeasure that Facebook was not deplatforming spreaders of “misinformation” fast enough for her, and presumably, for her boss’s tastes. She said, “there’s about 12 people who are producing 65 percent of the anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms. All of them remain active on Facebook, despite some even being banned on other platforms, including Facebook – ones that Facebook owns.”
If all that wasn’t enough, Psaki was at it again the next day. In a Friday 7/17 press conference she offered that, “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not other if you – for providing misinformation out there.”
As the saying goes, I need new conspiracy theories, because all my old ones are coming true.
Seriously, people have speculated for years that the Deep State has been behind much, if not all, of the social media censorship. But this is right in your face government censorship. We have what is, in my opinion, an illegitimate government installed through election fraud stomping on the right of American’s to freely access information on a matter that affects all our lives.
“It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated.”
Dr. Leana Wen, CNN Medical Contributor
When I first begin writing about Covid, now nearly a year and a half ago, I was very concerned about what I was seeing. The never-ending drumbeat about Covid in the press, even in January and February 2020, immediately made me suspicious that it represented some sort of PSYOP (psychological operation). By whom or to what end, I was not sure, but it had the look and feel of a propaganda effort.
Today, I’m more convinced that ever that Coivd is a remarkably sophisticated hoax and is being used by the powers that shouldn’t be to advance their agenda of tyrannical global government.
One bit of evidence for this is how the rhetoric of Covid tyranny not only is not subsiding but seems to be getting louder, even as threat of Covid long ago peaked.
One example of this is a comment made by the appalling Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical contributor. Just last week, she said in an interview, “It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated” Dr. Wen went on to say, “But at some point, these mandates, by workplaces, by schools, I think it will be important to say, ‘Hey, you can opt out, but if you want to opt out, you have to sign these forms, you have to get twice weekly testing.”
Back when Covid first became an issue in early 2020, there were any number of people saying that it was going to be used as a means to usher in tyranny – vaccine passports, lockdowns, mandatory vaccines, and all that – but they were just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists, who didn’t know what they were talking about.
Today, they don’t look so crazy.
In fact, all those warning from a year or more ago look rather prescient today.
One example of early warnings about the globalists’ intent to use the so-called Covid pandemic to advance their plans to impose tyranny comes from James Corbett, an outstanding independent journalist who’s reported on the nefarious plans of the deep staters and globalists for years. His video “Medical Martial Law 2020” discusses the origin or the lockdowns and vaccine mandates we’re still fighting here in July 2021.
Statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the US-Mexico Border
“We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.”
Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, Presbyterian Minister and Union Civil War Veteran
It had been my plan to continue my series on Critical Race Theory (CRT) this week, but events, as they say, conspired against me. Not that I had a bad week last week. But it was a busy week, so not one conducive to research, which is a most necessary thing if one wants to write intelligently on CRT. Lord willing, I will take up that subject again next week. But for now, I thought I’d return to one of my favorite yet recently neglected topics: immigration. More to the point, the role of the Roman Church-State in fostering immigration treason against the American people.
For a number of years now, I have argued in this space that one of the leading unindicted co-conspirators in America’s ongoing immigration disaster is the Roman Church-State. Rome has been using immigration since at least the first half of the 19th century to subvert the republican government of the United States. But for all Rome’s obvious efforts to this end, it is a very rare immigration writer who points this out.
One of the best places for seeing just how aggressive Rome is in pushing costly and aggressive immigration, migration and refugee resettlement policies is United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) website under its “News” section. I’ve been following this news feed for years, but never once have I seen a single immigration press release that did not promote immigration policies destructive to American.
The past few months, the USCCB has been oddly silent on the immigration front. I’m not sure why this is. One possible explanation is related to an important rule among salesmen: When you make the sale, stop talking.
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
In an article titled “Pope Francis Calls for Giving United Nations Organization ‘Real Teeth,’” the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist says that, “The twenty-first century is witnessing a weakening of the power of nation states, chiefly because the economic and financial sectors, being transnational, tend to prevail over the political.”
That economic and financial sectors have throughout history have operated across national borders, and that the Bible in no way prohibits international trade, these things the Pope does not want you to think about. These forces, the Pope tells us, in some undefined way “prevail over the political,” and this, we are to take on the Pope’s word, is a very bad thing that can be fixed only by ushering in an even bigger government, a world government run by the UN.
So what does the Pope mean by “economic and financial sectors” prevailing over the political? Given his authoritarian dislike of economic and political liberty, he likely means that, despite the best efforts of regulators to stamp out economic and political liberty, people, ordinary people, are still free to make voluntary economic decisions in their perceived best interests. Liberty of this sort is deeply disturbing to globalist tyrants of all sorts, whether we’re talking about religious globalists such as the Popes of Rome – all of them, Francis included, are Antichrists who hate, loathe and despise Christ and his people whom he freed spiritually, politically and economically – or secular tyrants of the sort who run the UN, the World Economic Forum or any number of other globalist busybody organizations.
There’s an old saying, if it doesn’t fit, get a bigger hammer. The drive for world government is all about elite globalists such as the Pope getting a bigger hammer to beat the nations and peoples of the world into their mold, imposing on them by force the choices and behaviors the elite want them to exhibit, but which if left to themselves the people would not choose. “There’s just too much liberty out there,” is ever the cry of the tyrant.
In times past, those who warned about a plot to impose world government on the nations of the earth were viewed as kooks. “That’s conspiracy theory!” people would cry.
But the push for world government, while it is a conspiracy in the proper sense of the term, is certainly no unsubstantiated rumor spread by fact challenged individuals. It’s an open secret, possibly one of the worst kept secrets ever. The Pope’s of Rome and other Vatican officials simply cannot stop themselves from openly longing for world government and constantly take the opportunity to tell everyone how wonderful their brave new world will be.
As Christians, we cannot endorse world government. But how can I say this? As Christians, we must always ground our ideas about politics and economics in the Scriptures. So where in the Bible does is the matter of world government and individual nations ever brought up? Is it brought up at all? In short, yes. The Bible has a stance on world government. God opposes it. Further, God endorses the idea of a system of nation states of the sort that came about as a result of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which concluded the Thirty Years War.
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
“Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” This quote, or some variant to it, has been attributed to several prominent people. In searching for the origin of the quote, I found it credited to such notables as John Knox, William Tyndale, and Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Jefferson used “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” on his personal seal. Jefferson wanted to use this saying on the Seal of the United States
Whatever the origin of the quote, many Christians today are troubled by the notion that it is ever a Christian’s duty to resist tyranny. Citing Paul’s injunction in Romans 13 “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities,” they take Paul’s command to be, if not an absolute, at least something very close to it.
The extent of the civil magistrate’s legitimate authority came to the surface in 2020 with the coming of the Covid 19 restrictions across much of the world. These restrictions not only affected schools, universities, and businesses, but also churches. Sincere Christians, when considering how to react to government restrictions, in particular government restrictions on church meetings, came to different conclusions. Some believed it was the duty of Christians to obey every command of the various civil authorities that restricted, or outright prohibited, church meetings. Others considered it a Christian duty to resist such edicts. Because of these different views, as a follow up to last week’s post on the divine origin of civil government, it seemed good to me to say something about the relationship of civil government to the church.
To take the suspense out of things, I’ll tell you my view of the matter up front. Christians are required to obey civil magistrates, but only in the Lord. The civil magistrate, while a legitimate minister of God, has limited authority. This was also John Calvin’s view. He wrote,
The characteristic of a true sovereign is, to acknowledge that, in the administration of his kingdom, he is a minister of God. He who does not make his reign subservient to the divine glory, acts the part not of a king, but a robber. He, moreover, deceives himself who anticipates long prosperity to any kingdom which is not ruled by the sceptre of God, that is, by his divine word (Institutes, Prefatory Address).
Later in the Institutes, Calvin wrote,
We are subject to the men who rule over us, but subject only in the Lord. If they command anything against Him let us not pay the least regard to it, nor be moved by all the dignity which they possess as magistrates – a dignity to which no injury is done when it is subordinated to the special and truly supreme power of God (Book IV, Chapter 20.32).
It is the view of this author that the civil authority has no jurisdiction to regulate how Christian churches conduct their worship services, and that all such regulation represents overreach on the part of the civil magistrate. This is not to say that Christian ministers and Christians themselves are not subject to the governing authorities. If Christians commit acts that are contrary to the law of God and the just civil laws of society, then they are justly punished by the civil magistrate. But the regulation or prohibition of singing hymns, capacity limits due to Covid, or even outright prohibition on gathering on the Lord’s Day? All such restrictions by the civil authorities are tyrannical and ought to be resisted by Christians everywhere.
Detail from The Tower of Babel by Peter Brugel, 1563.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
In his 2020 encyclical Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis wrote, “The right to private property can only be considered a secondary natural right, derived from the principle of the universal destination of created goods.”
Listed under the heading “Re-Envisaging The Social Role of Property,” Francis’ comments are not, as some of his more free market critics suppose, out of the mainstream of Roman Catholic economic thought. Rather, the Pope’s attack on private property is simply a restatement of Rome’s long-held unchristian, erroneous, and socialist understanding of private property.
To underscore Francis hostility to private property, we need look no further than the paragraph quoted at the top of this post, “The principle of the common use of created goods is the ‘first principle of the whole ethical and social order; it is a natural and inherent right that takes priority over others.’” In Pope Francis view, collectivism is “ethical” while holding to the Bible’s view of private property, that it is lawful for a man to do what he wishes with his own things, is not.
Contrary to Pope Francis, the common use of created goods, far from being the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order,” is a guarantor of poverty and tyranny. One would think the many failed socialist states over the past 100 years, and the economic and political disasters suffered by those unfortunate enough to live in them, would make this clear. But far from slowing them down, it’s almost as if the economic disasters suffered by the Soviet Union, Venezuela and a host of other nations embolden the socialists, including Pope Francis, to double down on calling evil good and good evil by pushing for more economic collectivism.
In one of his lectures, John Robbins made the important point that systems of thought tend to go wrong from the very beginning. That is to say, systems of thought, in this case economic thought, tend to begin with faulty premises which then lead their adherents to faulty conclusions.
This can be seen in the economic thinking of Pope Francis, who begins with the unbiblical notion of the “the principle of the universal destination of created goods” which in turn leads him to attack private property and capitalism – God’s economics – and to promote the form of coveting we know as socialism or collectivism.
But while at least some Christians understand that capitalism is the economic system of the Bible, it may come as a surprise even to them that one must begin in Genesis to have a sound understanding of economics, specifically, the origin of private property.
Lux Lucet 