The journey of thirteen British colonies pushing out the British Empire towards becoming the American Empire is an interesting one. No one wants to be a target .. especially when the shooter is a global empire whether Roman, British or American.
The shift from federated republic to a centralized state with dreams of empire started early on even as the American Revolution drew to a close. Powerful people with their own version of empire on their mind would eventually get there way with the US Constitution coup d’etat in 1787 to Lincoln’s War on Southern Independence as well as the total war on Southerners and Indians to the blame placed on Spain for the USS Maine in Havana, Cuba harbor through Woodrow Wilson and beyond. As they say, the rest is history.
What really helped is summarized in a couple of recent articles, one by Bionic Mosquito called Evangelicalism and another by Brad Hoff called Syrians Were Quietly Warned Before the War.
As with all trends that impact nations and people groups, this all gets real messy real fast and stays that way. This is seen in the Bible as well as throughout most of history that evil forces seem to get the upper hand time and again as there is no real long term peace from this world’s experiences.
Specific to the US’s trajectory toward becoming a brutal empire was the bent for power and control, first of the land to the west of the thirteen colonies and eventually around the world especially after WWII.
Tracking the heart of American thought starting in the early 1800s it is apparent that a movement of Christian religious thought left the foundation that Jesus Himself emphasized during His lifetime. Bionic Mosquito rightly pinpoints several influencers that distorted what it meant to be a Jesus-Follower towards becoming a self-centered global terrorist, carrying a Bible.
[Regarding] the evangelical timeline and splintering… What I view as, perhaps, the most corrupting: John Nelson Darby and Cyrus Scofield. A focus on end-times theology, a focus on a state for Israel (resulting in a worship of the modern state with that name). Scofield, a scoundrel in his personal life, would somehow have his reference Bible printed by the prestigious Oxford Press! Many denominations would read from his Bible.
There would be a further splintering in the form of “Bible-believing Christians” vs. liberal modernists – they would push for all having to conform (leftists never change). There would also be a mushy middle in every denomination, eventually leading to a growth in the liberal side – after all, if you don’t feel strongly about something, you won’t really fight for it.
Distractions like this attract the masses and are passed on throughout the generations and what you end up with is a political Christianity, one that Jesus would say “you still don’t get it do you?”.
In the US this culminated about the time of Woodrow Wilson:
There was revivalism: western New York, Tennessee, the Cumberland Valley. Charles Grandison Finney – emotionalism for the sake of emotionalism. People have the free will to choose salvation (see Luther and Calvin spinning in their graves). You don’t have to wait for God to do His work; you decide – just come forward (a prototype for Billy Graham, it seems).
L. Moody – the YMCA, hymnals, the Moody Press. Billy Sunday – went from professional baseball player to evangelist. He attracted the largest crowds of any in the late eighteenth-century – and he played a significant role in the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment (no booze).
Biblicism was weakened – just get a confession of faith; the door was opened to liberalism and the leftist version of the social justice movement. The Enlightenment contributed here: reason, divorced from God, could not accept many of the claims of the Bible. Let’s just try to hold onto the moral stuff, without the grounding in the Bible or in worship.
I am reminded of Murray Rothbard’s work, World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals:
Also animating both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered “Yankee” areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out “sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on earth.
The high-bar (or low-bar, more accurately) of this merger can be summed up in two words: Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson with his dream, post WWI, of the League of Nations was a primer for the US entrance as the baton receiver when the British Empire lost its possessions during WWII. The US decided to do “empire” differently and more covertly. The US would target various countries for regime change to “manage” the world, and Christians themselves would be targeted just like during the Roman Empire.
This is where the article by Brad Hoff takes over showing how Christians are blindsided when they become the target. I wonder how many US Christian still think that this policy can’t come “home” to domestic soil .. even Robert E. Lee saw this in 1866:
Below is the Syrian doctor Shaza’s story, excerpted from the book…
As Shaza mused on the catastrophic shift from an idyllic life to one of upheaval, she recounted being given a forewarning of the Syrian Christian tragedy. As a physician Shaza ministered to those displaced due to the Iraq War: “I worked with the Iraqi refugees from 2003 to 2010 in a charity center. It’s a program done by the Church, but they are accepting all the people – Christians and Muslims.” Little did Shaza foresee that less than a decade into the future it would be Syrian Christians themselves caught in dire straits.
Shaza related how a number of Iraq refugees tried to warn her:
They talk about horrible stories. They’re kidnapping, killing, raping. When they trust me after a couple of years, they keep saying, “Have a plan B. They are going to do this with Syrian Christians.” I keep saying, “No, it will not happen.” They keep saying, “No, it’s going to happen, so think about what is your next step if it’s happened.” And we didn’t think about that. We never thought that this will happen in Syria. Most of the Syrians – they keep saying that it’s protected because it’s a strong region. I have been to Iraq and to Jordan, to Egypt, in the past as a tourist – I saw poor people. We never see them in Syria. We have no homeless people in Syria. It’s a prosperous country. It was a good country, but after, I think, 2006 or ’07 till 2010, we began to notice something. Maybe politics, maybe economic, I don’t know what’s the problem, but something happened, you know. Makes the people more poor so more suffer. They have these thoughts of revolution. I think that made them easily accepted this.
I think the last part of this snippet is key. The empire targets people groups and impoverishes them so they become revolutionaries so the state can use that excuse to crush the rebellion. The state/empire always claims it is bringing “democracy”, however in fact it brings terror and poverty to destabilize the region to ensure regime changed nations remain 3rd world status. This is the American Empire’s MO (modus operandi )
At the end of the day, Christians became the target in the Middle East when the American Empire was playing “find the terrorists” especially since the 1990s. I am pretty certain the American Empire is as secular as it can get as any “Christian Principles” were thrown out decades if not centuries ago. You can count on the American Empire to have its eyes on Christians domestically in the years and decades to come. Are you ready for this?
Peace out.
-SF1