“Intelligence analysts and the chief counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Richmond, Virginia field office are concerned ‘radical-traditionalist Catholics’ are a threat to our democracy and could be ripe for recruitment by white supremacists.” What are the red flags?
• Homeschooling
• Meeting Every Sunday with Other People Who Want Good Lives
• Pro-Life and Anti-LGBT+
Look what the DOJ tried to do to “Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life dad who stopped an aggressive abortion escort from harassing his 12-year-old son.” The FBI swarmed his house that included battering rams and ballistic shields and arrested him in front of his wife and children and filed a lawsuit against him. “The Department of Justice alleged Houck violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. A guilty verdict would have brought with it “a maximum possible sentence of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release, and fines of up to $350,000.”
The jury saw through the charade and the injustice of the Department of Justice and its anti-Christian minions. Houck was found “not guilty.”
You might say, “Well, I’m not Roman Catholic.” Good luck with that, “Even to those who are not Catholic but believe in the sanctity of life or homeschooling their kids, the FBI memo should be concerning. An already politicized and weaponized Department of Justice was caught once again targeting innocent Americans for their beliefs.”
There is precedent for these types of attacks against Christians. And it’s the usual subjects without arm bands and goosestepping and sig heiling to a human Führer. Theirs is the ideology of atheism and its attendant religious rituals (yes, atheism is a religion disguised as “philosophical speculation”), including something from nothing evolution,[1] the bloody sacrament of abortion,[2] sacred sexual cultism remaking men and women into new creations, sacred texts, earth worship (climate change so as not to offend Gaia and the other earth gods),[3] and priestly “consensus experts”[4] who can’t be challenged.
There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s been done countless times.
For example, churches in Nazi German were “confined as far as possible to the performance of narrowly religious functions, and even within this narrow sphere [they] were subjected to as many hindrances as the Nazis dared to impose.” This assessment is from a 1945 report published by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches was prepared for the War Crimes Staff. It offered the following summary: “This study describes, with illustrative factual evidence, Nazi purposes, policies and methods of persecuting the Christian Churches in Germany and occupied Europe.”
Where did the strategic plan begin? “Implementation of this objective started with the curtailment of religious instruction in the primary and secondary schools with the squeezing of the religious periods into inconvenient hours, with Nazi propaganda among the teachers in order to induce them to refuse the teaching of religion, with vetoing of . . . religious textbooks, and finally with substituting [a] Nazi Weltanschauung [worldview] and ‘German faith’ for Christian religious denominational instruction…. At the time of the outbreak of the war … religious instruction had practically disappeared from Germany’s primary schools.” This describes what has happened to our nation’s education system. A materialistic worldview and “secular” faith replaced the once Christian worldview that served as the foundation of education in America. Public (government) education in the United States is anti-Christian and anti-reason.
The next step was to neutralize the impact churches might have on politics. “Under the pretext that the Churches themselves were interfering in political and state matters, [the Nazis] would deprive the Churches, step by step, of all opportunity to affect German public life.” How often do we hear that the “separation between church and state” means churches must remain silent on social and political issues and that pastors cannot use their pulpits (unless they’re liberal) to influence legislation? The sad thing is many Christian pastors are OK with this and believe it’s the biblical way. See my book Myths Lies and Half Truths.
When Martin Niemoeller used his pulpit to expose Adolf Hitler’s radical politics, “He knew Nazi spies and secret agents reported every word spoken.”[5] Leo Stein’s book I Was in Hell with Niemoeller describes how the Gestapo gathered evidence against Niemoeller:
Now, the charge against Niemoeller was based entirely on his sermons, which the Gestapo agents had taken down stenographically. But in none of his sermons did Pastor Niemoeller exhort his congregation to overthrow the Nazi regime. He merely raised his voice against some of the Nazi policies, particularly the policy directed against the Church. He had even refrained from criticizing the Nazi government itself or any of its personnel. Under the former government his sermons would have been construed only as an exercise of the right of free speech. Now, however, written laws, no matter how explicitly they were worded, were subjected to the interpretation of the judges.[6]
In a June 27, 1937, sermon, Niemoeller made it clear to those in attendance had a sacred duty to speak out on the evils of the Nazi regime no matter what the consequences: “We have no more thought of using our own powers to escape the arm of the authorities than had the Apostles of old. No more are we ready to keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”[7] He was arrested a few days later. His crime? “Abuse of the pulpit.”
The “Special Courts” set up by the Nazis made claims against pastors who spoke out against Hitler’s policies. Niemoeller was not the only one singled out by the Gestapo. “Some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the ‘Confessional Church’ were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years.”[8] A group of Confessional Churches in Germany, founded by Pastor Niemoeller and other Protestant ministers, drew up a proclamation to confront the political changes taking place in Germany that threatened the people “with a deadly danger. The danger lies in a new religion,” the proclamation declared. “The church has by order of its Master to see to it that in our people Christ is given the honor that is proper to the Judge of the world…. The First Commandment says ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ The new religion is a rejection of the First Commandment.”[9] Five hundred pastors who read the proclamation from their pulpits were arrested. People protesting pro-abortion policies have been arrested in the United States while pregnancy centers have been attacked and some firebombed.
Too many Christians argue that we are not to go against the government, that we are to “submit” no matter government authorities do. “It’s in the Bible,” they claim. Civil authorities are bound by the same laws as the rest of us. That’s why there is no divine right of kings in the Bible. The Hebrew midwives disobeyed an order from Pharaoh (Ex. 1:17). The prophet Nathan challenged King David to do right (2 Sam. 12). Daniel was not a revolutionary when he opposed the king’s law (Dan. 6). John the Baptist rebuked King Herod for his sexual sins (Matt. 14:3-5). Jesus called Herod a “fox” (Luke 13:32). Peter continued to preach, obeying God rather than those in authority, even though he was commanded to stop by those in charge (Acts 5:29). Paul used his Roman citizenship to challenge the Roman Empire (Acts 16:22-40; 22:25-30) and even appealed to Caesar (25:11; 28:19). Paul spent time in prison because he was seen as a threat to the Empire, even being bound by a chain (Acts 28:20)
To obey Romans 13 is to call our civil officials to uphold their oath of office, an oath that nearly all of them took by affirming “So help me God!” Once a civil ruler takes political office, he has the “power of the sword,” that is, he has civil authority and the claim of governmental legitimacy to enforce the law using civil sanctions. By not limiting the power of civil government with our voices and votes, we give a free hand to officials to act independent of any human restraint to tax our income at any level, confiscate our property, send our children to war, arrest us for manufactured crimes, and even execute us. And who gets to determine what constitutes a crime? Civil rulers alone unless they are held accountable for their actions by the electorate. But only an informed electorate is in the position to act as a brake on the unbridled power of the State.
According to a radio editorial some years ago, “a man’s religion and the strength of his conviction are his own personal matter” and therefore “religion should not interfere with politics.”[10] Of course, this too is an expression of humanist “neutrality” designed to silence Christians but allow for every other conceivable worldview to find expression in the public and political arenas.
Let’s apply the neutrality logic to Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Should the churches have remained neutral because they were churches, and their denouncement of Hitler and his policies would have been fundamentally religious? In fact, this is exactly what many churches did do and for what they believed were sound theological reasons. “Religion was a private matter that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order—nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft—operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.”[11]
Christians were told they had to submit to this external order since the State was seen as the autonomous authority of the public order. The church’s sole concern was man’s spiritual life. The church followed one set of rules which were religious, while the State took a religiously “neutral” position. “The Erlangen church historian Hermann Jorda declared in 1917 that the state, the natural order of God, followed its own autonomous laws while the kingdom of God was concerned with the soul and operated separately on the basis of the morality of the gospel.”[12] It was because of this disjunction—built on the myth of neutrality—that Hitler could carry out his devilish schemes unhindered by most religious people. The “Confessional Church,” however, took a different, non-neutral, position:
[It] opposed the Nazification of the Protestant churches, rejected the Nazi racial theories and denounced the anti-Christian doctrines of Rosenberg and other Nazi leaders. In between lay the majority of Protestants, who seemed too timid to join either of the two warring groups, who sat on the fence and eventually, for the most part, landed in the arms of Hitler, accepting his authority to intervene in church affairs and obeying his commands without open protest.[13]
Those “who sat on the fence,” having fallen for the neutrality myth, supported Hitler by default. While they did not openly join with the “German Christians,” a pro-Hitler alliance of ministers and churches, their inaction “landed them in the arms of Hitler” anyway. So much for neutrality and being at peace with the world.
Restoring the Foundation of Civilization
The main reason anti-Christian civilizationists survive and seem to thrive is that Christians have not engaged with, answered, and built a competing alternative culture—THE ORIGINAL CIVILIZATION—founded on the principles found in God’s Word and observable in creation.
The Establishment and Limits of Civil Government
The Bible tells us that civil rulers are ministers of God. The Greek word translated ministers is the same word used to describe ministers in a church. There are civil ministers and church ministers. Both serve as God’s ministers within their jurisdictions. It is unbiblical to assume that civil rulers are autonomous, that they can legitimately rule independent of Gods limiting authority of them. It is a serious mistake to take Paul’s instructions in Romans 13 and claim that civil rulers cannot be challenged by the citizenry.
[1]Kevin Simington, “Evolution in Crisis as Darwin ‘Evidence’ Contradicts Theory of Evolution,” My Christian Daily (February 13, 2023).
[2]“No liberal cause is defended with more dishonesty than abortion. No matter what else they pretend to care about from time to time—undermining national security, aiding terrorists, oppressing the middle class, freeing violent criminals—the single most important item on the Democrats’ agenda is abortion. . . . The Orwellian dishonesty about abortion begins with the Left’s utter refusal to use the word abortion. It would be as if members of the National Rifle Association refused to use the word gun. These ‘pro-choicers’ treat abortion the way Muslims treat Mohammed. It’s so sacred, it must not be mentioned. Instead we get a slew of liberal euphemisms for baby-killing: ‘reproductive freedom,’ ‘a woman’s right to control her own body,’ ‘terminating a pregnancy,’ ‘freedom of choice,’ ‘a woman’s own private medical decision,’ ‘a procedure,’ ‘access to health care,’ ‘family planning,’ ‘our bodies, our selves,’ ‘choice.’ Choice is important when it comes to killing babies, but not so much when it comes to whom you hire, whom you associate with, what you think about evolution, how much gas your car consumes, how much water comes out of your bathroom showerhead…. The only other practice that was both defended and unspeakable in America like this was slavery…. Abortion is the sacrament and Roe v. Wade is Holy Writ.” Ann Coulter, Godless: The Church of Liberalism (New York: Crown Forum, 2006), chap. 4.
[3]Michael Crichton, “Environmentalism is a Religion,” Remarks to the Commonwealth Club (September 15, 2003).
[4]Mark J. Perry, “For Earth Day: Michael Crichton Explains Why There Is “no Such Thing as Consensus Science,” AEI (April 20, 2015).
[5]Basil Miller, Martin Niemoeller: Hero of the Concentration Camp, 5th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1942), 112.
[6]Leo Stein, I Was in Hell with Niemoeller (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1942), 175.
[7]Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 239.
[8]Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 239.
[9]Quoted in Eugene Davidson, The Trials of the Germans: An Account of the Twenty-Two Defendants before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, [1966] 1997), 275.
[10]Heard on WGST, Atlanta, Georgia (September 12, 1986).
[11]Richard V. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” Fides et Historia (North Newton, KS: The Conference on Faith and History), X:2 (Spring 1978), 13
[12]Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” 14.
[13]William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 236. Emphasis added.
Author: Gary DeMar
Gary—who served as President of American Vision for thirty-five years—is a graduate of Western Michigan University (1973) and earned his M.Div. at Reformed Theological Seminary in 1979. Author of countless essays, news articles, and more than 27 book titles, he has been featured by nearly every major news media outlet. Gary also has hosted The Gary DeMar Show, History Unwrapped, and the Gary DeMar’s Vantage Point Webshow and is a regular contributor to AmericanVision.org. Gary has lived in the Atlanta area since 1979 with his wife, Carol. They have two married sons and are enjoying being grandparents. Gary and Carol are members of Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA).
