Newsletter #1: Understanding the Times

Sep 19, 2023

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The last few years have been some of the most disorienting any of us have ever experienced, and it can be quite a challenge to keep up. That’s understandable since, the more you look into the matter, you realize that such disorientation is by design.

As a nation, we are becoming as fragmented as ever in what some are calling “The Big Sort,” where we are splintering into various affinity groups based on political ideology, ethnicity, gender, theology, age, and regional culture.

Through relentless propaganda campaigns, academia and the news media exacerbate natural differences and create entirely new ones. Meanwhile, as we all try to process what’s going on, social media has a tendency to make us want to find comfort in our own little bubble of people who think exactly like us.

Some of the divisions are necessary and unbridgeable, while others are created and exaggerated in order to keep organized resistance at bay. As I see Christianity in particular struggling to discern what to do with woke leadership, whether to treat them as wolves or simply misguided brethren, I have felt the need to contribute what I can to the discussion.

A Little About Me

According to sociologists, I’m a “Millennial,” although I prefer the term “Echo Boomer” since my father is a disabled Vietnam Era vet, and I tend to value the company of conservative “Boomers” more than I do other generations. While my father was drafted during the war, the Army stationed him in Korea near the DMZ. His experiences there and after his return to the States left him deeply distrustful of our government as he began his own search for meaning.

Subsequently, my father became a Christian and moved to the Bible Belt, where he met my mother. He became a Sunday School teacher and did his best to raise me in a Christian environment while always encouraging me to pursue truth and think for myself. However, as he continued to read the Bible for himself, he found he was constantly at odds with what local churches taught, especially regarding God’s sovereignty in salvation.

Thanks to his search for the truth, I grew up listening to teachers like John MacArthur and R.C. Sproul through their tape and print ministries while also listening to great teachers of the past like Martyn Lloyd-Jones. My father also exposed me to the works of A.W. Pink, Charles Spurgeon, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Owen, John Flavel, and many others at an early age. As a result, these men have greatly shaped my worldview and helped me navigate a world saturated with lies.

My Experience with the State Indoctrination System

Though homeschooled, I attended a secular university, transferring from a technical college after the end of The Great Recession. That period of economic instability left me very uncertain about my future, and many refer to my generation as the lost generation because of it.

Still, I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history without any debt thanks to several scholarships. Though I graduated with high honors, I went against my professors’ advice to pursue a master's—instead, I preferred the security of a regular job learning a trade without taking on debt. I’ve always viewed debt as a form of slavery or indentured servitude, and I knew I would be vulnerable in a system that was not friendly to my convictions.

There were numerous other reasons that I did not pursue further education. Apart from the apparent glut of liberal arts degrees on the market, another discouraging factor was the comparative abundance of scholarships geared specifically toward women and minorities. Additionally, I could not help but notice that the overwhelming majority of students were women.

I later came to find out by reading Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools that corporations were donating “hundreds of millions of dollars” “to encourage female achievement in higher education.” However, there were already “four times as many privately funded college scholarships available for girls as for boys,” and women were already earning the majority of degrees.1

Despite this, Obama established the White House Council on Women and Girls in 2009 on the pretext that women did not have “the same education and career opportunities” as men. Later, in 2021, Biden established the Gender Policy Council to replace the former council.

Meanwhile, when the Obama Justice Department created the Healthy Masculinity Campus Athletics Project in 2011 to combat “toxic masculinity,” institutions like Wheaton College Massachusetts gladly accepted grants from the program.2 While we obviously cannot blame everything on the state, the state has done everything in its power to undermine the family by attacking masculinity and promoting feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism.

I watched in bewilderment in 2015 when the White House was lit up with rainbow colors in honor of Obergefell vs. Hodges, celebrating the legalization of same-sex marriage. Even worse, I saw how many so-called evangelicals were compromising on the issues of feminism and homosexuality. For instance, I remember when the dating website ChristianMingle buckled after a lawsuit in 2016, and they began to allow gay dating on their website.3

If that wasn’t surreal enough, in 2016, thanks to Jordan Peterson, I became aware of Bill C-16 in Canada that would compel Canadians to refer to so-called transgender persons by their preferred pronouns.

While I was working in a trade, I came to better understand how the overwhelming majority of work in America is now geared toward the service sector at the expense of industry. This shift has disproportionately hurt men and favored women so that, in many families, women are now the breadwinners. Also, America is no longer a primarily middle-class country, which will have a profound impact on representative government if this trend is not reversed.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

What I gradually came to understand was that I was caught up in something called “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” the name assigned to the technological revolution following the Digital Revolution. It differs in that it is an eerie merging of innovations in digital technology and the physical and biological world. Directed by the powerful technocratic elite, the goal is to usher in a period of transhumanism that fundamentally alters the nature of humanity.

While in college, I learned about the power of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the threat they posed to national governments. After graduation, I began to learn about such powerful organizations as the World Economic Forum, Soros Fund Management, BlackRock, and their promotion of DEI and ESG policies.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is essentially a Marxist system that seeks to do away with merit-based inequality, which often means holding back those perceived as part of a privileged class. In other words, those enforcing DEI policies attempt to combat discrimination based on race, gender, class, and “sexual orientation” by actively discriminating against those they label as privileged. Furthermore, when an individual belongs to more than one of these established marginalized groups, they refer to the overlap as “intersectionality.”

On the other hand, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scoring is basically a way to destroy our economy by demanding businesses comply with policies to appease the climate cult. A company’s ESG score tells investors how they are dealing with environmental, social, and corporate governance issues.

The Role of Big Eva

Perhaps the most distressing thing I have come to realize is just how important the role of the religious establishment has been in all of this. In fact, Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has mentioned the importance of integrating faith in his article “Welcoming Faith in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

In seeking to incorporate various world religions, Schwab and his associates at Davos have been likened to a Gnostic cult, and many of their views are not unlike those of the Valentinian Gnostics confronted by Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, in the days of the Roman Empire.

The Woke Church and “The Fourth Great Awakening”

Simultaneously, either through direct collaboration or moral compromise, organizations like The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, The Gospel Coalition, Together for the Gospel, 9Marks, Wheaton College, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Midwestern Seminary, Dallas Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, and others have contributed to what Democrat financier Zack Exley calls “The Fourth Great Awakening.”

Also known as the Social Justice movement, The Fourth Great Awakening has infiltrated Reformed evangelical churches through monetary ties.4 The Young, Restless, and Reformed crowd or “New Calvinists” have been especially influential in this regard.

The WEF and Woke Anti-Americanism in the Church

An example of corrupt financial ties would be WEF member James T. Riady and his connections to Reformed Theological Seminary.5 Ligon Duncan is the chancellor and CEO of RTS, and Kevin DeYoung serves as Associate Professor of Systematic Theology.

While declining to call him a false teacher, Justin Peters has warned about Ligon Duncan. Meanwhile, The presence of Duncan and DeYoung at the Puritan Conference in 2022 caused a notable stir.

Ligon Duncan has made several woke comments, and it was Duncan who suggested that illegal immigration might be a way God could reverse secularism in America.6 In this, Duncan sounds a lot like social justice warrior Russell Moore, who works on the Evangelical Immigration Table, financed by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations as part of the National Immigration Forum.7

Many neoconservatives share a similar disdain for native-born Americans, as Tucker Carlson has pointed out. As an example, he mentioned Bill Kristol who, at an American Enterprise Institute meeting in 2017, argued that immigrants were more impressive than native-born Americans. Tucker also referenced a 2018 tweet where Kristol said he’d “take in a heartbeat a group of newly naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings” who voted for Trump.8

Reflexivity and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Unfortunately, I often hear Christians passing along the same type of rhetoric. While I will not deny that the breakdown of the family and the local church have greatly impacted American work ethic, it is inaccurate to lump everyone from the same generation in the same category. It’s very easy to play on natural generational tensions as practically every generation has said essentially the same thing about the generation that comes after it.

This is a prime example where natural tensions can be used to alienate groups from one another through the use of reflexivity. “Reflexivity” is a vital term to understand as we try to navigate the massive propaganda campaigns we are constantly exposed to. Reflexivity involves a predetermined outcome brought about through overwhelming propaganda so that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.9

Many become caught up in such reflexive movements wittingly or unwittingly, and it’s often very difficult to distinguish between the complicit and the hoodwinked. That’s not surprising. An article in the Financial Times, written by a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, openly advocated for governments and corporations to use psychological operations (psy-ops) to manipulate public opinion and action.10

Intersectionality and the Ecumenical “Ministry of Truth”

Meanwhile, having detected the dramatic shift in cultural attitudes towards Christianity after Obergefell vs. Hodges, leaders like Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, and others have adopted a form of “soft intersectionality.” Whether they engage wittingly or unwitting (I’m often inclined to believe the former), the effect is largely the same, even if they don’t engage in the same sort of fire-eating rhetoric as the hardcore woke.

In the case of the radical woke, it has become very clear that anyone who resists them will be browbeaten into submission. A case in point would involve the Bret Kavanaugh hearings of 2018, where Ed Stetzer and John C. Richards of Wheaton College helped pile on Kavanaugh as he faced relentless charges of sexual assault from Christine Blasey Ford.11 Politicians and news media pundits constantly told us we had to believe Ford, despite the lack of any evidence. The Senate eventually confirmed Kavanaugh as Supreme Court Justice but only after he had his name dragged through the mud.

The message is clear: if men such as Kavanaugh with very powerful friends could face such treatment, what can the common man expect? Many women don’t seem to understand why men are so afraid of them in the workplace. The fact is men know they can be accused of the worst of crimes against women, and they will be very lucky if anyone will give them a fair hearing. They are more likely to be counted guilty until proven innocent, and the religious establishment will be more than happy to put their foot on their throat in order to appear morally upright.

Not only that, Michael O’Fallon, founder of Sovereign Nations, an organization dedicated to preserving the sovereignty of nation-states, has warned that organizations related to The World Economic Forum and the Council for Foreign Relations have induced major evangelical leaders like Al Mohler, Ed Stetzer, Ligon Duncan, Mark Dever, and Tim Keller to infuse the evangelical movement with progressive politics with the aim of making the church compliant with ESG and DEI policies.12

The Corporatist Controlled Economy

Furthermore, O’Fallon’s colleague, James Lindsay, an expert on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and founder of New Discourses, has described ESG scoring as a sort of Faustian bargain with the devil whereby “US and world corporations” receive “guaranteed financing, government protection, and reliable access to capital” so long as they’re willing to subvert their own countries.13

While you might hear your favorite Fox News commentator talk about how incompetent the Democrats are, that’s not exactly accurate. While the vast majority of our congressional leaders are bumbling morons, both Democrat and Republican, they’re largely puppets for larger NGOs like the WEF.

The dismantling of our economy was planned and is part of a larger cultural revolution, and rural areas have been hit the hardest. Even before the COVID Plandemic shut down our economy in 2020, organizations like fee.org were reporting on the economic crisis in rural areas, with young families fleeing decaying cities for better economic opportunities in more metropolitan areas. Remote work has offset some of this, but the future of the rural economy remains uncertain.14

Additionally, it’s getting harder and harder to find a job where you will not in some way be forced to affirm the DEI and LGBTQ+ cult thanks to the Corporate Equality Index. Recently, McDonald’s ran a social media ad with two homosexual men with the text “if that’s not love idk what is.”15 Also, Disney has included a transgender character in the movie Onward, geared toward children, and even Chick-fil-A now has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion executive.16

While many conservatives like to joke about how such companies go woke and go broke, this sort of thing will not go away until we can destroy the ESG cartels themselves through concerted action. Half-hearted boycotts won’t work.17 If we are not able to destroy the ESG cartels, conscientious Christians will ultimately be forced into isolated communities with largely separate, analogue economies.

The same applies to woke church leaders. As Michael O’Fallon has pointed out, we need to make a concerted effort to remove those leaders that have brought wokeness into the church.18 Otherwise, we will be left with institutions that are merely apostate imitations of churches. While some bear more guilt than others, those whose actions do not require removal should at least require a public renunciation of the woke ideology they enabled.

The Inevitable Reaction

All of this state-induced gender confusion and the constant barrage of rhetoric against young men has left men feeling despised and isolated. Recognizing this trend, many secular and Christian figures have developed online content especially geared towards young men.

Notably, Doug Wilson through his publishing platform, Canon Press, has promoted men like Michael Foster, author of It's Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity, and C.R. Wiley, author of Man of the House: A Handbook for Building a Shelter That Will Last in a World That Is Falling Apart. As a theonomic postmillennialist, Doug Wilson has inspired many young men through his experiments in Moscow, Idaho, and such video content as How to Save the World (In Eleven *Simple Steps).

Part of the reason such content resonates so well is that much of the older generation has largely given up on the next. Some appear to express a morbid delight in announcing that the world is just going to burn anyway, and they play into that same sort of reflexive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Meanwhile, guys like Michael Foster are promoting ideas like raising families away from the big cities, planting churches in rural areas, and being active in local government—good stuff.

Unfortunately, Wilson has also platformed Stephen Wolfe, who wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism, which promotes such dangerous ideas as the imposition of blasphemy laws and the promotion of kinism. That sort of rhetoric is reflexive in the opposite direction and ends up undermining our Constitution. Nevertheless, Wolfe has shown that he is very well aware of the moment we are in through his recent article for Chronicles Magazine: “The Rise and Fall of the Evangelical Elite.”

The very term “Christian Nationalism” has sparked enormous online debate as of late and was the subject of a G3 Ministries podcast (Episode 75). G3 is also hosting a pre-conference this year, which includes Grace Bible Theological Seminary’s pre-conference on The Gospel & the State.

The term “Christian Nationalism” sounds innocent enough until you realize its most vocal proponents like Joel Webbon, Stephen Wolfe, and others support public blasphemy laws, as is clear in The Statement on Christian Nationalism and the Gospel. Michael O’Fallon has repeatedly warned about this sort of reactionary movement that will ultimately only help further divide or “Balkanize” America.

Still, young men are tired of the defeatist rhetoric, and I, for one, do not believe that a premillenialist or amillennialist eschatology requires one to be defeatist as to the present. I am also not willing to give up on American Constitutionalism.

Final Thoughts

My primary purpose in beginning this newsletter is to help fellow Christians process our rapidly changing world and hopefully help them avoid some of the pitfalls in an age where much of the news and social media is designed to separate us into groups and keep us in perpetual fear.

At the same time, this newsletter is also aimed at anyone who is just trying to make sense of what’s going on. On that note, one particular pitfall I would urge Christians to avoid would be dismissing sources just because they are not Christian. For instance, while men like Jordan Peterson and James Lindsay are not our co-laborers in Christ, they are co-belligerents and fellow countrymen willing to oppose the Marxist woke and help prevent the destruction of Western Civilization.

I remain a Constitutionalist and firmly believe that Americanism remains the best system we can hope for. May God mercifully bless America. Long live the Republic!

Philip’s Substack

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