Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris

Though much of the public will always remain in ignorance of the schemes being hatched around them, one of the silver linings of such tyrannies as we have seen recently in the scamdemic (2020-present) was that it woke a lot of formerly-sleeping people up to the lies and sorceries of the secular-scientific state, which have all been made possible by the secular age helping to further the conception of the State as a “god.” Around a quarter of the population (maybe more) have significant doubts about the official narratives of the rulers regarding Operation Covid 19.

The ruling elites are seemingly losing their ability to dupe everyone with their pseudo-scientific justifications for ruling over everyone. “Lockdowns are needed for public health, you have to trust the science!” — “All we need to do is print more money and that will help everyone” — “If only Congress can pass legislation on X, it will be solved.”

More people than ever before know that “the experts” of the State—the central bankers, the mainstream “economists,” the “public health” czars, and other crony scientists and statist intellectuals and academics—are nothing more than frauds used to justify the interventions and evils of the state regime, which is a secular religion more than it is some “science-based” statism. People aren’t just more aware of these schemes than they were in the 1990s, but are more aware of them than they were even a few years ago. They might still be a small minority, but there are more of us than seemingly ever before. Very few people in the prior century had any criticisms of American statism outside of the other political party which they didn’t like as much as their own. They still approved of the system in general and thought it served them. Much less people believe that today, including even a good handful of those born in the mid-twentieth century who required half-a-century to come to their senses.

The secular-statist age

The twentieth century was an almost wholly statist one, in practice and ideologically. It was an age where “the science” (i.e., the ideas of men) was substituted for a godly (or scriptural) understanding of political economy, resulting in the great technocracies we have witnessed from the communists’ attempts in the East at all-around central planning to the interventionist regimes in the West that have been socialistic in all but name. Thus we got the “scientific socialism” of Karl Marx or the supposedly scientific and empiricist economics of John Maynard Keynes, and these were used (instead of God) to “teach” men how society (supposedly) needs to be organized for peace, prosperity, equality, or some other goal. 

Naturally, this “atheist” age, where God’s way was completely done away with for the ideas of men, produced a hyper-statist age where the State became the new “god.” (Hence, communism, fascism, society-wide social engineering, the interventionist state, etc). It is thus no coincidence that the atheist age coincided with great statism in the twentieth century, which, not coincidentally, coincided with the greatest slaughter the world has ever seen. For a godless people are never truly “godless,” but only godless insofar as they don’t know the true God. Those without God are always going to always find a new (false) god, and this “god” will always be men and their interventionist systems that attempt to play God in all matters of social order, hence the drive of statists and other idolaters, whether willing to call themselves socialists or not, to become economic planners and general social engineers over society.

While we can see the point men try to make when they say “godless communists,” strictly speaking there is no such thing; communism—state power and a revolutionary use of it—is their “god.” Likewise, there is really no non-religious State, as secularists like to imagine who tell us that “we need to keep religion and state” separate; statism is a secular religion, and what they’re really telling us is that they want freedom to impose their religion of statism on everyone else. Thus there is really no such thing as “atheism.” The real question is who’s your God? As Michael Plaisted writes,

“The discrepancy is never between ‘God’ and ‘no god,’ it is only between ‘the one true God’ and the ‘pantheon of human institutions.’ Everyone is religious, by definition. You either practice public religion, by giving up your taxes so your neighbor can receive benefits, or you can practice pure and undefiled religion by volunteering your charity so your neighbor can receive benefits.” 

At any rate, the twentieth-century was one where men largely forgot about God, did not consult the Most High for their wisdom, and naturally substituted statism and the man-made philosophies for God, which meant that political violence—police force, war, prisons, concentration camps—would be substituted for a society based on God, neighbors, community, and voluntary human interaction.

The end of the secular age?

But even before the last century—one that was animated by secular thinking, socialist ideology, and the all-around statization of society—came to an end, the (secular) free market economist Murray Rothbard pronounced secularism dead. In an article titled “The End of the Secular Century,” Rothbard predicted that the secular-humanist philosophy, and the totalitarian statism that had accompanied this age, was at an end. This rather unprecedented statism that we saw in the twentieth century—from the Progressive Era at the turn of the century, the New Deal interventions during the Great Depression, the continued rise of statism in America after the Second World War, or more recently the Covid State—was largely a result of a substitution of the ideas of men for the word of God. When men consult men and “the world” for their ideas, and leave God out of the picture, they are most likely to find that a new “god,” the government, is the “savior” that has all the answers to running a society and solving its problems. Without God and His word, men are prone to buying into the ideas hatched by men, like a Marx or a Keynes, who tells them that state intervention is the only “solution” to their problems, and (of course) that something other than statism in the first place—for both of them it is various alleged inabilities of a market economy to self-regulate—is the cause of them.

But as Rothbard pointed out, these ways of thinking—rationalizing political action based on the theories and visions of men like Keynes or Marx instead of seeing if they could be justified by God—has not been something that has any real tradition, and thus staying-power, behind it (though, of course, there is nothing new under the sun and some variant of these ideas has always been among men). This secular age of the twentieth century, rather, was a temporary deviation from the religious principles and ideas that normally guide men.

“We have to realize that the secularist age, even though seemingly inevitable and eternal at the time, was only a brief glitch in the history of mankind. Secularism was born in the Age of Enlightenment, in the eighteenth century; it was given great impetus by Darwin in the late nineteenth century, and it came into its own and dominated Western culture from the 1920s through the 1960s.”

As evil as this highly political age has been and still continues to be, we shouldn’t expect it to last if the humanistic philosophy behind it cannot. For as Rothbard said, “in every civilization, religion has always been the dominant force in people’s values, goals, and very lives.” Well, we might call all these things—statism, humanism, atheism, paganism, etc—“religions” too, as I have suggested. But if by religion Rothbard means Christianity, then these false religions may once again be confronted. The “trust the science” people of today who wore masks and took vaccines as soon as the “health experts” told them to, or the men who assumed that there was wisdom and logic in socialism because Karl Marx wrote convoluted volumes defending it, are once again being challenged by men like ourselves who are falling on the word of God to combat these great evils, and are no longer ashamed to do it. 

Indeed, we are more than comfortable to assert, with the prophets, that the “new world order” of men is a false, and therefore necessarily doomed, social order, and that this evil effort at global totalitarianism will not ultimately prevail against the free society that God has promised us. As the prophet Micah foresaw, 

“In the last days the mountain of the house of the LORD will be established as the chief of the mountains; it will be raised above the hills, and the peoples will stream to it. And many nations will come and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways, so that we may walk in His paths.’ For the law will go forth from Zion and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. Then He will judge between many peoples and arbitrate for strong nations far and wide. Then they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will no longer take up the sword against nation, nor will they train anymore for war. And each man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, with no one to frighten him. For the mouth of the LORD of Hosts has spoken. Though each of the peoples may walk in the name of his god, yet we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever” (Micah 4:1-5).

Rothbard seems to have seen that this humanistic secular religion—the idea that society should be planned by state rulers according to “the science” and the ideas of men—couldn’t last as a support-beam on which tyrants could stand and tell everyone how to live their lives forever, if albeit they managed to shake everyone out of their faith for some time. 

“In the twentieth century, it was possible for secularist intellectuals to ignore this overriding fact [that men have always been theologically influenced], and to claim that modern science had put an end to these ‘superstitions’ of the past. But now, since the 1970s, secularism is rapidly going down the tubes, in the United States and throughout the world. Religion is back, and with a vengeance…No longer is it possible to ignore the importance of religion in human life and culture.”

Since the secular age is more so a deviation from a time where religious influence was stronger in men, we shouldn’t expect the secular-scientific age, nor the hyper-statism that accompanies it, to continue to have intellectual force behind it, for it is not standing on the solid rock of God and His word. More men than ever are coming to know liberty from statism and God’s hand in it all, and they are using the scriptures, rather than mere secular sources, to combat these wicked regimes. 

We are no longer uncomfortable or ashamed, as the secular twentieth century had made most men, in relying on the word of God to combat these evils. We are no longer dissuaded by the secularists’ idea, which has more or less permeated the culture for now, that “science” has “debunked” religion and that anyone who cites God and the scriptures as their source of socio-economic knowledge is “anti-science,” relying on “mythology,” or something to that effect. Men are coming to see the truth in the word of God. Praise God! 

While many secular libertarians still believe that they need to try and convert atheist statists to libertarianism, when they are not coincidentally statists but are understandably following their new god, the real prospect ahead of us is that more Christians than ever are coming around to the ideas of liberty and understanding that the Kingdom of God is the opposite of the statist tyrannies that we have always seen. Seemingly knowing the compatibility of secularism and statism (as evidenced in the twenty-first century), this need to preach liberty rather than atheism to Christians is more or less what Rothbard saw and proposed. 

“The long-term strategic lesson for secularist libertarians of the resurrection of religion in the modern world should be crystal clear. The prospects for the eventual victory of liberty, in the United States and in the rest of the world, are excellent; the prospects for the triumph of atheism are nil. Secularist libertarians should stop trying to convert the religious to the dubious glories of atheism, and should start trying to convert them to the cause of liberty.”

But is Rothbard’s speculation right? It doesn’t seem to have been in the first quarter of the twenty-first century of which he was speaking. Indeed the regime of secularists has advanced more than it was during Rothbard’s lifetime, justifying its numerous interventions—from the “war on terror” and domestic surveillance state following September 11th, 2001 to the hundreds of billions printed after the “Great Recession” in 2008 to the rather unprecedented lock-down and mass-vaccination of society in the “Covid” age—under the guise of science and the advice of “the experts.” Rothbard didn’t live to see these things, but would not have been surprised by them, and would not have expected the statist course to be thrown-off anytime soon. Surely he expected its continued expansion for some time.

But things are still at a tipping-point, and we still have time to show men the ways of the Lord and call them to obedience and captivity to Christ. Men are still getting more fed up every day with the lies that “the experts” are feeding them on. And the statists are struggling to maintain their narratives, even if they still have millions of fools who buy into them.

Secular libertarianism, however, is a dead-end philosophy. We can’t hope to turn atheists, and even millions of professing Christians, away from their State-god, or to really hope to advance the cause of liberty at all, without the help of God and His word. The real future is Christian anarchism, where the Lord is our God, and men increasingly waking up both to God, liberty, and the need to walk out of Egypt. The secularization of our world in recent centuries has only led men further down the road to serfdom by solidifying the State into a god. But it has been man’s sin for millennia to regard these men as gods. As the Lord said through a prophet, our world has always been filled with “evil people, which refuse to hear my words, which walk in the imagination of their heart, and walk after other gods, to serve them, and to worship them” (Jeremiah 13:10).

Are men getting closer to ending their worship for the false god State? Are men realizing the lies of the worldly ideology of statism? Are men seeing how much they need God yet? It remains to be seen. We will look to the Lord regardless.