[This is part 5 in a series “On Statism and Adultery.” See part one, two, three, four, six, seven]

Leaving Egypt Ministries, Obadiah D. Morris 

For the most part we have only spoken of the whoredom of statism from the perspective of the average person who lusts after systems of political power. These are the common statists who advocate political power as a philosophy or ideology and work to empower the kingdoms of men through their adulterous ideas. But I also use the term statist to refer to the people who practice political power, ie., the men who actually rule over other men. These men are also adulterers who perpetuate the idolatrous ideology of human government in order to secure their rule. They teach people how to be good statists so that adulterers will be bred across the population who can apologize for their rule over men who they need to lust after them. 

The harlotry of state rulers

Whereas those who lust after state power might be called whores, harlots, and prostitutes, in a closely related sense the scriptures also refer to these things as practices of the State itself, used to seduce the statist whores among the non-ruling public into supporting them. 

“Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without prey. The crack of the whip, the rumble of the wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot! Charging horseman, flashing sword, shining spear; heaps of slain, mounds of corpses, dead bodies without end — they stumble over their dead! because of the many harlotries of the harlot, the seductive mistress of sorcery, who betrays nations by her prostitution and clans by her witchcraft” (Nahum 3:1-4). 

Statist propaganda, ie., the worldly political philosophy that endorses an alleged necessity of human rulers, is spun by the people in power to trick men into apologizing for the existence of these political plunder systems. Statism is essentially witchcraft, used to brainwash men into falling for these lies that human civil government is “necessary” and “inevitable” to social order. Whereas average men lust after the Assyrians of the world to rule over them under the delusion that pledging allegiance to States is our best means of finding protection from the Babylonians (in our day the “Chinese” or the “Russians”), the Assyrains of the world, in turn, engage in a type of harlotry that is teaching people how to lust for them. The ideology of statism, which is spread by the statist intellectuals who are always allied with political regimes throughout history, is a sort of sorcery by which men become fooled by the ways of the world into supporting human rulers rather than God as their King. 

Although there is already a propensity within a man to idolize human domination systems that doesn’t necessarily require propaganda for him to advocate for these systems (men don’t need to read Marx to become socialists), we might still view propaganda as being a great aid in getting men to buy into these worldly ideas and chasing after many schemes rather than remaining upright and godly. The mere existence of a State, as the political status quo in society, leads men to defend its existence as apparently rooted in tradition, history, and truth. The propaganda and imagery of States—the flags and fighter jets and uniforms and officers—are able to aid in turning men into idolaters who praise human rulers and apologize for their existence. Between the flags, national anthems, soldiers rappelling from helicopters during sporting events, television commercials of marines crawling through the mud, the civics lessons in government schools, etc., the State makes itself appear as the greatest thing in the world that all men should trust in for their security, all while the reality is that this is the very cause of their demise into being an unsafe and impoverished society. All throughout history, States have saw to it that men should be turned into good little statists who intellectually and emotionally defend the evil system of human government, so that the state rulers need not even use the police club to beat everyone into line, but will be able to easily dominate a bunch of proud statists who shout “back the blue” as they are living in a police state. As one commentary says of the Assyrian regime and its ability to seduce others into its ambit,

“Rightly is Nineveh called the well favoured harlot; for her splendour and magnificence were unsurpassed, dazzling all beholders and hiding the rottenness that lay below the surface. The mistress of witchcrafts. She was skillful in employing every art to seduce nations to her side, [in] secret practices which she employed to gain her ends and to make her rule attractive, [all while] depriving them of freedom and making them tributary, or, in some cases, actually selling the inhabitants as slaves” (Pulpit Commentary, Nahum 3:4).

While the idolatrous and sinful ideology of statism is at the root of setting up systems of human government, once in place these systems themselves help perpetuate the cycle through propaganda that trains people to prostitute themselves out to the kingdoms of men. They have every incentive to do so, being that if men abandoned their adultery for human rulers and stopped cheating on God with men, it would no longer be possible to maintain systems of human domination, which rely on good, well-trained statist whores (like Americans) to commit this sin of apologizing for these political systems — all the better if you can get them to proudly and patriotically proclaim that they are “the greatest system of government the world has ever known.” This is especially true when figures as powerful as “presidents” come along and lead men into following them and adopting their ways. While it is always a sinful statist philosophy that works to set men into power, these men themselves can work to further train it in men and lead a cult around themselves and their image. For a Biblical example, we see how king Jeroboam “caused the inhabitants of Jerusalem to play the harlot [and] lead Judah astray” (2 Chronicles 21:11). In a real world example, we have seen how the cult of Donald Trump has worked to keep people who could potentially turn back to God if they had to endure another “Democratic” presidency to maintain their faith that government works for them and that the only problem with these systems is the wrong men in charge. These false gods work to rope people back in the system who may have been close to giving up on it and repenting for their statism altogether. They keep men believing they have a dog in the fight and that we are just in need of new political saviors. They seduce men back into statist adultery and keep them away from allegiance to God alone. They help otherwise average statists to double-down on their statism and buy their Trump flags, don their Trump gear on their backs and heads, and rush down to their local polling station with a sense of urgency to make a vow to serve these false gods. This is what harlotry is all about: men falling into idolatry, particularly of the statist sort. Whereas God frees His people from Egyptian bondage, they always go back to whoring themselves out to state rulers in the belief that salvation rests within men and their systems. They refuse to serve God alone and chase after their false gods.

“For long ago you broke your yoke and tore off your chains, saying, ‘I will not serve!’ Indeed, on every high hill and under every green tree you lay down as a prostitute” (Jeremiah 2:20).

When statists today seek salvation from government, whether the domestic state that is perceived to be “theirs” or a foreign state that is seen as an ally against other foreign states, they are just like Israel and Judah in the Bible, who were harlots and adulteresses who sought after Egypts and Assyrias rather than to rely on God to protect them. They believe that “national security” and “public safety” is only found in tax-funded soldiers and police officers, rather than trusting in God alone. One reason men come to trust in the gods of the State is that these ruler-gods, after having taken over a population, are able to make people believe that they exist for the “public good.” Like today, men believe that police exist for “public safety,” that government “health” departments are for “public health,” or that agencies that tax and redistribute property are here for “public welfare.” This is why Jesus had to teach His people that we are not to be like the authoritarian rulers who call themselves “benefactors” (Luke 22:25). The role of state propagandists is to convince everyone that they couldn’t do without human government — or really, that they couldn’t do if they only trusted in God to protect them. They must be made to believe that they would be invaded or starve to death without militaries and political agencies. This is why all statists immediately fear innumerable bad things that will allegedly happen without tax agents and their systems ruling over them. They have been trained to believe that human kings protect them and that a stateless society where God alone rules over His people is “lawlessness,” “chaos,” “disorder,” and “anarchy.” The lack of faith in Liberty is a lack of faith in God. Those who fear all the supposedly bad things that would happen without human rulers simply don’t trust in God to protect and provide for those who trust in Him. The statist propagandists of the world make men fear liberty as a means of turning them away from God’s rulership and into the hands of men, for liberty is God’s. They teach men how to fear men rather than how to fear the Lord, because a God-fearing people do not set up human governments, knowing the evils that come with them, and cannot be allowed in a political plunder society that depends on man-fearers. Statists need to get others trained in their worldly ideology so that men do not have the gospel-ideology of God’s Kingdom. Statism is the essence of ungodliness and faithlessness, and all those who want to rule over men must assure that people buy into these political ideas rather than discover anarcho-theocracy as the only legitimate path to freedom.

State rulers, then, are just as much adulterers as the lay statists of the public are, though more often than not, they are promulgators of the adulterous philosophy of statism rather than merely foolish adherents who don’t know what they’re doing. They are evil men who know full-well that they are spreading their wicked ideology in order to ensnare men into bondage, as opposed to the mostly-stupid people from the public who unwittingly buy into it.

Although sin precedes the existence of human government, as the very thing that sets it up, all human rulers have it in their interest to work to train this sin in men and keeping them praising human government rather than to repent and seek God’s Kingdom. Sin comes before the State, but all States, which are nothing without it, work to perpetuate sin in society. Although all governments, save the Kingdom of God, are erected in sin, all of these systems of human government have an incentive to lead men further into sin by working to spread statist propaganda in society, getting them to pledge allegiance to their flags, sing their national anthems, turn men into “America” loving patriots, dangle benefits in front of their face that are paid through robbing their neighbor’s, and in general working to further the very sinful statist ideology that was present before these systems were even erected.

Not surprisingly then, the kings of Israel in the Old Testament, who were clearly set up in rebellion to God (1 Samuel 8), took men further down the same road that they had already gone down to set them up. As David Lipscomb (1831-1917) mentioned in his book, On Civil Government,

“Their kings, despite an occasional good one, led them further from God, deeper and deeper into sin and rebellion; led them into idolatry, involved them continually in war and strife, brought them into frequent alliances with the rebellious and idolatrous nations of the earth that supported human government, all of which brought upon them the destruction of their country, the consuming of their substance, the destruction of their cities, the slaughter of their armies, and the captivity and enslavement of their people” (Lipscomb, On Civil Government, p. 23).

Systems of human government, which are always born in rebellion against God, depend upon sinners for their existence. This sin precedes their existence, but it is no less understandable why these rulers of the world work to refine it in men once they have been put into power through the idolatry of the people: so that their adulterous and promiscuous hearts will keep them cheating on God with human government, rather than repenting, turning back from the curse of human rule that has come upon them, and seeking God’s Kingdom alone.