Before We Will be Enslaved
By J. Jeff Toler for Shenandoah Christian Alliance j.toler@sca4christ.org
Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? (Romans 6:16 NIV)
“Only by resisting the invasion of the spiritual kingdom by the temporal can digital despotism be condemned.” This is the subhead of “Waking Up from the West’s Regime Dreams” by James Poulos in “The American Mind—a publication of the Claremont Institute.” published online March 25, 2024. [https://americanmind.org/salvo/waking-up-from-the-wests-regime-dreams/]
For Poulos, the Executive Editor of “The American Mind,” this is the time for a very sober and sobering examination of what is happening; what is being perpetrated on us by powerful forces whose priests and acolytes may not even know what calamity they are about to usher in. “They know not what they do.” They don’t know because their focus is only on the temporal—believing as so many do that all they can see and hear is all that there is.
I had a conversation recently with a man who declared that God can’t be proven. For him, science presents no compelling evidence for His existence. Because he’s very affable and good natured—laughing and making others laugh, I like the man regardless. For him, science and technology are powerfully ontological. Yet, in the same breath he admits he’s not into much the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, who, it should be noted, spent their lives searching the physical realm to explain their understanding of humankind and the gods. If he sounds familiar to you, that’s because he could represent anyone you might know, or you know of, even those who are influencing the world you and I inhabit.
For them, the world is explained only by what we can observe and how we contend with those observations. Alarmingly, the psychopaths who have seized the reigns of power and control in it, the world is defined in terms of the digital realm. Theirs is digital despotism. The West—the Anglosphere—has raced headlong into the embrace of this phenomenon. Why? What is the reason for this we must ask?
Since time immemorial there have been slaves and masters. Down through the ages, slaves had no say in their status. For many today, they willingly enlist.
Some historical context is appropriate in understanding why the Americans differed from England in the matter of governance. At the time of America’s founding, England had endured well over a century of civil wars following the Reformation’s arrival there.
As Poulos (pictured) writes, “Harsh a verdict as it may be, we must be honest enough at this late date to admit that however great or good its achievements, the United Kingdom has simply not been able to preserve and sustain them, due to its deep-seated inability to securely ground its regime on a spiritually authoritative foundation. It does not take that much more courage to go on to consider that this original malady has spread wherever Anglos have spread too.”
This spiritual authoritative foundation is found only in the Bible. New England Puritans, followed soon by Virginia and Carolina Cavaliers, and Maryland Catholics, had no reason to defend their homeland’s chaos when they fled from there—instead choosing to build their new regimes on hard work and faithful adherence to the Bible as they saw fit, uniformly allied because of England’s collective hostility toward them. This would explain why we shouldn’t be at all surprised that the UK, Canada, and Australia have rushed headlong into the embrace of something that promotes and promulgates an authority that is not in the least spiritual, much less sanctified, because of its contempt for it. For them, the Woke Borg offer a solution to counter the spiritual by creating weapons of “unprecedented power.” Throughout history, England, and by extension European history, offered brilliant contributions to western civilization. But, they lacked the healthy cohesion of a biblical and classical liberalism in responding to the Reformation. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism]
Today, this unprecedented power is presented in many ways, including: mass media streaming services, private and personal history records, emerging social credit scoring, digital currency, and artificial intelligence (AI) just for starters. But the more insidious threat is from the invasion of temporal forces who promote the compulsory worship of false gods of progress and technology. Sadly, progressive Christianity or a deconstructed Christianity, are likewise relying on metaphysical narratives in replacing the meta narrative of the Bible. The last thing we need are local churches and denominations volitionally choose to be enslaved to an epistemology contradicting the biblical injunctions God plainly says are an abomination to Him.
For example, it was announced that the United Methodist Church (UMC) finally lifted a ban on homosexual clergy May 1. Even more heartbreaking is the stunningly lopsided 93% approval of the new ruling—682 to 51 at the church’s first general conference since 2019. The delegates at the conference, meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina, also voted to affirm same-sex weddings. [https://www.thetrumpet.com/29461-united-methodist-church-lifts-ban-on-homosexual-clergy]
If it seems a stretch to conflate the abandonment by the UMC of any real biblical authority, with the digital technology that pounds out the drum beat of an endless litany of new sacrileges, then re-read my experience with my atheist interlocutor. For him the church isn’t providing a reasonable response to why God matters because there is no evidence of Him in his mind, scientifically and rationally. That is to say, the evidence that’s paradigmatic to the transcendent truth of God and His revealed word isn’t really considered.
In choosing to use the term “slavery” as it relates to our world now undergoing digital transformation, we must understand this to mean not as binary code, but the increasing capacity to process data and the automation of data processing—with astonishing speed and proportions. While we can easily admit there is much the digital age has made in positive benefits and gains, it has also created new ontologies—the study of the nature of being—and cognitive deprivation. In other words we have surrendered our valuable God-given decision-making to raw ideology. Ironically, as digital technology users, we are, at the same time, being enslaved by it. [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-023-00675-y]
We can choose to be a slave to the truth that will set us free, or be the slave of another master who, ironically, is a slave himself.
- So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” they answered him, “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say, ‘You will become free’?” (John 8:31-34 ESV)
Photo by Giu Vicente on Unsplash
