The Darkness of Our Culture and the Light of Christ

USA cultural darkness

We are in a dark place as a country.  This is directly a result of the extreme shift to the left by the Democrat Party.  Prior to 2020, President Barack Obama was our most far left President.  But even Obama was still on the cusp between being an extreme liberal and being a communist.  In a recent book, John Drew wrote about his occasional meetings with Obama in the early 1980’s and that Drew – a leftist at that time – had persuaded Obama to accept a more moderate position than that of hardcore Marxists. In another article in the same book, Trevor Loudoun reveals that Obamacare was a dilution of the healthcare plans desired by the Marxists in that it did not replace all private healthcare with a national, government-run healthcare system.  However, in July 2020, the camp pushing Joe Biden towards the Presidency and the camp promoting the communist Bernie Sanders’ candidacy reached a landmark agreement – a 110 page pact regarding goals for the government.  In so doing, Joe Biden broke the policy of the Democrats going back to 1948 of not embracing the far left, communist element of the Democrat Party.

The language of the Biden-Sanders pact is dry and opaque, and most citizens would not have the patience to plow through it.  Convoluted and turgid prose is, to this writer, a clear sign of an attempt to obscure the purposes and direction that the writers intend to take. In this case, it is clear that the intent of the Democrats is to implement communistic revisionism into government policies, to overthrow the values that inhere and undergird our legal system, to overthrow the principle of private property either through nationalization or through infiltration of and control of the private sector.  

In 1948, Henry Wallace, a former Secy. of Agriculture, former Vice President, and former Secy. of Commerce ran for President as the candidate of the Progressive Party.  He identified himself with defending the Soviet Union from the attacks and hostility of the Truman administration (Truman had become President when President Roosevelt died after being re-elected in 1944).  Thus, despite his impressive resume, there was an invisible but real line between the “progressive” or left-leaning Democrats and the hard left or pro-communist elements.  When the pact between Biden and Sanders was signed, that invisible line was erased.  A couple of months later, the Democrat 90-page Platform was published and most of the positions found in the Biden-Sanders pact were contained therein.  

The new system is wholly based on atheism and its replacement of Judeo-Christian morality with what the philosopher Friedreich Nietzsche called a “transvaluation of values” where that which has for centuries been deemed good based on Judeo-Christian values is now replaced by DEI, ESG, and identity re-definitions regarding men, women, children, right, wrong, work, and life.  Marx’s economic dialectic is now conjoined with cultural Marxist themes that assume a country with soulless identities.  Those identities are no longer fit to control and manage the government through representative government but are to be managed by that government for the good of all.  This follows the philosophical principles first enunciated by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Further, in order to fully grasp the extent of our “dark place,” we also need to be alert to the significance of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030.  This document with 91 sections is the vision of the new world government which the UN hopes to fully establish by 2030. Before considering this document, have you the reader wondered where the UN is while all the conflict is going on in the world?  The UN with its traditional peace-keeping functions and powers seems nowhere to be found in stories about the fighting in Ukraine, in bringing peace in the Middle East, in Yemen, in Syria, or in Gaza for that matter.  UN troops were fighting in Korea and the UN has had troops in other war torn areas. Yet, Agenda 2030, the UN’s vision for world governance has no discussion of police or military power.  Further, unlike the original United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1946, there is no discussion of “rights.”  The word “rights” only appears once in Section 19 of this latest major document, although in 1946 rights appeared in every other sentence.  In this latest “vision,” the key terms that keep re-appearing are “needs” and “sustainability.”  

The emphasis on needs is lifted directly from the Marxist playbook which stresses “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”  Sustainability is a more modern economic goal intended to call our attention to the fact that we all – whether or not we live in a developed country, a less developed country (LDC), or a less developed developing country (LDDC) – need planet Earth.  We all need the air, the sunlight, the rain, the oceans, the oxygen, and yes, some CO2.  We all need our energy resources, and presumably by speaking about needs and the sustainability of the world as a whole, we are thereby going to take our minds off ourselves and our present advantages over others who have the same basic needs as we. 

Under Agenda 2030, it is assumed that need and sustainability will be properly handled – i.e., unselfishly – by a world government.  That government will be the United Nations which, as we know, is filled with hundreds of unselfish individuals (ha-ha). Nevertheless, in our present world crises, the UN seems strangely not to be in play.  At the same time, for the one world government types, driving electric cars is going to help us find

common cause with – to identify with — people who need to walk two miles through the jungle to find clean water to bring back to their villages in pots carried on their heads.  Through a leap of faith, we are asked to believe that doing without gasoline is caring about those distant people in straitened circumstances.  Thus, by buying into the sustainability narrative, one can have a Mother Theresa self-sacrificing and relieved conscience without having to leave one’s own home to personally help the underserved of this world.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the only hope in this darkness.  These sinful directions taken by our culture must be met with bold faith.  We must speak up for Christ and the Biblical truths in which we believe. We must not fear ostracism in our neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces.  A born-again Christian teacher of social studies in New York City was sitting in his department’s office when a young lady teacher began dancing in front of him in plain sight of other teachers, chanting “I don’t have a soul, I don’t have a soul….” in an effort to mock his faith.  On another occasion, another male teacher called out to him from across the office, “Hey, I wanted to ask you, is God a he or a she?.” This was yet another incident of ridicule.  Let us count as all joy incidents such as these. 

Yet, if we are born-again Christians who have been saved by the blood of the risen Lamb of God are not willing to stand for what we believe by stating our opposition to some of the existing social and political attitudes and policies, then are we really fulfilling our duty to the Lord?  We can express our views clearly and firmly without resorting to a spirit of defiance or hostility.  The path to our present darkness did not start with Obama or Biden though they have taken some unwise and irrevocable steps to sabotage the nation, nor even with the bogus Supreme Court doctrine of “separation of church and state” which led to the abolition of prayer and Bible reading in our public schools.  We must never forget that we stand with the One who said, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,…which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.” (Revelation 1:8)

Jeffrey Ludwig

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About the Author

Jeffrey Ludwig
Jeffrey Ludwig is a semi-retired Pastor of Bible Christian Church who serves as a guest preacher in local churches and teaches philosophy part-time at a university. He is the author of four  books available on amazon.com and has published over 275 articles online. He has been married for 28 years and he and his wife are proud parents of a grown daughter. Email: philprof2@gmail.com