Tag Archives: American Theocracy

The American Theocracy: Modernity’s Failed Quest

‘Holy War! The Rise & Fall of the American Theocracy, 2039-2079’ (Part 6)

By Nathaniel Lane Stewart, M. A.

The Unique Phenomenon of the American Theocratic Republic (Part 5)

(Note: This post marks Part 6 of the introductory essay of an historical narrative, supposedly published in A. D. 2195, almost 200 years from now, on the history of the American Theocracy.  This post will continue the presentation of the second of the three ‘necessary presuppositions’ which Professor Stewart maintains are essential to understand both the rise and fall of the American Theocratic Republic.  God willing, this essay should be completed in three more posts: the next one will complete the examination of the second presupposition, the following post will examine the third presupposition and the last one offer a few a closing remarks.  The posts to follow those coming three parts on the ‘history’ of the American theocracy will provide an outline of the book and of key dates and events in the history of 21st century America. SMC)

The three distinct ages (or phases, if you will) of Modernity express well how Modernity was shaped by Christianity even as it rejected its basic principles:

1. The Age of Early Modernity (1650-1800)

2. The Age of High Modernity (German Higher Critical Thought) (1800-1900)

3. The Age of Late Modernity (or the Age of Dialectic Materialism, or the age of Secular Modernity) (1900-1950)

It is beyond the scope of this essay to expound the definition and influence of each age upon the course of human history (14).  However, such a effort on our part is not necessary for our point.  However, we cite these ages to offer to two sweeping observations regarding the ideological roots that contributed to the rise of the Theocratic government in the twenty-first century:

One, contrary to the claims of its apologists that it was proactive in its declarations,  Modernity was in reality a reactive movement towards the Christian Faith.  The rise of Modernity is directly linked to the century of religious warfare in Europe that was a result of the Protestant Schism in the 1500’s.  By 1650, it was clear that Protestantism and Catholicism must exist side by side as competing manifestations of the Christian Faith.  Thus, the rise of Modernity might best be expressed as intellectual men seeking a middle way for mankind to still experience the spiritual unity of the human race, but WITHOUT institutional religion or an organized church defining that unity of experience and perspective.  And these three ages express Modernity’s efforts to reunite Man after a century of religious warfare.

This note leads us to our second observation: The course and failure of Modernity to unite mankind WITHOUT institutional Religion.  And let us note the defining principles that illustrate the course and failure of Modernity in this quest:

 1. Early Modernity (1650-1800): Unlike its successors, Early Modernity was not a purely secular movement, but desired to find a non-sectarian, though a truly religious and a truly universal creed for all men, based upon either human reason or human observation.  Early Modernity was best expressed in movements such as Deism, Empiricism, Cartesian rationalism and Scottish Common Sense Realism.  The quest of these movements was effectively killed by the skepticism of the Scotsman, David Hume in the mid-eighteenth century.  The task would fall to the German scholar, Immanuel Kant, to restore Western man’s quest for a new religion that unified mankind in both a spiritual and institutional manner.  That new quest was opened up with Kant’s ‘Fourth Category’ regarding Man’s knowledge in which he separated faith from reason entirely, excluding all matters of faith, religion and the church to realm of the mystical and therefore freeing all rational pursuits from a religious viewpoint.  This premise opened the door to many radical intellectual developments over the nineteenth century and leads us to the age of High Modernity, often referred to the Age of German Modernity (1800-1900)

 2. German Modernity (1800-1900): Religion was not reasonable, and therefore, all intellectual exercise must be pursued without the influence of religion.  It was the German Modern who claimed that Religion and Reason, or Faith and Knowledge, were two distinct spheres which were separated by an impassable gulf, but man existed simultaneously in both.  Ergo, he must learn to segment his life into two distinct spheres-the mystical realm of religion, and the intellectual realm of reality (which religion could not to affect.)  This position effectively created what the Humanist of the sixteenth and seventeenth century was not able to create-a world where a global religion was not tied to faith or the supernatural realm, but to pure reason and human experience.  The Creed of the High Modern, the German Modern, was science, and progress, being centered entirely upon Man separated from both God and the church.  And by the end of the nineteenth century, the great apologists of Modernity were prophesying that finally in the twentieth century, this great quest a truly Humanist religion and creed, divorced of God and the church would finally and inevitably arrive in the world, creating the utopia that mankind had yearned after for centuries.

We now come to the third era of Modernity:

3. The Age of Late Modernity or dialectic Modernity (1900-1950)

This age was the shortest of the eras seeing as it offered the greatest claims of all three ages, and was viewed in its day as the fruit or climax of all that mankind had been pursuing for the last several centuries.  At the beginning of the twentieth century, the promises of the Dialectic Revolutions of Communism and Socialism, the progress of science and technology, and the great power amassed by the empires of the Europe seemed to indicate the Modern must now finally succeed in his quest.  But by A. D. 1950, the Modern world had created two massive global wars that felled ancient monarchies, overthrow centuries-old social orders, and created the birth of the most terrible form of warfare known to man-the age of the atomic bomb, which then ushered in the great ‘Cold War’ of the latter twentieth century.  And even as these catastrophes exploded around the globe, the dialectic revolutions declared as inevitable facts of science and history failed to materialize.  Thus, by the late twentieth century, Modernity’s hopes were crushed and it dreams, claims and hopes were waning quickly.  It was in this world that the Post-Modern Critic attacked the folly of Modernism.  And then, at the dawn of the third millennium, the rise of religious warfare killed what was left of the old Modern ideal.   The first forty years of the twenty-first century witnessed the Death of the Modern, the rise of the Post-Modern Critic, the explosion of Religious warfare on a global level and the spread of localism and tribalism-all of which created the convergence of ideas which led to the forces that gave birth to the ideal of the American Theocracy of the 2060’s and 2070’s.

And what did that convergence look like in the history of the world?

 To be continued. . . 

(14). For a useful survey of the ages of Modernity, see Religion Without Deity: The Progression of the Modern, 1650-1950, by E. Willard Mencken, Published in A. D. 2041, by the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Link

Holy War! The Rise and Fall of the American Theocracy: 2039-2079 (Part 4)

By Nathaniel Lane Stewart, M. A.

The Unique Phenomenon of the American Theocratic Republic  (Part 4)

(Note: This post marks Part 4 in a series on the history of the American Theocracy, a work supposedly published in A. D. 2195, when much of the world was governed by the Covenant of Religious Detente, a series of accords proposed by Pope John Paul III in A. D. 2121 and agreed to by leaders of Christendom, Islam and Judaism ten years later.  The author of this book, Professor Nathaniel Stewart, taught at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia during the middle of the twenty-second century, one of the few universities still left in the North American continent which was devastated by war from the 2040’s to the 2070’s.  This section continues his second observation regarding the historical significance of the American Theocracy-the unique historical and philosophical world which contributed its existence.  For the previous section of this part, see the link below.  Parts 1 and 2 can also be read on this blog.) 

The American Theocracy: Historical Context

Thus, what was this unusual convergence of ideas that occurred in the early decades of the twenty-first century (which was the result of the philosophical revolutions of both Modernity and Post-modernity) and would lay the ground work for the institution of the American Theocratic Republic in 2065?

The answer to that question can be readily found by discerning the pan-centennial flow of western philosophy from the rise and spread of Modernity, its slow morphing into Post-modernity, and the eventual collapse of Western philosophy as a whole by the 2040’s.  It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a complete survey of these systems of thought and their impact upon the history of the world (10).  However, such an examination is not required in order to answer our query.  A simple understanding of each proposition as it moved from age to age will provide us with a more than sufficient answer to this question.  But first, let us outline the eras of the history of Philosophy as well as that of religion before explaining each position:

1. The Protestant ‘hiccup’ of the Christian Church (1517-1650)

2. The Age of Modernity (1650-1950)

3. The Era of Post-Modernity (1950-2040)

4. The Great Collapse (2040-2065)

5. The American Theocratic Republic (2065-2079)

One of the most important observations that needs to be noted is that the Age of Modernity, the Era of Post-modernity, the Great Collapse and the American Theocratic Republic can all find their origins in what historians now refer to as the ‘Protestant hiccup’ of the Christian church.  Again, it is beyond our purpose to examine these inter-historical connections (11), but we note this fact for one reason: While most of the Theocratic apologists were rather anti-Protestant in the traditional and historic sense, they were hardly loyal churchmen as was demonstrated by President L. Carter McPherson’s purge of the ‘Old Order Catholics’ in 2069 from the party apparatus (12).  So in one sense, the American Theocracy was the final gasp of a degenerate and dying semi-Protestantism. But on this point, we digress.  The two key questions we must ask are 1. How did the Protestant version of Christendom give birth the Age of Modernity, and given this fact, 2. Why was the Age of Modernity so long (1650-1950)?

The answer to the first question is actually discovered in the answer to the second question, so we shall answer the latter one first.

The Age of Modernity roughly spans the years A. D. 1650-1950.  It’s length must be credited to the fact that in 5,300 years of philosophical and religious speculation (including all Pre-Christian thought), Modernity was the oddest and perhaps most irrational school of thought ever (13).  The reason is thus:

While the Modern rejected the spiritual principle, definitions, propositions and general principles of Christendom (both Protestant and Catholic forms), its school of thought maintained in outward form the basic principles of knowledge, structure, order, rational thought, applications and ethics of Christendom, and particularly that of Protestant Christendom.  So that while many Moderns were anti-Christian in thought, they were nonetheless, quite Christian in knowledge, forms, traditions, and practices.  And herein is the greatest irrationality of the Modern.  In form, he was Christian while in spirit he was not.  It was this paradox that gave Modernity its length as well as laying seeds that would ultimately produce a cancer that will kill it entirely.

The three distinct phases of Modernity express well how Modernity was shaped by Christianity even as it rejected its basic principles:

Early Modernity (1650-1800)

High Modernity (German Higher Critical Thought; also known as the German Era of Modernity) (1800-1900)

Late Modernity (or Dialectic Materialism, or Secular Modernity) (1900-1950)

To Be Continued. . .

 

(10) Professor M. C. J. Hopkins, IV, Ph. D., D. D., held the Chair of Historical Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, England, and wrote a very fine work outlining the course of the Modern and Post-modern Philosophies.  His work, while highly devoted to the worship of the Holy Catholic Church, is nonetheless a true work of scholarship and provides a helpful survey in this topic.  It is entitled: The Historical, Existential, and Catastrophic Consequences of Collective Unbelief: An Historical Survey and Interpretative Examination of the causes and course of Protestant Sectarian and Rational Absurdities upon the history of the Catholic Church, 1500-2131.    (And this is the abbreviated title. Sadly, Professor Hopkins was never known for his brevity.)

(11) Besides Professor Hopkins’ work, see the essay, An Examination of the Parallel and Contrasting Strains with Modern and Orthodox Protestantism, 1850-2070, by Charles L. Fields, M. A., Professor of History and Philosophy, New York Ecclesiastic University, A. D. 2161.

(12) See Volume II, Part 2, Chapter 15, of this work for the historical background of the ‘purge.’  While many scholars of the church in our time claim the purge by President McPherson was purely religious in nature, the facts appear to indicate his actions were a combination of both religious ideology and political convenience.  After the National Referendum for McPherson as Supreme President of the Theocratic Republic in A. D. 2068, many Old Catholics aligned themselves with the last remnants of the Neo-Libertarians (who had subsumed all other opposition groups, including the American Gay Party) and both groups were still hoping to overthrow the Theocratic government some time between A. D. 2069 and 2070.  Recent documents have provided evidence that the Old Order Catholics had exchanged secret letters with officials at the Vatican who had promised the support of papacy in the overthrow of the American Theocratic regime.  However, these same documents show that while some church leaders favored intervention in the American political crisis, the majority did not, primarily due to the fact that much of Europe was still under Russian domination and the papacy was trying to balance both cooperation with the Russian Imperial Federation and the underground movements fighting against this occupation.  Thus, support from the Papacy for an overthrow of the American theocracy was never forthcoming, and many Old Order Catholics were either killed or imprisoned in camps during the second Neo-Nullification crisis in A. D. 2071.  Those who survived were liberated by the armies of the Eastern Alliance in A. D.  2077-2079.

(13) See Professor Stewart’s work, The Death of the State: How the German Epistemological Matrix Destroyed the Protestant Commonwealth, Chapter 5 for a concise explanation of the irrationality of Modernity.

The American Theocracy: Historical Context

Holy War! The Rise and Fall of the American Theocracy: 2039-2079 (Part 3)

By Nathaniel Lane Stewart, M. A.

The Unique Phenomenon of the American Theocratic Republic (Part 3)

(Note: This post marks Part 3 of a series on the history of the American Theocracy, a work supposedly published in A. D. 2195 narrating the establishment and reign of the American Theocratic Republic in the 2060’s and 2070’s.  Parts 1 and 2 can be found on this blog, and at least 4 more parts remain to come, God willing, including an outline of the book.)

The Unique World that created to the American Theocratic Republic

Part of the challenge in narrating the rise and fall of the American Theocracy is the necessity of understanding the unusual convergence of ideas that occurred in the early decades of the twenty-first century which gave birth to the American theocratic movement in the 2040’s. As noted previously, one of the common misunderstandings of the Theocratic movement is that while it was a twenty-first century phenomenon which tried to combat what it perceived as twenty-first century threats, its leaders did so with a very distinct twentieth century perspective. In fact, one of the great ironies of the movement is that while the Theocratic apologists possessed a highly refined sense of historical consciousness, their sense of history was rooted more in fiction than fact and myth than heritage (5). We will explore this strange paradox of their thought in greater detail below in our third observation regarding the character of the movement itself, but it is important to note its odd historical perspective as we seek to understand the world in which Theocratic movement came into existence.

What then was this convergence of ideas in the early part of the twenty-first century that gave birth to the American Theocratic movement? (6)

The simplest answer to that question is to note what caused this convergence, and that was two philosophical revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Those two revolutions could be characterized in this manner:

Mankind dethroned the one central authoritative principle that God ordained to govern all knowledge and all realms of life.

What is that one central principle?  Religion as mediated through the Catholic Christian Church is the only divinely ordained means by which all knowledge must be understood and all of life governed.

Any survey of the history of ideas from the nineteenth century through mid-twenty-first century will reveal this principle was rejected by two radical philosophical revolutions that in turn created the global desolation of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and would traumatize three or four generations of American Christians as they tried to reconcile those revolutions with their Christian faith.

What were these revolutions that appeared to shake the very foundations of Christendom, dethroning the governing principle of religion in all matters of faith and life?

They were 1. the Modern denial of religious reason, and 2. the post-modern affirmation of irrational thought as a viable alternative to philosophical reasoning.

We in the twenty-second century understand the complete absurdity of both statements of philosophy. We have seen how they have died and Christianity still remains fully intact, unharmed, unscathed and still dominating globe, despite the fact that both schools of thought claimed the church would die before the third millennium or shortly after its onset. (7). Interestingly enough an obscure historian of the early twenty-first century understood with a keen perception the fact that the modern and post-modern systems of thought could not survive beyond the twenty-first century, and wrote as much in one of his works, describing the modern and post-modern worlds as well as the age that would follow them in these terms:

“Once the momentary belch of Modern Secularism has been expelled,

and the ethereal effusion of post-Modern Fideism has passed, then

once again the old order of (religion) will be restored, and (the church)

will reign supreme over the souls of men as it did before. . .” (8)

 It was then this so-called ‘belch’ and ‘effusion’ (forgive the crassness of the cited author who was obviously a most primitive writer) that caused so much consternation among the Christians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries because most of them operated under the presupposition that these systems would completely erase Christendom off the face of the earth.  Of course, Christian theologians in our day have illustrated well from nature itself that God has appointed religion to be the queen among the sciences, and as the church must mediate all true religion unto mankind, we know that no philosophy of man can eradicate the church.  But most American Christians, still operating under the sad pale of sectarian, individualistic, and hybrid forms of a degenerate Protestantism, failed to the see the folly of such thinking.  And hence, by the time the traumatic events of the twenty-first century had reached their zenith in the mid-2050’s, the time was ripe for the Theocratic Party to claim that it fell to all Christians to once and for all eradicate all anti-Christian thinking from the world by use of the sword as was believed to be the only means by which godless notions could be expelled from the human race.(9)

To be continued. . .

 

Notes:

(5) See The Messianic Mission of the American Evangelical-Catholic Church (2010-2036) by J. Campbell Locke, M. A., published in 2091. Chapters 3 & 4 deal specifically with the historical revisionism practiced by Evangelical Christians from the 1970’s to 2030’s, and is a helpful study, even though Locke never gave up his ‘Semi-Protestant’ biases.

(6) See the essay, The Restoration of Religion: How Post-modernism ‘saved’ Christian Catholicity  by N. L. Stewart, M. A., for a conscience explanation of how Post-modernism killed Western Philosophy, allowing the Christian Faith as mediated through the church to once again gain intellectual dominion in the Western world.

(7) As one satirist wrote, ‘Though the Christian was traumatized in the twentieth century, the modern and postmodern should be apoplectic were they to travel forward into time and see not only that Christendom had survived their puerile attacks, but that their “infallible utopias” would not even be recognized by a young grammar school student.’ (see A Christian Antidote of Joy against the Dark Spirits of Unbelief and Folly.)

(8) The Third Codex of the Catholic Academic League (A. D. 2171) forbids the citation of writers from the so-called ‘Protestant Era’ (1517-2036), and that is why we, the author have not cited the name of the writer of this quote, This author’s works are banned from even the lower clerics as his heresies are regarded as so precise and hard to detect that only the most spiritually superior of experts can decode his sectarian language.  Such was the ‘prophetic’ nature of his writing in that he so accurately described the course of religion in the next century that churchmen of our time have deemed him inspired of the devil if not completely insane.  We the author do not think that he was moved of the devil in his writings for they are filled with too much Christian virtue to be of a hellish nature.  But his biography is clear: he suffered extensively from melancholy spirits that no doubt came from his refusal to abandon his misguided Protestantism even after most of his kind had rejected him. For further details on this writer, see Mr. Stewart’s article, ‘Heretics of the 21st century,’ in the Encyclopedia of Heresy of the Christian Church.

Since young students will be reading this work, it was necessary for the quote to be edited as it is plain his writings are far too crass for most pious Christians.  The full quote can be found in the same article.

(9).  It is worth noting that Post-modern Evangelicals, and later the Theocratic movement adopted the methodologies and practices of the Society of Jesus in enforcing religious rules upon society.  While the Order of the Society of Jesus practices such enforcement in a much more civilized manner than did the American Theocracy, the parallel attitudes are a fascinating study in comparison.

 

Personal Note from me the blogger:

Here is the full, unedited quote (SMC):

‘Once the momentary belch of Modern Secularism has been expelled, and the ethereal effusion of Post-modern Fideism has passed, then once again the old order of apostasy will be restored, and human religion in the form of Anti-Christ will reign supreme over the souls of men as it did before the fires of the Holy Spirit burned deep in the souls of God’s elect, igniting the flame of the Protestant Reformation.‘