Welcome back to The Fourth Way podcast. Our last episode focused on unpacking the basics of propaganda. How it works, who it works on, why it works, etcetera. I was all ready to jump into the meat of the season in this episode, but I got a little bit sidetracked. I got sidetracked because I felt like this season was missing something.

I realized that this something was the Christian component. See, what drove me to start creating podcasts in the first place was my frustration with how I had been propagandized to see Christianity and my conservative Christian group a particular way. Yet I uncovered that there was a lot under the surface that needed addressing within my group. So this season is really the culmination of what began several years ago for me, once I realized that I was propagandized. I have the opportunity to hold my group's feet to the fire in regard to Christianity through this podcast.

Now, while I wanted this season to be applicable to everyone, Christian or otherwise, I realized that I I couldn't do this season without spending a good amount of time focusing on Christianity. So in this episode, I wanna set the stage for future episodes in which I'm going to focus on the Christian problem. This episode is going to explain why I feel the need to shine the spotlight on Christianity throughout this season, and it will hopefully help you to see how I'm going to do that and what my intent is. If you're not a Christian and you want to skip this episode and any future episodes which focus on Christianity, that's fine. Nevertheless, I think it is this very thing that completes the season for me, and I think it'll give you some good insight whether you're a Christian or not.

So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into this episode. The Book of Revelation contains two main antagonists, the beast and the false prophet. Now, interpretations abound as to the identity of these two individuals or groups, and what their identity truly is, but those interpretations are usually aimed outside of one's own group. So it could be some world leader, right? If I'm an American, it might be Putin, it's probably not my own guy.

Or it might be an American, but it's gonna be some liberal Democrat like Biden, not somebody in the Republican party who who I like. Or it's gonna be some religious leader outside of our own group. For Protestants, the Pope has always been a very popular candidate. Now I don't know who the Antichrist or the false prophet are, but at the moment, I'm leaning towards them being recurrent entities in each age. I don't really think there is one Antichrist or one false prophet.

You know, first John seems to indicate this as a a very real possibility because he declares that many Antichrists have already gone out into the world. So I take it as there have always been Antichrists and always will be and false prophets in every age, and it's a cyclical sort of thing. It's something that we can identify and apply whether we're the early church or the modern church. And to get a little bit more specific, you know, judging from the description of the Antichrist, I think that he is embodied in world governments. And judging by the description of the false prophet, I think he is embodied in the church.

Yeah, that's right. I think that the church is often the false prophet. Now before you go to pick up stones, which by the way is exactly what Pharisees and false prophets, you know, those who killed the real prophets, that's exactly the type of thing they would do, just hear me out. I'm not at all saying that you should leave the church. Not at all.

I love the church, and we are not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together. The church is great. But just as Satan seeks to mimic and co opt everything that God does, so has Satan co opted the church throughout history, and he's done this long before the church was even called the church. Reinhold Niebuhr, no philosophical friend of mine, brings out this truth so well in an article that he wrote in 1969 entitled The King's Chapel and the King's Court. In this article, Niebuhr bemoans the way that church, those who would become the religious right, were crawling into bed with politicians.

Boy, if he could see us today, things are way worse than when when he identified them. For an extended look at this evangelical harlotry, I'll put a number of book recommendations in the show notes for you to explore. But essentially, to summarize, Christianity began to be courted by corporate America and certain politicians in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. And this really took off during the Cold War as The United States sought to pit ourselves against the godless communists. Hence, at this time in the nineteen fifties, In God We Trust was printed on the currency, Under God was placed into the Pledge of Allegiance, and Presidential Prayer Breakfasts were started.

It's also within this decade, the 1950s, that the civil rights movement really started to to be founded, though it wouldn't really really take off until the nineteen sixties. But it starts to make major headway in the nineteen fifties with some significant court cases. Now, you can't have many too many blacks running away to communist countries like Cuba and declare that they're better off in godless Cuba than in Christian America. Now, you didn't know that happened, propaganda is probably behind that. But Radio Free Dixie was a big thing.

Blacks escaping to Cuba and living it up better there than in parts of The United States. Robert Williams, author of Negroes with Guns, is the most famous individual who did this thing and, you know, he considered the blacks to be an occupied mass in white America, you know, because Radio Free Dixie is a clear allusion back to Radio Free Europe, right, when they were occupied. So Christian America, God filled America, couldn't appear to have worse civil rights than godless communism. So government began, more than ever, to co opt the Christians willing to be their mouthpieces. And this is the position in which we find Niebuhr writing from.

He has seen Christianity co opted by the government for at least the past two decades when he writes this article. And he sees what's happened and he sees what's coming and he calls it out for what it is. Rather than being prophets who speak truth to power, a wilderness prophet, the church was being court prophets, allured by power. Now, if you're familiar with the prophets in the Bible, the court prophets were the ones who lived in ease and comfort in the palace or in the court of kings. For the most part, and with very few exceptions, we find that court prophets tend to be no prophets at all, at least not prophets of the true and living God.

They're false prophets who don't utter the words of God, but rather declare to the king that which he wants to hear. One of my favorite examples is the story of Micaiah who is summoned by King Ahab to prophecy about whether Ahab will win the battle or not. All of the court prophets had been telling the king that he'd be victorious, but Micaiah was a wilderness prophet, not a court prophet, and he told Ahab the truth that he got from God, that Ahab was gonna die. Of course, Micaiah paid for not scratching the king's itching ears and he was placed into prison with bread and water only and told not to be released until the king returned safely. As the king never returned safely, dying as the true prophet Micaiah declared, I don't really know what ended up happening to Micaiah.

He may have paid the ultimate price for the truth. I don't know. Anyway, Niebuhr hones in on these court prophets as being false prophets and he identifies the soon to be religious right with them. While that may be a broad generalization and while I think it's possible to be a false prophet in some regards and a true prophet in others, I think Niebuhr identified something true. The church or at least certain iterations of the church are false prophets.

They're either false prophets completely or in a partial sense, through certain blind spots that they have. And generally speaking, the closer that you get to the palace or to the court, the bigger the false prophet you're gonna tend to be. The allure of wealth and power and influence are almost always corrupting. In my mind then, whether or not the false prophet represented in Revelation is the church, it doesn't really matter. The church or institutionalized religion has frequently been portrayed throughout the Bible as false prophets and court prophets.

The wilderness prophets are usually the ones with little power, they're shabbily dressed, they're persecuted, they say really weird and counter cultural things, and they eat food cooked over dung and do other weird stuff. But what does this whole court prophet and wilderness prophet thing have to do with our series on propaganda? It has a lot to do with it, I think. Government is a bitter poison that nobody can stand the taste of. Taxation, conscription, persecution, violence, corruption, you name it, government is nasty.

But using pure violence doesn't tend to fare too well for rulers, which is why as David Graeber pointed out in our first episode that we talked about, many people and institutions seek to implement the less coercive and abrasive forms of power by controlling information and using charisma. Certainly, politicians do this kind of thing, but throughout time, politicians have recognized that the church is a wonderful vehicle to co opt into their service. They've been doing it all the way since the Old Testament times with the court prophets. Religion is the spoonful of sugar that makes the poison of government go down. It's a primary delivery system not just for the government, but for a lot of things really.

So wherever it is that you find propaganda, you're bound to find the church not only not lagging too far behind, but often at the forefront. Sometimes this is the true church which has gotten disoriented, but other times, it's a wayward and corrupt church of the devil. That's for you to decide which one it is in each instantiation. With all that in mind, as we journey through each area of propaganda, propaganda in domestic abuse, in racism, in corporate greed, in government, etcetera, I'm going to have a special episode in many of these sections focused on the way that the church has been the false prophet for this evil. I wanna reiterate that I am not against the church.

In fact, my current job is a missionary whose job description entails church planting. I love the church and I think it's vital to Christianity, it's central to Christianity, it's the alternative politic, it is the big k kingdom compared to the world's little k kingdoms. However, I recognize that the church is so important and so powerful that everyone else wants a piece of her. I think the movie, The Book of Eli portrays this kind of thing beautifully where everyone's trying to wield God for their own purposes and power, which doesn't make God and His Word bad, it means that people recognize the true power that exists there. So I'm not exposing the evils of the church as false prophet in order to discredit the church as a whole.

Rather, my goal is twofold. First, I want to acknowledge our sins and repent of them. Bringing evil to light is how we begin to heal. But second, knowing how the church is constantly allured into false prophecy should help us to avoid the same pitfalls in the future and identify and distinguish the false church from the true church or the wayward church from the church on the straight path. I wanna protect the church and purify her so that she can be the powerful incarnation of Jesus in the world, His hands and His feet.

If you're a non Christian, you might wanna skip these episodes and you may not find them relevant to your life. Although if you live around a lot of cultural Christians, you may be interested in the way that the church has been corrupted in some of its manifestations throughout history. But for me, as a Christian, these episodes are invaluable to me working through the topic of propaganda, as well as in my own personal working through faith and my attempt to edify the church. Definitely go check out Niebuhr's article, and I'll also link a Great Christianity Today article that talks about something very similar. Watch the Book of Eli and read some of the books that I'll link below about Evangelicalism, or just watch Phil Fisher's video on it which provides a pretty good summary.

I think you'll find all that stuff helpful and interesting and we will definitely be getting back to the church. That's all for now. So peace and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.