Worship at Christmastime in 2021
"Worship the Heavenly Father in Spirit and Truth" - John 4:24
But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. John 4:23-24
Worshiping the Heavenly Father in spirit and truth. What possibly could these words, these words which are reality checks for Christians, mean this Christmas 2021 as we pause in our hearts and minds to consider again the societal and cultural acknowledgment of the Great Incarnation? As a budding, late-career historian (though over this past year I’ve been coming to terms with an unfavorable realization of what that means in the contemporary “academy”), my thoughts and deep concerns as a Biblical Christian in this time of the Covid Criminal Conspiracy are focused on the status of my personal public witness, the witness of Christians I observe and know, and the witness of my church congregation, others open to observation, and generalized observations of the American Protestant Church. Each subject and level could bear is own separate examination and analysis. This coalesces for me into these questions: What are we professing as members of the Body of Christ when by our normal practices are expressing our witness? And are there deeper, historical and socio-theological meanings of our time with which we are contending? What do we profess we believe by our corporate responses to the extraordinary social, cultural, political, and economic occurrences since the beginning of 2020, and earlier?
Most churches and most Christians whom I bring to mind are aware that things of immense significance are taking place …things that are historical and disturbingly hidden …that is, things that would be clarified by future intellectuals and historians with the passage of time, accurate examination and analysis of primary (documented and documentable) sources, and the wide acceptance of agreed on understandings of what occurred. A contemporary refrain when imagining such a future outcome future is ‘This will be as it has always happened in the past, right? …So some … you and me? professing Christians now believe.
This “Tom Take” post is written after having just read with much appreciation an essay which articulated in understandable language what I’ve intuited and sought clearer understanding of for years – the understanding that forms, I think, the most important perspective in which to frame the last 2 years of the covid extravaganza. The short essay, “Mammon and the Culture of the Market: A Socio-Theological Critique,” was written by the Harvard theologian, Harvey Cox, and published 20 years ago.* The essay explained how American society – you, me, and all active participants in American society have unwittingly and unknowingly for a long time believed and practiced the ideological underpinnings of “the Market” in every area of our lives and effectively worshipped the idol of the “Market God.”
Here in this blog post and in Cox’s essay, the “Market God” is the sovereign entity which has substance as material - i.e., empirical practices and rote but rational thinking, and as imagined, i.e. embedded in our hearts and minds in unthinking ways as “normal”, “not extraordinary. Cox’s powerful critique placed considerable responsibility on the shoulders of American Christianity for its failure to harken publicly (and prophetically) to this societal realization. His essay was not so much a critique of capitalism in all its many and varied expressions, though it was, nor did it question the achievements that the American political-economic system of free choice had delivered over decades to many in its population and to the global population since WWII, though it did.
The take-way powerful punch in the gut was that I, you, and all American Christians have been and are worshiping in a society-wide religion in spirit and truth has been that of an idol which is no god but which in many unmistakable ways is the false “Market God.” I encourage you to access the article and read it reflectively during this Christmas season.
Cox turned to the sociologists’ chief characteristics of understanding and analyzing traditional religion. He presented these characteristics in relation to the god of the market and the Market as God in these following “classic categories” along with my slight annotations and my comparisons to Biblical Christian beliefs. Here are the chief characteristics of the elements that make up the religion of the Market God in brief comparisons with Biblical Christianity:
· A metanarrative. With the Market as God, its metanarrative is the story of human history, its development, and the story that culminates in the historical integration of global humanity by a single political-economic system: the one-world global market of free exchange. In Biblical Christianity, the saga of human history is the history of God’s relationship to His creation and creatures, the pinnacle of which is the individual human person. The history of creation under the Only God Almighty of Jacob and Jesus is humankind’s salvation history with a beginning, a salvific intervention, and an ending where God is the main Actor of earth’s tragic history … tragic due to sin and Satan.
· An interpretation. With the Market God, human freedom is the main characteristic of human history and the most realized freedom of this religion is the freedom to choose – that is, consumer choice, among an endless number of commodities. In the religion of the Market everything becomes subject to commodification including, as we have seen in the covid conspiracy, the surreptitious but partially disclosed by motivated investigators to commodify the human genome and the basic foundation of life itself. Up to now in the 21st century, the Church has had a record of being unified in its opposition to this commodification of life, but the extreme wealthy elite sociopaths have devised expert ways and technologies in the Covid Criminal Conspiracy around this temporary and oppositional religious obstacle, made possible by the willing insouciance of the American Establishment Church. In Biblical Christianity, such a usurpation of Creation Sovereignty belongs solely to the God of Jacob and Jesus.
· A doctrine of sin and salvation. By the religion of the Market, everything - and this means everything including the privatization of all natural resources including land, water, air, sea, and space, and the human race by its transmogrification into a transhumanist synthesis of man and machine in the expertly planned and immense funded Great Reset, is readily available to be subjected at the right price. This Market salvation of course is to be provided and achieved for global humanity without moral, ideological, philosophical-theological resistance – certainly so far by the American Establishment Church, to this process in all of its material and spiritual manifestations. In Biblical Christianity, the Word of God infused with and by the Lordship of the Living Christ through the Holy Spirit stands in unadorned but complete and irrefutable resistance to this corruption and attempted usurpation of God’s Sovereignty as Sole Prosecutor, Defender, Judge, and Jury until the close of human history.
· An array of sacraments. The rituals of the religion of the Market “focuses on the central act of exercising the freedom to choose by making market decisions” - ‘I shop therefore I am.’” The rituals of Biblical Christianity focus on the tragedy of sin and sinfulness of human beings in their acts and enslavement to Satan, the flesh, and the world and its salvation and true freedom purchased by the sacrifice of Christ Jesus at the Cross.
· A vast catechetical network to convey the teachings to those who need enlightenment. In the religion of the Market God, “Advertising is the systematic self-explication of the market faith.” For Biblical Christianity, proclamation, personal testimonies, the sharing the Gospel of Jesus’ sacrifice as the Son of God, as well as the ancillary efforts upholding the integrity of the Faith in the areas of apologetics and evangelism create an outreaching network of catechesis.
· An eschatology (teaching about ‘last things’). The Market God inspires secular, materialistic, and atheistic conceptions of last things or the end of human development. As a prime example, Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, depicts liberal capitalism as the end of the human search for a more egalitarian and equitable system of human freedom. Biblical Christianity gives prophetic warnings to non- or pretend-worshipers of the Biblical God and assurances to true worshipers about the end of history.
· A pantheon of exemplary heroes of the faith. Worship of the Market God is exemplified by the “risk-taking, informal, relaxed, but tough and realistic new breed of entrepreneurs” – those who are inspirational in their commitment to market values of efficiency, exacting measurement of progress and success, and to becoming paragons of “the secrets” to greater capital accumulation for financial freedom beyond the cares and concerns of most people on the planet. Biblical Christianity acknowledges but does not resolve the cautionary but realistic tension between excessive material wealth and the abundance of holding onto the provisions on earth and the assurance of spiritual rewards in heaven. Nor does it provide an individual or collective release from earthly stewardship towards God and one’s neighbors.
· Outcomes work out for good …(so goes the religious claim and hope). And here Cox stated that most importantly, the “god” of the market culture always brings benevolences, even guiding mysteriously (Tom note: the “hidden hand” of the free market?) so that all things eventually work out for the good. Cox stated that these mysterious ‘working outs’ elevates the Market to a status of the divine. Biblical Christianity claims the Divine promise that “all things work together for good” with the provisions “for those who love God and to them that are called according to His purpose.” Whereas the Market God offers an assurance based on a relatively short span of time under the dynamic, non-static and changing political-economic control of central bankers, the assurance of Biblical Christianity is from an unchanging, Good God who always has fulfilled His promises.
A clue to the factual accuracy of this false religion, based on its failures of its “salvation” for all as promised through the ideology of “the Market,” is that the basic cause behind the covid crisis are those whose privileges have given them the vantage point to see what we – the non-extreme wealthy – commoners of the common lot of humanity, have not until now been able to see: the global Market system of ceaseless competition and unlimited natural resources necessary to keep “the global world-system” functioning well and expanding forever is false. And we – in 2020 and beyond are now being made to accept all the necessary transformational “new” requirements due to the implosion of the failed global system from its inequities, imbalances, limitations, and contradictions.
Thus, “they” have rationalized, “they” will continue to enjoy their extreme privileges while “we” – global humanity, must face and accept the discipline now required to meet the new requirements of their only real option. That is, their “Great Reset” is the only real option available that exists in their minds in order for them to maintain their privileges and luxuries. That option includes the necessity that the limited global natural resources must be parsed under the control of the few extreme wealthy by the subjugation and enslavement of global humanity to the new world-system; depopulation must be enforced upon global humanity to make the numbers of mass global population manageable at levels necessary by the new technological means for a functional and gradually improving global technocracy; totalitarian control of global humanity and creation must be instituted by the technocratic governance of the basic biological stuff of human life on earth; and eventually the false worship of the “Market God” will of necessity be transformed into the worship of the only true leader of the new world-system, voila, …him whom we in the Body have been given in the prophetic Word and anticipate as “the AntiChrist.”
It is tempting and possibly purposeful without condemnation, to look scornfully at those Christians who willingly are modifying their lives to accord with the false official narrative in all its lies and deceptions. Their belief, which is expressed by their unruffled, unquestioning, nonchalant acceptance of the covid criminal conspiracy in its official-ese fake narrative, causes us who have seen through the charade for what it is, as presenting a righteous invitation … for me, to bear the brunt of deserved, intense anger for their spiritual laggardness.
In truthfulness, I’ve distanced myself as much as possible from these un-woke, spiritually asleep professioners of the Faith. They have been the object of my mostly internal rebukes for their not seeing what many of us have seen – the falseness and fakeries of the whole covid extravaganza.
Yet, at a much deeper level, we all have been disillusioned, mystified, and spiritually hijacked in our common worship of the Market God. The planned “divide and conquer” mechanism being used by the elite to keep the American population from coming to a consensus powerful enough to challenge the official narrative – though such consensus power is growing (even though we must be aware that they can operationalize their next false flag at any time). Beyond and deeper than the elite-planned pitting of the “woke” versus the “non-woke” looms the reality of this matter of the false religion and our common worship of the Market God.
Will we Biblical Christians awake and remain awake to the possible complicity of our worship of the Market God? Will we receive the conviction and the deep stirrings of the Holy Spirit to persevere, in spite of the fact that our brothers and sisters in Christ may become more outraged that it is we who are “the problem” by our refusal to accept the “vaccine;” that by our antivax stand against the covid “vaccines” and boosters we are keeping the global population from the so-called herd immunity; etc. etc. etc. Ultimately, if we refuse to worship the Market God and the eventual appearance of Its in-the-flesh “son” – the Biblical AntiChrist, will we persist in our resistance if factually “the rapture” turns in reality to “the Capture” as prophesized in the imprisonment and murder of the saints who resist the Satanic world-system?
In this current social and cultural celebration of the Great Incarnation in 2021, may we each pause in our hearts and minds to give thanks again meaningfully for the priceless gift of salvation by our Redeemer Lord who came as one of us, born of a woman and given human life with all its risks and mysteries, and amidst and in spite of all this world’s paradoxes and contradictions in its fallen estate of sin and corruption. And let us seek to gird ourselves in spirit and truth to the right and righteous worship of the One True Triune God of Jacob and Jesus and to affirm our allegiances and loyalties to this God by questioning and being willing to separate ourselves as led by Him from the Market God of the satanic world-system, refusing further idol worship, and intending to persevere in spite of what future troubles come. May we be faithful. And may you and yours have a Blessed Christmas in acknowledgement of the Incarnation of Jesus of Nazareth, the One True Son of God, Whom we worship in spirit and truth! Amen.
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* The Cox essay was published as a shorter article entitled “The Market God” in the March 1999 issue of The Atlantic magazine and can be accessed at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/1999/o3/the-market-as-god/306397/. The reference for the essay I read and referred to herein is Harvey Cox, “Mammon and the Culture of the Market: A Socio-Theological Critique” in Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self, eds. Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 124-135.