How Pontifical Pharisaism and High-Sounding Doublespeak Rule in America

A few days ago, I received an email from Uber demanding restrictions beyond due limit: “We received feedback regarding your face mask on a recent trip … You’ll need to verify that you are wearing a mask before you can request your next trip by taking a photo of yourself wearing a face mask.”

Dismayed submission to secular constraint and coercion has been customary among Christian conservatives over the last 100 years. In this period of time, secularists took several successive steps to supplant the Judeo-Christian worldview as America’s foundation with supposedly neutral and objective secularism, largely through a plan of action involving judicial overreach, scheming and strategy.

— Removal of prayer to Jehovah God from public education in 1962 (Engel v. Vitale).

— Removal of the Bible, following three centuries and meteoric rise of America, from public schools in 1963 (Abington School District v. Schempp).

— Removal of the Ten Commandments from public schools, court houses and government buildings in 1980 (Stone v. Graham).

— Extermination of unborn babies in 1973 (Roe v. Wade).

— Exaltation of homosexual sin and legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015 (Obergefell v. Hodges).

— Expansion of homosexual and transgender rights in 2020 (Bostock v. Clayton County).

That could never have happened in early America, where the founders established Christianity as the religion of America in the 13 original state constitutions: Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland.

At the time, the Judeo-Christian worldview was in a position of control over the spiritual, intellectual, educational, economic and vocational mountains of influence in America … the same position secularists in today’s America are in. Big Tech, media elites and big government bureaucrats have imposed secularism’s ekklesia, its ideology and values on an uninformed and biblically illiterate population.

And that was achieved, as said, by scheming and strategy: “The realm in which the archenemy works is not the moral but the spiritual. He calls into question the Word of God, casts doubt on its integrity (and denies its veracity).”

If facts matter to Uber, here are some to contemplate: “The coronavirus is about 100 nanometers in diameter. Cloth mask ‘holes’ are 1,000 times larger than a virus. An analogy is used that a mask is like a mosquito getting through a chain-link fence. It’s actually much worse; it’s a mosquito getting through a chain-link fence with holes 14 yards in diameter” (Dr. Linda Johnston, M.D.).

What has begun in America is a final round of testing before “masks” will be pronounced by the ostensible Biden administration as mandatory, everywhere, all the time. What’s in the making by a rampantly unbridled government will dwarf even California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s frivolous “Don’t forget to keep your mask on in between bites.”

Pontifical pharisaism and high-sounding doublespeak as per George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is on full display in America:

— A society that has murdered 60 million preborn babies in the womb and that now preaches the sanctity of life.

— House arrest now being defined as “quarantine.”

— Forced isolation labeled as “social distancing.”

— “We are all in this together” while creating general alienation due to fear of contagion and contact.

— “Safer at home” when millions have been forced out of work and are having trouble making ends meet, not to mention the unsurpassed increase of suicide, hopelessness and domestic violence.

— For the greater good” when millions of businesses, many built over generations, have been forced into bankruptcy and are in a position of anything but good.

Would it be any surprise if Uber will shortly require a copy of one’s “vaccination ID” before allowing a ride? Or if eateries will demand to see a copy before opening their doors to anyone? Next, a vaccination ID will be compulsory to find work or to go shopping in the local supermarket.

How about the constitutional rights of any American, whether affected or unaffected by COVID-19?

To all appearances we seem to be on the verge of reaching the mechanism that turns a generation into “those who seek Him, who seek [God’s] face,” as it says in Psalm 24:6. Persecution tends to have a sanctifying and purifying effect, which, in the words of Charles Spurgeon, “will lead us to purge ourselves from all filthiness, and to walk with heavenly circumspection.”

American Christendom’s folly of constructing a “subculture” over the last century is clearly coming into view. Christians fire blanks and possess infinitesimal influence and leverage in the struggle for ideological supremacy and control of resources in the public square. It should be noted also that such a Christian “subculture” goes contrary to what Jesus in Matthew 16:18 said He would establish.

Twentieth and 21st-century American Christendom leaders evidently believed that they had locked, barred and bolted the doors to the world so as to keep the wolves from the “highest places of the city”. This deficient belief has been found wanting.

The church’s insignificant biblical impact on the current battle for free speech and against censorship by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, America’s corporate media conglomerate and media elites brings to mind the position Poland found itself in on Sept. 1, 1939, when modern-mechanized Nazi Germany blitzed its eastern neighbor.

Destroying the Polish air capacity, railroads, communication lines and munitions dumps, followed by a massive land invasion with overwhelming numbers of troops, tanks and artillery, Nazi Germany overran an antiquated state who was left largely to defend itself with horses and cavalry.

While the knocking on the barred and bolted doors may be loud, it still isn’t loud enough to wake American Christendom from its deep slumber.

The men and women of Issachar, “those having understanding of times and what Israel should do,” as 1 Chronicles 12:32b foretells, will have to move into the public square, taking up the front, if we are to make it through. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.