NOTES ON THE DIVINE DOMINO EFFECT: THE COLLAPSE OF AMERICAN LEADERSHIP AND THE RISE OF NEOPAGANISM – (WITH VIDEO)

1. THEOLOGY

SCRIPTURE. “This is a faithful and trustworthy saying: if any man [eagerly] seeks the office of overseer (bishop, superintendent), he desires an excellent task. Now an overseer must be blameless and beyond reproach, the husband of one wife, self-controlled, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach,not addicted to wine, not a bully nor quick-tempered and hot-headed, but gentle and considerate, free from the love of money [not greedy for wealth and its inherent power—financially ethical]. 

He must manage his own household well, keeping his children under control with all dignity [keeping them respectful and well-behaved] (for if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God?).And He must not be a new convert, so that he will not [behave stupidly and] become conceited [by appointment to this high office] and fall into the [same] condemnation incurred by the devil [for his arrogance and pride]. And he must have a good reputation and be well thought of by those outside the church, so that he will not be discredited and fall into the devil’s trap.” – 1 TIMOTHY 3:1-7, AMP

KEY TERM: “OVERSEER.” ‘Episkopos’ [ἐπίσκοπον]: “A Superintendent [Christian or Secular!] in general charge of a church [or organization], literal or figurative.” Also: “An overseer, curator, guardian, or watchman of a public work (e.g., churches or cities); a Magistrate sent to organize and govern a people.” NOTE: “The term ‘episkopos’ refers to an Overseer or Guardian, often [but not exclusively] used in the context of Church Leadership. In the New Testament, it denotes a person who has the responsibility of overseeing the spiritual well-being and administrative functions of a Christian community. The role involves Teaching, Guiding, and Protecting the congregation, ensuring adherence to Sound Doctrine and moral conduct.”

QUOTATION. “A few days ago, a man I admire and appreciate so much, DR. JOHN PIPER, wrote a Blog that disappointed me greatly and I fear has influenced large numbers of Evangelical Christians to Boycott the Election [of November 2024] all together. Piper asserts that to vote for Donald Trump is to endorse his immorality, not so much his pre-presidential affairs, but his arrogance, pride, etc. 

He writes: ‘I will not develop some Calculus to determine which path of destruction I will support. That is not my duty. My calling is to lead people to see Jesus Christ, trust His forgiveness for sins, treasure Him above everything in this world, live in a way that shows His all-satisfying value, and help them make it to Heaven with love and holiness. That calling is contradicted by supporting either pathway to cultural corruption and Eternal Ruin.’ PIPER ARGUES: ‘I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring’ …

We must be reminded that we’re not choosing a Pastor whose qualifications require sterling character traits as well as one who rules his house according to Scriptural Standards. Instead, we are electing a President. Should he be of the best of moral qualities if that is an option? Yes! But if the only option is to vote for what some like to refer to as ‘the lesser of evils,’ should the Christian refuse to vote? No! This is a nonsensical, without Biblical support, attitude that caused millions of Evangelical Christians to sit out the 2012 and 2016 elections and thus insured the election of a radical Hater of America to be elected.  And now, faced with the potential for putting into position a Socialist’s Regime that will essentially install a tyrannical government dictating every aspect of lives, people like John Piper, and scores of other influential persons, are advocating boycotting this critical election or opting for a write in candidate.” – WADE TRIMMER, “Are We Electing a Pastor or a President?” Training for Reigning, July 14, 2023; edited

• MR. TRIMMER’S BIO. Wade has been in full-time Christian service since 1971, thirty-five of those years as a senior pastor. In 2008, Wade formed Training for Reigning Institute of Disciple-Making, a non-profit organization, for the purpose of equipping leaders (primarily in Third World countries) to make disciples who reproduce other disciples. He is the author of 47 books, a conference speaker and leader of international mission’s training. He is married to Anne, and they have three grown children, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren. They are members of Grace Fellowship of Augusta, Georgia, and make their home in North Augusta, South Carolina.

COMMENTARY. “Because some False Teachers were now spreading their Erroneous Doctrines with assiduity among the believers at Ephesus, and it was necessary that Timothy (to whom the care of the church there was committed) should be assisted by some ‘Bishops, or Elders, and Deacons, well qualified to teach the people.’ The Apostle, after observing what an honourable office that of a Christian Bishop is, here describes the Qualities and Virtues necessary in one who desires to attain it.” – JOSEPH BENSON, Notes on the Holy Bible, 5 vols., 1811-1818; edited

II. TEACHING

From these thorough Introductory Comments, THE LESSON is nearly already taught when considering the current Massive Collapse of American Leadership today. Starting of course with the President of the United States and the American Church Leadership, we are hourly witness to an historic degradation, or what Catholic historian PAUL JOHNSON rightly called the ‘Great Dégringolade’ – The Precipitous Decline of the West (Modern Times, 1983).

It is the same Idea proposed by DR. CARL F.H. HENRY in his magnum opus, Twilight of a Great Civilization (1988) in which he prophetically observed:

“Our generation is lost to the Truth of God, to the Reality of Divine Revelation, to the Content of God’s Will, to the Power of His Redemption, and to the Authority of His Word. For this loss it is paying dearly in a swift RELAPSE TO PAGANISM. The Savages are stirring again; you can hear them rumbling and rustling in the tempo of our times.”

THE NEW PAGANISM. Which leads almost seamlessly to an overview of a brilliant American historian’s analysis of our Current Madness. DR. TIMOTHY SNYDER is sometimes referred to as our most important interpreter of The Times by many of his peers. I shall attempt here to distill his magnificent essay into a few digestible chunks for the remainder of our conversation.

• BIO. Timothy David Snyder, born in 1969 in Dayton, Ohio and raised by Quaker parents, is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He is on leave from his position as the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, with plans to transfer to the University of Toronto for an indefinite time; he is also a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He has written several books, including Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010), On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), The Road to Unfreedom (2018), and Our Malady (2020). Several of them have been described as best-sellers.

THE LECTURE. “The New Paganism: Value, Sacrifice, Charisma, and (Oracular) Truth.” Ulrich Mohrhoff, Editor (Auro Café, July 23, 2024; abridged & edited). In this lecture Professor Snyder addressed THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS: 

“Why is it that we have these Right-Wing Parties, which actually seem to be about sacrificing yourself for no particular reason, which seem to be about your own suffering but in fact above all the suffering of others, which seem to seek a political equilibrium in which I suffer some but you suffer more, why is that? Why do we seem to be in a Moment where there is just so much cultish behavior, when the most successful of these Movements or Parties seem to have Cult Leaders who are regarded as heroes and treated as gods? ‘Why is it that the future is so dark?’ Why is it that one can be politically successful, socially influential, without offering a future at all or by filling the future with Dark Fantasies of how things are going to get worse and must be worse? Why is it that we spend so much time staring at tiny things that we keep in our pockets, and what does that have to do with the warming of the planet?”

• IRRATIONALITY. [PREMISE]. “‘I’m going to start from the point that if we really thought these Questions were about Reasons, we would have to note that people seem to be sacrificing their own best interest over and over and over again.’ That people seem to be doing things that are obviously contrary to what would conventionally be regarded as the National interest or the interest of the State. It really doesn’t make sense for people to vote for DONALD TRUMP knowing that this will mean the end of all of the social benefits upon which they actually depend.”  

• UKRAINE. “It really didn’t make sense for VLADIMIR PUTIN to invade Ukraine. We can toil mightily to try to find various ways in which he was a rational actor, but I think if we simply accepted that makes no Geopolitical sense, we would be much closer to reality. It doesn’t make sense to invade a country and then find yourself much weaker with respect to your actual problem, which is China. If we are seriously Geopolitical about this we have to think that Putin is a geopolitical fool, and so I really think we have to start from somewhere else. I don’t think you can easily rationally explain by appeal to interest why Russian family after Russian family gives up its sons for this struggle. I don’t think that Rationality or Interests is the way to start there.”

• THESIS. “So what I’m going to be trying out on you this evening is a ‘Different Heuristic,’ a different way of trying to explain what’s going on, which I’m going to refer to as ‘NEOPAGANISM.’ My argument is going to be that if we understand the way European Pagans behaved, we will actually see ourselves much more clearly than we do when we start from the notion of interests or failure of interests. I’m not talking about the Marvel Comics version of Thor, I’m not talking about the DC Comics version of Wonder Woman. What I’m talking about is the actual ‘Pagan Heroes and Gods,’ who were very demanding of sacrifice, who were fickle, who were mysterious, who were devastating not only to their enemies but to their friends, to their favorites, who communicated in a way which was addictive and inscrutable at the same time. I’m thinking of Pagan gods like Odin, who kills the people he admires the most because after all they should be in Valhalla, or a Pagan God like Zeus who wants us to be stupid for the entire existence of our species and therefore chained Prometheus to a rock for allowing us to learn something.”

• HISTORY. “What I’m going to try to evaluate is FOUR AREAS of modern social and political life in which I think this heuristic might actually add some understanding and some knowledge, and those points are going to be: Value, Sacrifice, Charisma, and Oracular Truth. Gotland [Sweden]was a very big deal from about 800 to 1,000, maybe a little bit afterwards, it was an incredibly wealthy island. It seems to be the place where the Vikings from Scandinavia, mostly Swedes, brought back a lot of their wealth after engaging in trade – in wax, honey, but chiefly slaves, with the Muslim world. So in that period of time, most of the silver which has been found in Europe or in Northern Europe, most of it is actually on this one island where it was buried in huge hoards. And there are presumably lots of those Hoards still on Gotland with thousands and thousands of silver coins in them, of antiquary and also of financial interest.”

• (1) VALUE. “This brings me to the Question of Value. Why did the rich Vikings bury their ill-gotten gains? Why are there these Hoards? The Answer seems to be that they believed that you can take it with you. That after death you will have access to the things that you leave in the ground, that this is Odin’s law that if you have it underground, and then after you are buried underground and you emerge in Valhalla, you’ll have access to the weapons and the wealth that you brought with — you can take it with you. ‘What I want to suggest is that that Principle shouldn’t sound strange because it’s quite explanatory of the way that our richest people behave.’ They are behaving as though they can take it with them, and I think once we know that, or if we start from that assumption, then a lot of other things begin to fall into place … My point is that if you think of the Pagan Version of Value, you’re closer to where people are who actually have a lot of wealth. If you think of them as behaving in terms of their own interests or trying to achieve things, I really don’t think you get very far, but if you think of it in terms of: an ‘Instinct for Hoarding and an unjustified belief in immortality’ – I think you’re actually closer to where the money [or Value] actually is.”

• (2) SACRIFICE. “Which brings me to Sacrifice. When a successful, which is to say wealthy, Viking Chieftain was buried, certain things happened. We don’t have many witness accounts of this but we do actually have one very detailed one. If you were an important Viking Chief and you died, you got to take it with you. Your friends made sure of that, or your clan, your followers, your retinue made sure of that. They would build a Death House for you, you’d lie in it for nine days (nine is a magic number), meanwhile there’d be Ceremonies and Banquets. At certain intervals they would sacrifice dogs, hens, your horse, and put them into a pit into which you would eventually join. In the example that was witnessed in the early part of the 10th Century by a very interesting Arab chronicler, a slave girl was elevated to the status of the wife of the Chieftain, and then she was killed so that she could join her new husband on the other side. So, Value is not only what but also whom you take with you … ‘There’s a kind of MAGIC around Trump.’ Which is that if you rationally thought he was a billionaire, and he asked you for money, you would say, you don’t need my money because you’re a billionaire, but incredibly none of his supporters has ever had that thought. Instead, they make offerings to him, they offer to him things that matter to them. The $5, the $1, the $10 matters to them.”

• (3) CHARISMA. “‘My Definition of “Charisma” is the Ability to Tell a Big Lie and Make it True.’ If we look back at the Pagan Days — which included much more interesting big lies than the ones we have now — Odin isn’t really telling the truth probably about Valhalla, but nevertheless it can structure your whole life and even the way that you die. The claim to be a God is probably not true, but our Oligarchs in various ways are making these kinds of claims, if not to be Gods then at least to be something like Heroes. There’s a kind of sublimated version of this in the Libertarianism of the United States, where our Oligarchs tend to in one way or another put forward a view called Libertarianism. ‘Libertarianism is that so long as everybody behaves as badly as possible, it will be good for us all in the end. That is a Religious View.’ It is literally, historically a Religious View … A lot of us — Americans, Russians and other people — are living inside Big Lies. Trump’s Biggest Lie is that he won the American Election [of 2020], which has created a dimension of reality along which many millions of people live. Putin’s Big Lie, or one of them, is that Ukraine does not exist, and that has created the dimension along which many people are living … Elon Musk is another Big Liar, he lies a lot, but it’s not so much that he has a Big Lie of his own. ‘It’s that he’s a sort of Father of Lies. His Technology’ — not only his of course but we’re going to stick with him — The Technology that he has brought into our lives along with others allows lies to spread.
• (4) TRUTH. “Now moving to something else, what’s the logic of Oracular Truth? If we’re in a Pagan World, and we’re going to see a Seer, a Prophet, a Sibyl, someone who can tell us the future, we really want the truth. It’s really important to us, and we’re going to believe what the Oracle tells us. What the Oracle tells us is sometimes true, it’s sometimes not, it leads us off in a certain direction where we end up doing things. It involves you, it tracks your nature. Now, the reason that I’m dwelling on the Logic of Sacrifice and on the Logic of the Oracle, is that it’s the same as the Logic of Behaviorism. The Way that Behaviorism works is that I sometimes give you what you want, I sometimes don’t. You don’t know the Logic behind it and so you keep coming back … Which brings me to the claim I’m going to make about your iPhone … It’s an incredible technological thing, and as a result it must be a ‘Site of Reason,’ it must be somehow making us smarter, informing us. All the studies of course are on the other side. We are losing IQ points, we are dropping IQ points like a truck driving down the road with its back door open. We are getting Dumber in every measurable way. So this thing that we’re looking at, it takes technology to make it work but of course it also takes technology to burn a fire in a pagan temple. It’s certainly not a Site of Reason. ‘I think your Phone is an Oracle.’ I think you go to it for the truths that you want, and it answers you in the obscurities that motivate you.”

III. LAST THOUGHTS

“SOFT MAGIC.” A term created by communication scholar and former colleague, DR. ROBERT NORTON, to describe what may be defined as: “‘White Magic’  or that which is described as ‘Good Magic,’ as opposed to ‘Black Magic,’ which draws upon the powers of evil beings to achieve ostensibly Good Ends; i.e., ‘WITCHCRAFT.” 

Another Christian thinker who had a major impact on the formation of my Christian Worldview was CHARLES COLSON. Charles Wendell Colson (October 16, 1931 – April 21, 2012), generally referred to as Chuck Colson, was an American attorney and political advisor who served as Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1970. Once known as President Nixon‘s “Hatchet Man” [expert in the practice of politically motivated dirty tricks], Colson was convicted and served three years in prison, but became an Evangelical Christian in 1973. This led to the founding of his non-profit ministry Prison Fellowship after serving time, and three years later, Prison Fellowship International, 30 books, including Born Again (1976), given to me one year before me own conversion on October 30, 1979. NOTE: I am preparing a special presentation of my own Christian Conversion to be posted soon.  – Adapted from Wikipedia, Feb. 18, 2025; edited      

AGAINST THE NIGHT (1989). Among Mr. Colson’s most important books was not only Born Again that was to help save my life, this one I used for years as foundation for my graduate courses in Cultural Analysis at Regent University during the 1990s.

Here is a statement of his CENTRAL IDEA from that work emanating from his piercing warning 25 years ago that “The Barbarians are Coming!”

“Today’s Barbarians are ladies and gentlemen. Yet behind their pleasant, civilized veneer lurks an unpleasant intolerance that threatens the very processes of pluralism and freedom they claim to defend … The prevailing Secular [View is] that Moral and Religious Absolutists have no right to advocate their views in our Relativistic Public Square. ‘[This] attitude, shared by many otherwise sensible people, demands that everyone has a right to express his or her own views – as long as those views do not contain any suggestion of Absolutes that would compete with the prevailing standard of Relativism’” (pp. 46-47; edited).

HISTORIC IRONY. Now then beloved, as with all of us so-called “Culture War Warriors” back then, we all presumed that our Chief Enemy were all those dirty unchurched, Non-Believers that were hellbent on killing the American Order. While that is still the prevailing view of the White Church, it commits a number of massive Historic Errors (“Big Lies!”), not the least of which is this:

‘Dr. Snyder’s Neo-Pagans and Colson’s New Barbarians are effectively US, beloved! The White Christian Church that follows hard after their Beast-Master, President Donald Trump!’

Notably: 81% of all White Christian Evangelicals voted for Trump – for the third time in a row! THE POINT:

The American Church as Practicing New-Pagans is overwhelmingly responsible for the Supernatural Darkness of the Trump MAGA-QAnon Phenomenon, and thereby the rapid Deconstruction of the American Order.

As reports from several reliable polling agencies show: White Republicans, Christians Pastors and Leaders, Business Leaders, the Military, the Police Community, and a large portion of the Blue Collar sector in America constitute this:

‘Coalition of New Barbarians as America’s Ruling Class.’

AGAINST THE LIGHT (2025). By this theological algorithm and sound cultural research, these are either directly or de facto ‘Arrayed Against Christ and Truth,’ and in Blasphemous Alliance with ‘Anti-Christ Donald Trump, the Big Liar.’

Weigh that most heavily in your soberest prayers and hard study, beloved. Then do exactly what God Himself instructs.

Selah. Selah.

MEDIA

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/8xehPTZxcw8