Christendom and Protestant America’s Apostasy into Paganism: A Timeline

“For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears.  And they shall turn away (their) ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:2-4)   ” And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of.” (2 Peter 2:2)

In the meticulously researched book, “Politicizing the Bible,” research historians Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker dig deep into the Middle Ages and Renaissance to show that Christendom’s long term apostasy began with the appropriation, deconstruction and paganization of scripture by politically motivated interpreters.  Among them were early Popes, Machiavelli, Marsilio of Padua, Henry VIII, Thomas Hobbes, and Descartes and Spinoza, who sought an empire of science.  

The authors argue that nothing can be rightly understood about the post-Christian West’s still unfolding apostasy, the historical-critical method taken for granted at modern divinity schools worldwide, evolutionary science and the paganization of Scripture if close attention is not paid to the great cosmological shift away from the supernatural Genesis account ex nihilo to an anti-supernatural and wholly evolutionary pagan or secular understanding of the universe, the Triune God, man, philosophy, science, and morality that occurred in the seventeenth century. 

The Catholic philosopher and research historian Thomas Molnar (1921–2010), reveals that by the time of the Renaissance, certain highly placed, influential Christian theologians, mystics and scholars at the highest levels of the church had discovered ancient Egyptian Hermetic magic and occult Jewish Kabbalah texts from the time of Babylon which they studied and translated, resulting in Hermetic Kabbalah. Then like Pico della Mirandola, they argued that occult hermetic science – the divine technology or Magic Way of reaching divine status and spiritual powers through ritual procedures such as transcendental meditation is the best proof of the divinity of Christ as a divine force of nature. In other words said Molnar,

“…..by the time of the Renaissance the esoteric texts of the first centuries A.D. had acquired in scholarly and humanist circles an unparalleled prestige, confronting as equals the texts held sacred by the church. In Pico’s estimation, ‘nulla est scientia que nos magis certificet de divinitate Christ quam magia et Cabala’ (there is no science that would prove for us Christ’s divinity better than magic and the Cabala.)” (“God and the Knowledge of Reality, pp. 78-79) 

The apostasy into evolutionary paganism grew, mainly out of sight, until it exploded into view during the eighteenth and nineteenth century’s.  In his classic work “Earth’s Earliest Ages” (pub.1876) the English theologian GH Pember (1837-1910) described Protestant heretics and apostates “of this nineteenth century” as returning to the occult wisdom traditions of “long past, and modern thought sustaining its flight upon the wings of ancient lore.”  

Almost every characteristic of antiquity seems to be returning:

“Open intercourse with demons is being renewed on a vast scale in the very heart of Christendom….numerous circles are carrying on magical practices (and the) ancient Mysteries (are being restored together with) mesmeric healings….astrology….and other practices….And, impossible as it would have seemed a few years ago, all these ‘superstitions’ are floating back….upon the tide of ‘modern thought.” They come no longer veiled in mystery, “but in accordance with the spirit of the age, present themselves as the fruit of science…progress….and evolutionary philosophy.” (Earth’s Earliest Ages, G.H. Pember, pp. 243, 245)

The ominous signs of this age are obvious, said Pember in another of his books, “The Antichrist Babylon and the Coming Kingdom.” Just as it was during the pre-flood generations, spiritism (open intercourse with demons) is now common throughout Christendom and even in Russia. In France it is the national pastime. The Protestant apostles of the powers of darkness are everywhere proclaiming their scientific and evolutionary theories demonstrating that the world created itself and had no need of a Creator while the miseries which have resulted from sin,

“….are blasphemously charged upon the Almighty, Who so loved the world as to give His son for it (but is now) impiously forbidden to curb and discipline the rebels who owe their existence to the breath of His mouth. And when we see such men as John Stuart Mill (and) John Morley, the late Chief Secretary for Ireland…guiding their fellows to defiant insubordination, we can scarcely wonder that Bradlaugh…said, ‘This world might have been happy, had not the shadow of God fallen upon it.” (pp. 35-36, 60, 1888)

The secular research historian James Webb, author of The Occult Underground, summarizes the terrible consequences of the growing apostasy.  He observes that morally informed reason had died sometime before 1865 and this opened the door to the age of the irrational (autonomous feelings).   Bereft of assurances of immortality after so great an attack on biblical revelation, masses of hopeless people were left, “begging for a revelation which was scientifically demonstrable.” (p.222)

Their need was eventually answered by various forms of neo-pagan socialism, including Karl Marx’s messianic Communism and Hitler’s Nazi Socialism advertised as the longed-for “scientifically demonstrable” revelations that when actualized would result in a heaven on earth.  

Research historians, Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie write that the first socialists had almost all been lapsed Anglicans from Evangelical homes who became dignitaries in the Church of England.   For all of them, socialism was the new evangelization:

“There was a Christian fringe to the London socialism of the eighties, but this too was Anglican. The Christian Socialists came together in Stewart Headlam’s Guild of St. Matthew and the Land Reform Union; and the more respectable Christian Social Union, formed in 1889 – seeking in Fabian style to permeate the Anglican Church – soon attracted more than two thousand clerical members. Dissenting clergymen too began to find a place in the Fabian Society and the London Progressives, while Unitarian churches and centres like Stanton Coit’s Ethical Church provided a meeting place for believers and idealist agnostics.”  “Socialism was for all of them, the new Evangelism.” (Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians, 1977, p. 18)

The failure of the Anglican hierarchy to repudiate apostatizing higher critics and radical freethinkers scandalized faithful, orthodox Evangelicals whose outraged response was considered reactionary by the intellectually arrogant scholarly community. In 1861, apostate Benjamin Jowett and six liberal Churchmen published a volume entitled Essays and Reviews in which they expressed alarm lest,

“…the majority of Churchmen, by holding fast the narrow, fundamental beliefs, should estrange themselves more and more from contemporary thought.” (The Founders of Psychical Research, Alan Gauld, p. 49)

The portents of apostasy in the Church of England were ominous:

“It seemed to conservative Christians quite appalling that at a time when the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture was being undermined by Darwin and his allies, a group of those whose sacred duty should have been to shore it up again had conspired to hammer their wedges not under it but into it.” ( p. 50)

Gauld records the rapid decline in faith among younger Cambridge men was due to skepticism based on science, evolution, and the historical critical method: 

“the outstanding Cambridge intellectuals of the 1870’s – the Trinity group centering on Henry Sidgwick and Henry Jackson and including Frederic Myers, G. W. and A. J. Balfour, Walter Leaf, Edmund Gurney, Arthur Verrall, F. W. Maitland, Henry Butcher and George Prothero – tended towards agnosticism or hesitant Deism.” (Gauld, p. 64)

In this same period a group of young dons from Trinity College, Cambridge, turned to spiritism and paranormal research (study of the spirit dimension) as a substitute for their lost Evangelical faith:

” In February 1882, Podmore took Pease to a meeting at which this group founded the Society for Psychical Research . . . Among those who founded the SPR were Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour – later a conservative Prime Minister – and his brother, Gerald.” (The Fabians, p. 18)

The original group that established the Society for Psychical Research in England,

” was centered around the figure of a leading Cambridge Apostle named Sir Henry Sidgewick, professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge and close collaborator of Sir William Crookes, where the duo spent a decade carrying out scientific experiments on ghosts and mediums.” The Occult Tesla Part 10, Matthew Ehret, matthewehret.substack)

The parent of America’s modern progressivism is the socialist Fabian Society which in turn spawned the Cambridge University spiritist group, the Ghost Society, founded in 1851. In turn, the Ghost Society spawned the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) founded in 1887: 

“Council Members and Honorary Members of the SPR included a past Prime Minister (William Gladstone)…and a future Prime Minister (Arthur Balfour)…2 bishops; and Tennyson and Ruskin, two of the outstanding literary figures of the day(as well as) Lewis Carroll (and) a surprising number of titled persons.” (Gauld, p. 140)

By the early 20th century, the secular materialist Sigmund Freud and heavily demonized Gnostic occultist Carl Jung were SPR Corresponding Members. Both men contributed to the S.P.R. Journal of Proceedings.

Secular and Christian research historians of the nineteenth century largely agree that the dominant figures in the occult spiritist/socialist movements were Christian, mainly Protestant, Evangelical and Anglican clergymen. The onslaught of skepticism, ridicule, atheism, agnosticism, higher Biblical criticism, moral relativism, Darwinism and occult New Age spirituality assaulting the tattered foundations of Christendom and Protestant America were inspired in large part by Protestant/Evangelical heresy together with an unhealthy interest in Spiritism. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie explain this strange anomaly:

“The lesson instilled by Evangelical parents had been given a secular form. Evolution or what (Sidney) Webb called Zeitgeist, had taken the place of Providence, yet what Webb described as ‘blind social forces’…which went on inexorably working out social salvation’ did not relieve men of their moral responsibility. Victorian religion had taught that a belief in God’s purposes must be accompanied by an effort to discern and advance them. Socialists who substituted a secular religion for the faith of their youth felt the same compulsion.” (Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Fabians, 1977, p. 115-116)

Modernism Enters the Roman Catholic Church

Shortly after the turn of the century, Pope Pius X sounded the alarm that progressive “thinking” was taking hold of the contemporary mind, and in that way taking possession of Western civilization and Catholic laity and priests. The Pope defined progressivism and its primary doctrine evolution as “Modernism” and in 1907 declared it a heresy in the encyclical ‘Pascendi Dominici Gregis.”  

The Pope noted that Modernist heretics were claiming that Christ is in us (pantheism) and that through evolution a Christ-force progressed and/or emanated from nature spontaneously and of itself.  Since evolution implies continuous change or progress, heretics claim that the Lord’s immutable (unchanging) truths do not exist, therefore there is nothing immutable  in the Bible or the Christian Church. All are subject to change since everything is infused with impersonal divine spirit, power, intent, determinism (fate), and motion. Thus claim heretics, religion itself lives and evolves, and must in fact be changed.

Apostate change-agents further claim that all religions and belief systems are true because the divine-force suffuses and energizes all things. By extension of this perverse reasoning, both America’s Constitution and Gaia (earth) are alive, and Gnosticism, Satanism, Wicca, Theosophy, Islam and Sharia are true. This is syncretism (subjectivism), the uniting of good and evil, truth and lie, the holy and the unholy. R.J. Rushdoony comments:

“Now syncretism is destructive of the human mind, of rationality (A) man who wants to unite good and evil…has lost the capacity for clear thinking. His mind is darkened, clouded, fuzzed over, and incompetent….Man, by presuming to be god, has by that act destroyed the possibility of true thinking; from so radically false a premise, no valid conclusion can follow.” (“Why Is Rick Warren Waffling?” Lee Duigon, Chalcedon)

Fifteen years after the Pope sounded the alarm, the liberal (evolutionary pantheist) theologian Harry Emerson Fosdick pleaded for tolerance of more liberal views of Christianity at the First Presbyterian Church of New York City on May 21, 1922.  According to Fosdick, it is no longer necessary to believe in the sovereignty of the Triune God in history, the virgin birth, the inerrant Bible, or special creation and the Fall, hence Original Sin.  Accept evolutionary science, said Fosdick.  It can be received by the visible church without harm as can pluralism (all ways lead to ‘heaven’). 

This message, with printing financed by New World Order globalist John D. Rockefeller, was sent out to 130,000 pastors and leaders. Its title was changed to “The New Knowledge and the Christian Faith.”

In response to Fosdick’s plea for tolerance the Rev. Clarence McCartney of Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania responded on July 13, 1922 with a sermon entitled “Shall Unbelief Win?”   In his summary of the points raised by Fosdick, McCartney said if they were valid then Christianity would be a Christianity of the opinions of men, and the principles and good purposes they favor leading to a Christianity without worship, a Christianity without God, and a Christianity without Jesus Christ.  Theological liberalism, said McCartney, is progressively transforming the church into a secular institution.  (“Shall Unbelief Win?” thisday.pcahistory.org)   

In our own time progressive transformers no longer plead for tolerance but rather, like Pope Francis, brazenly chastise  the faithful for not embracing anti-Christ, anti-Biblical, anti-creation evolution while pastor Rob Bell boasts of reinventing Christianity as a neo-pagan Eastern spirituality and Evangelical leader Leonard Sweet claims to use quantum physics to ‘scientifically’ prove that Jehovah is ‘in’ everything (pantheism). 

Not to be outdone, progressive former President Obama used our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to justify the pagan ideal, androgyny and/or gender-neutrality:

“[W]hen we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is not only Christ sacrificing Himself on our behalf, but it’s also the golden rule — treat others the way you’d want to be treated.” (Using Christian faith to justify ‘LGBT Pride Month’, Charlie Butts, OneNews Now)

 In Jeremiah 36:22-24 we read that beginning with the priests and prophets, the people were led to rebel against the message from God:

“And it came to pass that, when Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king cut it with a scribe’s knife and threw it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier.”    Jeremiah is dismayed and astonished that they can take the Word of God, cut it up with a knife, cast it into the fire, and burn it until the message is totally consumed.  Shocked by their actions he said, “…neither the king nor any of his servants who heard all these words was afraid, nor did they tear their garments”   You have forsaken the Lord your God, said Jeremiah, and now “your evil will chastise you, and your apostasy will reprove you.  Know and see that it is evil and bitter for you to forsake the Lord your God: the fear of me is not in you, declares the Lord God of hosts.” (Jeremiah 2:19)

This is an exact picture of Christendom’ and Protestant America’s apostasy into paganism.  Though none of the heretics and apostates from the Middle Ages to our own time burned the Word of God they nevertheless destroy it in the way they deal with it.  Francis Schaeffer comments:

“They destroy it by not reading it as written in normal literary form, by ignoring historical grammatical exegesis, by changing the Bible’s own perspective of itself as propositional revelation in space and time, in history, by saying only the ‘spiritual’ portions of the Bible have authority for us.”  (Death in the City, p. 78)

They destroy the Word of God because their desire is to be on what they falsely perceive to be the scientifically enlightened winning side. They are “lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God” who desire the things of this world: lofty position, prestige, power, applause and trappings of scientific and religious prestige:

 “There is no one who claims that there is no God who is not infected by carnal desire or a lust for earthly power or the delightful madness of some showy spectacle.  They love such temporal things and seek their happiness in them.  They pursue the earthy objects of their desire wherever they lead and fear anyone who seems to have the power to take them away.” (Augustine, On True Religion, 38, 69)

Thus they fear and loathe faithful defenders of the Revealed Word and special creation and this is why they are at least as hostile and intolerant if not more so toward faithful defenders than are their evolutionary atheist and occult pantheist counterparts.

Over and across the entire Western church, from Roman Catholic to Protestant and Orthodox, it is the faithful truth-tellers and pro-lifers who stand unmoving against the heresy and apostasy of theological liberalism and its primary doctrine evolution.  Thus they are thrown into jail for defending life and harshly criticized, ridiculed, condemned and demonized as haters, bigots, and homophobes whose rejection of the phony evolutionary science that the scientifically enlightened apostates say is textbook evidence,

 “…of an unyielding ignorance on the part of the religious.” (Total Capitulation: The Evangelical Surrender of Truth, Dr. Mohler, October 25, 2011)

The contemporary organized church has for the most part capitulated and is therefore torn with strife, distrust and chaos.  Capitulation is deadly to the church because it kills belief by requiring that the external forms of religion be maintained but their substance be discarded. This is practical atheism, said R.C. Sproul:

“Practical atheism appears when we live as if there were no God. The externals continue, but man becomes the central thrust of devotion as the attention of religious concern shifts away from man’s devotion to God to man’s devotion to man, bypassing God. The “ethic” of Christ continues in a superficial way, having been ripped from its supernatural, transcendent, and divine foundation.” (“What is Practical Atheism?” R.C. Sproul, Ligonier, Jan. 12, 2015)   

When men make themselves the central thrust of devotion they no longer know what they have lost, much less that they themselves are lost, for though they have a pretense of godliness, they deny “the power thereof ; from such turn away.” (2 Tim. 3:5) 

This verse largely concerns apostate theologians of our day. They profess a false Christianity, a scientifically enlightened, evolutionary pantheist nature religion that observes the outward forms of godliness (God and Christ words, religion, church buildings, sacraments, vestments, religious services, good works), but reject its supernatural power, that is, the Triune God of Revelation, special creation, Original Sin, Jesus Christ God incarnate (John 1:1), the resurrection, second coming, miracles, regeneration, judgment, heaven, and hell.

2 Tim. 3:5 is a warning urgently needed by wavering, yet still faithful, Bible-believing Christians, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise. If they finally capitulate to the constant pressure brought to bear against them, they will ultimately surrender to damnable apostates. Rather than compromising with heretics and apostates, as many Christians today are inclined to do, Paul warns: “From such turn away!”

Judgment and Forgiveness  

Beginning with the Roman Catholic church destructive forces were unleashed that were later taken up and acted upon by the Protestant, Evangelical, and Anglican. Though the entirety of the Western church bears guilt, for hundreds of years Roman Catholic and Protestants have acted as if their church bears no individual guilt and seeing only the guilt of the other have been divided against each other, throwing punches, accusing each other of heresy over sins committed by the entire church going back hundreds of years

While the Western church has been fighting against itself, Satan and his legions have been free to undermine and destroy the foundations of our civilization, harvest unknown numbers of souls, and launch a forceful spiritual attack against Christ’s Church. Christendom and Protestant America have fallen and been transformed into a hellscape.

The entirety of the church is responsible for the decayed and withered condition of today’s church and the subsequent fall of Christendom and Protestant America and it is time for the faithful remnant to forgive and forget, to hold out the hand of fellowship, and then united as brothers and sisters in Christ defend Christ’s Church, and the faith once given.

The day is late and the time is right now for repentance and reconciliation:

“For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?” 1 Peter 4:17

The Western church must forgive, forget, and stand together if the church is to successfully engage the spiritual warfare of our time:

“If you forgive people their sins, your Father in heaven will forgive your sins also. If you do not forgive people their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.  Matthew 6: 14-15 

2024 @ Linda Kimball