In 1997 Gary North 2022 (1942-2022) produced a thousand-page study of one instance of such capture: Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church.[1] Its funding from humanists and other people we’d now call “globalists,” the coordination of subversive agents outside and inside the targeted institution, their ideological self-consciousness and discipline, are familiar to anyone aware of the accelerating corrosion of Western institutions.
North identified Modernism as the root ideological and spiritual perversion of our world. It was a nice ecumenical touch for the Calvinist (anti-Romanist) scholar to begin his book’s foreword by quoting the popular 20th champion of the Roman Catholic worldview, G. K. Chesterton:
Almost every contemporary proposal to bring freedom into the church is simply a proposal to bring tyranny into the world. For freeing the church now does not mean freeing it in all directions. It means freeing that peculiar set of dogmas called scientific, dogmas of monism, of pantheism, or of Arianism, or of necessity. And every one of these . . . can be shown to be the natural ally of oppression.[2]
Chesterton’s Orthodoxy was published in 1924, the year he joined the institution that had formally condemned Modernism as a heresy.[3]
North’s purpose was not to evaluate Chesterton’s conversion but rather to highlight his insight into the problem:
[Chesterton] understood that the most dangerous of modernism’s heresies are to a great extent merely extensions of heretical theologies that were rejected long ago by the early Church. Chesterton’s insight here was that theology has implications for society. Heretical theology leads to political tyranny. Bad theology produces political oppression. The twentieth century stands as evidence of his contention.
Modernism is another gospel. This was Chesterton’s contention; it was also the contention of his Protestant contemporary, John Gresham Machen.[4] Both of them did their best to challenge modernism. Both of them wrote popular books for Christians in the pews. They died within a few months of each other. Chesterton did not live long enough to see the Roman Church engulfed by modernism; Vatican II began a quarter century after his death.
Machen, however, did see modernism triumphant in his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America [PCUSA]. Seven months before he died, modernists persuaded the broad evangelical majority of that denomination that Machen had become disobedient to Church authority, and that for the sake of the peace, he should be removed from office.[5]
Machen saved them the trouble of excommunicating him: in 1929 he left the PCUSA to found the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Theological Seminary and recruit an illustrious faculty, most notably Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), who taught there from 1929 to 1972.
Now that Liberation Theology-friendly Jorge Bergoglio has helmed the Vatican as Pope Francis for almost a dozen years, the engulfing is virtually complete: the College of Cardinals, who will elect his successor, is populated mostly by cardinals whom Francis created in his “liberal” image.
The College has 228 members, but only 137 can vote in the next papal conclave because they’re 80 or younger. Since 2013, Francis created 142 cardinals, 94 of whom—a 68% majority—will be eligible (and “papable”).
Last October he said Catholic bishops may “bless” individuals in homosexual unions, stressing (for now) that the Church’s definition of marriage (exclusive union between a man and a woman) is not revisable. Apparently Genesis 5:2 embodies no imperative to call such deluded individuals to repentance.
Some recent popes would have anathematized any Catholic who scandalized the Church by publicly suggesting such a thing; some earlier popes would have (unjustly) turned him over to the authorities for execution.
Which reminds me: on good biblical grounds it had been the Church’s teaching for millennia that justice sometimes requires capital punishment. (Who may carry it out is a separate issue.)
In 2018, however, with the stroke of a pen, Francis defined the death penalty “inadmissible.” How long will it be before a pope, this one or the next, declares by “executive order” that “discrimination” against homosexual unions advertised as “marriages” is also “inadmissible”?
More recently than North, the courageous and brilliant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a recent convert to Christianity (read her account of it), has explored the ways and means of ideological and institutional subversion; for her, this has never been merely a academic matter. The Islamofascism that mentally and physically oppressed her and from which she escaped made secular humanism, at least for a while, seem worthy of assent. I hope my readers will benefit from her June 4th Free Press essay, “We Have Been Subverted.” (Hat tip to The Maverick Philosopher.[6])
She begins autobiographically:
If you wonder why I—a woman of color, an African, a former Muslim, a former asylum seeker, and an immigrant—look at the antics of today’s anti-Israel, anti-American protesters with such fear and trembling, allow me to explain.
Her explanation banishes any initial wonder.
I was born in Somalia in 1969. The country had achieved independence nine years before. But less than a month before I was born—on October 21, 1969—a junior member of the brand-new Somali armed forces seized power with the help of the Soviet Union. The first two decades of my life were shaped by the upheaval that followed that coup.
Drawing on the work of ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov, Ali surveys the four stages of subversion (i.e. de-civilization, the descent into barbarism) that Bezmenov identified: Demoralization, Destabilization, Crisis, and Normalization (by which time no one remembers when things were otherwise).
The subverters? Marxists, Radical Islamists, and the Chinese Communist Party (none of whom have “Barbarism or Bust” emblazoned on their banners). Their common enemy: The West.
“I am not saying that Bezmenov’s formulation explains all that we are seeing,” she writes. “It clearly does not address all the West’s problems. But once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.”
What happened? Here’s part of the answer:
During the Cold War, the United States was able to forestall subversion because its institutions and people had the necessary antibodies to stave off subversive ideas. Doing so is easier when you have a visible peer as an enemy. But when the Cold War came to an end and we declared victory, we mistakenly thought our enemies laid down their arms and that history had ended—so we let our guard down.
She warns “that not all activism is subversive,” noting that her “life would not be possible without the righteous activism of those who fought for women’s rights and civil rights. So how to tell the good activism from the bad?” There’s no simple answer:
One thing to pay attention to is your gut. Another is your mind: be discerning and skeptical of people recruiting you to their cause. Does their cause ask toleration of you or require compelled speech? Are you being recruited to fight for a cause you know nothing about? Is that cause maximalist and uncompromising; does it glorify violence?
Before closing, she cites Orwell’s apothegm: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,”[7] adding “Everyone with eyes to see is now scrambling to do just that.”
Her logic is inescapable (go ahead; try to escape it); the words she uses to express her argument are exemplary in their force, grace, and clarity. See if the pieces don’t fall into place for you as they did for me.
Notes
[1] Gary North, Crossed Fingers: How the Liberals Captured the Presbyterian
Church, Tyler, Texas, 1996, xlviii + 1086. I have the nearly four-pound hardback; one you may download its pdf (and all his other books) gratis at Gary North’s Free Books. Scroll to the title. I would have provided the link but clicking it initiates the download of a “heavy” file, something I presume you only want to do deliberately, not accidentally. For North, modernism is not so much a “heresy” (as it is in Roman Catholicism) as a worldview that favors reason and scientific rationality over divine revelation. His writings, especially his extensive economic commentaries on the Bible, reflect his view of modernism as an assault on biblical law and the substitution of of secular humanism for the biblical worldview.
[2] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Image Books, [1924] 1959, 125, as quoted in North, Crossed Fingers, xii. For Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) appreciations of Chesterton, see: James Sauer, “Chesterton Reformed: A Protestant Interpretation,” Antithesis, Vol. 1, No. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1990; James Piper, “How A Roman Catholic Anti-Calvinist Can Serve Today’s Poet-Calvinists,” Desiring God, May 28, 2008.
[3] See the Holy Office’s decree of July 3, 1907, Lamentabili Sane; Pope Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, September 8, 1907, which describes modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies”; and Sacrorum Antistitum, the “Oath against Modernism” that Pope Pius X’s instituted on September 1, 1910.
[4] GRESS-um MAY-chen.
[5] North, Crossed Fingers, xii-xiii.
[6] William F. Vallicella, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali on Yuri Bezmenov and Subversion,” The Maverick Philosopher, June 6, 2024; see also the critical discussion in the comments. For more on Bezmanov, see this 1984 interview: “39 years ago, a KGB defector chillingly predicted modern America,” Big Think, January 13, 2023.
[7] George Orwell, “In Front of Your Nose,” Tribune, March 22, 1946. Reprinted in The Collected Essays: Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols., Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
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