No, they are relevant, honestly!
I have downloaded, and am currently reading, The Great Secret of Islam by the French popular historian Odon Lafontaine (and you can too – searching on his name will take you to the free download site). The book is one attempt at an up-to-date synthesis of the evidence that the standard narrative of Islam is complete fiction, and that Islam actually began as a Messianic Jewish Christian sect linked to Arab imperialism beginning in the seventh century.
A lot of people have been doing similar critical historical work on early Islam (his is based largely on that of Édouard M. Gallez), so I won’t go into detail here, except to pass on Lafontaine’s account of the historical background to Islam’s rise. He shows how, largely because of the decay of the rival Byzantine and Persian empires at that time, there was a widespread revival of Messianism, especially in the Middle East, where various Jewish groups hoped the Messiah would come, and various Christian groups (Lafontaine majors on the Judaean Nazarenes who were, in their christology, Arian) expected the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ.
He reports that these hopes even led as far as the rebuilding of a Jewish temple on the temple mount when Jerusalem was briefly captured from its Christian rulers by a coalition of Jews, the aforementioned Jewish Christian sects, and Arab allies. It was this temple that was, a century later, replaced with the Dome of the Rock, which itself has been shown to have originated as an anti-Trinitarian Christian architectural statement (over against the Holy Sepulchre), rather than a specifically Muslim one.
But one should never forget that such messianic ideas were always propagated by people who wanted to be the Messiah, or part of his court. Utopia may have been the carrot – but personal power was the real motivation. That is why so much Islamic doctrine was later formulated to justify what the prophet (actually later Caliphs compiling the Quran and hadiths) wanted to do in the way of sex or brutality.
In discussing the Messianic theme, Lafontaine quotes a useful word coined by Soviet dissidents in the Cold War era: surreality. By this they meant the kind of unreality in which the Communist rulers lived, and which they imposed on their subjects, in which everything was getting constantly better even as it fell apart. Significantly this fictional world was created by the utopian dreams of the Marxists, in which Marxist-Leninism had ushered in an ideal society that would inevitably lead to heaven on earth, against all the evidence on the ground. But of course, the Politburo had the dachas and the ZIL limousines, because they were the Chosen Ones, and so largely believed their own propaganda until reality, inevitably, struck.
Lafontaine relates this surreality, in accordance with his theme, to Islam, which began, and has continued, as an attempt to usher in a literal Messianic age, including the return of the “prophet” Jesus and the Mahdi (Messiah), and a final Judgement. This is to be achieved by imposing the dar al-Islam on the rest of the world, called dar al-harb, or “territory of war,” by all means. Mostly this means imposition by conquest, and notoriously includes the belief that the world will only be prepared for the age to come when every Jew has been killed (and in some iterations, every Christian and idolater too). Yet this “religion of peace” has, in reality, only ever been represented by repressive empires riven by internal conflict. A key feature of the Islamic “future hope,” like that of the Communists, is that it is the actions of the faithful that will bring it about – under the leadership of the Chosen. Such a task cannot be left to God.
Let me at this point make the claim that such messianic movements are surprisingly ubiquitous, and that they all, in fact, derive from the original Messianic hope in the Jewish Scriptures. This may seem too bold a claim, but the biblical idea that history is moving towards an end goal was pretty unique in the ancient world. The commoner view was that history is in some way cyclical, or else that it has decayed from a former golden age. Only in the Tanakh do we see a sovereign God working out his purposes in history, and promising the vindication of his chosen people Israel by sending a king, a prophet like Moses, a somehow divine servant, to liberate them, purify them and, indeed, to recreate the world in perfection for them.
And only with the explosive spread of Christianity, proclaiming that this Messiah had actually come in Jesus Christ, and would return at the end of the Church Age, was this enticing future hope spread among the nations. But as it was spread, it was also perverted by various sects in various ways, of which Islam is just one. And one of the almost universal perversions was the temptation not to wait for God to bring salvation, but to bring it about oneself by creating the supposed conditions for the Messiah to come, most often by force.
I want to exemplify this principle mainly from current, and therefore dangerous, examples. But first I’ll mention one close to home because, as I’ve mentioned in the past, it involves the beginning of my own local church. My church was founded around 1646 by first-generation Particular Baptists in Oliver Cromwell’s Civil war army. Their doctrine was Reformed, except for an understandable, but erroneous, attraction to Fifth Monarchism, a position which held that the cataclysmic upheavals of the time would usher in the promised return of Christ and a golden age. For my people, this gave meaning to their warfare, as they believed a truly Christian government of free people could be achieved, which would surely match the biblical preconditions for the parousia.
In their case, the failure of the Commonwealth project led to disappointment and theological recalibration. But for some, dashed political hopes were a prompt to take matters into their own hands and, as it were, to compel Christ to return. And so soon after the Restoration Thomas Venner attempted a Fifth Monarchist revolt in London, which ended (as these movements always do) in his own death.
Turning to today, the way that Christianity introduced the Messianic concept to the world, as I have described, explains a lot about most current ideologies, including those thought of as secular. Communism is one such secular form of Messianism, which is one reason it has been described as a Judaeo-Christian heresy. The “Thousand Year Reich” of the Nazis was another – and directly drawn from the idea of the Millennium in the Revelation of John.
But even the Enlightenment was, in essence, an attempt to replace the “pie in the sky” optimism of the Christians with a similarly perfect society based on reason, which even acquired a mechanism in the philosophy of Evolutionism. But it still involved coercion in the form of eugenics, wresting institutions like science and education from religion, and so on.
We can view the secular technocratic globalism of today’s elites as the direct descendant of the Enlightenment, and can note how it is pervaded by “surreality,” from the illusory benefits of green energy, to the ideas that mass immigration and digital IDs will bring peace and freedom. All these deceptions arise from the messianic theme of a future utopia, characterised in this case by sustainability, diversity, inclusion and all the rest. They are, in practice, always introduced by coercion and by suppressing the truth, because only the elites have the wisdom both to establish the new world, and to govern it wisely from the palaces they have deserved by being the Chosen.
Perhaps the reason that globalist progressives are so strangely wedded to militant Islam is that they share similar Messianic hopes, just as (according to Lafontaine) seventh century Persian Jews, Judeao-Nazarenes, and Arianised Arabs had enough in common to work together to capture Jerusalem – and enough differences for the coalition to collapse once their aims diverged. And so we see that the two main ideologies vying for control of the world are both messianic in their outlook, which includes being coercive in their methods, and exhibit surreality in their blindness to truth. A couple more examples may have more significance to us than appears on the surface.
One is the movement of some Jews (and a few Christian Zionists) to rebuild the Jerusalem temple, burn red heifers and reintroduce levitical worship. We seldom appreciate that there have been several attempts to do this since Herod’s temple was destroyed (and the true temple of Christ’s body set up), such as the one in the seventh century mentioned previously. All of them have been, in effect, attempts to fulfil perceived biblical prophecies, and so, as it were, to “force God’s hand” into sending his Messiah and returning the Kingdom to Israel (but see Acts 1:6-7). I guess the major danger of the present attempt is that, were it achieved, conflict with Islam and with its globalist allies might indeed trigger Armageddon. For some, that is probably the intention: human Messianism has little concern about spilled blood, and there are even secular globalists for whom a nuclear holocaust is a good way to reduce the population enough to usher in the Sustainable Utopia.
My last example was outlined in another recent post of mine. And that is the Dominionist fringe of some Christian Pentecostal cults, which has since before World War II fostered a doctrine of the Manifest Sons of God, always meaning primarily the self-appointed Apostolic leaders of the cults, who will by their Godlike supernatural endowments of power, usually helped along by guns and bombs, subdue the institutions of the world for Christ, thereby triggering his return. You will note that there is very little to choose between this idea and militant Islam, even in the perverted doctrines that such groups invent, or more often recycle from British Israelism or otherwise forgotten heretical sects.
The most obvious current iteration of this Manifest Sons of God or Joel’s Army teaching (though the full teaching is often not manifest to the rank-and file churchgoers) is the New Apostolic Reformation, exemplified by IHOPKC, Bethel and indeed the entire “prophetic movement” (and pretty much any church claiming to be led by an Apostle). Currently, it is half-obsured in the “Latest Thing” of this movement, the so-called “Communion Revival,” which intends to hold the largest Communion service ever in Washington DC, I believe in October, as part of the project to bring the “Seven Mountains” of culture under Christian domination. Its ostensible aim is to “bring everyone together,” which sounds great in the context of ideas like “Uniting the Kingdom” over here. But it is not what it seems.
The reason it is even worth discussing is that, although this wacky theology appears to have little traction in the worldwide Church, in fact the NAR has a huge foothold because it already dominates the worship music industry, through which Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation etc gain respectability. Even more significantly, these groups have a place as advisers in the White House, are involved in influential umbrella organisations like the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point, and as I pointed out in my previous post, were uncritically given a voice even at the Unite the Nation event. They will eventually fail, like all the false Messianic movements, but may well bring disrepute to the gospel, or even real harm, before they do so. Just remember what that unlikely seventh century Arab-Nazarene hybrid became.
But there is a real Messianic movement, and it is called biblical Christianity. If there’s one thing that distinguishes the real thing from every counterfeit, it is this: those truly chosen by God to usher in the new age are those who live out Jesus’s suffering servanthood, and wait patiently for the return of the bridegroom when the Father determines by his own authority. Its members don’t agree on everything, because there is no human authority qualified to impose surreality on them. But they compose a surprisingly large number from every tribe and nation. And somehow, they remain salt and light amid all the religious and secular messianism competing for power in this confused world of ours.
