There were many different issues and moods amongst both crowds and speakers at the London Free Speech Festival yesterday. The most revolutionary voice was probably that of Elon Musk, whose message was that we probably don’t have another four years to replace this government (and the Uniparty structures around it) before too much damage has been done to personal freedoms and the economy. People in sleepy villages (like mine) need to wake up, he said, and act to bring about such change. It’s difficult to interpret that in any other way than as a call to revolution.
But that depends on your definition of revolution. The Antifa crowd like to doom-monger the collapse of all that is not Nazi hate at the hands of “flag brandishing” (to quote the Telegraph) violent skinhead thugs. And otherwise respectable sceptics like to fantasise images of lamp-posts suspending the whole political class. But actually, the dissatisfied English working class and their allies are not particularly susceptible to Bolshevik-style rabble rousing, as the whole character and makeup of yesterday’s protest demonstrated.
I’ll leave aside the small outbreak of violence, whose instigators and participants are far from clear – it was masked Antifa protestors who were filmed throwing stuff at retreating (!) police officers on Westminster Bridge. But even if Free-Speech ruffians were involved, it was a tiny faction, despite dominating the state-curated headlines of the Mail and the Telegraph, as usual ineffectively downplaying the event.
What is more plausible as a regime-change model than 1789 or 1917 is the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia, a genuine “colour revolution” in which the sheer pressure of peaceful protest gave the autocratic Communists no remaining base from which to rule. Revolts in the so-called Democratic West have a slightly different problem, in that they do not face quite the same totalitarian cliques, but rather uniparties wedded to ideologically captured institutions and international structures like the EU. In other words, many thousands of people, and not just a few tens or hundreds, have to be induced to resign. But once a people refuses to be ruled, resign they must.
In the Velvet Revolution itself, and in some other transitions of power in the old Eastern bloc, one factor that kept the revolutions peaceful was the close involvement of the churches, or some of them. And something of that involvement was very evident amongst the marchers, and on the stage, yesterday. Apart from the myriad crosses on national flags (whose Christian symbolism one speaker pointed out to applause), there was a good number of actual wooden ones, “Jesus is King” banners, dog-collars and other signs that marchers were there to further Christ’s liberation, and not simply Tommy Robinson’s. And it was Tommy who invited Christians to speak, sing and pray.
The murder of Charlie Kirk, and the spiritual response to it in America, reminds us that millions of Christians, both committed and cultural, have been involved in the MAGA movement, and not simply the Christian Nationalist megachurch leaders influencing the White House. As long as these ordinary Americans see themselves as preserving the traditional values of Christ in family, business and state, the likelihood of their leader and figurehead, President Trump, becoming another Stalin is vanishingly improbable. I suspect that here, as there, an increasing number of genuine Christians will side with “the revolution” rather than with the globalist Establishment. It does appear that the current polarisation of society is along “not peace, but the sword” variety, that is good v. evil. But Jesus’s admonition to Peter to put down his sword predominates in Christian political instincts.
The changes in America have been wrought through their existing political system, radical though the present administration’s Augean Stable clearout has been. Over here the situation is less tidy. There are grave doubts amongst the grass-roots dissidents that PM-in-waiting Nigel Farage has the qualities to become an English Trump, and he himself stubbornly disowns the hundreds of thousands, or more, who marched yesterday, as “that lot.” Consequently, Advance leader Ben Habib was the only British politician, and not an MP at that, who spoke, and gained the crowd’s support… but probably not the nation’s votes. So the probable course of future events is by no means obvious, and I don’t intend to try to predict it here.
The Kingdom of God is not political, and yet Christians have seldom stood aloof from the political process, and that seems to be legitimate discipleship unless you’re a Mennonite or a JW. As I have said, Christian opposition to unjust regimes has facilitated, and often tempered, the overthrow of many of them. My own church was founded, to a large extent, by Baptist soldiers actively engaged in overthrowing Charles 1. It seems to me that, usually, such radical political activity is ethical, rather than theocratic.
Yesterday, for example, it was clear that many of the Populist leaders from Europe who spoke see how central Christianity is to their nations, and are not simply taking the cross as an anti-Islamic emblem. Yet whilst Catholic, Evangelical or other traditions inform their efforts, they are not seeking to impose a theocracy, which is why they expressed such solidarity with historically Protestant England yesterday. And remember that whilst Elon Musk too sees Christianity as essential, his own dream is of a free technocracy, in which the trivial religious goal is simply playing with space-ships to Mars.
I say theocracy is not the name of the game, but there did seem to be one exception yesterday. The church leader who brought a team from Australia and New Zealand, and spoke quote early on after his cronies performed a Haka to intimidate Mr Starmer (probably already intimated sufficiently at present!), spoke about the need not only to repatriate illegal immigrants, but to keep non-Christians out of public office, and actually to ban the building of mosques, temples (and presumably synagogues), only Christian churches being permitted in his utopia. Now, he spoke more strongly than any other speaker about the Lordship of Jesus, but my strong impression, though I have not researched him or his church, is that he is a proponent of the Seven Mountain Mandate Dominianism propounded by the New Apostolic Reformation in America and elsewhere. That this is, in general, where his theology is coming from, was confirmed by the fact that he closed not with a prayer, but with a prayer declaration or decree that would have done Kenneth Copeland proud.
The Seven Mountain ideology, like so much else that is wrong in Pentecostalism, has developed out of cults like that of William Branham, which also had an idea of “Manifest Sons of God” uniquely qualified to rule the world. It is linked to the “Fivefold Ministry” model of the NAR which means, in effect, that self-appointed Apostles get to run the world, rather than equally narcissistic WEF guys. The idea is that the “seven mountains” of culture (a list I forget, but which includes everything really) should be wrested back from Satan, if necessary by force, to prepare the world for Jesus’s return. In other words it is the mirror-image both of Revolutionary Communism and Gramsci’s Long March through the Institutions. And it is also pretty much identical with Islam, only within that ideology a Caliph gets to usher in the reign of the Mahdi. In all cases you end up with a tyranny.
It is the fact that proponents of this view appear to have gained great influence in the White House that most worries Christians who see the future return of Christ, not a militant religious movement, as the real hope of the world. In fact it is in part the non-utopianism of true Christianity that helps to moderate regime changes. Christians look to achieve improved societies, not perfect ones, in the present age.
Fortunately, present day Apostles are too narcissistic to be successful psychopathic dictators. Hitler or Mao would eat them for breakfast. Even a cult like Bethel only succeeds in influencing churches by appearing more successful than it is. In fact, like most cults, it has a very high turnover of actual members, who become disillusioned, or burned-out, after a while. Christianity on the ground may well be pretty deficient, but most Christians have no truck with extremism, and so neither America nor Britain are likely to end up as The Handmaid’s Tale.
Nevertheless, as we contemplate all the external forces lined up against those longing for change, we need to be aware that perhaps the most damaging religious force within Musk’s revolution is Dominionism, if it is not kept at arm’s length.
So Tommy Robinson would be well advised to procure a long spoon.
