I write as a world Christian. What do I mean by that? As citizens of America,2 we should be proud of our country’s heritage. As patriots, we should never shy away from defending our God-given freedoms. As followers of Christ, we should be willing to defend the Gospel and the human rights of our neighbors even to the point of persecution, prison, and even death. We should also realize that we are called to be “witnesses … to all nations” (Luke 24:44-49). The Great Commission is a command to reach the nations with the Gospel (Matthew 28:16-20). We do that by reaching individuals with the good news, but the promise of salvation is to “all nations.” This literally means “all people groups.” We are to establish Christian families, churches, cultural and ethnic institutions, and entire Christian civilizations throughout the world.
Unless we think preaching includes only a tiny subset of the Gospel, we will see in Matthew 28:19 that this includes the command to “make disciples of all the nations … teaching them to follow all that I commanded you.” Preaching a Gospel that does not include teaching the nations to obey all that God’s Word commands is a truncated Gospel. This full-orbed proclamation is the work we are called to accomplish prior to the Second Coming of Christ. “And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come” (Matthew 24:14, emphasis added). Only when the task is fulfilled will the Second Coming of Jesus Christ bring an end to history. We, the Church, have been given the task, and the means and the ability to fulfill it. Salvation is by grace through faith. We are justified by faith and not by works, but this is a salvation that comes with works for us to perform according to God’s will.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10).
While salvation is personal, it is not only personal. I came to realize this when I was a college student. I was converted to Christ as part of an outreach to young people in a small evangelical church plant in the heart of downtown Boston. As a young Christian, I planned to become a teacher and work as a “tentmaker”3 (Acts 4:34-37) in a foreign country by teaching English as a second language while serving the needs of a local church. While this did not happen exactly as I planned, I soon found myself working with Christian media through The Forerunner, a Christian worldview newspaper; Predvestnik, a Russian language publication I founded in Kiev, Ukraine in 1991; and several publications for students in China, Latin America and South Africa.
At that time, shifts of tectonic proportions were taking place in formerly communist countries and the so-called Third World. I began to see that similar dramatic changes must soon occur in our own nation as well. Our nation can either move forward in its current position of agnostic secularism and attempt to secure our status militarily and economically as the most powerful nation in the world; or we can reclaim the Christian heritage of our Puritan beginnings and strive to rebuild America as an example of strength and prosperity on the ideals of the biblical law and government.
What will this mean in the scope of history?
We are beginning to see a new world emerge, an age of rising Christian civilizations, not just in the West, but throughout the whole world. We must seek to understand how we as a unique American Christian civilization fit into the purposes of God in our generation. As one anonymous dissident in the time of the Soviet Union put it, “Christianity is the fermenting agent, the ‘yeast of the world,’ causing history to rise like dough in a trough, not only in the past but in the future as well. Christianity alone possesses enough motive force gradually to inspire and transform our world.”4
Among the civilization states, we will see a time when the Gospel will leaven the nations without the distractions of continual wars. This will be an era of multipolar civilizations, many of them modeled on Christian principles. All forms of coercive globalism will be defeated. This will lead to greater peace and freedom within these Great Spaces, not through politics, but through shared cultural identity. In a Christian civilization, it is the love of Jesus Christ that unites us.
My geopolitical perspective changed dramatically in 2020. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the insane US presidential election, and our government’s response to a growing number world conflicts, I began to realize that Western leaders react to crisis after crisis, but most do not have a plan to foster peace. It is as though they do not even realize the huge changes that have taken place in the world in the past 30 years. America is not ready to assume a role of leadership in the new multipolar reality. President Biden referred to the changing world order in a 2022 a speech by saying, “We have to be in control.”5
Has any US president ever been so out of touch with reality?
At the same time, Christians can take heart that evangelism is exploding in countries such as Iran, Russia and China. There is a world awakening throughout the Global South as well. Rather than prepare for war with these nations, America should be concerned with reclaiming our own Christian civilization and letting our light shine as a city on a hill that shines its light for all the world to see (Matthew 5:14).
As Christians, we understand that our faith is not merely a mental assent, but rather “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:2-3). Faith is hope turned into sight. It will take great faith to reclaim our Christian civilization. To do so, we must self-consciously begin to recover the faith and traditions of our ancestors. We must realize that salvation is not simply a ticket to heaven “in the sweet by and by.” Rather, “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:28). This kingdom is powerfully expressed “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10).
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to the place which he would receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:8-10).
We are to be occupied with seeking the kingdom of heaven on earth. On this spiritual path, Christians of past centuries have discovered political, economic and societal systems that approximate the principles of Christ’s kingdom. However imperfectly, we are always reforming and looking for a better system. We should never imagine that we have arrived at “The End of History.” Both the Church and Christian nations ruled by God’s laws and principles are yet in their infancy. We still seek for the undiscovered country – the City of God.
I have always believed that Jesus is the King of the nations. However, in the past few years, I’ve become more aware that America needs another Great Awakening much more than political reform. There must first be a revival of love for one another. We must tear down the dividing walls that are destroying us as a nation. Then we must see the entire world as God sees it, not as a place fraught with nations who are the “enemies of freedom,” but rather with the vision painted by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.6
In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the leveling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.7
2 Throughout this book, I use “America,” the “US,” or the “USA” to also describe the Western world, especially nations with a Christian heritage that have received blessings of Liberty from God, but have exchanged our birthright for the “mess of pottage” offered by Western Liberalism (Genesis 25:29-34).
3 According to this passage, the Apostle Paul and his companions did not collect money from churches on their missionary thrusts to the nations of the Roman Empire. They worked to support themselves while helping to establish the young churches. A “tentmaker” is thought to be any kind of leather worker.
4 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ed., From Under The Rubble, Little, Brown & Company, Boston,
1975, 146-147.
5 Joseph Biden, President of the United States Speech, Troy, Alabama, 5/3/2022.
6 Throughout this book I use the Russian transliteration of “Aleksandr” instead of the western form of “Alexander” for the first names of both Dugin and Solzhenitsyn.
7 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Nobel Literature Prize Speech,” 1970.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1970/solzhenitsyn/lecture/.
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