SEEING THROUGH SMOKE Seeing Through Smoke Living the Truth in an Age of Deception Jon Garvey The Hump of the Camel , Devon, England 2020 SEEING THROUGH SMOKE Living the Truth in an Age of Deception Copyright © 2020 by Jon Garvey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews. For information: Jon Garvey, [email protected] Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible ® (NASB), Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation Used by permission. www.Lockman.org For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. Then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. For this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness. 2 Thessalonians 2:7–12. Contents Preface ix §1 The Father of Lies 1 1 On Conspiracy Theories Plots afoot 9 The spread of disillusion 11 The Great Deception 14 2 The Propaganda Century The growth of propaganda 19 How propaganda destroys societies 22 How propaganda destroys ideologies 26 Christian vulnerability to propaganda 28 3 Propaganda in Words Lies 31 Truth 36 Language 39 4 Propaganda beyond Words Personality 43 Emotional manipulation 45 Coercion 49 Confusion 52 5 Framing the Great Deception Considering the devil’s involvement 55 Where is antichrist? 61 §2 A Smörgåsbord of Deception 67 6 Modernist Deceptions Modernism in history 73 Scientism and the supernatural 75 The materialist mindset 79 7 Cultural Marxism The Long March through the Institutions 83 A case study 89 The great divide 93 8 The Postmodern Dimension The grand narrative of Postmodernism 97 Foucault, intersectionality and queer theory 102 Postmodernism and current issues 108 vii Contents 9 Confusing the Issue with Facts Science and truth 111 Silencing science 114 10 A Climate of Fear Politics with everything 125 The new religion 132 11 Follow the Money Unlikely bedfellows 141 Evil oil 146 Woke philanthropists 151 §3 The Pillar and Rampart of the Truth 155 12 Learning from History Continuity of care 161 Weathering war 162 Restoration repression 168 Survival strategy 172 13 Learning from the Apostles Paul’s pattern 177 Christian culture shock 183 14 Workshops for Transformation Understanding the problem 189 Varieties of solution 192 Swallowing a gyroscope 199 Bibliography 205 viii Preface ON 26 TH JUNE 2020, the New Culture Forum published a book by Marc Sidwell entitled, very much in keeping with the contents of this book, The Long March: How the left won the culture war and what to do about it . My first reaction on reading it (it can be downloaded free from their website 1) was that it so much overlaps what I spent much of last year writing that it renders my book largely unnecessary. This was actually rather reassuring as, when I had completed my draft manuscript and was considering finding a publisher, I sought to find endorsements from people in significant Christian leadership positions in the UK, since church leaders were my target audience. My first disappointment was in finding just how many Evangelical leaders I had known in college or had got to know since had already succumbed to the kind of ideas I warn about here. The second disap- pointment was in getting three refusals, on various grounds, from those I finally approached, whom I might have expected to be allies in bringing this information to uninformed and maybe confused church leaders. Bearing in mind the ease with which I was able to obtain en- dorsements for my two previous books, this seemed to me both to in- dicate what a battlefield this subject is, and perhaps (on a more per- sonal, spiritual, level) that this was not a door the Lord wanted me to keep pushing at that time. But Marc Sidwell’s book also highlighted another issue. Between the time he sent off his manuscript in, I believe, February of this year, and its publication yesterday, the situation in Britain and the world had been completely transformed by the SARS-CoV-2 crisis and its poten- tial aftermath, and the social and political unrest sweeping western 1 http://www.newcultureforum.org.uk/assets/books/The_Long_March.pdf ix Preface countries following the slaying of a black man, George Floyd, in Min- neapolis. Yet as Sidwell pointed out in an interview yesterday, those events do not outdate his book, but have actually served to make his claims about the reality of Neo-Marxism’s “Long March through the Institu- tions” obvious to more people. I think the same is true of my book, though even as I wrote it I knew that my ignorance about the outcome of a General Election on Brexit, the 2020 US election, and a number of other issues were likely to date the book prematurely. In the end, I think events just underscore its message. Last year I had difficulty getting the leadership team of my own church to understand what I was talking about, whereas in a conversation over tea with a casual secular acquaintance this week, she volunteered that there is clearly something “rotten in the state of Denmark,” and my brief sketch of the “long march” immediately joined many of the dots for her. The downside of the recent events is that they emphasise the subtitle of Sidwell’s book: that the left has already won the culture war, and that the question is now one of survival for those with a commitment to freedom or biblical values, rather than effective resistance or rever- sal of the trend. It will certainly not be a question of “church business as usual.” This is reflected in the surprising number of informed commentators who, on YouTube and elsewhere, are resigning them- selves to a bleak future of moral servitude, or alternatively to actual civil war. And all this without most people in the churches, or amongst the public, knowing there was such a culture war going on at all. Marc Sidwell writes as a churchgoing Christian, which influences his writing in, for example, citing the same work by Rod Dreher that I do in my later chapters. But he writes primarily for political conserva- tives, and his suggestions for action tend towards how individuals might take a leadership role in beginning the long and painful process of undoing the present cultural destruction – always provided that the x Preface unworkable utopian socialism being foisted on the world does not first create a social and economic crisis that brings a revolutionary rever- sal, such as we saw with the collapse of the Soviet System. That, he says, cannot be guaranteed within the foreseeable future, and things may get a lot worse first My authorial aim was different from Sidwell’s from the start: I wrote firstly to inform Christian leaders of the nature and massive scope of the deception enveloping us, and secondly to sketch out strategies that might help the churches survive and witness during the hard times. I also wrote against the background of the dominical and apostolic warnings of the final rebellion and deception associated with Anti- christ in the end times, making the injunctions of Jesus to be on our guard and to watch even more urgent than in former times of persecu- tion from without, and doctrinal error from within, the people of Christ. I wrote for the churches because it was as the Church, and not simply as individual believers, that Christ established his kingdom on earth. Although at present, it appears that most church leaders see neither the nature nor the urgency of the problem, it is as a body that we are commissioned to testify to Christ in the world. There have been times in history when individual Christians in exile, or even in prison, have kept the faith alive, and even influenced events by their suffering or writing. There have also, as Sidwell points out, been many occasions where believers who happen to be close to the reins of power have brought about transformations of society. He names modern individuals, but all Bible readers will be familiar with characters like Daniel, trained up for political leadership from youth, or Esther, thrust into being the woman for the hour unexpectedly. But the churches as a whole cannot retreat to the desert, and nor will they wield the levers of power in an anti-Christian age. Sometimes in history, as in pre-war Nazi Germany, most of the churches have failed to rise to the challenges of the time. At other times, their faithful, suf- fering, witness has been a catalyst for change: it was the willing suf- Preface fering and faithfulness of Christians that most inspired Alexandr Sol- zhenitsyn in his incarceration in the Gulag, and it was arguably the publication of his Gulag Archipelago that made the collapse of the Eastern bloc inevitable. It is important to remember that the Church was designed by its Lord for such times.