War in Heaven, War on Earth
By Maurine Proctor
The following is an essay I wrote when many came together to form the Family Leader Network and Foundation. Though this organization is for all — and not just for Latter-day Saints — I sought to define why it was so important to awake and arise to be engaged in the cultural war of our time and defend family, faith and freedom in the public square. You can subscribe to the Family Leader updates by clicking here. If you wish to volunteer to help in your state send an email to rkbriggs@verizon.net with your name, contact information, and the skills that you would like to offer. Many good people and organizations are involved in various ways to stand against the moral erosion of our time, and we salute them all. This essay was my personal expression of why it mattered to me to get involved.
Past the dimmest edge of memory, in a time beyond time, we were all involved in a War in Heaven. It was a great clashing of ideas with a deadly outcome, for we understand that a third part of the hosts of heavens were lost, banished, their inheritance turned to ashes.
What we sometimes forget is that this epic battle wasn’t a war waged and finally won at that point. It was the first skirmish in a longer war. We learn in Revelation that the scene of the battle was just moved. Where? “And… Satan, which deceiveth the whole world was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast with him” (12:9).
The War in Heaven became the War on Earth.
Since the War in Heaven was a battle for the mind and heart with a collision of certain ideas and philosophies, we can be certain that it is the same ideas and philosophies that are challenged and eroded here.
The challenge was about the sovereignty of God. Those who opposed him wanted to usurp his place, upend his laws and the order of things, substituting the divine with their own plan.
Moral agency with its risks would be replaced by coerced virtue — the very meaning of virtue redefined by the insurgents. God would be replaced by man as the standard of things. (“Ye shall be as gods” Satan promised.) All would be saved (equality without merit or dependence on God.) Undergirding all was the rejection of family, of God as father and benefactor.
Arch Madsen said,
At this moment, the most fierce and destructive ideological war in all human history is being fought and is escalating hourly. We are waging it with the sharpest and most powerful communications ever produced. What is this struggle? It is clearly a continuation of the war in heaven — in dimensions far beyond anything mortal man has ever before experienced.
God would have us understand truth and be able to make our choices based on enlightenment, while Satan seeks to destroy us with lies and illusion. This battle has produced more casualties, more suffering, more destruction of property than all physical warfare since time began.
We are bombarded by messages, taught and shaped by images broadcast to us. The earth is swept by signals that convey ideas to the minds of all people in a single stroke. But with all this technology and communication, truth is not better or more powerfully conveyed or understood. [i]
In fact, quite the opposite. While the whole world listens, the rebel’s doctrine from the war in heaven undergirds the messages, like the plumbing that runs beneath a neighborhood. It may often be invisible, but it is everywhere.
God’s Sovereignty Challenged
The worldly philosophies sound familiar, the mutiny against God is the same. Now the sovereignty of God is not just challenged, he is declared persona non grata. He died, he didn’t exist, he never was. Don’t mention his name in the marketplace of ideas or you are branded, dismissed as naďve, unsophisticated. You may be sued.
Scripture is not a message from our Creator who is eager to teach us who we are and what makes nations rise and fall. It is not a trusted operating manual for existence, but a collection of myths from desert poets.
Morality is not embraced, but attacked as self-righteous, bigoted or even hateful. We have been taught to be wary of hierarchy — that one set of behaviors or beliefs could be superior to another. We have been told it is judgmental to discern one philosophy as healthy and life-giving and another as destructive.
No longer can we make appeals to “right and wrong.”
What’s surprising is how readily we have accommodated ourselves in our discourse to the rules laid down by those who hate what we believe. We have collapsed before their insistence about how the debate should be structured. Don’t admit that you are religious or that your concerns come from a religious perspective. Don’t claim that all lifestyles and all choices are not created equal.
The irony for a religious people is that we are not allowed to bring God or his commandments into any debate, but once we play by these rules and leave God out, we have already lost. We have acknowledged that materialists get to set the terms.
It is amazing how often religious people are told not to thrust their lifestyle on others, when in fact, it is religion that has been in the retreat for some time.
Most scholars agree that the cultural war that is raging comes down to this: What we think about God influences everything else. The essence of the culture war is the great rift over the issue of God. That is why the secularists so often rage with fuming hostility against religion or the mention of God in society, why lawsuits are mounted against Ten Commandment plaques or the words “under God” in America’s Pledge of Allegiance.
That is why they will not be happy until every last vestige of God and his sovereignty is annihilated with enthusiasm and persistence. Not until God is utterly dethroned are they completely free to create a new order.
Deadening Materialism
In our public discourse we have succumbed to a materialism that suffocates the human spirit. By this we don’t mean the tendency toward consumerism and greed, though that is a symptom of a materialistic worldview. It is instead a mindset that sees matter as the only true reality and refuses to recognize as genuine knowledge anything that cannot be derived by scientific experiment and scientific method. That suggests that everything else has no legitimacy.
Only arguments backed by studies can be taken as credible. The intangibles — love, beauty, truth, spirituality, passion, salvation — are cast aside like relics of a superstitious past. These are merely subjective notions imposed upon a world of atoms and empty spaces where such concepts, strictly speaking, have no actual existence.
As Daniel Peterson and William Hamblin describe it, “Morality becomes relative. (Atoms don’t care one way or the other.) Personality is nothing more than a fleeting by-product of biochemical interactions. There is no real meaning in a universe indifferent to human hopes and dreams, and all will end with our personal deaths and, ultimately, with the death of the universe itself.” [ii]
This mindset accomplishes what the rebels in the War in Heaven set out to do — dethrone God and his troubling laws that demand effort, progress, growth, risk, beauty, creativity and faith — in short all that is most excellent about the human soul. .
Those who follow the Judeo-Christian tradition that has shaped Western culture ask “Why am I here? What is life’s purpose? What is true? What is right for me to do?” Modern materialists ask, “How does it work? What controls behavior? How can I get what I want?
Assumptions Influence Choice
If we descended from God, we have one set of expectations and laws to follow, if we merely arose from primeval sludge, the most evolved of the animals, we have quite another. Our core assumptions affect every behavior and every institution.
In sexuality, if man is an animal, he has nothing to do but satisfy his instincts. He has no need to create a family, to go about the difficult work of nurturing others over the long haul and attaching himself to one woman. What, in fact, would prohibit any sexual activity — however out of bounds? What standard or law should stop pornography?
The notion of right and wrong over this important aspect of life disappears and is replaced, instead, with the need to avoid frustration through egoistic self-expression. Materialistic society, relieved of any consideration of morality, becomes a slippery slope to the worst kind of debauchery — because what’s to stop it? What law or rule can we appeal to when the giver of laws is dethroned?
We invite sexual anarchy, misery, and the complete dissolution of the family when we give up on God and his laws.
Consider issues of the sanctity of life. If we are merely a bundle of atoms, a bit of protoplasm, a piece of expendable meat, what’s to say we shouldn’t abort babies or design them to meet our needs, or end life when it no longer is convenient for us? Without a sense of the divine, we have no place to stop in our tinkering with biology. We cannot appeal to morality to restrain us.
In a society that has eliminated the divine and has thrown away Judeo-Christian tradition, who’s to say that humans are more important or special than animals? Who is to balance their competing claims? A teenager was given the ethical question that if her family dog and another person were both drowning, who would she save? She didn’t know.
What’s more in the materialistic mindset, evil ceases to exist. People are not seen as creative agents, the product of their choices, but are determined by their environment. Thus, the day after the terrorists struck and demolished the World Trade Towers, killing nearly three thousand, a college teacher asked her students if the act was evil. The students couldn’t say.
Tolerance
Once society was structured around the belief that right and wrong are absolute, unchanging, and that these laws are communicated to men and women by God. This view of truth and morality formed the basis for much of Western civilization.
But as David F. Wells said, “A certainty about the existence, character and purposes of God — a certainty about his truth — that seems to have faded in the bright light of the modern world. They were convinced that God’s revelation, of which they were the vehicles and custodians, was true. True in an absolute sense. It was not merely true to them; it was not merely true in their time; it was not true approximately. What God has given was true universally, absolutely and enduringly.” [iii]
In contrast, relativism is the belief that man is the author of truth; one man cannot tell another man what is true for him. Truth is individually defined not externally existent. To the relativist, one man’s truth is just that — one man’s truth; it can be nothing more, unless agreed upon by society or enforced by law.
The catch phrase for the relativist to stop cold any conversation about the nature of things is, “That’s only your opinion.”
In our relativistic world, tolerance is the crowning virtue and diversity the highest aim. All ethical views are created equal. “I don’t judge you, you don’t judge me. Neither of us has to feel bad.” Appealing to our lowest natures, this is not only a bleak recipe for stagnation of the human spirit, but also the groundwork for chaos. Here there are no higher claims upon our spirit, no self-discipline or growth demanded.
“If there were no eternal truths, to what principles would mortals look for guidance?” asked Elder Neal A. Maxwell. “If not accountable to God, to whom are we ultimately accountable? Furthermore, if nothing is ever really wrong, then no one is ever really responsible. If there are no fixed boundaries, then there cannot be any excesses. Why should we be surprised, then, at so many disturbing outcomes, including the lack of community, when every man does that which is ‘right in his own eyes’ [iv] and seeks not the righteousness of the Lord but instead walks ‘in his own way.’ [v] ?” [vi]
Jim Birrell noted, “Once tolerance is claimed as the highest virtue, all others fall away. Tolerance for the right things in the right amounts is a virtue. No decent or democratic society can exist without it. To respect individuals you disagree with is Christian; however, to tolerate evil as a Christian drains society of virtue. C.S. Lewis made clear the nature of evil — it is predatory; it will devour virtue. And when there is nothing of virtue remaining, it will devour itself.” [vii]
Who then prospers in this relativistic world? How do we settle things when two claims about issues of value clash? It is not by an appeal to a higher law or by an appeal to right and wrong. Instead, the winner is the one with the most power to wield, the most will, perhaps the most money. Raw tyranny becomes a dominant feature of society, power forces that take it upon themselves to dictate truth for everyone else.
This idea is familiar to Latter-day Saints in the figure of Korihor, called the anti-Christ. Following the pattern of the War in Heaven, first he sought to set aside Christ, saying, “Ye do not know that there shall be a Christ.” [viii] Next, he trampled and belittled their morality, their understanding that absolute truth existed, calling it being “led away… after the foolish traditions of your fathers.” [ix] He claimed that he wanted to liberate the people from bondage to their traditions, a familiar phrase.
Of course, he had an alternative — a substitute morality. It was raw will, the domination of the fittest, “every man fared in this life according to the management of the creature; therefore every man prospered according to his genius, and that every man conquered according to his strength; and whatsoever a man did was no crime.” [x]
Here lies
the hidden and dirty secret of a morally relative viewpoint. Once the
sense of morality and right and wrong have been abandoned, people are
ripe to be dominated by others exercising sheer will. If whatever a
man does is no crime, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
A Substitute
We are reminded that the aim of the War
in Heaven was not only to dethrone God, but also substitute his plan
for another more pleasing to the rebels. They hoped to be “as God”
on their own terms. They had a new religion, a new idea, a new system
of things to replace God’s laws. It was a plan based on safety, seeming
equality in that all would be saved.
The rebels had a plan for creating what they claimed was utopia.
So, as we have watched the Judeo-Christian tradition trampled and marginalized, we can assume that there is a similar pattern. The battle of ideas is not between religion on the one hand and bland neutrality on the other. It is between religion as exemplified by the Judeo-Christian tradition and another religion. It is not called a religion, but it has every characteristic.
Call that other religion Political Correctness or the New Age or merely the assumptions of the cultural elite, but it is a movement and an ordered system of thought. It inspires enthusiasm and blind acceptance of its tenets. It begins with many of the assumptions of relativism, but moves on from there to be dictatorial. It desires the destruction of Western civilization as we once knew it.
Though this religion is hard to label, it is easy to see. In towns and cities, in schools at all levels, in the media, in large foundations, and in the military, standards derived from the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights have been replaced by the dictates of this new religion. All we need to know to realize its importance is to listen to the news. It is better to break a commandment than be politically incorrect. If an actor slept with several women, that would be no problem, if he made a movie about religion, he may be banned from Hollywood.
The goal of this new moral vision is “further emancipation of the human spirit.”
“Further emancipation of the human spirit” sounds good, until we note that is Korihor’s appeal as well. “I will make you free,” goes the chant as you are put in bonds. “Emancipation of the human spirit” is a code phrase for the culture war, a revolution that actively seeks to change and demolish our values. The individual is to be liberated from his or her ties to the family, tradition, religion and cultural values.
Only when these things are diminished and then swept away will this PC religion/movement be able to establish its vision of utopia. Here is the clue to the truth of this. All ideas, religions, cultures and societies are the same as all others through the eyes of the cultural elite, but “the Western tradition with its Judeo-Christian foundation is the repository of all evil and should be replaced with something that grants no superiority to any idea, culture or philosophy — except, of course, PC.” [xi]
The cultural elite who embrace this new order will be tolerant of everyone except the religious for whom they often express disdain. Their technique for all of those who do not comply or conform is vilification and intimidation. This, of course, means the death of the free exchange of ideas. Some subjects cannot be discussed or debated. We have become a muzzled generation who can shout obscene things on television but can’t mention our feelings about Christ at Christmas in school.
How ironic that this new morality mandates charity, but punishes student study of the Lord of Charity; that it makes legal blasphemy, vulgarity and obscenity (things offensive to people of all faiths), but outlaws “hate” speech that offends favored groups and their political issues.
How ironic that it legalizes pornography, even daring to call it ‘art,” despite its offensiveness and destructiveness to women, marriage, families, and little children, but outlaws the posting of the Ten Commandments for its lack of ‘sensitivity’ to people of no faith.
Christian charity persuades; the new “virtue” demands. Christian morality hates the sin but loves the sinner; the new morality loves the sin itself, legalizes it, sees to it that it is taught in our schools as normal, happy, healthy and then places the sinner on a pedestal, proclaiming him or her the beau ideal of progressiveness, courage and irreverence, the kind of a person or group who deserves special protections and privileges.
All of this, of course, is accomplished while the devotees of the new order claim the moral high ground. The religious tradition is destroyed on the grounds of social justice, tolerance, love, and human compassion. Their new system, they claim, offers perfection, paradise and harmony on earth — the same ideas that were trumpeted in that earlier war before this world was.
As Diane Alden said, “The world they see is a utopia where tolerance will be mandated, and right and wrong will depend on what those ‘enlightened’ totalitarians decide.” [xii]
It creates a world that is on the one hand over-regulated and on the other lawless. This is not something that happens all at once or in a dramatic flash. If it did, we might arise. Instead our freedoms and moral climate are lost piecemeal and incrementally, while our heads are turned and we are doing something else.
A Sobering Time
Thus, this is a sobering time, when as the scriptures remind us, “all things shall be in commotion,” [xiii] a time President Boyd K. Packer described as “days of great spiritual danger for this people.” [xiv] We have seen progress in some areas; our technology continues to thrust ahead, science has made some resounding discoveries and many of us are materially well-off, but these mask a deeper malaise and emptiness. We sense that round and round in the turning world, the center is not holding.
As a society, we are in a spiral downward, a decline in our values and morality that is rushing along at a startling pace. We have read in the Book of Mormon of cultures that deteriorated in a matter of years, at a ghastly momentum, and have not fully understood how this could happen — until we have observed our own world lurch and dive.
It is not just that pornography is thrust at us at an ever more aggressive pace, that media are corrosive and violent. It is not just that marriages are failing and religion is marginalized and beaten out of the public square. It is not only that our children are rebellious and talk back, that they are taught the intricacies of sexual involvement in the youngest grades or that they hide in back corners and take drugs. These are all symptoms of something deeper.
Some would suggest that our problems are political — that if we can only get the right people elected we’ll see a turnaround. Some see our problems as cultural — the erosion of our souls through the constant intake of media rot. Certainly, both political and cultural problems must be addressed. Yet at the heart of it all is a spiritual darkness that we have allowed to creep into our world and dominate our discussion and our social institutions.
God-fearing people haven’t resisted very much as the new culture of liberal secularism has triumphed over their world view. “Resistance,” said Robert H. Bork, “has been mild, disorganized and ineffective.” [xv] Christians fell asleep and the world changed.
In a dismal moment, Paul Weyrich said, “I believe that we have probably lost the culture war… in terms of society in general we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important…I know that what we have been doing for thirty years hasn’t worked, that while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism. We need to take another tack, find a different strategy.” [xvi]
It is time to awaken and reclaim our world. Time to cast our lines deep to find the new strategies and personal spirituality that can help win this new battle for the souls of men.
Can we do it? The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Tomorrow: The Stakes in the War
[i] Madsen, Arch “The Battle of the Mind”, Meridian Magazine.
[ii] Peterson, Daniel and Hamblin, William “A Classic Book on Religion” Meridian Magazine
[iii] Wells, David F. (1993) No Place for Truthi. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishings
[iv] Judg. 17:6, Judg. 21:25)
[v] D&C 1:16
[vi] Maxwell, Neal A. “Take Especial Care of Your Family” Ensign May 1994
[vii] Birrell, James R. “Relativism and the New Meaning of Tolerance in America’s Culture Wars”, Meridian Magazine
[viii] Alma 30:26
[ix] Alma 30:27
[x] Alma 30:17
[xi] Diane Alden “PC — The Rise of the Religion of the New World Order” NewsMax.com Oct. 30, 2000
[xii] Ibid.
[xiii] D&C 88:91
[xiv] Address to J.R. Clark Law Society, Feb. 28, 2004
[xv] Robert H. Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, (New York: Regan Books) p. 7
[xvi] Weyrich, Paul, An Open Letter to the Conservative Movement, February 16, 1999