On WorldNetDaily (WND), Ellis Washington shows us how a first-century religious heresy is intimately connected to twenty-first-century politics:

Regarding American liberalism, pick any utopian socialist – from Woodrow Wilson, FDR, LBJ, Clinton, Carter, Obama, to the useful idiots of atheism, feminism, gay rights, civil-rights activists, the labor and teachers’ unions – and you will find a person who thinks his knowledge base (politics) is superior to virtue; that the Bible is a collection of myths that isn’t to be taken literally; that moral relativism holds that all religions lead to “god” and that no religion is better (or worse) than any other; that separation of church and state is the singular dogma of liberalism; that there are no miracles, God or need for a savior. The State is god, and god is the State. The state under socialism will give everyone heaven (utopia) on earth through cradle-to-grave care. Private property, liberty and independent man are all relics of a bygone era …. Doesn’t the ancient cult of Gnosticism, which systematically sought to pervert and denigrate Christianity, sound strangely similar to modern political liberalism, which, since the Enlightenment Age, systematically sought to pervert and eliminate Christianity from the marketplace of ideas?

Washington cites Benjamin Wiker’s new book 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read. Wiker, in turn, cites Eric Voegelin as the individual who connected the dots between the ancient cult and modern liberal-progressivism (a.k.a. socialism, fascism, communism):

Voegelin argues that we cannot properly understand the epically destructive character of 20th–century utopianism unless we understand the nature of a particular, ancient Christian heresy, Gnosticism. For Voegelin, Gnosticism defines the nature of modernity, or, more exactly, of a particular virulent and destructive strain of modern thought, a strain that includes liberalism, Marxism and National Socialism.

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Resources:

Ellis Washington’s WND article. His WorldNetDaily archive is here.

Benjamin Wiker’s 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read.

Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics. Also available in an omnibus edition, Modernity Without Restraint.

—Mike Gray