Church of the CIA

Yep, it’s a nifty click-bait title. Actually it’s much more subtle than that, and I’ll do my best to explain what I see.

The folks who actually hold the effective reins of power in this world don’t care who wins the wars, so long as the wars continue. It won’t matter what we suppose the particular plans to be, because that isn’t likely to have much effect on what God wants from you and I. Rather, we can characterize the net result of what these plutocrats do. However, we can generalize plans and motives as the obvious lust for worldly wealth and power. These folks feel entitled to it, and have no problem with using us as toys and tools to get those things. It’s not too hard to understand the dehumanizing influence of self-indulgence; we see it daily on a much smaller scale.

So the recent trends in recorded history have taught these plutocrats that constant warfare is the single optimum plan for getting what they want. Whatever vision they pursue, whatever god they serve, it boils down to the keeping war alive and making sure they aren’t the ones having to fight and die.

Further, the religion taught here on this blog (Radix Fidem) assumes God is still the Master of Creation and all of this stuff is really His problem. He has not called a one of us to be directly involved, and if you try to understand how His Son did things from the proper context of God’s wider revelation, you realize His Son said it was not His concern, either. We don’t fix this world; we let it follow the course God has established and maintains for fools who reject His truth. Getting involved in political activism is a rejection of His calling on us. But the Son definitely warned us to pay attention and be aware as much as the Father allows us to see what’s going on — wise as serpents and harmless as doves is the symbolic image He used.

On my way to reaching this sense of understanding, I committed myself to lots of things that others had told me were the revelation of God. Among those things was serving in the US Army and striving to serve as pastor in any of a number of Southern Baptist churches (for the most part). I was exposed to a lot of stuff that served as both a filter and gateway to serving among the elite of each different context where I endeavored to serve. Seems folks who considered themselves the elite sometimes thought I was a good candidate for their imaginary elite-ness. However, there was always this same underlying theme blending together religion and warfare. I was supposed to have an unquestioned conviction that this was God’s will.

As I look back on those many influences trying to drive me into that folly, I see some interesting threads. Way back during the Cold War, when communism was still the Big Bogeyman of the day, there was already a thread at work to replace it, a new team forming in the locker room. The plutocrats could see that their construct — the “Communist Threat” — was already dying as far as their uses were concerned, and it was past time to come up with the new one. So among the most serious scholarly commentary among my co-religionists from those days came warnings that the next big serious threat to life, liberty and the gospel was Islam. While you can find that kind of ominous preaching going way back in Church History, this was something different. It was written as propaganda, some knowingly so. The upper ranks of church commentariat had been infiltrated by the CIA. Meanwhile, the rest of the CIA and friends were doing their best to turn latent Islamic fervor into something that could be manipulated for their ends.

Maybe you’ve read studies or watched videos that explained how the CIA trained and guided those who tortured serious Islamic scholars in various countries, for instance. Maybe you know that Islam has long been divided between two major partisan branches, with several rather substantial sub-branches and so forth. It’s not so much that I pretend the CIA simply created terrorist tendencies ex nihilo, but that they managed to steer some of the natural tendencies until we now have a fairly powerful treat from a particular kind of Islamic fervor. Whether that fervor is inherent in Islam is not the point; the CIA and various cooperating agencies are making sure that fervor is well armed and supplied with the means to cause trouble.

I could never tell this to my former associates among the Southern Baptists or US military. This is contrary to their orthodoxy. Why, who could imagine the US government’s own agents would try to kill our troops? Yes, Western intelligence operatives have been caught dressed in Arabic garb and car bombs headed toward Western military positions. Yes, lots of folks who escaped the system and had very interesting stories to tell managed to die or disappear in highly questionable circumstances. None of that is insider information; you can hunt it down among sources you may or may not trust.

I can’t begin to outline how many layers and types of useful idiots there are between us ordinary folks and the plutocrats, but it’s a really big problem that they keep blinding most of humanity. Instead, I’ll warn you not to take the bait and promote the idea the ISIS is anything but a Western intelligence psychological warfare operation writ large. Keep your eye out for threats from folks who claim Islam as the excuse for making trouble, but don’t buy the hype.

Nor is this really just a warning about the CIA. You can find servants of the various brands of plutocrat propaganda in just about every existing agency because they’ve worked so hard to infiltrate everything. If it’s organized enough to have a budget, it’s probably compromised. You do know, I suppose, that there is just as much controlled opposition on all sides of this noisy clamor? The peaceniks are corralled into pointless activism — pointless in the sense it could never possibly change anything the plutocrats do. It won’t matter how many true believers you have in each of the various activist groups and movements, because someone in the group will always make sure it stays on track.

This is a good enough reason to refuse organization as we know it, but that’s not the full reason Radix Fidem rejects it. First, all of this organization is every kind man can imagine, but none of it organizes as God intended, not as God wired us in Creation. Second, the only way to get moving in the right direction is to start from a radical individual redemption that pulls you totally out of what exists now. We don’t just reject some elements of Western religion; we reject the whole of Western Civilization. That’s a tall order. Even when you get far enough along to understand how to do it right, you’ll likely find yourself isolated — no one to organize but you. Maybe your own immediate family can move in that direction, and that’s truly a blessing, but finding others to extend that organic structure is quite rare.

This is not our time. Maybe soon God will move us that way, but not yet. Meanwhile, there’s a literal sense in which we could say: I’ll be damned if I join a church run by the CIA.