You might have heard recently of CBDCs—Central Bank Digital Currencies. CBDCs are a form of programmable electronic money issued by a central bank.(1)
A Bank of International Settlements (BIS) survey found that 90% of governments are presently working on CBDC technology.(2) On March 9, 2022 the president of the United States signed an executive order (EO) in which he stated "My administration places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC."(3) US Government officials commenting on the EO(4) frame this project in the standard WEF buzzwords.(5)
After exponentially deepening the 2020 health crisis by unprecedented restrictions on freedom, the government of Canada froze the bank accounts of citizens who were engaged in non-violent protests in February 2022.(6) Governments do not need CBDCs to freeze bank accounts.
Still, as Matthew Crawford observes, moral panics have the utility of arming "top down projects of social transformation, typically by administrative fiat," and, "the usually subterranean core of the liberal project… is not merely political but anthropological: to remake man."(7) How do you remake man? An entire science of behavioral modification has arisen which Shoshana Zuboff calls "instrumentalism."(8) Replacing cash with the use of programmable CBDCs could sharply tilt power from the everyday citizen toward government and corporate overlords. Social engineering could speed the end of both secular and religious freedom.
Christians understand that the borrower is servant to the lender, and that the control of money is often a tool of oppression.(Proverbs 22:6-7; Jeremiah 22:1-5) All that we possess comes from God. Property ownership is the result of God giving life, mercy, opportunity, and blessing.(Deuteronomy 8:1-20) I can buy gasoline from an unbeliever but I should not become a co-owner with him in jointly purchasing a gas station.(2 Corinthians 6:14-18) The increasingly authoritarian landscape of "public-private partnerships" between the state and private corporations blurs these lines. When the state gets together with private industry, the result is monopoly and fascism.
But let's' back up for a moment. What is a CBDC?
Listen to the definition offered by the Bank of International Settlements (BIS):
A CBDC is central bank-issued digital money denominated in the national unit of account, and it represents a liability of the central bank… it offers a new option to the general public for storing value and making payments. A CBDC is different from existing forms of cashless payment instruments for consumers and businesses, such as credit transfers, direct debits, card payments and e-money, as it represents a direct claim on a central bank rather than the liability of a private financial institution.(9)
Money is used to exchange goods and services, to transfer wealth from one party to another. Modern society differs from the agrarian economy seen in Old Testament times. In our world, central banks issue currencies, banks trade the money we give them for a promise to give money to us when we request it. Mostly we as individuals control to whom we give our money.
But CBDCs have crucial new qualities: they are digital and programmable. Every unit of CBDC is uniquely identifiable and the issuer can restrict your wealth transfer. Under a CBDC regime, not you, but you and the central bank, control the use of the money. Under a CBDC regime, money becomes a kind of tokens over which someone else has ultimate control.
BIS General Manager Agustin Carstens points to the importance of this change:
There is a huge difference… in cash, we don't know for example who's using a one hundred dollar bill today; we don't know who is using a 1,000 peso bill today. A key difference with the CBDC is that central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that. Those two issues are extremely important and that makes a huge difference with respect to what cash is.(10)
This element of control over CBDCs is illustrated by China's digital Yuan trial in Shenzhen. Citizens were given CBDCs but there was a catch; the CBDC was programmed with an expiration date. In this way the people were encouraged to spend the money and discouraged from placing it in a savings account. Ninety percent of the Yuan were spent in shops.(11)
Some have extolled China's digital Yuan because it uses a string of numbers to identify the money rather than the name of the user. They claim this gives more privacy than the credit card system. But CBDCs are programmable, and the data surrounding their use could be changed at any time. Anonymities could be withdrawn. More than this, the centralized nature of CBDCs means that the central bank or a second tier controlling entity could add or remove money from anyone's account with the flip of a switch.
From our standpoint in mid-2022, most CBDCs are said to be 2-4 years away, but some are already here. Not only has China been using a digital Yuan since April 2020, but the Bahamas issued a working CBDC in October 2020 called the Sand Dollar:
To make it easier for Bahamians to spend their digital dollars, the licensed digital payment platform Island Pay on Wednesday announced it partnered with Mastercard to issue the first-ever prepaid card linked to a CBDC, giving residents the option to instantly convert their Sand Dollars to Bahamian dollars to spend anywhere Mastercard is accepted on the islands and around the world.(12)(13)
Revelation 13:11-17 describes the rise of an entity which students of Bible prophecy have identified as a degenerated United States under the control of a Protestant or post-Protestant religious influence. In the closing stages of it existence this power would exercise singular geopolitical influence—influence so strong that no one refusing compliance with her directives will be able to buy or sell.
Until recently this scenario seemed fanciful because there were no evident mechanisms to enforce prohibitions to buying and selling. But the rise of bitcoin and similar DLT-based(14) "coins" since 2009 has made substantial financial transactions possible through non-state controlled currencies.(15) Nation-states are moving rapidly to compete by developing CBDC technology.
Movement toward a CBDC-dominated financial regime would dramatically increase external control over how you use your money. Through CBDCs private corporations or governments would track 100% of your spending. They could easily surveil the full landscape of your political and religious views, and sway your exercise of religion.
When society has undergone a substantial transition to the CBDC regime, the power of the central bank will be without equal. The threat of exclusion from the system would be beyond contemplation. That threat could influence denominational theological positions. Your buying and selling habits could be coerced as described in Revelation 13:16-17.(16)
The use of a CBDC means all of your transactions are traced. Illegal activity can be blocked. But who decides what is illicit activity? Will authorities be able to automatically impose fines? Automatically make withdrawals? Will they be able to limit transactions on the basis of a social credit score? Will they be able to limit food purchases or ability to travel because of a personal carbon score? The World Economic Forum issued a 28 page guide to creating CBDCs, and includes among the questions each government should ask itself when creating a CBDC, "Can a third party freeze or seize CBDC assets?"(17)
Revelation 18 foretells the final and complete destruction of Babylon. Particularly interesting is how the Bible identifies her two fundamental accomplice groups: the kings of the earth (Revelation 18:9-10) and the merchants of the earth (Revelation 18:11-20). Whatever happens on the way, Babylon's final destruction disrupts this three-way "public-private partnership." The final concentration of power will be a spiritually incestuous and fascistic relationship between church, state and merchants. The convergence of these powers will mean economic coercion on unprecedented scale. The final test of humanity will have to do with worship, but intermediate developments along the way which have been opaque to us appear now to be emerging. The advent of programmable money, the "huge difference" in control noted by the BIS chairman, could have its part in completing the final architecture of global control.
We can be certain that when the powers that be are ready, they will tout extraordinary conveniences for CBDCs—conveniences and advantages will seem almost irresistible. And yet, if there is any people who should know better before signing-up to the unprecedented powers for social control that come with a societal move to a CBDC-based financial regime, it should be Christians.
You have been warned.
Jesus triumphs in the end; we have no worries about that. But along the way, let's be careful out there. We're living in very strange times.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes:
1. "A central bank, reserve bank, or monetary authority is an institution that manages the currency and monetary policy of a state or formal monetary union, and oversees their commercial banking system. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the monetary base." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_bank.
2. BIS Report 125, Anneke Kosse and Ilaria Matte, "Gaining momentum—Results of the 2021 BIS survey on central bank digital currencies," p. 1, https://www.bis.org/publ/bppdf/bispap125.pdf.
3. Executive Order, pg. 5, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2022/03/09/executive-order-on-ensuring-responsible-development-of-digital-assets/.
4. Statement by NEC director Brian Reese and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on New Digital Assets Executive Order, March 9, 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/09/statement-by-nec-director-brian-deese-and-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-on-new-digital-assets-executive-order/.
5. The WEF is the World Economic Forum, an organization bent on remaking the world into a globally managed technocracy of self-selected multinational corporations, governments and NGOs through initiatives like the "Great Reset."
6. CBC News, Feb 18, 2022, "Banks have started to freeze Bank accounts linked to Ottawa protests, Federal government says," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me-erNZ31z8.
7. Matthew Crawford, "Covid was liberalism's endgame," May 21, 2022, https://unherd.com/2022/05/covid-was-liberalisms-endgame/.
8. "Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior toward profitable outcomes. Competitive pressures produced this shift, in which automated machine processes not only know our behavior but also shape our behavior at scale. With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. In this phase of surveillance capitalism's evolution, the means of production are subordinated to an increasingly complex and comprehensive 'means of behavioral modification.' In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I called instrumentarianism. Instrumentarian power knows and shapes human behavior toward others' ends. Instead of armaments and armies, it works its will through the automated medium of an increasingly ubiquitous computational architecture of 'smart' networked devices, things, and spaces."(Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, p. 8.
9. BIS Report 125, Ibid., p. 2.
10. "Bank for International Settlements head Agustin Carstens about CBDC and control," https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpNnTuK5JJU.
11. Chen Yawen, "China's e-yuan solves one stimulus problem," Nov. 24, 2020, https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/banking-finance/chinas-e-yuan-solves-one-stimulus-problem.
12. Vicki Hyman, "The Bahamas is ‘disaster-proofing’ payments with its first-ever digital currency, February 18, 2021, https://www.mastercard.com/news/perspectives/2021/the-bahamas-is-disaster-proofing-payments-with-its-first-ever-digital-currency/.
13. IMF, March 2, 2021, "The Bahamas: The World’s First Digital Currency | F&D Magazine," https://youtu.be/oFdiTFsknA8
14. DLT stands for "digital ledger technology," which is a consensus of replicated, shared, and synchronized digital data geographically spread across multiple sites, countries, or institutions. Unlike with a centralized database, there is no central administrator.
15. Satoshi Nakamoto initiated the Bitcoin blockchain in January of 2009 with the genesis block. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the text "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." This note references a headline published by The Times and has been interpreted as both a timestamp and a comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#cite_note-NY2011-18. The deployment of Bitcoin came on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008, a severe worldwide economic crisis that was the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression of 1929.
16. "He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."
17. https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_CBDC_Policymaker_Toolkit.pdf.