The ‘Boomer’ generation should be called the generation of the ‘Great Irony.’ The causes we often championed in the wake of the 60's - such as the importance of dissent, free speech, the need to question authority and government, were swept away in an attempt to control all the engines of power and take over the State.
Those hippies who railed against 'The Man' - became 'The Man.' In the words of a 70’s band, ‘All those Day-Glo freaks who used to paint the face, they've joined the human race, some things will never change.’ Case in point, my own testimony.
I first took acid at a Black Sabbath concert and helped lead a sit-down protest of my entire 300-student senior class.
I directed and acted in a self-produced high school version of the play ‘Marat-Sade,’ with a theme revolving around the French revolution. 13 years later a ‘long strange trip’ would lead me to the Adventist church! (Even stranger, I met my first ‘Adventist’ at a cocaine party.)
Many of those 60’s and 70’s radicals did not just join the human race and assimilate into ‘straight’ society’ as I had done, they decided to bring in a Marxist revolution with the long march through the institutions – co-opting the ‘system’ to bend it toward their utopian will. I was there. I saw it happen.
The classic example of this was Bill Ayers, the former member of the weather underground (a man who should have done hard time for domestic terrorism but skated). He and his terrorist wife became university professors, influencing a generation of students with their leftist rhetoric – including Barak Obama (‘a red diaper doper baby’ for sure).
Obama, the man who perhaps more than any other actually gained the power to fundamentally transform American society into a Marxist image. His most influential childhood mentor, whom he called ‘Pops,’ was a card-carrying communist pornographer. The minister whose preaching he sat under for 20 years – a leftist liberation theology racist.
A conscious attempt was made (particularly in the universities) to supplant the principles of classic liberalism with Marxist ideology, an intent to attack the foundations of the constitutional republic and its enduring ideals - while censuring and destroying all dissent and dissenters! A tyranny would develop (eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 parody of Stalinism and Nazi propaganda) where even language was warped into service to the 'Woke Big Brotherhood.' Hence the butchering of innocent/defenseless developing humans in utero became 'reproductive rights,' the removal of their butchered remains as 'removing pregnancy tissue' - and the surgical mutilation of reproductive body parts called 'gender care.'
A land where ‘safe and effective’ actually meant untested, ineffective, and potentially deadly.
A topsy turvy, upside down ironic world, where the constant refrain was that our country is institutionally racist – yet the leftists spouting that accusation, actually had full control of every institution themselves (Big Tech, The Corporate Media, The Academy, The Administrative Government & Hollywood)!
Do Black Lives Matter?
A radicalized society - where the mantra ‘Black Lives Matter’ (an organization created by Marxist’s whose platform purposed to destroy the nuclear family) – actually meant, ‘only black lives killed by white cops while in the process of committing crimes matter.’
The best initial statistical guess in the wake of the George Floyd debacle was that only 10 unarmed black men had been killed by police that year (they later desperately searched for more). Yes, black men were being hunted in the streets by racist cops (only seen through 1984 Marxist spectacles) – and in honor of their new saint George Floyd, they declared they were going to ‘burn it all down!’
It quickly became evident that black lives did not really matter at all. In 2020 alone over 1,800 innocent unarmed black women and girls were murdered (not by white people) – nobody cared! But many of our Adventist leaders took up the ‘Black Lives Matter’ banner anyway, just as they had the ‘Hands up don’t shoot’ false narrative.
I should have seen the writing on the wall when I decided to attend a Black Student Christian Forum meeting in the seminary chapel (1990-91?). The chapel was jam packed with black students looking for a presentation to get their blood stirring.
I and only one other white man found ourselves surprised to listen to a non-Adventist speaker regale the clapping crowd with his projector screen proof that all the great characters of Biblical history were indeed black! That white guy and I looked at each other wondering what world we were in. Was this a meeting of the Nation of Islam, or the Black Hebrew Israelites? It certainly wasn’t the Adventist church. Or was it?
That same year I became good Adventist friends with a former Zulu gang member from Soweto working on getting a green card, and a former Opium addict from Nepal training to become a minister. Yes, we truly are the most diverse church in America, contrary to what the DEI opportunist race baiters would try telling the church!
My friends and I would end up praying and fasting for our Nepalese friend’s wife, who in the midst of the start of the Gulf War (unbeknownst to anyone in the communication blackout) – was fleeing from Kuwait across the desert on foot for days to finally be delivered in answer to our unknowing prayers. As I sat at the kitchen table one night afterwards with my Zulu friend (who before his conversion to Christ and preaching the Adventist truth, had lived under apartheid and belonged to a gang called ‘one white man, one bullet’). He said to me, ‘I hate American Blacks.’
I was stunned and said, ‘They are your Adventist Christian brothers, you should not hate them!’ He responded again, ‘I hate American Blacks.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because they are always complaining about being oppressed, and they don’t know the meaning of the word!’
Feminism
I should have known the ironic writing was on the wall when I had repeated run-ins with a female preacher whose homiletic exegesis was the worst I had ever heard. I challenged her in person on two separate occasions when she boldly proclaimed things that neither Scripture nor the SOP supported (if she were male, I would have done the same thing). Each time she would condescendingly dismiss my concerns.
At Sligo church, in a revelation seminar type outreach, she declared that the mob in the garden of Gethsemane was actually slain and resurrected by Jesus. I asked the senior pastor if that was Biblical, he just replied matter-of-factly, ‘No.’ Later he would preach a message to potential new believers on the subject of Sabbath observance saying, ‘Well, the way I see it, if you want to pick flowers on the Sabbath go for it, if you want to pull weeds, go for it, if you want to stuff yourself with chocolate, go for it!’
The same female preacher who raised the Gethsemane dead would run the week of prayer at the seminary when I was there. In one of her sermons she declared that the priests bearing aloft the ark of the covenant stood in the midst of the stormy Jordan depths with great billowing waves buffeting their bodies! During another sermon she revealed how she had serious long-standing ‘daddy issues.’ Then, in her closing sermon, she twisted the text to meet her retributive feminist needs. ‘The Bible says,’ she said, ‘Because they were women, the disciples did not believe them when they testified to Jesus’ resurrection.’ ‘Because they were women the Bible says,’ ‘Because they were women the Bible says!’ she kept yelling. Then, she screamed at the top of her lungs to the male crowd of prospective preachers like a drill sergeant, over and over and over, ‘I can’t hear you!’ Bullying them to echo loudly her final feminist appeal. This woman would eventually become the professor of homiletics and director of the Doctor of Ministry program at Andrews!
Babies
I should have known the writing was on the wall when I sat in a chaplain training group in our flagship hospital and watched the following drama unfold. One of my fellow students, an elderly Baptist woman, shared with the group, with tears in her eyes - that her daughter had become pregnant out of wedlock. Without skipping a beat, our supervisor (the chief of chaplains at the hospital) – said to her, ‘Well, you ought to tell her to get an abortion.’ The conservative Lutheran in our group jumped up and ran outside. I followed him out. ‘ I don’t think I can continue in this program,’ he said. I convinced him to stay and told him this was an isolated opinion of the supervisor and we both needed to tough it out. We became close conservative comrades in the midst the often-challenging process.
Manufacturing Racism
In common terms, the proverbial 'script has been flipped' – both in the world and the church. We live in a twilight zone episode, a post-modern, quasi-religious land of projectionism. A land where the founding fathers who were trying, however imperfectly, to move the nation away from slavery, are demonized as racist and their statues toppled. A land where the Democrat party, forged in the pro-slavery KKK, bears no guilt and is valorized. For decades that same party, having complete control of all our great urban centers – blamed the deadly degradation and decay of their least privileged inhabitants on privileged white folk – though they were the actual ones with the power to effect change.
A topsy turvy, upside down, political landscape where the Republican party that forged the civil rights legislation, is demonized as the party of racism.
The Democrat party, on the other hand, would elect a president who was proud of being a segregationist, and who eulogized a former exalted cyclops that filibustered the civil rights act for 14 hours. I lived through this. A Democrat president who defamed his Republican opponent as being the actual racist one! I saw it.
Forgiveness is only available for those confessing the party line and possessing power in the religion of Woke – all others are subject to public slander, false accusation, cancelling, the loss of livelihood, or even life. In the name of 'equity' the equal rights of others are denied. In other words, ‘The only way to fight illusory racism is with real racism!’
I could go on and on, but I'm afraid the irony will get so thick I will have to go out and purchase a machete to hack my way out of the paradoxical jungle.
A majority of my boomer high school graduates were swept away in this paradigm shift of godlessness – drinking the proverbial Kool aid of a societal cult and its 24/7 brainwashing propaganda. The Democrat/Marxist party has used every dirty trick in the book – including capitalizing on a global pandemic for political gain. In the final days of the Biden administration (whoever was actually running this country) decided to virtually taunt Russia into WWIII by approving the use of long-range ballistic missiles by Ukraine. A last desperate dirty trick to burn the world down, before climate change kills us all and the ‘Orange Man Hitler’ takes over?!
America
Here I am, a refugee from the psychedelic wars, making my home in the kingdom of heaven and Remnant Church – yet still also residing in the US of A.
Pharmakeia
America, a land where large swaths of the Adventist church and its leadership have drunk the progressive Kool aid as well – embracing a race-based ideology in the face of the color-blind everlasting gospel commission. The Remnant Church – called to bring the truly Biblical, ‘temple of the Holy Spirit health message’ to a dying world. A Church whose leadership instead, rejecting that message - embraced the pharmaceutical propaganda lie and an anti-liberty of conscience platform.
Rivers of Rebellion
The Remnant Church is called to turn the world upside down in the footsteps of the apostles – instead, the Church itself being turned upside down in a post-modern tumbler of falsehoods and lies. We became a place where the will of the General Conference in session means nothing except as an unjust edict to be disobeyed. The disobedient paraded their badge of rebellious courage - flaunting a virtue signal in tight fitting slacks and spike heels behind a pulpit. Warping the Biblical text to their liberal will – just as all the fallen mainline churches before them.
A church where numerous ministers advocate for homosexual membership with impunity, while leaders of the same church bring down the hammer of judgment on those who cry out against that same church’s COVID crimes against the faithful.
A paradoxical world where the interfaith representative of our ‘Protestant’ Church submits to the handclasp of papal authority from the pope himself. A topsy turvy church, historically extolling the virtues of its ‘bottom up’ form of church government – now exhibiting a virtually Papal, ‘top down’ abuse of power - silencing those speaking truth to leaders (those usurping power over the consciences and body temples of the faithful). A church whose ‘Liberty’ leaders have invited the godless leftist camel into the church’s tent, while they gaze out the back of the tent with a telescope toward a virtually invisible ‘Christian Nationalist’ chimera.
We live in a nation that just experienced a sea-change of ideological allegiances – yet our church’s academics and leaders still cling to the sinking ship of identity politics and Marxist critical theory. It is a topsy turvy political arena, where the president elect ran on the platform of being the candidate of peace – promising to bring peace to a world racked with war – yet many of our supposed ‘non-combatant pacifist’ members believed the propaganda lie that the candidate of peace was actually a virtual Hitler, who would usher in the mark of the beast! This, in spite of the fact that in his previous term he started no new wars, implemented the draw down to end the longest war in American history, orchestrated the ‘Abraham Accords’ bringing the promise of unprecedented peace in the middle east (an act that should have given him the Nobel peace prize – instead of bestowing it upon Obama who hadn’t accomplished anything except the eventual drone bombing of 390 civilians into oblivion).
Has anyone ever heard of the ’Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom?’ it was founded during the first Trump administration through the State Department and Secretary of State. At one of this group’s meetings there were nearly 900 religious freedom activists present, representing 106 countries where survivors of persecution representing many different faiths gave their testimonies. Has anyone here ever remembered reading about this in Liberty magazine? Shouldn’t that have been the stuff for a cover article? It should, but it wasn’t.
Following are some quotes from the ‘Potomac Declaration’ (once again, anyone here ever heard of the ‘Potomac Declaration?’) that was generated at the first meeting of international representatives with the ‘Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom’:
“Coercion aimed at forcing a person to adopt a certain religion is inconsistent with and a violation of the right to religious freedom. The threat of physical force or penal sanctions to compel believers or non-believers to adopt different beliefs, to recant their faith, or to reveal their faith is entirely at odds with freedom of religion.”
"Religious freedom is universal and inalienable, and states must respect and protect this human right."
"A person’s conscience is inviolable. The right to freedom of conscience, as set out in international human rights instruments, lies at the heart of religious freedom."
Sounds like the rantings of a Fascist, Nazi, Anti-Christ, Hitlerian nightmare ready to usher in the mark of the beast, right? Not!
Many of our topsy turvy, upside down church’s members in 2020 were so afraid of voting for a ‘right wing’ president, believing that he would surely bring in the mark of the beast – instead, they helped to vote in a puppet coup candidate with dementia whose platform was opposed to the entire created order – as well as the constitutional foundations of our entire Republic.
To anyone (in the church or out) who hasn’t been infected by the topsy turvy ideological virus of our age - those extolling the genuine virtues of the Christian faith and the pillars of the constitution, are not the real threat to democracy! The final apostasy comes from apostates.
Let us praise God for on-going grace to finish his work during this time of reprieve. May the faithful remnant rise to the occasion, ‘as terrible as an army with banners (spiritual ones that is).
Chaplain Victor David Marshall
Victor Marshall – Retired full-time Adventist correctional chaplain. Formerly employed in 8 prisons in two states for 28 years. His testimony can be found in the book, “Persuaded by the Evidence – True Stories of Faith, Science & The Power of a Creator.” Chapter 27 - “From New Age to New Creation.”
His evangelistic website can be found at - lightintheselastdays.com
Victor and his wife Christiane currently live in Ohio.
