Feministic Gnosticism & Patriotic Gnosticism

By Brannon S. Howse

During the past half century, few ideologies have done more to promote mushy religious and spiritual ideas in the guise of enlightenment than modern feminism. In 1973, Gloria Steinem, co-founder of the National Organization for Women and celebrated early feminist leader, articulated a clear New Age vision for her cause. “By the year 2000,” she proclaimed, “we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.” 

Promoting gender equality was certainly not Gloria Steinem’s only agenda. The blurring of sexuality—a keystone of pluralism—also ranked high on her organization’s list of priorities as reflected in a January 1988 TIME article when it declared, “The simple fact is that every woman must be willing to be identified as a lesbian to be fully feminist.”

In her article “Feminist Salvation” in the July 1988 issue of The Humanist, Annie Laurie Gaylor, another influential feminist, went straight to the core of humanistic feminism’s objection to Christianity: 

[quote] Let’s forget about the mythical Jesus and look for encouragement, solace, and inspiration from real women. Two thousand years of patriarchal rule, under the shadow of the cross, ought to be enough to turn women toward the feminist salvation of this world. [end quote] 

Feminists clearly don’t want a patriarchal God—or a gender-neutral one. They want a matriarchal god—a queen of Heaven. These radical feminists seek Semiramis, the ultimate female-ruled religious system. The 1971 “Declaration of Feminism” is clear on this point:

[quote] Marriage has existed for the benefit of men and has been a legally sanctioned method of control over women. We must work to destroy it. The end of the institution of marriage is a necessary condition for the liberation of women. Therefore, it is important for us to encourage women to leave their husbands and not to live individually with men. All of history must be rewritten in terms of oppression of women. We must go back to ancient female religions like witchcraft. [end quote]

A variety of branches of witchcraft—the Wicca religion—exist today based on the goddess Diana, a.k.a. Artemis, a.k.a. Semiramis. 

One of the realities that stands in the way of full realization of these feminist ideals is the biblical American family. Harvard professor and feminist Mary Jo Bane explains that “in order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.” And best-selling author Sue Monk Kidd expands on the problems of “traditional” Christianity in her 2006 book The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine:

[quote] The main thing distinguishing the Gnostic gospels from the Orthodox gospels is their abundance of powerful feminine imagery of the divine. They reveal that many early Christians described and worshiped God as dyad, a being consisting of both masculine and feminine elements. They prayed to both the divine father and divine mother—to mother-father. One of their prayers, still intact, begins, “From thee, father, and through thee, mother....” The Gnostic gospels also referred to the Holy Spirit as female. [end quote] 

The feminists and Gnostics today believe that we should be worshiping a goddess, in part because they also believe that Eve somehow saved mankind. In his series on “The Feminist Agenda and Gnosticism,” John MacArthur reveals this deviant understanding of Eve:

[quote] Ancient Gnosticism focused on women. This is what it said, for example: “Eve was a spirit-endowed woman who saved Adam.” They said, “Final salvation for the whole world, from the imprisonment of matter, will come through self-realization, self-knowledge, in which a woman becomes so fully in tune with herself and so well knows herself and actualizes and realizes and fulfills herself, that she becomes fully divine. And as she becomes divine, she will rescue the rest of these lame men, just like Eve, fully divine, rescued poor Adam.”

In fact, convoluting the creation account, Gnostic texts tell us that Dame Wisdom was the heavenly Eve. There was a mystical heavenly woman named the heavenly Eve, who is the same as Dame Wisdom. She is the source of all wisdom. She entered the snake in the garden, and she taught both Adam and Eve the true way of salvation. The snake then is not called the tempter. The snake, in Gnostic literature, is the instructor. The snake is ultimate wisdom. The snake was wiser than anybody else. “The snake,” it says in Gnostic literature, “is the redeemer, because the snake is the incarnated woman who comes to heavenly Eve and teaches the truth about self-realization, which is self-fulfillment, which is making yourself divine, which delivers you from being encumbered by matter.” [end quote] 

So feminism and Gnosticism merge and produce concepts like Mother Earth, or Gaia, and it all fits in with the Tower of Babel and worshiping their queen of Heaven. Unfortunately, though, this Gnostic-based virus has spread beyond just radical feminism.

Ameri-Gnostics

Here in America, another insidious version of Gnosticism has taken hold. Based on nationalistic pride, it can be called “patriotic Gnosticism.” Let me give you a little background on how this has come to be.

America’s serious Christian heritage began around 1607. If you want to recognize “Founding Fathers,” who were genuinely Christian, you need to focus on the men who founded our original colonies in the early 1600s, not on the revolutionary founders of the 1770s. Many of these later founders were not Christian at all. 

The group of early founders includes men like Governor John Winthrop, who helped establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. He explained his motivation this way: 

[quote] It would be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world and to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of antichrist, which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts. [end quote]

It’s fascinating that, nearly 400 years ago, Governor Winthrop grasped the threat that Jesuits and the Church of Rome posed. Fearing their intentions for world dominion, the Massachusetts Bay Colony made it illegal to be a Jesuit. According to the website for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities:

[quote] In 1647, Massachusetts Bay banned Jesuit priests from the colony on penalty of death. The English Puritans, who settled the colony, feared the Jesuits for several reasons. First, simply because they were Catholic. To Puritans, Catholicism was nothing less than idolatrous blasphemy, and Catholics were destined for eternal damnation. Second, because the Jesuits were French, and France and England were engaged in a bitter struggle for control of North America. [end quote]

Roll the clock forward about 150 years to the revolutionaries, however, and you’ll find many of them embracing a form of Gnosticism. Gregg Frazer wrote an excellent book called The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders in which he addresses this issue. Dr. Frazer is a professor at Master’s College in California, and in his book, he details the beliefs of eight key founders from the revolutionary era: Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Here’s his assessment of their general approach to religion:

[quote] Reason determined what counted as legitimate revelation from God. Reason was the standard that had to be met by any potential doctrine, and reason was the final trump card that could command rejection of an authority or a tenet. Reason was no longer a supplement to revelation, employed to support and better understand 

truth, as determined by the authoritative Word of God. Rather, the roles were reversed, and revelation was selectively employed to confirm or expand upon what reason determined to be true. Doctrines, ideas, and events stated clearly in the Bible could be and were rejected as irrational and therefore unworthy of the God of the theistic rationalist. [end quote]

This is why Frazer calls the Founding Fathers theistic rationalists. Although they claimed to believe in one god, theirs was really a New Age god, based on a sinister mixture of New Age and Christian thought. 

More than any of the others, Thomas Jefferson exemplifies the founders’ preference for reason over revelation. In his study of the Bible, he took a penknife and cut out the portions he said did not fit with human reason. He believed such passages of Scripture did not qualify as legitimate revelation. The virgin birth is one of beliefs that got cut out of Thomas Jefferson’s Bible. His rationale for removing references to the virgin birth went something like this: Consider a group of 10,000 women. Do you know of any of these 10,000 women who have ever gotten pregnant outside of the sexual act that conceives a child? Of course not. Therefore, the idea of a virgin birth doesn’t pass the test of reason. He also removed the resurrection of Christ and all accounts of miracles. As Gregg Frazer explains:

[quote] By making their own reason the final determinant of what counted as legitimate revelation, and the final determinant of the meaning of revelation, the theistic rationalist essentially defined away any independent divine influence on their own religion and politics. God effectively lost the ability to define Himself or make demands on them with which they were not comfortable. In other words, they effectively became the voice of God themselves. In a practical sense, God became whatever they preferred Him to be and made only those demands they wished him to make. They had truly created a God in their own image. [end quote] 

Many principles of reason underlying the founders’ thinking are derived from Thomas Paine, whose book Common Sense stoked the flames of revolution in the 1770s and whose later work The Age of Reason captured the essence of theistic rationalism. Paine was so influential that John Adams claimed, “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.”

Although contemporary authors like David Barton re-cast the founders as Bible-believing Christians, they do not reflect the actual history of thought behind the founding of America. Consider, for instance, Paine’s description of the Bible in The Age of Reason, and see if you can imagine a biblical Christian holding to this sort of belief about Scripture:

[quote] Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would seem more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind, and for my own part, I sincerely detest it. [end quote]

And bear in mind Thomas Jefferson’s view of Jesus Christ: 

[quote] The greatest of all the reformers of the depraved religion of His own country was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really His from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of His biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill. [end quote]

Or John Adams’ attitude toward the church as reflected in a letter to Thomas Jefferson:

[quote] The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudice, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with Episcopal and Presbyterian creeds and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle, which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe, and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. [end quote]

The founders’ elevation of reason was essentially a quest for higher knowledge—a Gnosticism consistent with the seven rays of light emanating from the Statue of Liberty.

Now roll the clock forward another 100 years, and you will be shocked to discover what the Jesuits set in motion and intend for America today. While I do not agree with all that Charles Chiniquy wrote or believed, I find it interesting that in his 1886 Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, Chiniquy, a one-time Roman Catholic priest, explained that: 

[quote] The American people must be very blind indeed if they do not see that if they do nothing to prevent it, the day is very near when the Jesuits will rule their country, from the magnificent White House at Washington, to the humblest civil and military department of this vast republic. [end quote]

This helps explain how America will be absorbed into the world system. In Scripture references to the end times, many people have rightly observed that they don’t see a role for America in how the end plays out. By the end, it appears that we’ve collapsed economically and militarily. Perhaps we’ve been attacked, or perhaps we’ve just been absorbed into a North American Union. Perhaps America has through numerous international agreements been absorbed into a global religious system—the religious Reich—as described in Revelation 17 and 18.

As Abraham Lincoln warned, our demise will almost certainly come from within. We have perverted the concept of liberty to mean that everyone should do what is right in his or her own eyes. This version provides liberty for abortion on demand, for pornography, and for same-sex marriage. And all of this “liberty” is based on the idea that human reason is above the Bible.

Convergent Gnosticism

Feminist Gnosticism has brought the worship of Mother Earth to the mainstream. Patriotic Gnosticism has paralyzed critical thought about the true philosophical roots of our country. And Jesuit influence undermines all other Christian thinking. We have been spread wide open to the ecumenicalism of all religions coming together—here in America and around the world. Religions are gathering under the Mother of Harlots.

Alice Bailey would be thrilled. She predicted that our New Age would rest upon the foundation of a newly interpreted and enlightened Christianity, and it would confer a message of universalism. All will come to God; everybody will go to heaven; nobody will go to hell; all religions are merging because they all teach different paths to the same God. Even many within evangelicalism are infected by this thinking today.

The late Robert Muller, who served at the U.N. for more than 40 years and eventually, became the U.N. Assistant Secretary General, proclaimed his hopes for this one-world religion:

[quote] We need a world or cosmic spirituality. I hope religious leaders will get together and define the cosmic laws which are common to all their faiths. They should tell the politicians what the cosmic laws are, what God or the gods or the cosmos are expecting from humans. We must also hope that the Pope will come before the year 2000 to the U.N., speak for all the religions and spiritualties on this planet, and give the world the religions view of how the third millennium should be a spiritual millennium. [end quote]

The Church of Rome is doing exactly what Muller hoped. Since Vatican Council II, held from 1962 through 1965, the Roman Catholic Church has been steadfastly working to bring about this unity. The logo of the Jesuits’ Georgetown University is clear. It shows an eagle holding a globe in one talon, the cross in another, and words inscribed that translate “of the two, one”—world politics and religion together. While I do not believe Roman Catholicism will be the one-world religion, I do believe Roman Catholicism is helping to lead the way and will be part of the ecumenical, one-world religious harlot of Revelation 17:1 and 15-16 that is used by the mother of harlots. 

So what should our response be, once we see what is happening? Revelation 18:4 has the answer: “And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.’” We are not have anything to do with the Mother of Harlots. Christians must not be part of this false religious system. Paul offers similar instruction in 2 Corinthians 6:17-18: 

[quote] Wherefore, come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you. And I will be a Father unto you, and ye shall be my sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty. [end quote]

He also explains in 2 Corinthians 6:14 that light and darkness have no fellowship. So we are not to come together with unbelievers in spiritual enterprises—whether Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, or anyone else—even in an attempt to save our country. 

God’s people will be blessed and have God’s favor on them only if they don’t unite in spiritual enterprises with unbelievers, with those who worship another Jesus and promote another gospel (2 Corinthians 6:14-17). On the other hand, when misguided Christians do engage in spiritual enterprises with non-Christians, they actually guarantee that God will not bless our country but rather that He will judge and give us over as described in Romans 1:24-28. When God “gives people over,” they become open to a one-world religious structure, and that’s our challenge today—to avoid going with them. 

Copyright 2015 ©Brannon Howse. This content is for Situation Room members and is not to be duplicated in any form or uploaded to other websites without the express written permission of Brannon Howse or his legally authorized representative.