Now that idea and most of the ideas of the English Revolution came from –– through the Reformation –– the Bible. And the idea was simple. God creates order, the cosmos, creation. Humans create disorder. So when people come to know God, they become His partners in restoring the world as it should be. So revolution, turning the world upside down, is actually turning it the right way up. Of course, that’s relative to who says so and what they mean. Many people know that in the book of Acts, it was the agitators in Thessalonica who said that Paul and his fellow missionaries were turning the world upside down. Tacitus, the Roman historian, charged the Jews with turning the world upside down. Julian, later called Julian the Apostate, again accused Christians of being the subversives. And you can see that Marx said he was turning Hegel on his head, and Nietzsche quite openly said he was trying to reverse two thousand years of Christian civilization so that people could see that it wasn’t good; it was the slave morality of the Jews, as he put it, and he aimed for what he called a revaluation of all values. In other words, revolution depends on who says so and what they have in mind.

That’s important because the English Revolution was the first of five major revolutions that have shaped our modern world. The English — 1642, the American — 1776, the French — 1789, the Russian — 1917, and the Chinese in 1949, where I had the privilege of being there as a boy.

If you look at those revolutions, the first two were united in that they were both English speaking, but they were different in that the English failed. It was called the lost cause, and the American succeeded and became the winning cause. But they were united by more than the language. They were united that both of them came out through the Reformation from the precedent of what the 17th century called the Hebrew Republic, which came from the Torah and the book of Exodus. And above all, the notion of freedom within the framework of covenant.

The other three revolutions were quite different. The French, the Russian, and the Chinese were antireligious, anti-Christian, and specifically antibiblical. Why does that matter apart from just being a matter of history? If you understand the root, it is the key to America’s present crisis. Everybody acknowledges that America is as deeply divided today, probably as at any time since just before the Civil War. But why? Is it the social media? Is it the coastals against the heart-landers? Is it the nationalists and populists over against the George Soros–style globalists? Partly, in each case. But I would argue the deepest division is between those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of the American Revolution, which was largely, although sadly not fully, biblical, and those who understand America and freedom from the perspective of the heirs of the French Revolution.

Of course many of you know the French Revolution didn’t last long in France; in fact, only ten years. In 1799, Napoleon came and said, the Revolution is over; he was a dictator. But as historians point out, the French Revolution was like a gigantic, Vesuvius-like volcano, and the red-hot lava of revolutionary faith of one sort and another has flowed out across the world ever since in three ways. The first is the least important. It’s what’s called Revolutionary Nationalism in the 19th century, which contributed to the rise of the unification of Italy and Greece and even part of the secular wing of Zionism. Far more important was the second stream, Communism. Obviously planned and designed in the 19th century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but flourishing through the Russian Revolution and through the Chinese Revolution.

That’s the lava flow that most people recognize, Communism, Revolutionary Socialism. But the important point is the third lava stream. I call it Revolutionary Liberationism. And that is what is affecting America today. How?

It goes back to Antonio Gramsci who lived and died as a prisoner in Mussolini’s jails. He was an Italian Marxist, but he tried to figure out why Marx’s prediction never worked out. And he shifted Marxism. His view is now called neo-Marxism or Cultural Marxism, but instead of economic determinism, he switched to what he called Cultural Domination, or his word, hegemony, much used today. His ideas were picked up by the Frankfurt School in the twenties to the sixties. And in the 1960s, the most famous of them in California was Herbert Marcuse who was effectively the godfather of the new Left. In 1967– 68 he and Rudi Dutschke, leader of the Red Brigade in Germany, called for a long march through the Institutions. What did they mean? In 1968, Martin Luther King had been assassinated. Senator Robert Kennedy assassinated. One hundred American cities were ablaze, and yet Marcuse and the radicals knew they would not win in the streets.

What they needed was a long march through the institutions based on the historical precedent of Mao Zedong’s long march in 1934 in China. But the idea was, much more slowly, to win over the schools, colleges, and universities. Win over the press and the media. Win over what they called the culture industry, the world of Hollywood and entertainment, and then you can win the cultural gatekeepers of America, and then eventually win in the streets and, more important, in the halls of Congress.

Now, fifty years later, you can see the extraordinary successes and the inroads they have made, and you only need to think of the cancel culture and the speech codes and all that sort of stuff on the campuses, but it flows from ideas. It flows from what’s called just Theory with a capital T, or Critical Theory, and it’s a form of neo-Marxism or Western Marxism, sometimes even called user-friendly Marxism. But there are some very simple ideas; if you think of postmodernism, political correctness, tribal politics, identity politics, the sexual revolution, and all these various things which have flowed around America in the past fifty years, and much of the Western world, you can see the extraordinary influence of neo-Marxism and this revolutionary liberationism.

Why does it matter? It is a revolution entirely different from the American Revolution. Reinhold Niebuhr used to say that history has two bookends. One is anarchy, or freedom with no order at all, and the other is authoritarianism or order with no freedom at all. As he pointed out, and others like Rabbi Jonathan Sacks point out, you see both of those extremes, those bookends, in the book of Genesis, first eleven chapters. The conditions at the time of the flood, such violence that God regrets making humanity like that. That’s anarchy, freedom without order, leading to terrible violence. But the other extreme is the Tower of Babel, order without freedom, a proto-totalitarianism, and you can see that the call to Abraham, which comes after that in Genesis 12, through his family and then through the nation of the people of Israel is to provide between anarchy and authoritarianism a vision of ordered freedom.

So you can see that the radical left in this neo-Marxist form is extremely subversive of the American experiment. There are differences at all sorts of levels. You could start with their different sources. One goes back to the Bible, the other to the 18th-century Enlightenment — Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and so on. They have different views of humanity. The revolutionary Left is utopian. Man is born free, Rousseau said, and everywhere is in chains. Remove a chain or two and we’ll be happy, free, and fulfilled. Always the Left is utopian. The Bible, realistic. Through the prophets, and earlier, comes the first historical critique of the abuse of power. And you can see that leads to the separation of powers, to checks and balances. And you have, say through John Witherspoon’s teaching, James Madison, Federalist 51, the American experiment has a very realistic view of humanity at its heart, which is why, of course, the Supreme Court, as part of the separation of powers, is so important today and must not be politicized.

You can go on right down the line: freedom, the Constitution, attitudes to religion. They’re all different depending on which of the two revolutions you look at.

Now in the year 2020 the key difference was a very, very important one: How you address wrong. Both the Exodus Revolution and the heirs of the French Revolution admit there is wrong. Flagrant injustice, evil, both sides admit it. The difference comes in how you tackle it, how you address it. If you read critical theory, critical race theory, critical women’s study, critical facts studies, whatever it is, you’d see they have two ideas. First, in their words, hegemony — power, dominance. So you examine the pyramids of power to see who’s the majority, who’s the minority, who’s superior, who’s subordinate, who’s the oppressor, who’s the victim. And then you use the victim, the minority or whatever, in order to be a pawn to fight the status quo and seek to overturn it. Hegemony, dominance.

The other word that comes up again and again in their literature is antagonisms. You look for all the differences between men and women, between classes, between races, between generations, whatever it is, and you use them again through the analysis of power to exploit their differences and, again, overthrow the status quo.

Now there are lots of problems with that. A very simple one is they don’t look at people in terms of individuals but rather as groups and classes, using them as useful idiots to attack the status quo. There’s no real concern for individuals, even some of the people who’ve been terribly mistreated this year have been used because of the violations they experienced. The other problem is you only have power. Your power against power and conflict without end; the only answer, as the Romans put it, is the peace of despotism, when you achieve a power that can put down all rival powers. In other words, if you go back to Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, and probably the rise of leviathan, what Hobbes called the mortal god of the state.

Compare that with the biblical way of addressing wrong. Take the prophets. You address truth to power. And you can see that as a primary role of the prophets. Not just great flagrant injustices but the mistreatment of widows and orphans and people in the marketplaces putting their fingers on the scales unjustly, and so on — things that many people would have considered trivial, but they mattered to God because justice matters to God. But you move from truth addressing power to a call for repentance and confession and forgiveness and reconciliation, so enemies can be turned into friend. Now each of those simple words could be unpacked at great length, and you see the incredible difference between the two revolutions. Douglas Murray, who is a self-professed gay and atheist, argues in his great book The Madness of Crowds that the Left has zero mercy. Of course, that’s the wonder not just of mercy but of grace and forgiveness. And, if you think about it, forgiveness is closely tied to freedom. Without forgiveness, you can have only appeasement, buying off the superior power, or abasement, prostrating yourself before the superior power and hoping you won’t catch it in the neck. Think of the difference of forgiveness, the past dismissed and all its claims on you, and the future opened up. Forgiveness and freedom are very closely linked, and the answer of the gospel and the answer of the radical Left is so different; it’s night and day, light and darkness. And you can see that’s just one example of incredible stakes of the present moment.

If the heirs of the French Revolution prevail, and they are very strong at universities and obviously in the streets as we’ve seen this summer and in parts of Congress, then the American Revolution is called into question and finished.

Now you know in the election we’ve had one side saying we want to make America great again and the other side saying we must restore the soul of America. But I point out to you that neither side has said what made America great and what was its soul in the first place. And that is what Lincoln did and that is what needs to be done today.

So where are we? We’re at a kairos moment. We’re at a watershed moment. We’re at our equivalent to the Rubicon for Rome. And we need people like Lincoln at the leadership level and at the citizenship level to understand the crisis and to speak up for what they know is the best of the American experiment.

[In the second half of Dr. Guinness’s talk, he discussed six things he is watching for as we go forward. While not included as part of this Broadcast Talks, the full talk is available on video at the link provided below. Dr. Guinness concluded his talk with the remarks that follow.]

People often ask me, am I an optimist or a pessimist? I always refuse to answer that question, because in America optimism or pessimism is usually either a matter of the market, is it bullish or bearish, or it’s a matter of psychology, is the glass half full or half empty.

Christians should be realists, with hope. So we look reality in the white of the eye, but with confidence in the sovereignty of God and the power of the gospel and the dynamite of the Holy Spirit to move out again today.

So I finish with words that have meant the world to me, and I often share them. God is greater than all. Whether globalization in the grand trends or the chaos in America this evening, God is greater than all. So God may be trusted in all situations. Have faith in God. Have no fear.