Information Warfare in the Church
This communique was sent by an anonymous brother for the Christian Church.
„The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”
The following quote comes from Niccolo Machiavelli’s book called „The Prince” which for a very long time has been considered one of key manuals of statecraft. While not endorsing it’s content, we need to realize that it exposes mechanisms that politicians used to keep themselves in power. Likewise, military classic called “Bingfa” in Chinese, which roughly translates as the Art of War, written by General Sun Tzu during the warring states period, has an entire section dedicated to the use of spies. And so does the Hindu classic Arthashastra, and virtually every other military or political manual. If such techniques were used by the politicians before to control their enemies, it was only matter of time before they were used against the church.
Book of Acts is filled with description of intrigues directed against the assembly of saints, and so warn against them writings of the apostles. Good example is Galatians 2; 4–5 where Apostle Paul warns against false brethren infiltrating his church; Apostle Jude wrote exactly on the same topic in his famed letter. Multiple descriptions of conspiracies were included in the book of Acts, usually directed against Apostle Paul. Before we proceed, it would be useful if we paused for a second and thought why it was this specific Jew that was a target of such widespread activity of intelligence services.
Paul was unlike the earlier Apostles; while they were mostly “men from the crowd” as Jewish leaders of the era used to say, Saul was member of the social and political elite, both as a Pharisee and a Citizen of Rome. He possessed enough knowledge to debate both Jewish lawyers and Greek philosophers, which we see during his missionary journey to Athens, where he quotes a Greek poet. We also need to remember that Paul was sent to Damascus to support persecution of the Church; and came in there preaching that that Jesus is the Messiah. His arguments were profoundly intellectual and extremely effective in converting not just the crowd, but people from the top as well. Now we need to realize that when social elite is seeing something as “thing of the mob” it is always eager to ignore it, assuming that there is always a way to manipulate such a crowd. But when Paul proven to be extremely efficient at converting the higher-ups, he was seen as encroaching on someone else’s territory… this put him at odds with 3 main groups:
1) Power elite: The people who were currently in power. Not always were they opposed to Paul for ideological reasons, and even not always they were opposed to Paul. Examples of those who were not include Sergius Paulus or Festus. However they were people tasked with safeguarding Roman Empire, and often seen Paul as a threat to it’s stability.
2) Bushiness interests: Acts 19 is primary example where a group of sculptors tries to protect their business of making golden idols, feeling threatened by growing influence of Christian faith.
3) Religious men: We need to remember that in the Roman Empire there was no separation of Church and state as we know today. While Romans were always eager to add more gods to their pantheon, refusal to participate in the state cult of Caesar was often equated with treason. Likewise, both Jewish and Gentile men of religious devotion opposed Paul.
What those 3 groups have in common? All of them have resources to carry out information warfare against the church. Paraphrasing most common definitions of information warfare, IW can be narrowed to such manipulation of the enemy, that he will himself put a yoke on his head, thinking that he is acting in his own best interest. The foe is paralyzed by information, blocked by the venom of agents of influence until he has been completely tied down and enslaved.
What are the strategic goals of Satan’s information warfare against Christianity? For sure we can speak of few main ones:
- Gradual erosion of God’s truth written in hearts of all mankindand dissolution of Biblical moral teaching. This is extremely noticeable in the Megachurch “Christianity” today, where several pastors agreed to conform to the world by promoting the gay agenda and supporting whatever the state tosses at them.
- Corruption of Biblical doctrine and replacement of it with counterfeit doctrines. This is called “Spiritual disinformation” — purposeful spread of false information to benefit the one who created it.
- Infiltration of devil’s own men into decisionmaking structures in the Churches; promotion of mistaken selection of pastors, bishops, evangelists and leaders. One of major problems with Christianity today is total lack of leaders acting as God’s lower level officers in the war for human souls.
- Promotion of disunity & division in Churches, often over petty squabbles leading to large theological disputes and wars.
- Promotion of centralization of Church structure with simultaneous dissolution of horizontal connections in Churches; further bureaucratizing; creation of cults like Roman Catholic Church of Jehovah Witnesses, ecumenism.
- Capturing good projects of the church and twisting them to caricatural proportions, which puts society at odds with those initiatives. As an example can serve the Charistmatic movement being a counterfeit on Biblical gifts or Prophecy.
Due to widespread spectrum of info-aggression methods, development of universal defense methodologies is almost impossible. In this war human mind serves as the field of battle — thus the most important part of such war is to acknowledge that we are being attacked. Devil can operate unhindered as long as the people are not conscious of his actions — certain Ninjustu master from Japan said that Devil’s greatest achievement was to convince people that he does not exist. Once his lies are discovered, their effectiveness is reduced rapidly.
Sadly church — level defense against infiltrators is low, considering the fact that law in almost any country allows pastors or officials to almost universally lie without any penalty. Even modern day “authorities” that serve at “Christian” academia can without any penalty deceive or form one absurd after another as long as they sound intelligently or carter to the wishes of majority. We can determine major methods of defense against info-aggression from Satan’s side:
- Biblical knowledge. If we have knowledge of what is in the Bible, and how it should be interpreted, we will have a huge edge over the Devil. The more we know, the easier to spot a deceit.
- Using multiple sources when dealing with anything that is not the Bible. In addition to that, never base a doctrine or belief on a single verse — according to the Hebrew law, you need 2–3 witnesses to confirm a case.
- Know our own strengths & weaknesses. Discover the enemy as well; how he acts? What he believes in? What does he plan to do?
- Avoid underestimating your enemy.
- Vigilance — you need to be always ready for new Devil’s tricks, tactics or methods.
- Constant forming of a moral order based on Biblical revelation. Such a system is one of best defenses against Satan’s aggression.