The Collapse Was Never Political

A response to A Religious Tsunami is Forming in America--Socialism (Fulcrum7, October 27, 2026).

A religious tsunami is forming in America, the argument goes. Socialism is a synthetic faith that swaps the Creator for the collective and erases male and female, good and evil, and the Sabbath rest. It is a rehearsal, the argument says, for the deception that readies the world for the mark of the beast. Fulcrum7 published the case under that title in late October, and readers have received it as prophecy.

The diagnosis is not new, and it is not wrong. What undoes the argument is the instruction folded inside the diagnosis. The tradition it invokes rejected that instruction in print more than once.

The religion is real, and it is not new

Socialism does behave like a faith. It carries a total account of history, an original sin of class, a redemption by revolution, and a promised land in the classless society. The denomination’s own press was recording this before the present campaign cycle existed. In 1911, Signs of the Times described the sons and daughters of the wealthy who strike out from time to time for extravagant and foolish causes (Signs of the Times, 1911-09-26, p. 10). The comfortable young reach for something radical precisely because they have never paid its price. The observation is a century old, and it still holds.

What does not hold is the conclusion the tsunami thesis hangs on it. Naming the faith is not the same as answering it.

The tradition answered with engagement, not retreat

In January 1935, at the bottom of a decade of economic and political upheaval, Liberty magazine wrote the sentence the argument most needs and least uses: “The greatest collapse of recent years has not been a collapse in the economic or political worlds, but a collapse of character” (Liberty Magazine, 1935-01-01, p. 15). The failure the denomination named was spiritual before it was political. Its remedy could not be a politics of alarm.

Sixty-five years later the same publication made the prescription explicit: “The debate should not focus on methods of retreat, but on new models for engagement and new strategies that focus more on culture than on politics in the decades to come” (Liberty Magazine, 2000-03-01, p. 22). Neither sentence names an enemy. The tsunami thesis reads these two sentences as though they said the opposite. They are not a call to man the ramparts. They are a standing instruction to do the slower thing — to form people. Naming an enemy is easier than forming a person, and that is why the retreat keeps getting chosen over the engagement.

Prophecy read this way is the error the tradition named

The reach for Revelation is understandable, because Revelation lends urgency. The denomination has long taught that Revelation 13 depicts a counterfeit religious power joined to the state to enforce worship contrary to God’s law. That teaching sits at the center of its account of the final crisis (SDA for Me: Doctrinal Essays and Interactions).

The tradition has been just as explicit about how prophecy is not to be read. Writing in 1975, one of the denomination’s own scholars praised a critic for exposing the weakness of the futurist habit. That habit lifts the names of ancient nations out of Ezekiel and pins them on present-day powers, a move the critic refused to concede: “they are ignoring the history between then and now” (Andrews University Seminary Studies, 1975-04-01, p. 88). Lifting Revelation’s beast off its page and setting it down on a present political movement is the same maneuver, and it carries the same cost. Urgency bought at the price of context is not urgency. It is shorthand.

The capture is real; the enemy is misnamed

None of this means the argument is wrong about what it describes. American education was already being read as an instrument of something other than scholarship nearly a century ago. In 1936 the Youth’s Instructor printed a college graduate’s indictment of what modern institutions of higher learning were turning loose on the country (The Youth’s Instructor, 1936-06-23, p. 1). Two years earlier, Christian Education had reported that leading educators were daring to state openly where the public school system had failed (Christian Education, 1934-08-01, p. 4). Parents do send their children toward prestige even when the climate is toxic. The observation is real. The enemy is not.

The defect lies in what the argument does with it. A real failure of formation — families buying status instead of character — becomes proof that the enemy is outside the gate. The pages the argument inherits point inward.

A church that located the collapse in character, and kept insisting on engagement over retreat, was not preparing its readers to name a political flood and stand clear of it. It was preparing them to be the shore.

The alarm survives; the retreat does not

The flood is real, and the diagnosis survives the denomination’s press. The instruction does not. The tsunami thesis came to sound an alarm and stayed to sell a retreat, and retreat is the one answer the tradition never offered. An alarm that rings for every election eventually rings for none. The same press keeps returning to the harder thing: a character worth defending, and an engagement willing to defend it.

— Editorial Board, Institutional Voice