“Early in American Presbyterian history, the conception of church and state relations began to change, but the basic contours of the spirituality of the church remained and were reinforced. With the Adopting Act of 1729, the Presbyterian church allowed that chapters 20 and 23 of the Westminster Confession were no longer binding on ministers and that ministers need not receive “those articles in any such sense as to suppose the civil magistrate hath a controlling power over Synods with respect to the exercise of their ministerial authority.” In other words, any notion of an Established Church, let alone an Erastian one, was gone. It was still assumed that the church and state would be allies in Protestant America, but they were distinct bodies with different responsibilities pursued by different means.”

Kevin DeYoung
Gospel Coalition Article

Actually, this is not true. An established Church has always existed in every nation that has ever existed. An established church, officially established or not is an inescapable category. DeYoung doesn’t see beneath the surface here. The 1729 adopting act did NOT eliminate the possibility of an established Church. The 1729 adopting act instead disallowed that Christianity would be established church. The 1729 adopting act allowed the non-established Christian Churches to incrementally be displaced by the State Church of humanism which eventually became the defacto established church in America. The 1729 adopting act was and is a disaster and moved Presbyterianism in an Anabaptist direction.

By adopting the 1729 adopting act Presbyterians scorned their Fathers and created a situation where a pluralism was required. This meant that some form of polytheism was the Church that was adopted. The ironic thing here is that by adopting pluralism they at the same time adopted a monotheistic pluralism inasmuch as no other God or religion would be allowed the status that pluralism and polytheism was given. The 1729 adopting act required that the Christian church would not be established and so required that pluralism and polytheism be established. Establishment is inescapable.

As a result the small church I serve stands across the street from the Established state Church; the Government High school. That established church receives public taxes as established churches used to receive. That established church is required to catechize the children in the State religion (state sanctioned curriculum). That established church has its own clergy (teachers) paid by the State. That established church has its own creeds and confessions. I have to compete with the established religion. The 1729 adopting act led to all this being accepted.

What the 1729 adopting act did was to shield from Ministers and Christians the fact that established Churches are an inescapable concept. The Act could work because the colonies remained subjectively speaking, largely Christian, but the adopting Act today has reinforced the religious pluralization of what remains of our country.

Christianity is not a Democracy and the 1729 Adopting Act democratized the Christian faith. This was a mistake.

“In nearly forty years of ministry, I have yet to meet a single convert who was brought to Christ through the anger of a Christian. Never. Millions, however, may be won by love.”

Rev. David P. Cassidy

Matthew 3:7 Then said he to the multitude that came forth to be baptized of him, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. 9 And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Titus 1:13 Therefore rebuke them sharply, so that they will be sound in the faith 

Jude 23 And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.

I don’t know Rev. Cassidy from Adam. Someone pointed this quote out to me in a twitter thread. However, from this one quote I do know he likely shouldn’t have been in the ministry for forty years. I also know that he likely has never ever met one convert if he believes this is true. Anger and love are not mutually exclusive. If converts have never known the anger of God through the proclamation of the anger of the Christian declaring the Gospel then one has never known the love of God. The only way to proclaim the Gospel of love is by first proclaiming the Gospel of anger. (We call it “Law and Gospel.”)

Read those Scriptural quotes above… does John the Baptist read like he is not angry? Does Jude read like he is not angry? Does St. Paul look like he is not angry?

As I said above already anger and love are not mutually exclusive when presenting the Gospel in the one doing the presenting. In Acts 17:16 we learn that Paul was deeply provoked by the idols he found in Athens and thus began to “reason with” the men of Athens. The Greek word for “deeply provoked” (παρωξύνετο)  there means “to arouse anger, provoke, irritate.”

And lets not even talk about the kind of “love” that Rev. Cassidy mentions. Anymore that kind of love is the love of a whore.

Cassidy provides just one more example of why I can’t stomach, generally speaking, American clergy any longer. If you love your souls you will not listen to America’s clergy. They have to be the stupidest things on two legs these days. And if it means that the price of not listening to them is not listening to me I will gladly pay it, if you will only quit taking seriously anything these people say.

Yes … exceptions across the country exist. There is a reason though why they are called “exceptions.”

I have written here before about “Lizard People.” It is just my short hand way of referencing people who are not like most humans. They are people who seemingly have no soul, experience no guilt, shame, or remorse, and who view other people the way they might view insects or slugs. Certainly the Lizard People are driven by narcissism but there is more than just narcissism here. They are also psychopaths and the very worse of them are this way because of their religious beliefs.

In my reading I came across one of the Lizard People from the 18th century. Meet the Duc d’Orleans. Phillippe d’Orleans was one of the wealthiest men in France and was the cousin of King Louis XVI. d’Orleans was one of the guiding actors behind the dethronement and beheading of his cousin and his cousin’s wife, the Queen.

d’Orleans also had a sister-in-law whom he hated named the Princesse d’ Lambelle, who was one of Queen Marie Antoinette’s ladies. d’Orleans hated d’Lambelle because she had rebuked him for his role in the “March of Versailles” — an earlier attempt to murder the crown family. Rumors also swirled that d’Orleans would financially gain the d’Lambelle’s dowry if she would die.

d’Orleans thus paid assassins in the mob to murder d’Lambelle and then gave it the color of law by having her condemned to death for not taking an oath to hate the recently seized King and Queen.

However, we are still not in Lizard People territory yet. Where d’Orleans is seen as a Lizard came in an incident following the murder and decapitation of d’Lambelle. Upon the deed being done and after the mob had taken the decapitated and piked head of d’Lambelle to a salon to get her hair right again the mob marched the piked head before the veranda of the Duc d’Orleans.

Here we allow Nesta Webster to describe the Lizard Person quality of Phillippe d’Orleans.

“The Duc d’Orleans was just sitting down to dinner with his
mistress, Madame Buffon, and several Englishmen, when the
savage howls of triumph that heralded this arrival (of the piked head of d’Lambelle) attracted his attention. Walking to the window he looked out calmly on scene, contemplated with a perfectly unmoved countenance the dead, white face, the fair curls fluttering round the pike-head. The Duke of Orléans reportedly commented ‘Oh, it is Lamballe’s head: I know it by the long hair. Let us sit down to supper’,”

This is Lizard People status. No conscience. No remorse. No guilt. No shame.

It is just these same kind of elites that we are dealing with today. Like the Duc d’Orleans they have no souls. They perpetuate the basest of cruelties upon others and without blinking they sit down to enjoy their meals. You must realize that these are the kinds of people we are dealing with when we deal with the Corporatists, the Politicians at high levels, the Silicon Valley Billionaires, and the K-Street and Wall Street movers and shakers. You can not expect these people to be like you. They are not. They are Lizard People. They don’t have your manners, your morals, or your reservations. They are not like you. That is who we are dealing with as those behind the on the street Revolutionaries.

Do you really think people like Hillary Clinton, Bill and Melinda Gates, Barack Obama, Anthony Fauci, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Sasse, Larry Ellison, etc. are any different than the duc d’Orleans? These people have always existed and our challenge is to realize that there exists a whole class of soul-less people at war with “legacy Americans,” and in realizing that give them no quarter when the time comes.

Postscript — Philippe d’Orleans was one of those rare cases where one of the Lizard people met with poetic justice. Usually these people die at 95 in their beds screaming because they know that their deeds are finally going to catch up with them. Not so, d’Orleans. At 46 years of age d’Orleans visited the Parisian guillotine on 6 November, 1793 for crimes which no evidence was ever provided.

Be sure your sins will find you out.

Hollywood’s bent towards Communism from its very inception forward has given us, through the decades, film after film expressing anti-Nazi themes. And who could ever protest exposing Nazi evils? However, even in the last decade Hollywood continues to pour forth films marching the Nazi’s before us with one of the most recent ones being “Jojo Rabbit.” I’d wager to bet that every reader can rip off the top of their heads at least five films where the Nazis were villains.

Not only have there been the ubiquitous “we hate Nazis” films but there have also been the “those poor Communists” films. Films like, “Trumbo,” and “The Majestic,” work to the end of making the audience feel sorry for the Marxists. It is twisted history at its finest. This is not even to mention the rabidly pro-communist films that Hollywood spit out during WW II. Films like “Mission to Moscow,” and “The North Star,” “The Battle for Russia,” and many more were all films that were Soviet propaganda made by Americans to the end of having Americans sympathize with the blood thirsty Communists. Can you, dear Reader, rip off the top of your heads at least 5 films where the Communists were villains?

The reason this phenomenon remains the case is that Hollywood remains largely pro-Marxist in its sympathies. Books like, “An Empire of their Own,” demonstrate this reality. We can only conclude that the same Hollywood tribe who made their sufferings in the holocaust well known worked overtime making sure that the sufferings of others in the Ukrainian Christian holdomor were muted.

However, recently, there seems to have developed a disturbance in Hollywood’s dark side of the force. In the last 3 years a couple films have been released that not only indicts the monstrous regime that was the USSR, but also pictures those sympathetic to Communism in an unflattering light.

In 2017 the film “Bitter Harvest” was released. Though it will never be considered an “A-list” film, it remains a quality release. The story centers on a young Ukrainian couple who are star struck with each other from the tenderest of ages. Eventually they marry, but hardship drives them apart. The film tells their story of childhood in grain rich Ukraine, of their coming of age in Bolshevik occupied Ukraine, of their separation because of the heavy hand of the Bolsheviks in Ukraine, and of their reunion, all as seasoned with Yuri and Natalka’s other family and friends surrounding them as those supporting roles fill out the characters of Yuri and Natalka as well as their relationship. All of this romantic drama as set in the larger context of the 1932 Soviet occupation of Ukraine and the subsequent Ukrainian Holodomor.

At this point it would be tempting to rush ahead with the film story, but I’m not sure the average reader even knows what this thing called the holodomor is. Hollywood as taught you relentlessly what the “Holocaust” was with films like “Schindler’s List,” “The Pianist,” and “Inglorious Bastards,” but it has been largely silent on the Holodomor.

The Holodomor was the political starvation of the Christian Ukrainian people starting in 1929 as ordered by Soviet Premier, Joseph Stalin and as carried out by his Jewish Bolsheviks which resulted in the cruel death by starvation of the Ukrainian people in the vicinity of 15 million of people. This number dwarfs the number of losses in the Hollywood approved “Holocaust,” and yet you, dear reader, likely know very little to nothing about it. For people interested in reading about this politically incorrect attempt at genocide one should read Robert Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow.”

“Bitter Harvest” thus is set in this context. As such, in telling Yuir and Natalka’s story the film gives us a glimpse of the horrors of the holodomor. In the film we are introduced to the Bolshevik Commissars in Yuir and Natalka’s village who treated Ukrainian life then the way that unborn babies are treated today. These Bolsheviks oppressed, persecuted and murdered the Ukrainian people as they fulfilled Stalin’s orders by seizing the grain leaving the Ukrainian people starving. As such the film “Bitter Harvest” exposes the wickedness that exceeded the “Holocaust” by a qauntam factor.


In the course of “Bitter Harvest,” the curtain is pulled back just a little on the evils of Communism. We see the reality of prisons for those Ukrainian Nationalists who wouldn’t bend to Stalin. We see daily mass executions in Soviet prisons. We witness the casual cruelty of Communist true believers. We see the local Communist Commissar use the promise of food to seduce and attempt to rape the starving Natalka. We see the censoring of art and pressing in of thought control. (What today we call “political correctness.”) We see the futile attempt of the Ukrainians to rise against their Communist Masters. Finally, “Bitter Harvest,” reveals what Communism best produces, and that is people seeking to flee to freedom.

As I said, it is not an “A” list film but it is a quality film worthy of viewing if only because it begins to pull back the curtain on the holodomor for American grazers who learn their history through film. For whatever it is worth, you should give “Bitter Harvest” a view.

In a film released in 2019 that is an “A” list film that also deals with the holodomor is “Mr. Jones.” As much as I rejoiced over “Bitter Harvest” I exulted in the release of “Mr. Jones,” if only because more light was being cast upon the holodomor.

“Mr Jones,” tells the story of the young educated Englishman, Gareth Jones, who had both the courage to find out for himself the truth about the ongoing holodomor by visiting the Ukraine himself, and then by withstanding the onslaught on his character because he violated the politically correct narrative of his time as supported by journalist and political elites.

I stumbled across and first learned of Jones about 15 years ago upon reading S. J. Taylor’s “Stalin’s Apologist.” This book is a biography on Walter Duranty, who serves as the devotee to the lie in the film “Mr. Jones” to Gareth Jones advocacy of the truth. In brief Duranty and Jones are foils to one another in the film. This contest between Duranty and Jones thus frames the film as the theme of the film is truth vs. lies. Early in the film, Jones is discussing “truth” with the leading female (Vanessa Kirby) of the film and Jones insists that he is looking for the truth regarding the Ukraine. Kirby character Ada Brooks responds by asking “whose truth?,” and then only a little later in the face of Jones’ protestations about true truth, responds by chiding Jones that his view on truth is “a little naive isn’t it?” The theme of the film is then anchored at the end of the film as Ada phones and leaves a message for Jones saying, “tell Gareth he was right about truth.” Between those two conversations we see Gareth Jones, in the film, as against all odds, being a champion of truth. He champions truth before his employer MP David Lloyd George and his staff, he champions truth with his foil Walter Duranty, he champions truth in his bylines that are printed in the London Times. “Mr Jones” portrays Gareth Jones as a early incarnation of Solzhenitsyn’s maxim, “Live not by lies.”

The truth of the holodomor in the Ukraine pursued by Stalin was being suppressed everywhere in the West since, like Hollywood in the introductory paragraphs of this column, Journalist and Newspapers were being run largely by those with a political and kinship interest to keep the holodomor buried. Not only was the story buried by journalists but chaps like Walter Duranty (London’s “Man in Moscow”) also wrote complete fabrications and lies about the genocide that was the holodomor. Duranty was so good at his circumlocutions and prevarications that he was awarded a 1932 Pulitzer prize in Journalism for his lies touching the Ukraine. This is what Jones (and Malcolm Muggeridge) were facing in writing in contradiction of Duranty’s Pulitzer. Duranty’s writing was so distorted that Muggeridge later spoke of him as “the greatest liar I ever knew.” One can easily see how Duranty proves the excellent foil for a film that emphasizes that true truth exists. Keep in mind here that Duranty’s correspondent releases from Moscow to the New York Times at this time shaped American policy causing many to conclude that Duranty’s lies led to the US, under FDR, to diplomatically recognize the Soviet Union. Yet the film “Mr. Jones” leads the viewer to conclude, despite the whole web of lies spun by Duranty, the New York Times, and Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Gareth Jones’ “One word of truth outweighed the world.” It really is inspirational.

In the context of this war between the lie and the truth we are given insight of the holodomor in “Mr. Jones.” The film doesn’t go all in on showing the barbarity and cruelty of the holdomor. It instead takes a more subtle approach to exposing the sadness. It shows people dumpster diving for Jones’ orange peel that he casually tosses away into a coal container. It shows children hauntingly singing a child’s song about Stalin playing a tune on a fiddle leading to the death of the Ukraine by the seizure of their grain. Stalin’s tune led to madness of Fathers and Mothers having to watch their children die. Stalin’s tune led to hunger and cold. The film shows the death squad out collecting bodies tossing a wailing orphan on top of the dead bodies knowing that the orphan himself isn’t long for the world since his mother was one of the dead collected. The film subtly reveals to the viewer cannibalism. The film demonstrates Jones himself seeking to eat bark in order to survive.

Throughout all this the cruelty of Stalin and the Bolshevik Commissars is put on display. Yet, as I said earlier all this is done with comparative subtlety. One feels the impact of the starvation but isn’t overwhelmed by it. (Showing the reality would turn the film into a horror film.)

The technique of the Director is to film in somber colors to communicate the colorlessness of life in communism. The lighting is dimmed so that one feels, as they view the movie, that they are in some sort of place where the illicit is occurring.

Interestingly and cleverly enough food is a sub-theme of the film. Conversations over meals serve as both contradiction to the famine occurring in Ukraine and as irony that the Soviet apparatchiks are feasting while others are eating straw soup and are cannibalizing. The West also comes in for some derision here as a couple of scenes, once Jones returns home, shows the abundance of food in the West.

One final wildcard weaves its way through the film and that is the presence of George Orwell as working on his “Animal Farm.” Orwell becomes the final judge over the contest of truth vs. lie, of Jones vs. Duranty. Orwell is a man who desires to believe in all that the Bolshevik Revolution stood for in the minds of the Utopians yet still connected enough to reality to be able to believe that it might well all be a lie. In the end Jones convinces Orwell that “Stalin is not the man you believe him to be.” It is clear that Orwell is convinced by Jones and yet is deeply saddened that he has been convinced. “Animal Farm” in this film is the result of Orwell’s sad convincing.

“Mr. Jones” ends with displaying to the viewer the price that Jones had to pay for telling the truth. Perhaps the films most disappointing moment is when Jones is vindicated. I would say that is the most disappointing moment of the film because it simply is the case that those carrying the truth are not typically often vindicated in their lifetime. I am convinced that most often they are not.

See the film … if you enjoy a film with plot and character development you won’t be disappointed.