From Tyranny, to Western Civiliztion, to the Progressive Atheist/Islamist Coalition: The Long Arc of How We Got Here

FROM KINGS TO COVENANTS: THE LONG ARC OF HOW WE GOT HERE

I’ve been turning something over in my mind for a while. It started as a simple observation and then refused to stay simple.

For most of recorded history, the default way human beings organized large societies was kings, emperors, pharaohs, caliphs, and dynasties. Someone at the top claimed the right to rule—often by blood, conquest, or a claim that the gods had chosen him. The rest of us lived under that arrangement. Tyranny was common. So was order. Empires built roads, collected taxes, raised armies, and sometimes produced astonishing beauty. They also crushed people. That pattern held, with important local exceptions, for thousands of years.

Then something different happened.

I want to walk you through that story in plain language. Maybe this should be the opening conversation of a longer series—part history lesson, part warning, part invitation to see our moment more clearly. I’m an evangelical Christian, so I will not pretend the Reformation and the Bible were side notes. They were not. And I want to borrow a powerful frame from Os Guinness: the deepest, most successful model of free society we have seen so far is not the humanist Terror of the French Revolution of Paris in 1789. It is closer to the ultimate freeing of the enslaved at Sinai and to the inalianable rights of the American Revolution of 1776.

THE LONG AGE OF THE THRONE

After people settled, farmed, and built cities, power concentrated. You can start the clock around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt and run it forward through Persia, Rome, China, the Islamic caliphates, and medieval Europe. Rulers were often treated as sacred or nearly so. Law was whatever the strong could enforce. Ordinary people had duties. They rarely had rights that bound the king.

There were exceptions. Village assemblies. Tribal councils. The brief, brilliant experiment of Athenian democracy. The Roman Republic before it became an empire. Medieval English parliaments and Italian city-states. Still, the large-scale pattern was monarchy and empire. If you lived in a big, organized society, you probably lived under a throne.

That is the world most of our ancestors knew.

When the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410, pagans blamed the Christians. Augustine answered with The City of God, one of the most important extra-biblical books in human history. He would not say the empire was Zion. He drew a line that still matters: the City of God is formed by the love of God; the earthly city is formed by the love of self. The two are mixed together in history. No throne, however grand, is the kingdom of God.

A CRACK IN THE OLD ORDER

The crack did not start with the American Founders. It started earlier.

The Protestant Reformation did something politically explosive even when the Reformers were not trying to design a republic. It put the Bible in the language of ordinary people. It taught that every believer has direct access to God. It challenged the idea that spiritual authority and political authority could be fused without limit in one man or one institution. Conscience before God mattered. The ruler was not God.

You can't overstate this. Luther was no democrat. Calvin’s Geneva was not the Bill of Rights. But the long-term effects were real: literacy, a check on concentrated power, a habit of reading law and covenant in Scripture, and a suspicion that no human office is final. English Protestants, Puritans, and later the American colonists carried that habit across the ocean. When they talked about covenant, they were not inventing a marketing slogan. They were reaching back to a biblical pattern: a people bound to God and to one another under a law that even the leader must honor.

Os Guinness puts it sharply in The Magna Carta of Humanity. The master story of freedom is not the French Revolution. It is Exodus. Slaves are set free by God, given law at Sinai, and formed into a people who are to live as responsible free men and women under that law—not as a mob, and not as subjects of a Pharaoh. Guinness calls that vision the Magna Carta of humanity: ordered liberty, covenant, justice that binds the powerful. The American founding, for all its flaws and unfinished business, drank more deeply from that well than from the well of 1789. Paris offered reason, will, and the general will unbounded. Sinai offered freedom under a higher law. That difference is not a footnote. It is the difference between ordered liberty and revolutions that eat their children.

The American experiment took that inheritance and tried to scale it: written constitution, separated powers, enumerated rights, representation, no king. It was messy. It left out too many people at the start. It still required a Civil War to begin making good on its own words. But as a large-scale attempt to replace hereditary despotism with government by consent under law, it remains the most successful model we have actually run.

That is why I use words like ordered liberty and covenantal constitutional order rather than just “democracy.” Democracy without limits becomes another kind of throne—the throne of the moment’s majority or the loudest faction.

THE RIVAL THAT PROMISED A NEW WORLD

In 1848 Marx and Engels published a short, blazing pamphlet. Industrial capitalism had created new wealth and new misery. They offered a different story: history as class struggle, private property as the root of oppression, and a future classless society. In the twentieth century that idea seized states. Russia. China. Satellite regimes. The promise was liberation. The result, again and again, was a new despotism with modern tools—secret police, famine as policy, camps, and a party that claimed to speak for History.

Communism did not succeed the American founding as the next natural stage of human progress. It was a rival bid to replace both the old kings and the liberal constitutional order. It failed as a humane system. It did not fail as a warning.

THE STRANGE COALITION OF OUR MOMENT

Which brings us to now.

We do not live in a clean “next epoch” with a single new ideology that everyone can name. What we do see is an unusual partnership: parts of the secular progressive left—often post-Christian or socialist/atheist in practice—and political Islamists. They do not share a vision of the good life. One side talks equity, identity, and the dismantling of inherited Western norms. The other side talks revelation, sharia, and a political order under God as they understand Him. They clash on women's rights, freedom of speech, apostasy, and sexual ethics.

They can still march together. They share enemies: Jesus, the United States, Israel, classical liberalism, the older Christian-influenced West, and often the market order that produced the prosperity they both use. Historians and journalists have called this the red-green alliance. It showed up in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when leftists helped bring Khomeini to power and then learned what happens when the theocrats no longer need them. It shows up on campuses and in streets after October 7. It is not a secret. It is not a synthesis. It is a coalition against a third party--Judeo Christian Western Civilization.

I do not say every communist, socialist, or progressive is in this camp, or every Muslim. I am describing a pattern that is now too visible to ignore.

WHY THIS STORY STILL MATTERS

If Guinness is right, we keep facing a choice that is older than America: Sinai or Paris (Human Liberty in Covenant to God and His laws, or the self-worshiping exess and violence of the French Revolution). Covenant and higher law, or human will unbounded. The Reformation helped recover the first. The American founding tried to institutionalize it. Communism was a catastrophic version of the second. The current alliance is another attempt to tear down the first without agreeing on what should replace it.

Augustine would have recognized the temptation. Every age wants to dress its city up as the City of God. The work of the church is not to marry the age. It is to form people who can seek the peace of the earthly city without worshiping it.

I am not asking you to treat 1776 as Scripture. I am asking you to notice that the combination of biblical conscience, Protestant resistance to absolute human authority, English legal habits, and a written constitution produced something rare: a large free society that, for all its sins, bound its own rulers and left room for repentance and reform.

Most of human history did not look like that. Most of it looked like a throne with the foot of a tyrant on the neck of the people.

The question in front of us is not whether we can invent a brand-new world order out of slogans. The question is whether we will keep the hard-won pattern of ordered liberty under a law higher than the ruler—or drift back toward older forms of power wearing new clothes.

That is the conversation I want us to have following this article. Not nostalgia. Not panic. Clarity.

If this frames the moment the way you have been feeling it but could not quite name, take the pieces one at a time: the long age of kings, the Reformation’s unexpected political fruit, the American founding as an Exodus-shaped experiment, the communist detour, and the coalition taking shape in our own streets and institutions.

The old world of the throne was not all evil. The new experiment in liberty is not all golden. But one of them treated the human person as a subject. The other, at its best, treated him as a neighbor, to be loved, under God, accountable, and free.

That difference is worth getting right.