A religious tsunami is forming in America. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) do not just want higher taxes or a larger welfare state – they want a church. And they have built one, a sacred edifice with its own holy texts (the works of Marx, Engels, and the leftist chatter of 1,000 zealous university professors).
Its eschatology is a redeemed classless society, its doctrine of original sin is private property and the free market. It has prophets and martyrs, rituals of protest and moral purification, and a thick community that supplies friends, status, identity, and a sense of purpose. Its good work is social justice.
What was once a fringe movement has become the organizing force of its younger, more indoctrinated, and more urban devotees. Candidates who once treated socialism as a liability now treat it as an asset—to the delight of countless milennials who just want something different, without the historical awareneness of its cost.
Jeffrey Arm, vice president of external affairs at the Manhattan Institute, describes the DSA not as a political movement but as a congregation. It supplies the lonely, the underemployed, and the educationally indoctrinated with what churches once offered: moral vocabulary, social belonging, status, rituals, and a grand narrative of historical struggle in which the individual can play a redemptive role. The DSA offers an explanation and a cause. Capitalism, in this worldview, has cheated them, and they must oppose the dignity of owning private property.
This is not politics as usual. It is the religious impulse emptied of God and poured into the state. Humans are created with a metaphysical hunger for answers about our existence, identity, the meaning of history, and the nature of man (Acts 17:27). When that hunger is denied its proper object, it does not disappear, it attaches itself to the nearest available substitute.
Marxism has always understood this. The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communist Party did not merely nationalize industry. They offered a total account of history, a doctrine of original sin (class), a path of redemption (revolution), and a Promise Land (the classless society). The DSA is the American, post-Christian version of the same pattern. And it is coming fast.
Its leaders illustrate the point with particular clarity. The New York co-chair, a Yale graduate living in a $1.5 million townhouse, has claimed an immigrant background that does not exist. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, comes from an elite family. These are not dispossessed victims, they are educated, status-anxious zealous evangelists of this false religion. Their discontent is not primarily economic, but ideological, and spiritual, and they have been invited right into to Seventh-day Adventist churches.
Millennials
Millennials on average have higher median incomes and wealth than previous generations at comparable ages. Their resentment is cultural and comparative: the educated urbanite measuring his life against the promises of elite education and finding the measure unkind. The DSA supplies what the university promised but did not deliver—friends, status, and a story in which the adherent is on the right side of history. For them, redemption comes through power rather than grace. Their doctrine is simple: the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed, and politics is the means by which the latter overcome the former. Heretics are those who notice contradictions, or who continue to believe in the free market and the dignity of owning private property.
Lonely societies and people manufacture their own gods. When the Creator God is displaced, the political project expands to fill the vacuum. It acquires creeds, doctrines of sin, rituals of belonging, and mechanisms of excommunication. The result is not secular politics. It is synthetic religion. We saw this in the woke movement of 2020.
Education
The supply of congregants has a source. John Ellis, professor emeritus of German literature at UC Santa Cruz and author of The Breakdown of Higher Education, has tracked it for years. In a Wall Street Journal essay he notes what conservatives observed long ago and what many liberals preferred not to notice: American education has been captured by destructive radicals who treat the university as a transmission belt for ideology rather than a place of scholarship. Marxist professors hire and supervise other Marxist professors. The process is self-replicating. Unsurprisingly, these institutions have produced thousands of young Marxists, even in Adventist schools.
Faculty self-selection does the rest. Parents continue to send their children to the most prestigious institutions available, accepting the status premium even when the intellectual climate is toxic (including numerous SDA institutions). Ellis argues that the only remedy is to remove activist professors from their positions. There is no legal barrier to doing so. There is only the absence of will.
State-level efforts, such as those pursued under Governor DeSantis in Florida, represent one attempt to restore the distinction between teaching and proselytizing. Whether that distinction can be recovered at scale remains an open question. The alternative is continued production of cohorts who treat politics as liturgy and the Democrat Party as their natural home.
True Christians are not free to choose between love and truth. For the converted man, the two are not separable. Take abortion, for instance. A ‘love’ that requires the denial of what a child is, does not protect the child. It protects the parent from the cost of bloodshed. But the creation order is not a negotiable preference. It is the structure within which genuine care is possible. When that structure is abandoned in the name of affirmation, both love and truth are lost.
Consider how this new religion treats biblical marriage. Biblical marriage—a heterosexual covenant ordered toward union and, ordinarily, procreation—is simply set aside. The reduction is total. Sex becomes a matter of consent, pleasure, and risk management. When the only remaining constraints are procedural, the ideology that prioritizes adult pleasure over the interests of children, the integrity of the body, or the long-term health of relationships will prevail by default. A morality that cannot distinguish between biblical marriage and its counterfeits will fail. It also cannot restrain pseudo-religious political movements that treat God’s creational distinctions as obstacles to be overcome.
Some of these distinctions are:
Creator and creation
Male and female
Good and evil
God and humanity
Light darkness
The 7th day and the rest of the week
The pattern across these cases is consistent. Each of these distinctions are under attack today. The human religious impulse does not vanish when churches empty. It migrates. Our ideologically-captured educational system supplies the catechists. Political movements supply the congregations. Sexual ethics supply the revised commandments. Parental relationships supply the testing ground. In each domain the substitute is thinner than what it replaces, more absolute in its demands, and less capable of sustaining the distinctions that make authentic Christian life possible.
In the final crisis of earth’s history, Revelation 13 depicts a counterfeit religious power that unites with the state to enforce worship contrary to God’s Law. The rise of this synthetic political faith—replacing the Creator with the collective, erasing the distinctions of male and female, good and evil, and the Sabbath rest—mirrors the deception that prepares the world for the mark of the beast. When the human desire for worship is poured into the state rather than directed to Jesus the Christ, it becomes an instrument of coercion, and the final resting place of Isaiah 5:20.
Seventh-day Adventists see in these movements the fulfillment of prophecy: a great apostasy that exalts human authority above the Commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, culminating in a worldwide crisis that tests every soul.
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“But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth” (James 3:14).
