A Cause Not Our Own
by Donavon L Riley

Aldous Huxley once warned us: confession alone will not save us. The powers that move this world—those intelligent and practical masters—don’t want mere patients to lock away or rebels to shoot down. No, what they’re after is something far more insidious: they want converts, willing souls who will labor for the Cause with every ounce of their conviction. It’s a dark evangelism, a twisted mirror of what we know as discipleship, but this one isn’t leading toward life. This one is a call to surrender our thoughts, to abandon our own reckoning, and to fall in line with a new gospel of control.

There’s a new gospel sweeping over us, and it’s as relentless as any revival. This anti-evangelism doesn’t whisper salvation but submission, a soft surrender of the soul to something that feels true yet leaves us hollow. And we’d be fools to think we’re immune, that just because we call ourselves Christians, we’re safe from this strange conversion. Scripture urges us to be vigilant, to watch as the shepherd keeps watch over his flock in the night. There’s a reason for that: even sheep, if they stray too close to the wolves, find themselves coaxed into a trance that feels like security but is nothing less than a path to devouring.

We’re human, all of us, and this makes us susceptible—open to suggestion, to allurements that sound like truth but are wrapped in layers of deceit. We’re flesh and blood, subject to weaknesses and easily ensnared if we grow careless. But in Christ, there’s an armor not of metal, but of awareness, a kind of holy discernment. And so we need to see these tactics for what they are, understand the persuasion being cast over our minds and souls. If we stay unrooted, unattentive, even the strongest of us can be led into this new gospel of self-forgetting, this anti-evangelism of the modern world.

The call, then, is not to stand complacent but to be awake—to walk as pilgrims and prophets, not lulled to sleep by the promises of a system that seeks to shape us for its own purposes. To remember that in a world of endless gospels, there is only one true Gospel, the one that breaks chains, rather than forges new ones. We are urged to hold close to Christ not as a relic but as the living anchor in a sea of manufactured truths. Let us watch, then, and let us remember who and what we serve, lest we find ourselves enlisted in a Cause not our own, unknowing converts in a gospel of forgetting.