The Stage of the World: How Secular History Was Bent Against Christ

Part 7 in The War Unseen: The Long Battle Against Christ and His Church

This article is Part 7 in a series. Be sure to start with Part 1!

This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 1, be sure to read Part 2!

This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 2, be sure to read Part 3!

This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 3, be sure to read Part 4!

This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 4, be sure to read Part 5!

This article is Part 7 in a series. After Part 5, be sure to read Part 6!

Author's Note: What follows is a personal hypothesis. While I am a devoted member of the Orthodox Church, this work does not reflect the official position of the Orthodox Church nor does it speak on behalf of it. Instead, this is the work of a sinner.

What follows is my own hypothesis—an Orthodox Christian reading of secular history as a theater of spiritual war. I’m not speaking for the Orthodox Church. I am proposing that many “non-religious” turns in Western history are best explained as coordinated pressures that reshape souls and societies so they will no longer recognize Christ or His Church.

I owe much of this article to the writings of Fr. Seraphim Rose in his Orthodox Survival Guide and the podcast Ek Nekron for exposing me to these ideas at the time I was writing this series.

Beyond the Paywall

What comes after the Great Schism is not just religious division—it is the slow reprogramming of the entire Western world. In the full article, I trace the causal chain:

• From Scholasticism to Rationalism — how a shift from revelation to logic set the stage for faith in human reason over divine wisdom.

• Papal Politics and the Revolutions — why papal claims of world power invited secular revolts and new “civil religions” that mimicked the Church.

• The Enlightenment and French Revolution — the deliberate enthronement of “Reason” as goddess, with altars, calendars, and rituals replacing Christ.

• Nihilism and the Occult — how Nietzsche’s “God is dead” gave way to spiritualism, Theosophy, and Crowley’s black mass, demonic parodies of Christian worship.

• Totalitarian Experiments — how both the Soviet gulag and modern consumerism seek the same thing: to erase Christian consciousness and re-engineer human beings.

• Digital Tyranny — the rise of surveillance capitalism and engineered passions, a soft persecution that leaves Christians docile and distracted.

• Fragmented Churches as Easy Targets — how Reformation-era splintering weakened Christendom, leaving Protestants and post-Christians vulnerable to the spirit of the age.

Subscribe to read the full article and follow the thread from 1054 all the way to our digital dystopia today. You’ll see why the world we inhabit is not neutral ground, but the carefully cultivated stage of an ongoing spiritual war.