Pastor Scott Lively: The Way Forward in 2025

 The Way Forward in 2025

The November presidential election of 2024 changed the entire world overnight, so dramatically and in so many ways that confident predictions of what comes next are next to impossible. Many critical and pivotal factors are actively in flux, plus the malign elites from whose hands the levers of power have supposedly just been ripped are actually still largely in control for a few more weeks. Will they surrender? Or will they sabotage the ship of state and then slink away in the ensuing chaos to regroup and re-strategize? Either way, God is still on His throne overseeing it all and we who belong to Him can make our own plans in total confidence of that ultimate truth. Thus, my News Year’s Resolution for 2025 is to embrace and model the power of a redemptive lifestyle, positively and pro-actively. 

These are my plans and aspirations:    

In 2025 I want to promote a movement within MAGA and the Church to get back to nature as the antidote to the artificial world and the rise of transhumanism – and to do so in a mostly positive, proactive manner that encourages political de-polarization and unity on universal values as they are understood from a naturalist viewpoint. I have been developing this “natural life” theme for twenty years as a side-line to my culture war adventures,   but now, in “retirement,” I will reverse that order and make it my primary emphasis. 

The culture war will necessarily rage on as the pendulum swings strongly back to the right, and I will participate in that as an “elder statesman” and advisor through the promotion of my culture-war books, and through some of my future columns on WND and other venues. However, increasingly as time goes on I want to use honey rather than vinegar to flavor my message and to keep my main focus on the good things we want to restore/create rather than the bad things we want to remove/destroy.  

Indeed, every “thankless task” I’ve taken on and every battle scar I’ve earned over the past thirty years on the front lines of this war has helped to force “the worm’s turn” finally, making it at least possible for those evil things to be defeated and destroyed in this new political season. But, for my own part, I am inclined to continue to scout ahead to where we go next rather than join the clearing operation now in its nascent, pre-inauguration stage. I literally created the Swamp Rangers sub-division of my ministry in 2020 to take a leadership role in that clearing operation, believing Trump would remain in the White House in 2021.

Frankly, he could have used that help against the deep state and the RINOs then, but today he’s the most powerful leader in the world, by far, served by a stunning team of populist super-heroes and backed by a massive army of MAGA foot-soldiers. My contribution as a small fish in that big pond would be minimal and redundant.

It has always been in my nature to seek out the potentially highest-impact tasks not being handled by others (like exposing the homosexual roots of the Nazi Party and taking the arrows for doing so) and so I will press on with what I think will be most beneficial effort in the months and years ahead. In this case it means fighting “conservatism” by laying out a pro-active vision for a better future and proposing the means to achieve it. We will NEVER overcome the fatal flaw of conservatism (which is to always react to today’s “progressive” initiatives and then always settle for preserving yesterday’s status quo of baked-in leftist policies) unless we learn to define our own detailed vision for a better future than we ever had in the past, and to pursue it pro-actively and persistently as a lifestyle. 

I want to become a model of living that lifestyle personally and professionally. I want to remind everyone of the best things we had in the past, and to hypothesize/demonstrate how we can use those things as stepping stones to something even better in the future. I don’t want us to regress to what we were (an impossibility) but to progress toward what God wants us to be, to the best we can discern and implement it as a society of diverse interests and perspectives. That’s a huge challenge that will never be fully achieved until Christ rules this world in His Millennial Kingdom, but we can at least use the snap-shots He has given us in the Word (such as Isaiah 11) about what life will be like then.  

I’m obviously a futurist regarding the MK, but regardless of what eschatological camp we’ve chosen to inhabit in the present, those biblical snap-shots should be recognized as the gold standard for civilization in our future. They provide a glimpse of what God perceives as the ideal society, whether He’s going to impose it Himself from the Throne of David in an earthly Jerusalem (the pre-Millennial view), or whether He intends us, as the church, to subdue the world and impose it ourselves (the a-Millennial and post-Millennial views).  

The clear picture He lays before us is human civilization in harmony with nature as recognized best in the “universal” family and community values of the vast majority of human beings alive today on this planet. And importantly, that healing truth is the bridge to common ground between the Christian right, the Environmentalist left, and the Populist center on both sides of the divide. That island of common ground is the only place in the modern world where the satanic elites’ divide and conquer polarization strategy loses much of its power. 

Many MAGA people, fresh from victory over our Marxist polar opposites, might not and probably should not be receptive to the idea of de-polarizing our society in the short term, but in the mid-to-long term that’s the only way to de-fang the upper elites who keep us divided as a tool of social engineering. Identifying and socially prioritizing the universal values of the natural order we all were born into is the only way to effectively neutralize efforts to pit us against each other. That means first breaking the anti-family, anti-patriarchal stranglehold the Marxists have gained over our children and culture – so there’s still a civil war to be fought – but when/if we get back to cherishing normalcy as a society we can then build in safeguards to prevent the Marxist cancer from growing back.

That restoration is only possible if we actually have a clear, detailed vision for what it will look like when we’re done – something we don’t yet have. THAT is the task I want to pursue for the rest of my life: crafting and popularizing the vision of a truly family centered society in harmony with “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.” That was the cornerstone promise of our Founders when they first declared our independence: a promise which has never yet been kept in full measure. THAT must be the aspiration to which we hold tightly and teach our children to embrace. Pursuing that goal is what I will aspire to do in 2025 and beyond, along with any other persons of good will who care to join me.