Secular Patterns

Just by looking at the world, we can see that religion was the most important thing to human beings for a long time. The patterns in the Bible and the history of Christianity were with us for so long that they have become ingrained in our ways of thinking and show up in secular manifestations.

The movement of millions of Europeans a century and more ago from the "old world" to the "new world" in search of opportunity and freedom very much resembles the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament in the Bible. From the old order in which a person could not hope to attain salvation by his own merits to the new order where grace had given him a new life. Today's Europe is greatly changed and is itself the destination of millions of immigrants and the same pattern is evident.

Church history also leaves it's patterns. Tony Blair's New Labour Party and it's "third way" path between capitalism and socialism followed exactly the same pattern route as the Anglican Church (called Episcopal in the U.S.), which was formed as a compromise following the Reformation between Catholicism and Protestantism. In another example, Margaret Thatcher's political reformation, beginning in 1979, followed the same pattern of the Methodist Revival in England over a century earlier.

One of the easiest similarities to notice is the pattern resemblance between the Reformation in northern Europe in the Sixteenth Century and that of the Nazis in the Twentieth Century. The first was the breaking away from the old order to a new era of religious purity. The second was the same except it was for racial purity.