“From the time Europeans arrived on American shores, the frontier—the edge territory between white man’s civilization and the untamed natural world—became a shared space of vast, clashing differences that led the U.S. government to authorize over 1,500 wars, attacks and raids on Indians, the most of any country in the world against its indigenous people,” according to a History.com article regarding the genocide of Native Americans in the United States. “By the close of the Indian Wars in the late 19th century, fewer than 238,000 indigenous people remained, a sharp decline from the estimated 5 million to 15 million living in North America when Columbus arrived in 1492.”
The formation of the first 13 colonies in America, mainly by Protestants fleeing religious oppression, brought with it religious oppression against Catholics and other minorities, just as they had been persecuted in time past. These colonies denied access to Catholics, Jews and Quakers, passing laws that required imprisonment or death merely for their presence in the colonies.
“From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the ‘heretic’ and the ‘unbeliever’—including the ‘heathen’ natives already here,” Smithsonian.com notes in the feature, “America’s True History of Religious Tolerance.” Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”
This nation, from the beginning of its settlement by Europe, and in the name of Christianity, committed acts of mass genocide in their conquest of the land. Not only did it speak like a dragon through civil means, it persecuted others based on religious beliefs and thus spoke like a dragon in religious matters as well.
“In fact, the Church was the backbone of the slave trade,” the authors wrote. “In other words, most of the slave traders and slave ship captains were very ‘good’ Christians.”
For example, Sir John Hawkins, the first slave-ship captain to bring African slaves to the Americas, was a religious man who insisted that his crew “serve God daily” and “love one another.” His ship, ironically called “The Good Ship Jesus,” left the shores of his native England for Africa in October 1562.”
On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. At the same time, America held close to 700,000 people in bondage.
This hypocrisy was not missed by expositors of Bible prophecy in the following years. They saw this as a clear fulfilment of Revelation 13.
In 1892, Andrews wrote, “The civil power recognizes the equality of all men before the law; and the spiritual power acknowledges the right of every man to worship God according to his own convictions of what God requires. Here are the two horns like those of a lamb” (1892 JNA, TMR 92.1).
In The Advent Review and Herald we find the following statements:
- “We have briefly given our reasons for believing that the ecclesiastical or church power of this country constituted one of the horns of the two-horned beast of Revelation 13. Like the civil power, or Republicanism, it is mild and lamb-like in profession, but upholding slavery and war, and testing the faith of their members and others by their creeds instead of the word of God” (Advent Review and Herald, January 28th, 1858).
- “Next he sees a beast with two horns like a lamb, but he spake as a dragon. This we believe means the United States. This government is lamb-like in appearance, but dragon-like in action. In profession it is the land of liberty; but in action it is the land of slavery and oppression” (Review and Herald June 10, 1858).
- In the book The Great Controversy, written in 1888, the author states, “The lamblike horns and dragon voice of the symbol point to a striking contradiction between the professions and the practice of the nation thus represented. The “speaking” of the nation is the action of its legislative and judicial authorities. By such action it will give the lie to those liberal and peaceful principles which it has put forth as the foundation of its policy” (The Great Controversy, 442, emphasis supplied).
- And with an uncanny insight, we find these haunting words written in 1856:
“The prophecy does not say that at first he spake like a dragon, but at length reformed his speech, and breathed forth a just and Christ-like spirit. His future history presents no redeeming feature. He will continue to bellow forth his dragon voice, till he shall be cast into the burning flame, and the remnant whom he will persecute shall take their stand of victory on mount Zion with the Lamb” (June 26, 1856 UrSe, ARSH 68.9).
When slavery was brought to an end, the lamb-like beast found new ways to speak. Jim Crow laws were designed to oppress the newly freed black people. Vagrancy laws allowed for free blacks to be arrested if they were found to be without jobs. Of course, the newly freed slaves struggled to find employment and were often arrested for loitering. These “criminals” were then used to provide free labor to many of the same slave masters.
“The Vagrancy Act of 1866, passed by the General Assembly on January 15, 1866, forced into employment, for a term of up to three months, any person who appeared to be unemployed or homeless. If so-called vagrants ran away and were recaptured, they would be forced to work for no compensation while wearing balls and chains.
America would find yet another way to advance Dragon speak. Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half cousin, introduced a new science called eugenics. The teaching was based on Darwin’s idea of survival of the fittest, found in his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, published on November 24, 1859. Through eugenic teaching, it was believed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites. In other words, what was first only based on superstition and hunch, now could be backed by science. “Eugenicists argued that the environment in which a person was raised was of much less importance than the germ plasm inherited from their parents (i.e., biological inheritance) as the cause of ‘adverse social status,’ criminality, or general ‘social maladjustment.’” Hence, to seek to uplift or assist in uplifting the black race was seen as interfering with the process of natural selection. But eugenics did not just seek to not interfere with the process. Rather, eugenics sought to intervene by speeding up the process. By implementing policies designed to create a gap in education, incarceration, housing, and wealth between blacks and the “superior race,” it was believed that the dying out of the “inferior race” would happen sooner than later. The 1960s only served as evidence that the nation was still speaking like a dragon.
Then came the war on drugs, which disproportionately affected African Americans already in impoverished living conditions. For the same crime, blacks were imprisoned more often and with longer sentences. Eugenics lost open support by the 1940s due to Hitler’s connection with it. However, it did not disappear. It simply went underground, and like slavery before it, continues to inspire Dragon talk today.
Very few people in today’s society are willing to be identified as racists. It has become taboo. As a pastor, I have had many people confide in me about their different struggles. Racism is the only sin I have yet to hear confessed. Yet it exists. It has been integrated into the various systems of our society to such a degree that is self-sustaining. It no longer needs individuals to be racist to push it. This is why so many Americans appear confused about racism. They don’t see it openly in individuals, and so assume it is gone. In fact, many have just become used to the language of Dragon Speak, and thus cannot see the policies and unjust laws which persist to this day.
