“And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.” (Revelation 13:11)
Why this post?
Sixty-two long videos since June, from people who watch the same horizon I do. Videos are where I hear about things, not where I check them. So, everything below went back to its source document first, and where I could not reach the original, I say whose copy I am quoting.
Introduction — a lamb that speaks like a dragon
Ben Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist. He is also the vice chair of the President’s Religious Liberty Commission. In September an Adventist interviewer asked him the question many of us have asked: is the lamb-like beast of Revelation 13 starting to speak like a dragon?
“Well, our country is starting to speak like a dragon. … there’s no question about that. But we should keep an open mind.”
Fair enough. An open mind is the watchman’s job too. And one paragraph, published in 1888, tells us what to look for. Not a vague dragon. Two errors, and two hands reaching out.
“Through the two great errors, the immortality of the soul, and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his deceptions. While the former lays the foundation of Spiritualism, the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome. The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of Spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.” (Ellen G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 588)
Two errors. One about a day. One about the dead.
Since June both of them have moved. And the part that winked me is that both moved through the same man, the Vice President of the United States, JD Vance.
Error one — Sunday, and the hand reaching to Rome
The wall becomes a bridge
In June, Carson and the commission’s chairman, Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, handed the President its report. It is still a draft. The meeting to finalise it has been postponed, with no new date.
Americans have long talked about a wall between church and state. The draft offers a different picture.
“Perhaps a better analogy is that religious liberty acts as a bridge between church and state.”
Elsewhere it says the boundary “might be better understood as a bridge, separate and distinct but conducive to a dynamic exchange where religious communities strengthen government and vice versa.”
And vice versa. A wall keeps two things apart. A bridge is built for crossing. A government that strengthens a church will sooner or later be asked: which church? And on which day?
Patrick said it in his closing remarks at the commission’s seventh hearing.
“Every time we hear separation of church and state, we need to say there is no separation of church and state. That’s a lie.”
Carson told his interviewer that “The commission firmly believes in separation of church and state”, and that “anybody who tries to impose a Sunday law is going to find extreme resistance”. Then he asked himself whether circumstances could change to allow it and answered “Potentially.”
The chairman calls the separation a lie. The vice chair says the commission believes in it. Same commission. And the bridge is in the draft.
The day of rest comes back
In January the Heritage Foundation — the think tank behind Project 2025 — published a family report with a section headed “Support for a Uniform Day of Rest”. Heritage never names the day. It doesn’t have to. The court ruling it leans on is about Sunday-closing laws, and its everyday examples are Sunday ones. The Adventist Church in North America publicly opposed the proposal as a Sunday law.
In July the Institute for Family Studies said it plainer. Policymakers “should also at least consider” this:
“reinstituting Blue Laws requiring business closures on Sundays might help create more in-person community, for example.”
More community. Who would argue with that?
The Vice President and the sacred days
Then there is JD Vance.
In 2020, before he held any office, Vance wrote an essay that cited research on how blue laws raise church attendance. Its answer was blunt.
“So close the damn businesses on Sunday. Commercial freedom will suffer. Moral behavior will not, and our society will be much the better for it.”
This June, now Vice President, he published Communion, a memoir of his conversion to the Catholic Church. I do not have the book. The channel Strange Normal reads passages from it aloud on camera, and as read there, Vance writes:
“I’ve supported blue laws, state laws that shut down businesses on certain days like Thanksgiving, because these days are sacred”
His example there is Thanksgiving, not Sunday, and he goes on to say everyone ought to be able to take part equally. But look at the first reason he gives. Because these days are sacred. The state shutting the shops because a day is holy. Now read Ellen White’s phrase again. Sunday sacredness.
A Catholic reviewer quotes him praising Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum for a state that “ensures that working people have sufficient ‘rest from labor’”. As quoted, that names no day. It names a Pope.
Then the passage I did not expect. The same channel reads one about his grandmother, Mamaw, as he weighs becoming a Catholic:
“she felt the Catholic way of worship was rather formal but what mattered to her was Jesus.”
“Revelation 18 may have been about corruption of the Catholic Church, the horror of Babylon and all of its hocus pocus or it may have been about something else.”
Revelation 18. Babylon. The Catholic Church. All of it inside the Vice President’s own conversion story, with his grandmother’s question left open.
And he walked into Rome anyway. I say that with no contempt. Strange Normal itself calls it a “warm, funny, sincere memoir”. A warm book is exactly the kind to read slowly.
Saying it out loud
Some men just name the day.
Stephen Wolfe wrote The Case for Christian Nationalism. As the Adventist Review quotes him, he counts “obligating Sabbath observance” among the things a civil government may do. On which day, and why, he is honest:
“Whether or not Sunday is now a holy day by divine positive command is irrelevant here”
“the most fitting day (given apostolic practice and by long tradition) is each Sunday”
In an interview with Heritage & Hope he said such a law “wouldn’t be compelled worship”. The shops would just be shut, with “some sort of sanction” behind it.
Then there is the Austin pastor Joel Webbon. On his Right Response podcast his co-host floated having the Texas National Guard seize churches that fly pride flags, while admitting it would not happen for years. Webbon’s advice to politicians was “on this particular topic, you got to hide your power levels.” A little later came “start punishing blasphemers and also, uh, reinstall Sabbath laws.” And on the timing: “So, you don’t run on that, and you don’t talk about that as a politician yet. But, that is the goal we’re working towards.”
Yet.
One conversation was aimed straight at us. On Kings & Statesmen, a programme of New Saint Andrews College, the host Lennox Kalifungwa recalls talking with Seventh-day Adventist groups about his “affiliations with Christian nationalism”.
“I do think a lot of their concerns are irrational, a lot of it is is premised on Ellen White’s false prophecy”
His guest, Timon Cline, calls Sunday laws “a totally traditional practice in America”. And “the reason you close everything else down on Sunday um is because it’s predominantly Christian place”. After all, “you’re not frog marching people into worship”.
(Fascinating how he happens to cite frog as per Revelation 16:13)
Tradition. The majority. Wolfe sets aside whether Sunday is holy by God’s command as “irrelevant here”. In this whole exchange Cline never reaches for a command at all.
Jesus met that exact argument.
“Full well ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition.” (Mark 7:9)
The commandment never left the day open. “But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work” (Exodus 20:10).
The hand across the gulf
And the hand reaching to Rome?
In June the American Catholic bishops consecrated the United States of America to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. They did it, in their own words, “as part of the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”.
The same day the President’s official message said he and Melania “join in prayer” with the bishops. He called it “a powerful moment in our national story”.
“They will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power.”
How it might come
This is my expectation, not a fact. I don’t know if a Sunday law will arrive as a bill, debated for months where everyone sees it coming. It may well come as an executive order. One signature.
Why? Because that is how this administration already moves. In May the President’s proclamation for Jewish American Heritage Month encouraged Jewish Americans to observe a national Sabbath. The UFO files I come to below were ordered by a social-media post that the Department of War calls a directive. Neither needed a vote.
A day of rest could come the same way. Framed as family. As community. As gratitude for 250 years.
But it won’t arrive until error 2 manifests.
Error two — the dead, and the hand reaching to spiritualism
“And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.” “For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty.” (Revelation 16:13–14)
The files keep coming
Spiritualism today does not need a séance table. It can come as lights in the sky, with a government file number and a message.
Six releases of UFO files now. A gunship crew logged “cold orbs”. A senior intelligence official describes “countless orange orbs” on a helicopter flight over a test range. The department calls them “unresolved cases”: it cannot say what they are.
NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart said in May that “there are religious leaders that have been consulted by the White House.” He named no one, and I have found nothing that confirms it. Hold it as his claim. But hold it.
“Call that a demon”
In July Joe Rogan asked the Vice President about his earlier remark that these beings are demons. Vance did not back away. He gave a condition.
“But if we’re talking about an extraterrestrial being that is human-like but not human that contains effectively infinite powers and is torturing human beings. You can call it an alien if you want, but I think there’s a lot of historical precedent to call that a demon.”
To be fair, he hedged. Of beings that healed a man he said it “Sounds like an angel”, and added “This could all be fake.”
Still. The Vice President reached for the right word. Demon.
Then I heard what he does at the cemetery.
The family cemetery
Vance’s family has a cemetery plot on a mountainside in Eastern Kentucky. He has spoken of it in public before. In Communion, as Strange Normal reads it, he writes:
“I walk in that ancient plot of land and speak to people long dead.”
He talks to his grandparents and great-grandparents “like patron saints”. He calls the place “the outdoor temple of the dead”. He wants his children, one day, to have a place there to “speak to their ancestors”.
A few pages later, as Strange Normal reads it, comes the sentence everything else rests on:
“Memory Eternal is the promise that when you speak to the dead, they say something back. Even if only as a vapor from the past.”
They say something back. Even if only as a vapour.
He is just as open about praying to the saints. Of Protestant friends who “draw the line at consulting the dead people”, he says: “I think they’re wrong, but I’m not here to settle this argument.”
The same man who looks at a powerful being from the sky and says call that a demon walks into a graveyard, speaks to the dead, and writes that they say something back.
That is the whole danger from the vice president. He can name the demon when it comes as a monster. But what if it comes wearing Mamaw’s face?
Ellen White saw it coming:
“Many will be confronted by the spirits of devils personating beloved relatives or friends, and declaring the most dangerous heresies. These visitants will appeal to our tenderest sympathies, and will work miracles to sustain their pretensions.” (The Great Controversy, p. 560)
It aims at our tenderest sympathies. The grandmother we miss.
Scripture already gave us the defense.
“For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5)
If the dead know nothing, then whatever seems to say something back at a graveside is not Mamaw. Believe the dead are awake and listening, and you have no defense against the visitor with a familiar face and a kind message.
One book. One man. Both errors.
Strange Normal made this connection. “In one book, from one man”: the Vice President of the United States supports laws that shut businesses on days that are sacred, and defends speaking to the dead.
Go back to page 588. Sunday sacredness, the bond with Rome. The immortality of the soul, the foundation of Spiritualism. Two errors. Two hands. One cover.
Like the host, I have no quarrel with the man himself. He believes what he was taught about the dead, as most of the Christian world has been taught. That should not comfort us. It should wake us.
What I’m watching for next
The final commission report, and its bridge read line by line against the draft.
Whether a day of rest moves from a think-tank page to an order or a bill. My eye is on the pen as much as on Congress.
The next file release, and who gets asked to explain the “unresolved cases”.
Whydoneit
Because the two great errors do not arrive looking like errors.
A day of rest looks like family. Like community. Like a tired working man finally getting a Sunday off. Who could be against that?
A man speaking to the family dead he loved looks like love. Who could be against that?
That is why they work. Neither needs a villain. Both only need us to stop asking: what did God actually say? About the day. About the dead.
He has been plain on both.
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” (Isaiah 8:20)