Do Not Be Conformed to This Age

I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
(Romans 12:1-2, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

“It is the time of Antichrist’s reign,” Isaac Penington warned.

Penington, one of the most prominent writers among the early Friends, looked out over the seventeenth-century world and saw Antichrist “sitting in the temple as if he were God, and exalting himself over all that is called God, and which ought to be worshipped.” Today, one might read Penington’s “Some Questions Answered Concerning the Lamb’s War,” with its talk of dragons and beasts, merely as commentary on the Book of Revelation, but the questions it addresses had an immediate urgency for him and for his fellow Quakers.

They believed in the reality of Jesus Christ as the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), recognizing Christ as the Word that has existed from the beginning, the Word that was not only with God but was God. They believed most of the world had turned away from that Word, seduced by the secular, material temptations of Empire—that “even while the Lamb, and his pure life and holy testimony have prevailed, so that the dragon and his army could get no ground over them inwardly[,] yet the dragon, even then, hath prevailed over their goods, liberties, and lives outwardly.”

“Who is like unto the beast?” Empire’s mighty viziers taunted. “Who is able to make war with the beast?” Well, early Friends believed that, with the Lamb’s help, they could keep up the fight. But they didn’t see it as a violent revolution, like the civil war they had just lived through. As another early Quaker, James Nayler, put it, the Lamb called on them to reject “the whole work and design of the god of this world—his laws, his customs, his fashions, his inventions, and all which seeks to add to or take from the work of God as it was in the beginning.”

The less we accept from Caesar, the less we must render back unto him.

The other day, I shared an article on Facebook, a warning from a Christian magazine about the spiritual dangers of relying on ChatGPT and other large language models, forms of so-called “artificial intelligence,” to provide us with answers to questions we could have researched ourselves with some effort. One reader suggested we had little choice but to accept the situation. “[AI] is not going away and its presence will continue to grow,” he wrote. “You can run but, methinks, the only way to hide is by going completely off grid.”

“Would you have said the same to Woolman about the dyed cloth he opted not to wear?” another Friend responded, citing the example of eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman, who famously boycotted fabrics produced under unsafe labor conditions. A lively discussion followed, in which the original commenter acknowledged the moral argument but remained pessimistic: “I just don’t believe we should fool ourselves that we’re ever gonna make a clean break from AI.”

At this point, I chimed in. “While it may be increasingly difficult to avoid the AI slop that other people put out in the world,” I reminded him, “it’s relatively easy to decide not to help them spread it around, neither by sharing what comes our way nor by generating our own.” And though we may on occasion mistakenly give credence to something produced by AI, we can always resolve to greater discernment moving forward.

If only we could refuse to conform to this age as easily as flicking a light switch on or off! But “the world’s lusts have spoiled your souls of the heavenly image,” as Nayler remonstrated, “and the spirit of the world has captivated your minds to itself and its likeness.” And it takes a steady spiritual discipline to shake off those pernicious influences.

In the time of Antichrist’s reign, the rejection of Empire begins in our imaginations, but it must not end there.

Spirit calls on each of us to remember the promise of a more blessed community, and to commit to redirecting our lives toward establishing that “good and acceptable and perfect” community here on earth. “Good” and “acceptable” in the sense of a flourishing virtue that meets the covenantal standard; “perfect” in that it moves forward with a single-minded focus.

We don’t need to quibble, just now, as to whether or not each of us sees “the will of God” in that community in the same way that the earliest Friends did. Whatever we think about that, we can work together to pare away at the influence of Empire in our lives and in our meetinghouses. We can refuse to participate in the oppressive hierarchies of racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, and transphobia. We can accept the strangers in our midst as neighbors, and reject all forms of nationalism, especially those presented to us in deceptive “Christian” rhetoric. And with each small step away from the false god of this world, we can allow a greater power to work within us, reshaping and renewing our minds in the direction of love.