The Useful Enemy

Throughout history, manufacturing an enemy has served to centralise ecclesiastical and dogmatic authority, exhort doctrinal conformity, and “protect” followers from the evils of the world. When a movement secures its identity through what it opposes, an existential threat becomes necessary to maintain momentum.

Prominent historical examples illustrate this pattern:

Throughout human history, the most potent weapon for consolidating power has not been the sword or the law, but the invention of a shared external threat.

When a ruling elite or an unstable society is facing internal division, nothing unifies fractured groups faster than a carefully constructed, terrifying enemy. If you frame an out‑group as a real danger, people fall in line, dissent gets quiet, and leaders can justify whatever comes next.

When you look at this across very different periods, from ancient Canaan to nineteenth‑century America, the same pattern keeps showing up. Seeing it laid out like that has been really eye‑opening for me, revealing uncomfortable truths about control, manipulation, and institutional survival that I certainly never learned at school.

𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑨𝒏𝒄𝒊𝒆𝒏𝒕 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑴𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒍 𝑩𝒍𝒖𝒆𝒑𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒔: 𝑰𝒔𝒓𝒂𝒆𝒍 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑹𝒐𝒎𝒆

The underlying pattern of this approach can be seen in the ancient Near East. As recorded in the Israelite story of Joshua, the tribes of Israel emerged from the wilderness needing a unified national and spiritual identity.

Before anyone feels alarmed at my direction, I want to say that I’m simply focusing on the wider historical pattern here, and I recognise that the story of the Israelites, Caleb and Joshua holds deep meaning for many.

The narrative shows this pattern by framing the indigenous Canaanite populations as spiritually corrupted agents whose very existence would contaminate the Promised Land. If left to fester, this contamination would lead to fragmentation and infighting.

To enforce absolute social obedience and and maintain unity of twelve tribes, Israelite leaders utilized fear-mongering of the enemy. Joshua instructed maximum physical violence against the perceived enemies.

Genocide of the enemy was practised. Captured Canaanite kings were subjected to rituals of domination: their necks were stepped on, they were publicly executed, their bodies were hung on trees to inflict psychological terror on all who observed, and they were buried under massive rock piles as permanent monuments of Israelite dominance.

𝑹𝒐𝒎𝒆

Centuries later, the imperial government of Rome employed this blueprint to maintain civic and religious conformity across its sprawling empire.

Emperors like Nero and administrators like Trajan framed early Christians as unpatriotic, anti-social subversives who refused to worship Roman gods. Because Christians refused to sacrifice to the Emperor or buy sacrificial goods, they were blamed for disrupting temple economies and threatening the peace of the gods (Pax Romana).

Nero famously used the minority sect as a political scapegoat to divert public anger away from his own failures, subjecting Christians to horrific executions for the entertainment of his subjects, crucifying them, feeding them to wild beasts, or burning them alive as human torches.

We’ve all learned about the crusades where Popes killed Muslims and Jews. We’ve also heard about the Popish persecution of Protestants.

What no one told us was that during a 250-year period Roman Emperors were responsible for the martyrdom of 25 Popes, men who were prepared to be tortured and die for their faith.

In both antiquity and the classical world, the state asserted its absolute power over the individual by making a public spectacle of the designated enemy.

𝑴𝒆𝒅𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒍 𝑹𝒖𝒔𝒔𝒊𝒂 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝑵𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒔𝒕 𝑨𝒎𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒂

As state structures evolved, the target of the moral panic often shifted from external rivals to internal heretics. In the 1400s, as the Grand Duchy of Moscow sought to centralize autocratic power over independent territories like Novgorod, the Russian Orthodox Church and Tsarist crown built a theology dependent on purging all religious deviation.

They targeted the “Judaizers” and seventh-day Sabbath worshippers, framing them as insidious, hidden subversives out to corrupt the Holy Orthodox faith. By warning of a heresy infecting the royal court, prominent church leaders outlawed dissent and consolidated absolute rule, unifying a deeply unstable feudal realm under a fiercely nationalistic Orthodox identity. Religious dissenters faced horrific public executions, including being paraded through cities backward on horses while wearing mocking attire and burned alive in cages.

By the nineteenth century, a sanitised version of demonising minorities immigrated to the United States.

As millions of Irish and German Catholic immigrants arrived in the 1800s, segments of American Protestantism generated a theology built on anti-Catholic nativism. Prominent preachers and politicians warned that the Pope was the Anti-Christ, leader of a vast “papal conspiracy” sent to overthrow American democracy. This shared external threat successfully unified highly fractured Protestant denominations, Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, who otherwise held vast theological disagreements.

While the “violence” in this democratic context was primarily rhetorical and legal, nativists produced anti-Catholic newspapers, tracts and books; such as that of Pastor Lyman Beecher in his 1835 book “A Plea for the West” warning that the Pope was plotting to send millions of Catholic immigrants to establish a papal empire in the Mississippi Valley, thus overthrowing democracy from within.

Meanwhile in the USA in 1844, hostile Protestant Nativist sentiment exploded into deadly riots. Protestant mobs burned down Catholic Churches, a Catholic Seminary, and homes of Catholic immigrants. Again in 1855, anti-Catholic mobs attacked Irish and German Catholic neighbourhoods, burning buildings and killing at least 20 people. Discovering this history has helped me understand the political backdrop and rhetoric that dominates Ellen G. White’s book “The Great Controversy” with its targeted demonisation, used to cement the legitimacy of her leadership.

Recognizing historical patterns changes how we view political and religious rhetoric. It helps us to overcome a cultivated victim mentality – a persecution complex.

Historians and theologians note that exaggeration of persecution is historically used to enforce loyalty and ensure the survival of belief systems. Understanding history allows us to look past the sensationalised threats paraded before us and ask a more critical question: who benefits from my fear?

And this question matters even more for Christians, because fear‑based end‑time narratives can quietly take hold, in institutions and independent ministries alike, repeating the very pattern we’ve seen throughout history