Bitcoin and the Gospel of the Digital Age

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.” — Romans 1:25

Last week, I watched footage of Billy Graham’s historic New York Crusade at Yankee Stadium. Over 100,000 people gathered to hear him preach, a turnout that surpassed capacity. Vice President Richard Nixon, present on behalf of President Eisenhower, introduced Graham and praised his ministry, tying America’s greatness to its faith in God.

Graham’s message was urgent: choose God or false gods. Drawing from Exodus and Joshua, he warned that indecision itself is a choice—one that could lead to national and spiritual decay. He condemned America’s growing worship of materialism, secularism, lust, amusement, and indifference. These weren’t just personal sins—they were symptoms of a deeper cultural illness.

What struck me most was how religious rhetoric like Graham’s was woven into national identity. Nixon’s presence symbolized how faith and politics were tightly fused in Cold War America. The state needed religion to distinguish itself from “godless” communism, while religious leaders gained political influence. Civil religion—America’s moral framework cloaked in Christian language—flourished.

This fusion was not merely about belief—it was about power. The government inserted “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and made “In God We Trust” the national motto in 1956. Evangelical sermons like Graham’s became platforms for national repentance and ideological clarity. Choosing God also meant rejecting communism, liberalism, and moral relativism.

Graham’s critique of “America’s gods” reflected real cultural anxieties. Materialism flourished in a booming post-war economy. Secularism crept in through education and science. Lust and immorality rose with Hollywood and the sexual revolution. Amusement distracted from spiritual life. Indifference bred complacency in a world gripped by nuclear tension.

In this moment, religious revival became a political strategy. Faith was not only personal—it was national. And in the name of salvation, Americans were asked to deny themselves not just for Christ, but for country.

But was it really about Jesus?

To answer that, we must step back and view Christianity through a broader, archetypal lens—what Carl Jung called enantiodromia, the tendency of things to turn into their opposite when pushed to an extreme. Societies, like individuals, swing between poles: order and chaos, spirit and matter, liberty and control.

By the 1950s, America was already drifting toward one extreme. The fall of Russia’s Tsarist regime in 1917 marked not just the end of a monarchy, but the collapse of the last major Christian empire. In its place rose a new world order—not founded on divine right or spiritual truth, but on centralized finance and technocratic power.

The West, once oriented around the Logos—the divine principle of reason, justice, and moral order embodied in Christ—began to replace God with the market, kings with central bankers, and spiritual purpose with economic growth. The rise of institutions like the Federal Reserve marked a quiet coup: sovereignty moved from thrones to private boardrooms. Where God once said, “Let there be light,” the state now says “fiat”—Latin for “Let it be done”—and conjures money from nothing.

This fiat system, untethered from gold or any material reality, turned money from a medium of exchange into a tool of abstraction, speculation, and control. Under this system, entire governments bow not to divine authority, but to debt ceilings, interest rates, and algorithmic models. The empire of Christendom was supplanted by an empire of liquidity.

From a traditional Christian perspective, a world that removes Christ does not become neutral—it becomes anti-Christ. Not in the sensational sense of a horned villain, but in the truer, etymological sense: anti meaning “in place of.” This new order offers not open rebellion, but seduction: a promise to meet all needs—so long as we worship its idols.

Its genius lies in imitation. It mimics freedom, choice, and progress while hollowing out spirit, dissolving community, and replacing faith with spectacle. As William Ophuls warned, we’ve grown radically disconnected from nature and the sacred—drifting into a world governed by artificial systems that cannot sustain meaning or life.

Like Orwell’s 1984, this empire operates through screens, language manipulation, and constant surveillance. But its priesthood is no longer composed of prophets or pastors—it’s technocrats, algorithms, and AIs. They promise omniscience, but extract submission. Every click, swipe, and biometric scan feeds a system that defines our desires, curates our worldview, and reprograms our sense of self.

This is not liberation. It is pacification—offering convenience instead of liberty, data instead of wisdom, and distraction instead of salvation. The message is clear: you need no King but Caesar, no Savior but the system.

So was Billy Graham’s crusade truly about Jesus? Perhaps in form. But in function, it helped sanctify a national identity already shifting from spiritual truth to imperial order. His call to repentance paved the way—not back to Christ, but toward the technocratic extreme we now inhabit.

The Birth of a New Savior

By the mid-20th century, the West had replaced religious authority with managerial control. After the collapse of religious monarchies and the trauma of two world wars, a new ruling class emerged—not of kings or priests, but of economists, scientists, and bureaucrats. Power shifted from churches to state agencies, central banks, and multinational institutions. Morality was reframed as policy, and the gold-backed dollar was replaced in 1971 by fiat currency—money backed by nothing but government decree and public confidence.

In the decades that followed, this technocratic model expanded. Monetary policy became the primary tool for managing economies. Surveillance was justified in the name of security. Crises were met not with reform, but with centralization. Debt grew. Autonomy shrank. Digital systems began to mediate nearly every aspect of modern life, from finance to communication. By the 2000s, it was clear that this system concentrated power in ways that were opaque, unaccountable, and increasingly unsustainable.

Then came 2008. The global financial system nearly collapsed under the weight of its own complexity and corruption. Major institutions were bailed out with public money. Ordinary citizens lost homes, jobs, and savings. The system had failed, but its stewards were rewarded. This crisis marked a turning point: confidence in governments, banks, and the media eroded on a global scale.

In the midst of this collapse, a new kind of response appeared—not a political movement or protest march, but a line of code. On January 3, 2009, an anonymous figure using the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the Genesis Block of Bitcoin. Embedded in that block was a message:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”

It was a statement of purpose: a direct critique of the system Bitcoin was designed to bypass.

Bitcoin did not come with leaders, slogans, or state backing. It came with software. At its core was a new kind of trust mechanism—the blockchain—a decentralized ledger visible to all, controlled by no one. Unlike the secretive books of central banks or Wall Street firms, this ledger was transparent and self-enforcing. It promised a system where rules mattered more than rulers.

Satoshi Nakamoto remained anonymous, disappeared within a few years, and never sought personal gain. But the protocol he left behind sparked a movement.

Miners secure the network by solving cryptographic puzzles. Developers maintain and refine the code. Advocates educate others and defend its principles. What emerged resembled a secular religion—complete with initiation rituals, sacred keys, and evangelists spreading the message of financial freedom.

Bitcoin’s community developed its own cultural practices:

• Wallets serve as a kind of entry rite—granting access to the system.
• Private keys are treated as sacred—protecting ownership and identity.
• Nodes preserve the network’s integrity—maintaining consensus across borders.
• HODLing expresses long-term belief—resisting fear and volatility.

While not religious in doctrine, Bitcoin offers many of the same psychological and social functions. It provides a story of liberation. It promises protection from institutional abuse. It speaks to a growing global audience disillusioned with governments, banks, and failing currencies. To many, it offers not just a new form of money, but a form of meaning.

But for all its potential, Bitcoin is not without limitations. It imitates spiritual symbolism—offering scarcity, security, and truth—but it is still a human-made system, dependent on electricity, computing infrastructure, and global internet access. Its decentralization is powerful but fragile; it assumes cooperation, functioning networks, and sustained access to energy. If that chain is disrupted, the system fails.

Bitcoin also risks replicating the very structures it was designed to challenge. As large holders accumulate power and as regulatory pressures increase, it can drift toward centralization. It can become another tool of control—this time wrapped in the language of freedom and coded into software.

Bitcoin is a technological breakthrough. It is also a mirror: reflecting both our desire for freedom and our tendency to seek salvation in systems we build ourselves.

It may be a savior—but it is one without sacrifice, without transformation, and without resurrection.

The False Promise – Trustless Salvation

Bitcoin was created to solve an ancient problem: the corruption of man. Financial systems fail not merely because of bad policy or poor design, but because the people who run them are flawed. Banks collapse, institutions become unaccountable, and trust is repeatedly broken—not because money itself is evil, but because human nature is unreliable.

Bitcoin offers a radical solution: eliminate trust entirely. Its core promise is a “trustless” system—one in which transactions occur without needing any person, bank, or institution to act with integrity. Instead of relying on human judgment, it shifts trust to math, machines, and code.

This trustless framework rests on three components:

• A public, distributed ledger known as the blockchain
• Cryptographic protocols that secure data and identities
• Consensus algorithms that ensure agreement across the network

Together, these form a system designed to be tamper-proof and neutral. But in its attempt to eliminate human failure, Bitcoin also excludes the human element altogether.

In Christianity, human corruption is real—but so is redemption. People fail, but they can be forgiven, restored, and transformed. Bitcoin offers no such vision. It does not aim to redeem human nature—it aims to route around it. Where religion sees human fallibility as something to heal, Bitcoin treats it as a vulnerability to be removed.

If people can’t be trusted, Bitcoin’s answer is simple: remove people from the loop.

But in removing trust, you also eliminate what makes human society humane—mercy, discretion, second chances. Bitcoin doesn’t care who you are, what circumstances led to your mistake, or whether you were misled. Lose your private key? Your money is gone. Send funds to the wrong address? There’s no undo button. Get hacked or defrauded? There’s no one to call. The system cannot forgive.

That’s not freedom—it’s automation without compassion. A mechanical structure that tolerates no error and offers no grace. In rejecting the tyranny of central institutions, Bitcoin risks creating another kind of tyranny: one that is cold, invisible, and absolute.

It promises freedom, but only for the flawless. It values rules over relationships, code over character, precision over understanding. Its prized feature—immutability—may prevent corruption, but it also locks in honest mistakes with no path to correction.

What began as a revolt against corruption may instead bind us to a system even less forgiving. One that cannot listen, adjust, or care. A system that enforces justice without mercy, and finality without wisdom.

Technology can improve systems, but it cannot replace the distinctly human capacities of judgment, empathy, and forgiveness. Bitcoin removes the need for trust—but it also removes the possibility of grace.

And without grace, there is no salvation.

Idolatry – The Return of the Golden Calf

In the book of Exodus, God instructs the Israelites to plunder the Egyptians of their gold and silver before leaving captivity (Exodus 12:35–36). This wasn’t theft—it was providence. God had a plan for that wealth, which he hadn’t fully revealed. But when Moses delayed on the mountain, the people grew anxious. In their fear, they took the very gold for which God had a plan and molded it into an idol—a golden calf. They wanted something tangible, visible, controllable. In doing so, they didn’t just break a commandment; they reversed the divine order. What God had provided for communion, they corrupted for control.

This ancient story is playing out again.

In the 20th century, the United States—once steward of the global gold standard—abandoned it in 1971. Trust in hard money gave way to fiat abstraction. A technocratic elite rose to power, severing currency from creation and anchoring it instead in debt, policy, and perception. Over time, this system bred inequality, opacity, and widespread disillusionment.

Then came the enantiodromia—the great reversal. In rejecting the failures of fiat, many turned to its digital opposite: Bitcoin. Where the dollar was paper, Bitcoin was code. Where fiat was inflationary, Bitcoin was scarce. But rather than restoring a righteous order, this movement carried the seeds of its own extremism. It fled one idol only to forge another—this time not in molten gold, but in digital scarcity.

Bitcoin is the new golden calf of our age—shimmering not in firelight, but in server farms and LED screens. It is wealth without relationship, sovereignty without sacrifice. Like the Israelites at Sinai, many have taken what was meant as provision—creativity, mathematics, the ability to exchange value—and made it ultimate. The Creator is forgotten; the creation is worshipped.

Billy Graham once warned in his 1957 New York Crusade that Americans had not abandoned religion—they had simply replaced God with false gods. “Anything you love more than God,” he said, “is an idol.” Today, Bitcoin fits that warning precisely. It promises what only God can truly provide: salvation from corruption, justice for the oppressed, a future worth believing in. But instead of mercy, it offers mathematics. Instead of grace, code. Instead of a Savior, a system.

The documentary God Bless Bitcoin (2021) reveals just how spiritual this new idolatry has become. Bitcoin is preached as a path to moral and financial deliverance. Online communities speak of “hyperbitcoinization” as a kind of secular eschaton: a global reset where the faithful are rewarded, and the world is made right—not by repentance or reconciliation, but by protocol.

But this vision of salvation is hollow. It mimics the form of religion but inverts its heart. There is no grace for the latecomer, no mercy for the mistake-maker. Early adopters ascend; the rest are left behind. It is a gospel of scarcity, not abundance. A soteriology built not on the blood of Christ, but on the logic of code.

Christianity offers a very different vision. Jesus Christ does not hoard power—He empties Himself (Philippians 2:7). His kingdom does not reward those who hold, but those who give. His table is not for the elite few, but the poor, the broken, the undeserving. “The last shall be first,” He said—not the early investors, but the latecomers and outcasts (Matthew 20:16). His salvation is not an asset to be stored, but a gift to be shared.

Bitcoin, by contrast, institutionalizes inequality. It prizes security over mercy, finality over forgiveness. It imagines a world where the system cannot fail—so long as people are excluded from it. It calls this “freedom.” But it is a freedom built on exclusion, where wealth is permanent and error is unforgivable. There is no Jubilee, no second chance, no resurrection.

“You cannot serve both God and money,” Jesus warned (Matthew 6:24). Yet many today have simply exchanged one master for another—not the Federal Reserve, but the Bitcoin protocol. What once was trust in central banks is now faith in code, algorithms, and automated consensus. It speaks in the voice of rebellion, but delivers the same old bondage: the worship of wealth, masked as progress. What began as protest has become parody. The golden calf is back—only now, it’s decentralized, digitized, and globally networked.

But its power is no less false.

Conclusion – The Choice Before Us

Bitcoin and Christianity offer not just competing economic visions, but fundamentally different ways of understanding the world—of answering the oldest questions: Who are we? What do we trust? What will save us?

In the garden, God gave Adam and Eve a task: to cultivate, to steward, to serve. Creation was relational. Purpose came through obedience, not autonomy. In contrast, Bitcoin promises sovereignty without sacrifice, wealth without work, freedom without fellowship. It is a self-contained system—mathematically elegant, spiritually empty.

Just as the Israelites melted their gold into an idol, today many melt code into meaning—fashioning a digital calf to carry their hopes, their fears, and their faith. But just like then, the idol cannot speak. It cannot love. It cannot forgive.

Billy Graham once said: “God never meant that man should live by instinct. He gave us the power of choice.”

That choice remains. It always has. And today, it is clearer than ever.

We can choose the living God, whose laws are written not in code, but in love—who redeems the broken and welcomes the lost.

Or we can choose the machine: precise, powerful, and unyielding. A system that does not know your name, cannot hear your cry, and offers no grace when you fall.

This is not just about Bitcoin. It’s about what we worship.

Christ or code. Grace or control. Savior or system.

The golden calf has returned—but so has the choice.

And it is yours to make.

Support This Work

If this reflection on Bitcoin and its spiritual implications has spoken to you, I invite you to support the continuation of this work. Your support—whether through Patreon, BuyMeACoffee or another platform—makes it possible to continue researching, writing, and engaging in conversations that challenge today’s digital ideologies with timeless truths.

In an age of code and algorithms, we need voices that point back to grace, relationship, and the deeper meaning behind the systems we build.

Thank you for helping make that possible.