https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/interview-with-dr-martin-erdmann
Dr. Martin Erdmann is a church historian and theologian who has spent decades doing something most academics won’t touch. Across more than 3,000 pages of published work on mercantilism, progressivism, liberalism, world federation, and technocracy, he traces a single argument: that Western civilisation replaced the biblical covenant with a social contract, and that this substitution was not secular but religious. The state didn’t remove God. It became God. His most recent book, The Greed for Gold and Glory, is a 487-page, heavily footnoted examination of 16th-to-18th-century mercantilism, economic nationalism, and the financial machinery that still operates today. I reviewed it here.
The interview covers Venice as a pagan totalitarian state, the Glorious Revolution as oligarchic consolidation, John Locke as the architect of a civil religion that conservatives unknowingly propagate, fractional reserve banking as legalised counterfeiting, and the City of London as the inheritor of Venetian merchant practice. Erdmann does not offer comfortable positions. His central thesis, that classical liberalism and progressive liberalism are two sides of the same civil-religion coin, removes the escape hatch that conservative readers typically rely on. He is not attacking the left from the right. He is arguing that the entire framework is a replacement theology, and that both teams play on the same field. I’ve done a lot of interviews. This is one of the most important.
Erdmann holds credentials in the subjects he critiques. He wrote the entry on John Locke for the Zondervan Dictionary of Christianity and Science. He trained in intercultural studies at Columbia International University. He lectures on philosophy at North Greenville University. He publishes five days a week on Substack under Musings of the Court Jester. The answers below are detailed, some run long, because he chose to show the reasoning rather than just assert the conclusions. The claims he makes require it.
With thanks to Dr. Martin Erdmann.
