The Universal Church is today, it seems to me, more definitely set against the World than at any time since Pagan Rome. I do not mean that our times are particularly corrupt; all times are corrupt. In spite of certain local appearances, Christianity is not and cannot be within measurable time, ‘official’. The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.

— T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)

Well said! The emperor cult of America will one day fall, and Christians will have to either submit to the cultural mandate that the early Reformers and Early Church Fathers demonstrated to us or to the latest emperor cult if the times. Dispensationalists go as far as calling this point of submission to the evils of the culture “the mark of the beast.” I do believe they are hyper-extending the Word of God in that this mark in which we find in Revelation is typology; symbolic of the general nature of submission to foreign economies, not a literal chip in the human body. The chip technology is certainly available for our times, but a chip is not necessary to submit to the beast. One’s heart is what is needed. The hand that Revelation speaks of may be symbolic to the “working hand”, and the forhead that Revelation speaks of can certainly be symbolic of the mind. After all, Paul calls our submission to Christ “the renewing of the mind” (Romans 12:2; Ephesians 4:23).

The culture and nature itself will indeed be redeemed with all of mankind (Romans 8:22), and we are called to usher this into existence “on earth as it is in heaven” as Christ says. As Eliot implies in the quote above, today’s culture is striving toward more of what Rome was after: an agnostic type of state religion that retains a relativistic sense of morality for the sake of material gain. It will fail, as he says, but we whom are already advancing the kingdom of God within the areas of culture that we are able will be there (or our kin will be) to receive this blessed window of opportunity.