SURELY THE NATIONS ARE LIKE A DROP IN A BUCKET; THEY ARE REGARDED AS DUST ON THE SCALES; HE WEIGHS THE ISLANDS AS THOUGH THEY WERE FINE DUST.
—Isaiah 40:15
GOD BLESS AMERICA.
—Irving Berlin (and most presidents)
Whenever I hear the song “God Bless America” sung at baseball games and patriotic events, I ask myself, Why should he?
Like ancient Israel—the only nation ever to enjoy a covenant relationship with God—which was exiled because of its unfaithfulness to God and his requirements, America doesn’t seem to be doing much that would find favor in God’s sight.
A lot of people have made a lot of money by claiming that the United States has a special, even unique, relationship with God. Their evidence ranges from economic prosperity, to military might, to the large number of churches spread across the country, to statements made by our founders and by subsequent political and even religious leaders about divine providence, backed by quotations from Scripture. It all sounds good, but when I look at the arc of this empire, it appears to me that we’ve passed through each of Sir John Glubb’s stages—pioneers, conquests, commerce, affluence, intellect—and are fully engaged in the age of decadence.
Ignored by those who cite a litany of proofs of God’s blessing of America are the sixty million abortions (as of 2019); the mainstreaming of what used to be considered aberrant and abhorrent relationships, now openly displayed; various other corruptions of maleness and femaleness to the extent that in Oregon and Washington, DC (and probably more places soon), we have “gender neutral” designations on driver’s licenses; serial murders in major cities; cohabitation; marital breakdown; ethical violations in business and government; a coarseness and corrosion of culture that includes but is not limited to the multibillion-dollar pornography industry; and the abandonment of a standard by which we once distinguished right from wrong. This list is not exhaustive, and it likely labels me old-fashioned, out of touch, or intolerant, which only confirms how far we’ve fallen from what we once were.
The apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:30, “They invent ways of doing evil.” The evils known to us are insufficient to satisfy our insatiable desires, so we invent new ones. How reflective this is of the darkness of the unredeemed soul.
Ancient Israel was destroyed for sins similar to ours. What makes those promoting supposedly righteous America think we can escape judgment—or, if you prefer a nonreligious conclusion, avoid suffering the consequences of our chosen behavior? And it is chosen by each of us. We either willingly participate in it or are willingly indifferent to it, allowing the rot to progress, just as ignoring a termite infestation will undermine the foundation of your home.
The major media in Hollywood and New York promote these evils and are coconspirators in our decline, and when they are criticized, they defend themselves by saying they are just giving the people what they want. This is like saying you didn’t rob a bank but only drove the getaway car. Under the law, you are just as guilty when you give the robbers what they want, a chance to get away.
In what is known as the church age, we do not find God throwing down judgment on us for violating his laws, decrees, and precepts. But we do find that we suffer the consequences for ignoring him, just as we suffer immediate consequences from ignoring gravity by jumping off a tall building.
The late Roman Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen said it best in the mid-twentieth century. Then it was a very different America. He could have been prophesying about today when he observed, “America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance. It is not. It is suffering from tolerance: tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so much overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broad-minded. The man who can make up his mind in an orderly way, as a man might make up his bed, is called a bigot; but a man who cannot make up his mind, any more than he can make up for lost time, is called tolerant and broad-minded.”1
I love America. I am privileged—even blessed, if I may use that word—to have been born in this country through no choice of my own. With the possible exception of Ireland, there is no country in which I would rather live my earthly life, but it is not my home. Heaven is my home and destination, and while I want to preserve for my children and their children the freedoms I have enjoyed, the Scriptures foretell a day when everything that currently is will no longer be.
If you stay overnight in a hotel, would you call an interior decorator should the wallpaper not be to your liking? No, because it is not your home. If your house is on fire, would you be thinking of painting it?
CAMEO: Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
There are many who could qualify as the most influential person in the ascent of the United States, but if I had to pick one, it would have to be Thomas Jefferson. Though a deist who edited his own Bible, cutting out the parts he didn’t like, Jefferson understood that in order for our rights to be protected, they must be put out of the reach of government.
Like John Locke, Jefferson helped destroy the “divine right of kings” belief embraced by ancient rulers. Kings used to determine people’s rights (which were often limited and changeable at the whim of the king), but Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that human rights were given to us by our Creator and thus could not—and should not—be tampered with by monarchies or other institutions established by men and women.
That the first right of all—the right to life—was tampered with by the Supreme Court in the infamous 1973 decision known as Roe v. Wade does not repeal the truth of Jefferson’s words.
The Declaration was the philosophical underpinning upon which the other Founders, most notably James Madison, built the Constitution and thus the nation. Without the Declaration, it might have been impossible for the Constitution to have been written, and likely it and the nation would not have survived for as long as it has. Other nations have written constitutions, but most of them were not established on the type of base on which the US was founded.
On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, delivered an address that linked the founding of the nation to religious principles dating back to the great preachers of the eighteenth century. The following paragraph is of particular significance in a rapidly growing secular age.
A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.2
Are we neglecting and abandoning the cause behind our founding? Would Jefferson recognize the nation he helped create?
America is headed for foreclosure. We are drowning in financial debt and submerged under an immoral tsunami. At the end of 2018, the US national debt was approaching $22 trillion, and the deficit was at $985 billion. Both are growing. These are unsustainable numbers. If not addressed, they will lead us ultimately into bankruptcy and possibly another depression.
Our politicians are unwilling to do much about the financial debt, because they fear being called names by their opponents who will accuse them of not caring about children or senior citizens. Recall a political ad that responded to the plan of Representative Paul Ryan (a Republican from Wisconsin) to reform Social Security and Medicare. His plan was a serious proposal about a serious problem that needs to be addressed. The ad showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an elderly woman in a wheelchair over a cliff. It was a juvenile attack, but fear works better than solving problems for politicians whose main goal is to get reelected. If a problem were actually solved, what issues would politicians have to run on?
As to our moral decline, the day when citizens heeded cries for repentance have been overcome by the prosperity gospel and high-living TV evangelists. Megachurches are filled with people who don’t want to hear sermons about sin but prefer sermons about happiness, pleasure, health, and material wealth.
Dr. Charles Stanley has put it well: “We have moved from the day of Samuel who said, ‘Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth,’ to our present day when we say, ‘Listen, Lord, for thy servant speaketh.’”3
The motto of the Stony Brook School in New York is “Character Before Career.” In our modern political and socially dysfunctional era, it is more like career, personal pleasure, and affluence before character—if we ever get to character. Character presumes a standard by which we can judge who has good character and whose character is bad. But that requires we have a definition of good and bad, and to suggest that one exists puts one in danger of a lawsuit from the ACLU, a litigious parent, or an activist student. Such standards were jettisoned in the 1960s, and we continue to pay the price today, wherever the spirit of the age reigns.
Knowing how we got to this point is crucial to finding our way out, though absent a revival, like the one in 1857—which was true divine intervention—it may be too late.
As my fellow columnist Pat Buchanan wrote following the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, between a small group of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and alt-rightists and a group of hardcore leftists, “What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.”4
Does history teach us nothing? It teaches us everything, but it seems fewer are paying attention as we embrace the now, and many younger people appear to believe access to the internet is their port of entry to wisdom.
One last thought: why do so many self-declared Christians think God is active only when someone they voted for (mostly Republicans) is elected? Evangelist Franklin Graham said, “God showed up” when Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. So where was God when Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy were elected, just to name some modern Democrats? Was he on holiday?
Even evil dictators serve God’s purposes, from Nebuchadnezzar to Pontius Pilate to tyrants in modern times, if you believe, as Scripture says, that all authority comes from God.
THE AGE OF PIONEERS
American history—the real history, as opposed to the revisionist variety taught in many public schools and universities—is readily available to any who seek it. The traditional American history I was taught in school began with the “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus and continued through the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims and colonies at Jamestown, the personalities of men like William Bradford, the preaching of Jonathan Edwards and other colonial clergy, and the bravery of George Washington and his troops at Valley Forge, Paul Revere’s ride, what the Founders believed and wrote concerning limited government and unlimited personal freedom.
Those who established the new nation believed they had a higher purpose than making money (although that is not a bad motivation). Many believed, rightly or wrongly, they had a divine purpose, and they said so on many occasions. Whether they actually were fulfilling God’s will, they thought they were, and that in itself motivated them to stick with it as they confronted and eventually conquered the many challenges ahead.
THE AGE OF INTELLECT
America’s earliest universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Dartmouth—were founded by Christian men who (mostly) lived by biblical principles, and these institutions were established with the goal of educating students by using Scripture as the foundation for their intellectual and spiritual development.
Ever since Harvard College was founded in the seventeenth century, its motto has been Veritas, which is Latin for “truth.” Unfortunately, at Harvard and so many other universities, truth has become personal and relative, not objective with an immutable source.
Today, in these and other universities across America, God has become an embarrassment, though there are signs of an uptick in interest in the Almighty, chiefly because nothing else seems to be working or satisfying. A class taught at Harvard by professor of psychiatry Dr. Armand Nicholi called “The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life” attracted large numbers of students. The quest for life’s meaning continues even in a largely secular age.
Speaking at Hillsdale College in 1983, theologian Carl F. H. Henry referenced a remark by the late Harvard president Nathan Pusey, who said “the least that should be expected from a university graduate” is that he or she “pronounce the name of God without embarassment.” Dr. Henry added, “That minimum is no longer being met in America today.”5 He continued by noting contrasting approaches to human life and our purpose on earth: one which makes science and intellect supreme and the other which acknowledges the supremacy of God: “Is man but a physically upright and mentally clever animal or does he bear the image, however tarnished, of a holy and merciful personal Creator?”6
I’m betting that even the most hardened atheist wishes the story of God’s great redemptive plan were true. It is, whether one believes it or not.
Abortion
Since 1973, when the Supreme Court decided to strike down what remained of state laws outlawing or restricting abortion, the battle over the value and meaning of human life has only become more intense.
At bottom, it is about where life comes from, who gives it value, and whether humans are evolutionary accidents or the product of a Creator who endows us with rights and thus places them outside the reach of governments and politicians.
Are we, as the late philosopher-theologian Dr. Francis Schaeffer remarked, “material and energy shaped by pure chance in a random universe” with no author of life, no purpose, and no destination after we die, or are we created in the image and likeness of an objectively existing God who loves us and has a plan for our lives?
These two ideas, or philosophies, are at the heart of the debate over abortion, and so much else.
Scientific advances allow us to see inside the womb with greater clarity than ever before. Babies can be saved at earlier stages of a woman’s pregnancy, several weeks earlier than in 1973. No matter. The pro-choice crowd says that unborn life has only the value assigned to it by the woman. If she decides she doesn’t want the child, it’s a fetus or the product of conception. If she chooses to give birth, it’s a child or a baby. The value of the baby doesn’t change, having been made in God’s image from conception and now able to survive outside the womb at ever earlier stages of development. Pro-abortion groups use euphemisms like “choice” to shift attention from what is being chosen to the woman carrying the child, which is its own form of idolatry because it makes humans the determiner of life’s value. Such a philosophy has implications for the other end of life, as well as for physically challenging conditions in between, especially if government has the right to determine who lives and who dies based on its willingness to pay for treatment, something that continues to be debated among politicians. The father of the child he has helped conceive has no rights. If he wants the child and his wife or girlfriend doesn’t, she alone gets to make the decision.
If anyone is willing to take the time to see where this can lead, that person should visit Yad Vashem, the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem. Some still study the Holocaust (and a few deny it), but it seems we have learned little from it.
For mass killing to be carried out, a regime must devalue lives to the point where their extermination can be accepted by large numbers of people. That is what the Nazis did, and not only to European Jews but also to gypsies, the handicapped, homosexuals, and others they regarded as barriers to their perfection of the white human race. It is also the avenue that might lead to the devaluing of the elderly and sick as the cost of health care continues to rise and older people are seen as expendable. Don’t think this can’t happen. That’s what people once said about abortion. Euthanasia is a short step away from the abortion clinic, once government gets to decide whose life is valuable and whose is not.
There are ways to fight back against this antilife onslaught, and not just through the political system. Abortion is not the cause of our decadence but a reflection of it. It was G. K. Chesterton who noted that the danger when men stop believing in God is not that they will believe in nothing but that they will believe in anything.
Cole Porter wrote songs for a 1930s show titled called Anything Goes. Its title song begins,
In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now God knows,
Anything goes.
Porter intended it as satire. Today it could be a judgment on modern America.
More than three thousand pregnancy help centers have sprung up across America since Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973. Untold thousands of babies have been saved, and their mothers (and fathers) have been led to faith in Christ and to changed lifestyles and behavior. This has come without any political or judicial involvement.
The volunteers at these centers, and those who have contributed money to their work, have contributed to the decline in the number of abortions in America. These centers offer free services during pregnancy and after the child is born, adoption services, counseling, cash, diapers, and clothes, unlike abortion clinics, which charge for their “services” and who offer no physical or spiritual help. If people want to “make a difference,” as the saying goes, they can witness immediate results by volunteering, contributing, or seeking other ways to help these centers tell women the truth and save women from a life of regret, not to mention possible physical harm from abortions gone wrong. The film about Philadelphia abortionist Kermit Gosnell dramatizes the cynicism within the abortion industry. It’s titled Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.
Courts and legislators will change only when the hearts of Americans change, and that will occur only when people have a different view of life and of God, who created us to be his.
All arguments about abortion have been answered, including who will care for the woman and her child after birth, and if she doesn’t want to keep the child, where she can place him or her in a good adoptive home. Only the will to do the right thing remains, and no law alone can force people to do right.
THE AGE OF AFFLUENCE
The United States is the richest nation in the world and the richest in history. Yet perils lie ahead, as they have when other nations experienced periods of great prosperity.
A metaphor that serves as a lesson about decline is the city of Detroit, Michigan. Once a thriving metropolis, its descent into crime, lawlessness, and poverty reflects the downfall of other American cities that in the past were prosperous but because of bad economic, political, and, yes, wrong moral decisions fell from their affluence into poverty, fueled by high crime, falling real estate values, and what became known as white flight.
Detroit is Michigan’s largest city. Settled in 1701, it was the first European settlement above tidewater in North America. Its early economy, like that of many other towns and cities in prerevolution days (and well into the nineteenth century), was based on fur trading posts. By the mid-twentieth century, Detroit had evolved into an industrial powerhouse and the country’s fourth-largest city. By the end of the twentieth century, Detroit was well on its way to ruin (though recent signs of a comeback provide hope of a turnaround).
Washington, DC, which has had only Democratic mayors and a majority Democratic city council since the 1960s, when Congress gave residents the right to vote for their local leaders, is another city that has had several corrupt politicians. As in Detroit, Washington’s policies appear to have ensured a permanent underclass that Democrats can count on for votes, as long as government handouts keep coming.
While there have been periods of economic growth in Detroit over the past fifty years, politicians did not use the money wisely, and the city missed many opportunities to alter its downward trajectory toward more benefits, higher debt, and the discredited notion that constantly raising taxes would stop the bleeding.
The one flaw in a Detroit Free Press analysis of the city’s past problems is this line: “Although no one could see it at the time, Detroit’s insolvency was guaranteed.” It isn’t that no one could see insolvency coming; it is that they refused to do so. Their attitude was, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” (see Isa. 22:13). And so Detroit has succumbed to financial ruin.
There is a grand lesson here not only for other cities faced with similar problems but also for states and especially the federal government, neither of whom want to deny anyone anything, especially in an election year. The lesson is an obvious one, buried deep in our Puritan ethos: You can’t spend more than you take in, as though tomorrow will never come. If you do, your tomorrow might just look a lot like Detroit’s.
There have been times of great prosperity in America, including the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties. These were followed by sharp economic downturns, notably the Great Depression, because too many people in government and in their personal lives did not follow basic economic rules like not spending what you don’t have. Having an appearance of affluence is not the same as being affluent.
The federal government encouraged home buying in the 1980s and 1990s. As Time magazine noted in an article about whom to blame for the housing and financial crisis of the 1990s, it was “free-wheeling capitalism [that led to] the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, a cornerstone of Depression-era regulation. [President Bill Clinton] also signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted credit-default swaps from regulation. In 1995 Clinton loosened housing rules by rewriting the Community Reinvestment Act, which put added pressure on banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods.” Presidents from both parties like to brag that under their administrations, more people owned their own homes than ever before. That was true, but the larger question was, could they afford them? Many could not. They took out adjustable-rate mortgages, and after a few years of low interest rates and low monthly payments, when the interest rate jumped—along with the monthly payment—people couldn’t afford it, and the housing boom turned into a bust, leading the way to the 1990s recession.
You might think history would be the best teacher for not living above your means. It would be if people paid attention to history. But the devil gets new material to work with every twenty years, and people think history can teach them nothing. So too many doom themselves to repeat it.
Cities and states headed by liberal politicians often think they can solve problems by taxing the rich more. But in many cases, imposing higher taxes on the wealthy and successful has caused them to flee those cities and states for more tax-friendly places, such as Florida, Alaska, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wyoming, New Hampshire, and Tennessee, all of which have no state income tax. Their economies seem to be doing well. It’s because state government is allowing their residents to save, invest, or spend more of the money they earn, which produces a psychological boost and fuels business investment.
Growing up, I learned three things from my father, and from the example of successful people I admired and wished to emulate, that improve any life. They are inspiration, followed by motivation, followed by perspiration. Today that has flipped to create a sense of envy, greed, and entitlement. The former mostly produced successful and self-sustaining families. The latter has created a permanent underclass with little hope of escape. One political party seems fine with that because it produces more votes for them. They keep the “serfs” dependent on government by claiming the other party will take away their benefits. How cruel.
C. S. Lewis said that prosperity knits a man to this world. He thinks he’s finding his place in the world, while the world is actually finding its place in him. Lewis believed that what he called “contented worldliness” is the great enemy of the church.7
The late Roman Catholic writer Joseph Sobran put it another way: “I would rather belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to change than I would to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up.”
If the church will not sound a prophetic voice, warning a nation of the erosion of its moral underpinnings, who will?
THE AGE OF DECADENCE
In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever.
—Daniel 2:44
Decadence, like cancer, does not always follow the same pattern. It can manifest itself in several ways while leading to the same destination. Some things we see, others we don’t. Some things that we think are the cause of decline are actually the result of it.
A 2017 report from the congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) is a reminder that the future of America, should the country survive, is based less on what any president can do and more on economic and social trends over which the president, and politicians collectively, has less control. Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson summarized the findings of the JEC in his June 12, 2017, column.
Under the category “Family Life,” noted Samuelson, the JEC found that the number of people getting married has dropped again from previous years, but the number of people having babies out of wedlock has increased. In 2015, nearly one-third of all children were being raised in single-parent households, or they had no parents at all. That’s up from only 15 percent in 1970. Over the same period, births to single mothers increased from 11 percent of all births to 40 percent. In 1970, there were 76.5 marriages for every 1,000 unmarried women over the age of fifteen. By 2015, the rate had dropped to 32 per 1,000.8
Broadly speaking, millennials, especially, have suffered through parental divorces and seen in too many cases conditional love. One can understand why they don’t want to go through the pain of something similar, so they live together without bothering to get married. The use of the word partner in our vocabulary has almost eradicated the social stigma once attached to “shacking up,” or “living in sin,” as preachers used to say.
While many women must work outside the home because of economic necessity, and others choose to work for the sheer pleasure of it, couples who have especially young children face challenges, sometimes serious, caused by the need to place them in daycare centers, which lack the nurturing skills only a mother can provide. It’s a difficult and often controversial subject, and many books and articles have been written about it, but in my life and experience, moms who choose to stay home (or, yes, stay-at-home dads) have found a more pleasurable outcome than when both parents work in the early years of their child’s development.
Societies tend to decline when they lose a sense of transcendent purpose. According to the JEC, fewer Americans feel loyal to any particular religious faith, with about 20 percent of millennials answering “none” when asked about their religious affiliation. In the early 1970s, noted the JEC, about seven in ten adults belonged to a church or synagogue, and slightly more than half attended services at least once a month. Today only about 55 percent have a formal tie to a church or synagogue, and monthly attendance has dropped to about 40 percent.9
“Is the Western order becoming irrelevant?” asks a headline in the June 15, 2017, edition of the Washington Post. In a review of two books titled The Fate of the West and The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Carlos Lozada writes, “Superpowers come and go, but it’s rare that one puts in for early retirement.”10
Most of his review is an attack on the Trump presidency, but that first sentence raises a profound and compelling question. And the answer is that all great nations and empires “retire” because of the choices they make, before they are ever conquered by outside forces. If they had remained economically, politically, and especially morally strong, they might have endured, at least beyond their expiration date.
Here’s another item from the same newspaper, same month. In a story headlined “A Gap Defined by Values,” reporters Jose A. DelReal and Scott Clement write, “The political divide between rural and urban America is more cultural than it is economic, rooted in rural residents’ deep misgivings about the nation’s rapidly changing demographics, their sense that Christianity is under siege and their perception that the federal government caters most to the needs of people in big cities.”11
Of course. That’s where the big media headquarters are located and where most of the electoral votes are as well.
The story reports on a Washington Post–Kaiser Family Foundation survey of nearly 1,700 Americans—including more than 1,000 adults living in rural areas and small towns. It found “deep-seated kinship in rural America, coupled with a stark sense of estrangement from people who live in urban areas. Nearly 7 in 10 rural residents say their values differ from those of people who live in big cities, including about 4 in 10 who say their values are ‘very different.’”12
The question this poses—but is not asked in the story—is, whose values have the best record of promoting the general welfare, providing for the common defense, and insuring domestic tranquility? This isn’t a game in which all ideas and values have equal merit. In our day, we are told they do (unless they are ideas held by conservatives and/or Christians) and that even when those values conflict, it doesn’t matter, because it’s all about feelings and not objective truth. We fear giving offense more than we fear the consequences that come from buying into ideas that have a track record of error and failure.
Rod Dreher is the author of The Benedict Option,13 a book that has received serious attention in some quarters. It is inspired by the life of a monk who lived in a monastery during the first millennium. In an interview with the publication American Conservative, Dreher explained what he means by the “Benedict Option”: “It’s my name for an inchoate phenomenon in which Christians adopt a more consciously countercultural stance towards our post-Christian mainstream culture. . . . [The] only way to stand firm against the ‘barbarians’—people who live by feeling, driven by the passions, not right reason, and with no sense of restraint or obligation beyond satisfying their momentary demands—of our dominant culture is to form stronger, thicker communities based on a commitment to virtue.”14
Dreher is calling Christians to protect themselves from the corrosive secular culture by forming communities where they and their families can determine which values they live by as well as provide a witness—he uses the word resistance—to the broader culture. There once was a time when Christian values and belief were at least tolerated if not respected, but that time has passed. If we want to retain our faith—and if our country is to survive its expiration date—we must take decisive action to remove ourselves from the mainstream. Have you noticed that the mainstream is often where one finds pollution?
In an op-ed column for the August 2, 2017, edition of the New York Times, Dreher calls us to undertake “a brutally honest assessment of both the modern church and the contemporary world. This is painful, but denial will only make the inevitable reckoning worse.”15
In his own assessment, he points to a 2014 Pew study documenting the falling away from church by Americans, especially millennials, as well as the regression from authentic Christianity to what Notre Dame University sociologist Chris Smith calls a “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”16 Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD) is a pseudo-religion that jettisons the doctrines of historical biblical Christianity and replaces them with feel-good, vaguely spiritual nostrums. In MTD, the highest goal of the religious life is being happy and feeling good about oneself. It’s the perfect religion for a self-centered, consumerist culture. But it is not authentic Christian faith.17
Dreher also calls into question the dubious false and thus unrewarded faith and hope conservative Christians have placed in Republican politics (a subject the late Dr. Edward Dobson and I addressed in our 1999 book Blinded by Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America). While some gains important to Christians have been made through the efforts of some Republican legislators, this has not stopped the spread of secularism and its consequences. That’s because politicians cannot transform human nature, which God reserves for himself. Our problems as a nation are less economic and political and more moral and spiritual. As Dreher eloquently observes, “Too many of us are doubling down on the failed strategies that not only have failed to convert Americans but have also done little to halt the assimilation of Christians to secular norms and beliefs. Mr. Trump is not a solution to this cultural crisis, but rather a symptom of it.”18
This is a pill many American believers will find hard to swallow, because too many have been raised on and taught a version of a gospel that says America is uniquely blessed of God, for reasons that are becoming increasingly difficult to discern. Dreher warns that if we don’t take strong measures to insulate ourselves from the rampant secularism of our culture, we simply will not survive, and the falling away of our children and grandchildren from the faith only confirms his concerns. If you accept the prophecies laid out in both the Old and the New Testaments as true, then the reckoning about which Dreher writes is inevitable, absent a dramatic turnaround and a desire by millions of us to follow a different path.
Trying to slow down the collapse of America through the political system is futile (see Rom. 8:20–21). If reformation and restoration is to occur (and that too is debatable), it will not come from the top down, no matter how righteous government officials appear to be (and there are no righteous individuals, no not one, according to Ecclesiastes 7:20 and Romans 3:10). It can come only from a restored community of believers and from the bottom up, which means it must come from you and from me. It won’t be easy.
Given the history of other empires and great nations, the decadence that now is tightening its grip on America almost guarantees our demise, or at the very least a radical decline that will leave the country devoid of the liberties we now enjoy but are rapidly exchanging for a license to do whatever we wish.
I’ve written about this decline in many of my syndicated columns, so let me summarize what I think are forces fighting against our values—values our culture desperately needs, beginning with the family. According to the much-respected Pew research organization, only 46 percent of American children live in a home with two heterosexual parents. Five percent have no parents and are likely living with grandparents. Contrast that with 1960 demographics that showed 73 percent of children living in what we once called an “intact family.”
Marriage is tough, and I am sympathetic to those who have experienced divorce and are doing their best to care for their children. At the same time, we get what we ask for. The baby boom generation, America’s largest, campaigned for no-fault divorce and viewed cohabitation as a much-preferred option to marrying someone “until death us do part.” Subsequent generations show no signs of improving, as they seem infatuated with entitlement, victimhood, envy, and greed. I can’t blame them entirely, because their parents, their schools, and savvy marketers have convinced them that they are the center of the universe.
CAMEO: Hugh Hefner (1926–2017)
Many could rightly earn the dishonor of contributing to America’s decline, especially in the moral and spiritual realm. Selecting just one is difficult. Those who promoted slavery might qualify. So too those who promoted greed in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
One man, however, perhaps more than any other, is credited (more accurately, blamed) for greasing America’s “slouching towards Gomorrah,” as the late Judge Robert Bork wrote in his book by that title.
That man is Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy magazine and author of The Playboy Philosophy.
As I wrote in a radio commentary when Hefner died in 2017, Hefner was a general in what came to be known as the sexual revolution. His legacy, if one can call it that, ruined lives and families and led to the billion-dollar pornography industry that thrives today. Venereal diseases, some of which have no known cure, are also the bitter fruit of Hefner’s bogus ideology.
Whatever fantasies he temporarily fulfilled in some men, he led many into a lifestyle that was bad for women and children—and eventually, bad for men. The testimonies of women associated with Hefner are sad. Hefner operated on a kind of fantasy island, and those who journeyed there often crashed into a sea of brokenness and despair. Many women later told interviewers that they felt used and were discarded like spoiled meat.
The media rarely reported on them, perhaps because media people were frequent guests at Hefner’s mansion, attended to by available women.
Hefner divorced love from sex. He told men they not only could but should have sexual relations with any woman, even multiple women. No wonder women began to complain they were having trouble finding men who would be committed to them, while dating and especially in marriage.
In a kind of “which came first, the chicken or the egg,” would the sexual revolution have occurred without Hefner? That’s like asking whether the American Revolution would have happened without George Washington. Probably yes, in each instance, because in the earlier revolution there were pent-up emotions that led to freedom, and in the later one there were pent-up emotions that led to moral and spiritual (and in some cases medical) bondage.
In what might be considered a reluctant acknowledgment that the lifestyle he recommended for others did not produce positive results for himself, Hefner told Alex Witchel of the New York Times in 1992, “I’ve spent so much of my life looking for love in all the wrong places.”19
What better epitaph could there be for such a man?
The canned laughter of sitcoms hits its peak when the ten-year-old rolls her eyes as Dad is made to look like a complete idiot. Ozzie and Harriet may have been overly idyllic, but David and Ricky never mocked or disrespected their parents for laughs. Kids mimic what they see.
It will take more than a new Supreme Court justice and a Republican majority in Congress to save us from the fate of other empires. It will take a revival of the American spirit, and that can come only through changed attitudes toward our institutions and one another.
Throughout most of our history, each new challenge or period brought with it a sense of optimism about the future. Even during the darkness of World War II, we could sing, “There’ll be love and laughter and peace ever after, tomorrow, when the world is free” (from the song “White Cliffs of Dover”). Even if things didn’t quite pan out that way, members of the greatest generation moved ahead with hope and optimism. Today that’s gone, replaced with a growing sense of foreboding that not only are things pretty bad, but they won’t be getting better anytime soon. According to a midsummer Real Clear aggregate of polls, 37.6 percent of those polled believe the country is on the right track, while 56.8 percent say it’s on the wrong track.20 Polls also show that a majority believe the economy is doing well and give President Trump credit. Instead of seeking real solutions, which neither begin nor end in Washington, we just keep stumbling forward, like a man who is lost but refuses to ask for directions.
Clearly, politics can’t save us. The rhetoric from both parties has reached a new low. Little if anything is being accomplished to reverse the decadent trends of our times. But is that the role of government, or is moral improvement—the goal of a long-forgotten predecessor to more recent majorities and coalitions—the primary role of believers and of ministers preaching uncompromising biblical messages? Whereas we once could entertain reasonable expectations that our leaders possessed good character regardless of party, our last presidential election (2016) offered a choice between a boastful, superficial, narcissistic misogynist and a corrupt, entitled, shady, lying, unaccomplished politician who ignored her husband’s affairs in the pursuit of power. At least that was how these two candidates were presented to voters by partisans.
Another character quality that is in decline is modesty. A Calvin Klein ad features an “upskirt” photo of a young woman’s underwear. Victoria’s Secret catalogs and shopping mall displays, visible to children, feature barely clad women with come-hither stares. Some of the sexiest films ever made were produced during Hollywood’s golden age, when women and men kept on most of their clothes. Films and TV today go for the blatant, mainstreaming sex scenes, flaunting nudity, so much so that a movie’s R rating could just as easily stand for “raunchy” as for “restricted.” Scriptwriters put words in the mouths of actresses that would make a sailor blush, as the old saying goes. Yet we are supposed to regard this as progress and a demonstration of equality between the sexes.
Do I sound old-fashioned? There is something to be said about old things. Some things endure because they have proved to work for individuals and for society at large. Nations built to last generally sustain traditions and embrace values that brought them success and prosperity. Nations allowed to rot from within with no constraints do just the opposite.
Can America’s decline be stopped? Possibly, though the hour is growing late. But any revival of the American spirit won’t come through politics and politicians. These have contributed to the problem by not pointing to a better way, informed by history and especially by Scripture. America’s central problems are not economic and political; they are moral and spiritual. If not addressed on that level, our doom is sure. If addressed on that level and a genuine spiritual revival occurs, we could be the first nation to prove itself an exception to Sir John Glubb’s recording of three thousand years of human history.
One final warning from a conversation the prophet Jeremiah had with God. While it concerned ancient Israel under a different covenant, it still contains a similar warning for our own “wicked and adulterous generation”: “If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it” (Jer. 18:7–10).
THERE’S STILL TIME
In light of how far we’ve regressed, it would be easy to become cynical and give up any hope of rescuing our nation and retreat out of fear and frustration. As people of faith, we are called to be salt and light. Ironically, that is the same terminology used to describe our Lord, which to me means that the only hope for our nation is for individuals like you and me to become Jesus to a culture that has lost its way—to live up to the high moral and ethical standards of the Bible and to demonstrate God’s love for the world by reflecting that love in the way we live.
It won’t be easy, because it will demand at the very least these things from us:
• Set standards of decency and morality for yourself and your family, including the entertainment you support and the celebrities you elevate (and emulate).
• Gently but firmly guide your children to make wise choices, and provide appropriate discipline when they don’t. You are their parents, not their friends.
• Remove your children from government schools and either homeschool them or send them to good Christian schools. Do not send them to universities that have largely become propaganda centers for secular progressives.
• Persevere should your marriage seem not as glamorous as at the beginning, because many will likely be hit with the temptation that constant pleasure and personal satisfaction must always define a good marriage; remember your vows and keep them.
• Temper your skepticism with hope, never allowing it to fall into cynicism and always finding opportunities to lift up what is right and good and true.
• Gather regularly with other believers to worship, to celebrate, and to encourage each other.
• Learn from your failures—whether in marriage, in family, or in work—so as not to repeat them.
• Do whatever you can through adoption, friendships, support of local pregnancy help centers, encouragement, and engagement in the political process to make abortion an unappealing and unnecessary option for women who experience an unplanned pregnancy.
• Daily obey the call to “go and make disciples” (Matt. 28:19), often witnessing without words to show others that a free and abundant life is possible only through faith in Jesus.
• Resist the powerful pull of materialism that draws us into a downward spiral of envy and covetousness, encouraging us to be like everyone else rather than the chosen people of God.
• Understand the role of politics in our free, democratic society by studying candidates and voting according to your convictions and especially biblical truth.
• Contend for your rights as a person of faith, but always respectfully and humbly, even as our Savior faced his Roman captors.
• “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16 ESV) when faced with the real and alarming challenge presented by radical Islam.
This list is not exhaustive, and you may have some thoughts of your own to add to it, but you get the idea. We are neither helpless nor hopeless. We have been given all we need through our faith to not just survive but thrive. If you are a liberal Christian, you will likely vote a certain way, and if you are a conservative Christian, you will likely vote the opposite. If that’s all you do (and by all means, you absolutely should exercise this right), we will probably sputter along toward that expiration date until this great nation is no different from the ones we’ve studied here.
As I mentioned at the outset, there are approximately 185 million of us. We will likely differ in our politics, but when it comes to living out the teachings of our King, we have the opportunity to change the wrong direction in which our nation is heading. Christian values have not been lost. They have been abandoned because of neglect and hostility. We have tried to be like everyone else, and we have succeeded. But there is still time.
One hears this verse quoted often, but without discernible results. It is because there does not seem to be genuine repentance in the land and a continuing reliance on especially Republican presidents to deliver us from our collective sins. God spoke these important words to King Solomon: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land” (2 Chron. 7:14).
The question is, Who are God’s people today? Is it Americans, and if so, what are we doing that God finds favorable?
This verse has been overused in modern times, but its principle is as valid now as when it was spoken. It is not a formula to get what we want—such as personal peace and affluence—but a path toward redemption that begins with the individual and causes ripples that can reach into the highest levels of government. National character is defined not by government but by the placement of a people’s hearts and faith.
America may be nearing the end of its road. It has approached the end before. Spiritual revivals, not politicians, rescued us then from the abyss. As J. Edwin Orr has written in his book about the history of revivals in America, all of them came as a result of “a concert of prayer.” The social impact of revivals in the United States, as well as in England, was astounding. Crime, drunkenness, and many other social evils were addressed in ways no politician could. When hearts are changed, attitudes are changed, and the result is a changed nation. It never works from the top down but always from the bottom up—or more precisely, from the inside out.
What appears that we like to do the least—pray—is what is most effective in achieving the ends we seek.
It really is up to us, but mostly up to God, who just might respond again with a revival if our intention is to honor him rather than seek pleasure, wealth, and comfort for ourselves. Again, it all begins with a concert of prayer. Are you an instrument in that concert or a disinterested and only part-time spectator?
Ultimately, though, Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Keep that at the forefront of your mind as you consider into which kingdom you intend to invest most of your thoughts, time, money, and efforts.