How would your life change if you knew the exact date of the end of the world, and that date was only a few years away? Just for fun, let’s say you have received advance knowledge from a reliable source that on July 4, 2026, the world will end. Jesus will return on that date, the dead will be raised, and he will take those who have believed he is the Son of God into their eternal reward.
Stay with me. I’m not an end-times alarmist; I’m not peddling a particular millennialist view found through careful study of the book of Revelation. I’m a journalist, not a theologian. So please humor me and use your imagination. Pretend you’re a character in a science fiction novel. That giant asteroid we’ve all seen in the movies is on its way. Efforts to nuke it off course have failed, and it’s too late to try to ship us all off to colonies built on far-flung planets. The only help we’ve gotten from technology is the exact moment the world will go up in flames, vaporizing everything and everyone.
You may or may not have grown up in church, but you’ve heard the phrase “end of the world” through either sermons, sitcoms, or science fiction. The War of the Worlds was a famous radio drama in 1938. Some people listening to the broadcast narrated by Orson Welles on CBS believed it was fact. Many rushed out of their homes and into the streets, fearing Armageddon had arrived.
There was a time when church folk took seriously warnings about the end times. In the 1980s, a former NASA engineer, Edgar Whisenant, published 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988, mailing three hundred thousand copies free of charge to pastors all over America. An additional 4.5 million copies were sold in bookstores. When 1988 came and went without the archangel’s trumpet blast, Whisenant published a new book, setting the date in 1989. Followed by another, setting the date in 1993. Then another, warning of a nuclear firebomb that would destroy the earth in 1994. By then, no one paid any attention to his warnings, which is why you may need to employ some creative suspension of disbelief to answer my questions.
How would you spend those next—and last—few years? What would you do? Who would you want to know better, love better? What would your bucket list look like? What offenses against others would you attempt to redress? Would you quit your job? And do what? Would you give in to greed, lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, and pride? One hopes not. Then again, what would be the point of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, and the like?
If you knew life would end for you on July 4, 2026, what would you do?
Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately—we don’t get to know our expiration date, at least until it’s almost too late to do much about it. You and I both know of friends or family members who have been given weeks, months, or possibly a year or two to live, but the rest of us not only don’t know but also don’t spend much time thinking about it. With little sense of urgency to motivate us, we live day to day, week to week. We get up, go to work, come home, enjoy our families, go to the movies, go to church, take vacations, and try to be decent and kind. Which is why plunging ourselves into my little scenario might be helpful, might shift our attention to what matters most in life.
This isn’t a book about the end of the world. On that topic, I can’t help you. But let’s rephrase the question.
What if I told you I have a pretty good idea when our nation will breathe its last breath, or at least cease to be the bright and shining city on a hill that President John F. Kennedy mentioned in an address at the Massachusetts State House, borrowing from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount? How would you react if I told you I have received credible information suggesting that on July 4, 2026, this great experiment called America—at least the greatness part of it—will come to an end? What if I claimed that I have inside information indicating that on that date, America will join the once-great but now run-of-the-mill republics which stand for nothing, let alone liberty and justice for all? That the name America will be remembered fondly, but as a place to live and raise a family, the nation will be slightly south of ordinary?
I have, and my source is as reliable as he is courageous: Sir John Glubb.
You likely never have heard of him, unless you have a penchant for modern Arab history, and if you do, you understand why he is called Glubb Pasha. Or that he formed the Desert Patrol in Transjordan, consisting entirely of Bedouins. Or that in World War I, he suffered a shattered jaw, which led to yet another nickname, Abu Hunaik, Arabic for “the one with the little jaw.” A career British soldier who led and trained from 1939 to 1956 what eventually became Jordan’s army, Sir John also gained worldwide acclaim as a scholar and author, writing twenty-one books and hundreds of articles. One of them, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, is the inspiration for this book. Specifically, it was a paragraph from the introduction to that book that caught my attention.
The experiences of the human race have been recorded, in more or less detail, for some four thousand years. If we attempt to study such a period of time in as many countries as possible, we seem to discover the same patterns constantly repeated under widely differing conditions of climate, culture and religion. Surely, we ask ourselves, if we studied calmly and impartially the history of human institutions and development over these four thousand years, should we not reach conclusions which would assist to solve our problems today? For everything that is occurring around us has happened again and again before.1
If that sounds familiar, you likely have read—and remembered—a verse from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (1:9).
Sir John’s conclusion is the premise of my previous book, What Works: Common Sense Solutions for a Stronger America.2 We have a history. We can learn from the past, not to return to it but as a lesson for building a better future. Unfortunately, the closest too many of us get to history these days is the instant replay in a televised sports contest.
Sir John asserted we refuse to learn much from history “because our studies are brief and prejudiced.”3 He was surprised to learn that the average age of a nation or empire’s greatness is 250 years. “This average,” he writes, “has not varied for 3,000 years.”4 Let that sink in. Over the past 3,000 years, every great nation or empire lost its way in an average of a mere 250 years. I will do the math for you. On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will be 250 years old. What makes us think we will be protected from the fate of other great nations, which often collapsed under the weight of financial debt, moral rot, and military overextension? Doesn’t it behoove us—we who are living in the twenty-first century—to consider how and why great nations have fallen, that we might guard against the same fate for ourselves? Doesn’t logic dictate such a step? And of far greater importance, armed with this knowledge, is there anything you and I can do to postpone America’s expiration date?
If you knew that in fewer than ten years, this great nation will no longer be the beacon of freedom and opportunity it once was, what would you do right now to ensure that your children and grandchildren will continue to enjoy the uniqueness of America that was handed to you by your parents and grandparents?
Sir John found patterns, or stages, in the rise and fall of great nations. He called them the age of pioneers, the age of conquests, the age of commerce, the age of affluence, the age of intellect, and finally the age of decadence. Not every nation experiences each of these stages, and sometimes the stages have blended into each other. With some nations, it is difficult to distinguish between the ages of pioneers and conquests. But in general, each great nation or empire begins with some type of pioneer activity, gains territory through battle, and then settles into remarkable commercial activity, which in turn brings great wealth, and with it increased literacy and learning. All begin their final slide when a sense of shared morality and common virtue are abandoned. In the following chapters, I will take a closer look at some of the great nations of the past, to verify Sir John’s observations regarding these stages and to show parallels. Then I will briefly look at each stage, to show some parallels with our nation and how they point to what appears to be the decline of the United States and the West, and where we might wind up if things are not quickly reversed.
You may notice that I will refer to some developments within these empires and nations that occur beyond the 250-year window indicated by Sir John. In most cases, the entity in question does not simply disappear after 250 years but staggers on in a much less dynamic and influential state. The important point to understand is that they never return to their greatness, and I believe that is our fate unless we take the necessary steps to reverse an almost inevitable decline.
As a journalist who has been commenting on our culture in a syndicated column for more than three decades, I can clearly see that we have entered the age of decadence, especially when one considers the characteristics Sir John attributes to this stage:
• Defensiveness
• Pessimism
• Materialism
• Frivolity
• An influx of foreigners [too many, too quickly to be assimilated, I would add]
• The Welfare State
• A weakening of religion5
Does any of this ring true for you? Would any of these characteristics describe what’s happening in your community? Your state? Our nation? According to Glubb, decadence is caused by the following:
• Too long a period of wealth and power
• Selfishness
• Love of money
• The loss of a sense of duty6
Do you see any of these at work in America? “The life histories of great states are amazingly similar,” writes Sir John, “and are due to internal factors.”7 It is my hope that by learning of these internal factors, we can begin to correct them in our lives as the first step toward reversing the decline of a great nation. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s famous line has become a cliche to some, but it is no less true. Hegel said, “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
If America doesn’t learn from history—our own and the world’s—we are likely to suffer the fate of other great nations, rotting from within before either being conquered from without by an invading army or collapsing under the weight of self-indulgence, decadence, debt, a sense of entitlement, greed, and envy. It’s up to those now living and the next and perhaps last American generation—and to those immediately following, should we endure that long—to turn things around. The late Soviet dictator Nikita Krushchev once vowed, “We will bury you.”8 Even he didn’t foresee that while the Soviet Union would collapse, America might bury itself.
When I was a young man, a preacher—whose name escapes me—said that America is not at a crossroads, as some contend; America is a long way down the wrong road. We need to come back to the crossroads and take the right road. Historically, there have always been times when the US (and certainly ancient Israel) strayed from the right road and suffered the consequences for it. Most people are familiar with the story of the prodigal son, who leaves his father’s house, spends his inheritance on wild living, winds up sitting among pigs and eating their food (the worst possible condition for a Jewish boy), and returns to his father with a repentant heart. His father has forgiven him even before the young man says he is not worthy to be called his son. This is a story for individuals and for nations, as we can read throughout human and biblical history.
The problem for us modern Americans, who have satellite navigation systems in our cars, is that we don’t know where the right road is, because we have lost a sense of right and wrong and no longer submit to any authority higher than our own minds and life experiences. There is no right, and so we must tolerate everything, because to say no to anything gets you labeled intolerant or worse.
It is the height of hypocrisy for those who claim to be tolerant to be intolerant of any view but their own. These are the ones who strictly oppose censorship of any and all ideas, except those with which they disagree. It turns out free speech isn’t so free after all. If your speech doesn’t fit with the spirit of the age, you will pay a price. Sometimes it can cost you your job. In some countries, it can cost you your freedom. In a few, you pay the price for speaking out with your life. America is now in stage one of this familiar scenario. Canada is toying with stage two, prosecuting people who say things—including in sermons from pulpits—of which their government disapproves.9
What is to prevent America from sliding farther toward our own destruction? In these pages are some answers to that question. Let’s not be like the people described in the song “Vincent,” in which Don McLean sings, “They wouldn’t listen, they’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.”
There is no money-back guarantee on the United States. There is no certainty this country will continue to exist. Ronald Reagan used to say America is just one generation away from losing it all.
Are we that generation?
We could be, but I have hope that we just may be able to prove Mr. Glubb wrong for once. By the time we finish our study, you will also have hope.