America's Rebellion Against God
Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from religion.
Politics is downstream from culture. Culture is downstream from religion. America was founded by Christians, influenced and informed by Judeo/Christian values, and moored itself to biblical doctrine. According to a recent Gallup poll, for the first time in 80 years, less than half of American adults belong to a religious congregation. For the past fifty years, America has been on a steady cultural decline as it takes an axe to its Christian roots and rebels against God. We don’t need to reference Sodom, Gomorrah, or Mediggo to know what happens when Man is left to their own sin; it doesn’t end well. Just look at Europe.
Europe jettisoned their Christian faith in the 20th century. The vacuum was filled with two world wars, the Holocaust, and communist purges. There is no reference to God in the EU constitution and it was opposed by majorities of population in Ireland, Denmark, and England. Europe’s empty churches and the fire at Notre Dame are symbolic of its cultural decay. Europe’s waning birthrate represents its imminent fall and is the greatest sustained reduction in European population since the Black Death Plague in the 14th century.
Capitalism is an amoral economic system and requires the guardrails of Democracy. Our Democracy, meaning our 233-years old constitutional republic, is still inter-dependent upon reason (Athens) and faith (Jerusalem). Pope John Paul II wrote that faith without reason leads to superstition, and reason without faith, leads to nihilism and relativism. To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, Democracy is possible because of the goodness in Man. Democracy is required because of the evil in Man. America has been the product of five major waves of Christian influence going back to Plymouth Rock and is in desperate need of a sixth wave of Christian revival to act as a bulwark against the immorality of identity Marxism and nihilism that we are witnessing today. Religion and morality are the bed rock of a bottoms-up, self-governed society.
The puritan Christians aboard the Mayflower were fleeing religious persecution of King James I and came to America in 1619 to build a shining city on upon a hill (Matthew 5:14). Before John Locke was even born, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact which was the first written document providing for self-government, liberty through law and order, and was the basis for the US Constitution.
In 1776, nearly every European American identified himself or herself as a Christian. Approximately 98 percent of the colonists were Protestants, with the remaining 1.9 percent being Roman Catholics. Of the 54 signers of the Declaration, 29 were ordained ministers, and most of the others were deeply religious men. The words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” is based upon Christian doctrine. The Christian view of equality runs counter to common human impulses and is unique to the Christian West. In most of the world’s cultures, social hierarchy is more or less rigidly prescribed and the rules of social engagement are correspondingly tight.
Of the 3,154 citations in the writings of the Founders, nearly 1,100 (34%) are to the Bible, and about 300 each to Montesquieu and Blackstone, followed, at a considerable distant, by Locke and Hume. Our separate but equal branches of government, checks and balances, and federalism was the embodiment of the Founders’ Christian worldview, life experiences, and their profound distrust of human nature. Christian influence beyond our founding was most notable in William Wilberforce’s and Abraham Lincoln’s drive to end slavery, Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B Anthony’s push for women’s suffrage, and Martin Luther King’s crusade for civil rights. On the US one dollar bill is the motto annuit coeptis which translates to, “He smiled on our Beginnings.” On the east side aluminum capstone of the Washington Monument it reads, Laus Deo, praise be to God. In George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address, he issued a prescient warning: “Religion and morality are indispensable supports for our political prosperity.”
Today’s zeitgeist is militantly anti-Christian, Marxist at its core, and will not result in human flourishing.
FAMILY & SEXUAL ETHICS – The bible does not describe how to run a farm, a bank, or a small business. There are only two institutions detailed in the Bible; the Church and marriage. The nuclear family is the greatest social gift to humanity. The ideal of sexual abstinence outside marriage and monogamy inside marriage is losing its sway. Biblical sexual ethics and the family institution are in rapid decline: rise of the welfare state, sky rocketing divorce rates near 50% after no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s, declining birth rates, changing the biological definition of sex and the complimentary nature of men and women, toxic masculinity and emasculation of male as protector and provider, guaranteed income, government funded child daycare, out-of-wedlock births, rise of cohabitation, delay in age of marriage, gay marriage, AIDs, transgender movement, abortion, child abuse, date rape, sexual harassment, adultery, pornography, prostitution, and sexually transmitted diseases (one in five Americans).
VALUE OF INDIVIDUALS, FREE WILL and PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY– Christian salvation is available to all (Jews and gentiles) and is not awarded based upon age, sex, race, ethnicity, family, tribe, nation, nor political affiliation. America has been a witness to and enabler of: critical race theory, white privilege, elevation of victimhood, affirmative action, racial quotas, push for reparations, and cancel culture. Soft bigotry is illustrated in opposition to voter ID laws that presumes the color of your skin somehow prevents you from obtaining a government issued ID.
RULE OF LAW- The ten commandments and Christian morality is the foundation of our laws and judicial system. Yet, in America we have: sanctuary cities, open borders, non-prosecution of criminals who have the approved skin color or political opinion, defund the police, unequal protection under the law, witness and jury intimidation, proposed packing of the Supreme Court, not so peaceful protests, and looting justified by street thugs as reparations.
COVETOUSNESS – Disobedience to the command, “Though shall not covet thy neighbor’s goods” manifests itself in the growing acceptance of socialism, intensifying class warfare, an excessively aggressive tax structure that punishes risk-taking and success, a death tax that prevents generational independence and penalizes savings, and the intellectually empty presidential statement, “You didn’t build that.” The recently proposed increase in personal income, capital gains, and death tax combined with exorbitant state taxes could push individual tax rates to the 60% level. Even God asks only for a 10% tithe. Public company corporate profits which accrue to investors/owners average just 6%. Our profligate federal government spending, excessive federal debt passed along to future generations, unfunded social security, personal credit card debt, and student loan debt ignores the wisdom of Proverbs to live within our means.
NATURE AS IDOL – The environmental movement elevates nature above man. Biblical Man was given dominion over nature. The story of Adam naming the animals materializes in biology’s taxonomy (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, and Species) and chemistry’s periodic table. We see the hypocrisy of a secular culture that wants to “save the whale” while endorsing the 65 million abortions since Roe v Wade. God’s creation included fossil fuels and the symbiotic nature between Man (breathes oxygen and exhales CO2) and plant life (absorbs CO2 and emits oxygen). Inspired by Marxism’s insatiable appetite for power and control, the Green New Deal aspirants want to spend $100 trillion to have little to no impact on CO2 nor global temperatures. Our president makes commitments to halve our CO2 output by 2030 and our climate envoy proposes removing CO2 from our atmosphere. We have seen the inefficient government subsidies for expensive electric cars, windmills, and solar panels, and the termination of the Keystone pipeline to the detriment of our energy independence and costs.
TRUTHFULNESS and CENSORSHIP: Objective truth is a biblical doctrine (John 8:32). Corporate media has failed to live up to its traditional journalistic principles of objectivity, neutrality, and fairness: Russian collusion hoax, Ukraine phone call, Hunter Biden laptop, Russian bounties on US soldiers, non-existent election fraud, Georgia secretary of state phone call, death of capitol police officer, and the too numerous to list.
A free and open society cannot exist without free and open intellectual inquiry. In the mid-1980s, Stewart Brand is attributed with the phrase, “information wants to be free” which was the motto of the Internet boom. Big Tech openly engages in partisan censorship of conservative views. No longer is the digital public square a forum for adjudicating competing versions of the truth.
Luke 6:43 No good tree bears bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit.