Not rewriting history or seeing a sanitized version of it - the United States has always had problems since its founding. The European settlers and Englanders seeking a freedom for worship, expression, and land ownership brought their ideals with them - good and bad. In many cases their desires displaced native inhabitants and wreaked havoc with the natural resources. The penchant for increasing power, prestige, and wealth among some of the early 'landed' families became a conduit for the evil terror of slavery that tore the moral fiber of the country - for it was an attitude and practice that permeated throughout all the colonies - not just the southern part. Many leaders of that time - political and religious - could not assertively speak out on the demoralizing effect on the country that the slave institution had, since many of the more prominent leaders were themselves slave holders, including some Quakers. The gaping wound would not be healed quickly, and its festering condition was rampantly infectious. When a people can justify wrongdoing as beneficial for society and such justification becomes accepted and acceptable, permanent damage happens. Yet even with a number of persons taking sides against slavery and mistreatment of the native inhabitants of the land, there were still large numbers claiming rights to properties for which they had no right. We've had many trials and many errors in this country, which involved much sacrifice on the part of many, in order to determine it to be one nation under God. Its premise has always been shaky, still at the peak of America's existence, the majority of persons in the country considered themselves Christian or averred belief in God. Yet, it is my country with all of its wounds and I am blessed to live here and to find and enjoy some freedoms that are still intact..
What has concerned me in particular is that our nation has been incrementally moving itself
away from God over the last one hundred fifty years - a progression that has been reflected once again in the moral decline of our society. (with all of the challenges we have faced one would think those would drive us
to God) The founding fathers, despite their many imperfections and some outright sins, nevertheless honed out a society that purported a faith in the Almighty God of the Bible: The Father Jehovah, the Son Jesus Christ, and a Holy Ghost Triune God. They pointed to God's Word as a book of authority and the benchmark or touchstone for morality that God has divined for His human creation. Interestingly, at a point where it seemed that the country's independence was well established and declarations of the country being of God and founded on God (see origins of the anthem "My Country Tis of Thee" by Samuel Francis Smith which he wrote in 1831. The song served as one of the de facto national anthems of the United States (along with songs like "
Hail, Columbia") before the adoption of "
The Star-Spangled Banner" as the official anthem in 1931), the terror of slavery and its byproducts had expanded and demoralized the thinking of federal leaders and key political figures of the time. That wayward thinking would soon fan the flames for the great conflagration the nation would see - the War Between the States.
Prior to the War, Abraham Lincoln is noted, along with many voices of his day, as pointing to the enslavement of individuals as a pariah to a society that believed in God and called itself Christian. Other moral inconsistencies in a country that was called Christian were pointed to often enough from platforms in newspapers, in state houses, and from pulpits. Again - all confirm what God has said about our sin nature - that it is inherent in all of us, and that we can deceive ourselves to our own detriment about our perceived 'goodness', which can be as elusive as each breath we expel. As discourse on the societal ills heightened, Christian revivalism took place - a great "awakening" of Christian values, of what was God's will for the nation and citizens therein, which led to some of the social reforms notable in the 19th century. When you look at hymnal writing during those years, you discover the richness of faith being expressed in them about God, who He is, what He has done, and how we should respond. Yet even then, the invasive weeds of the Enlightenment movement, of the Transcendentalism movement, the Utopian movement and other
isms had begun to thicken and take root. (Louisa May Alcott's bent was towards transcendentalism, and the Utopian concepts; she interjects some of the isms into her famous works as those works were highly biographical.) The disciples of the movements explained away God as a distant, self-absorbed cosmic being whose interest in mankind was merely speculative, and that through the
innate goodness of humanity a society could thrive and be built up through its own good works and determination. There are still religious persons and persons of high intellect today that advocate such beliefs as true - especially the part about humans having innate goodness and being able to serve as masters of their own souls. Influential citizens began espousing such beliefs, in many cases, turning their noses up at the God of the Bible in preference of a god of their own devices.
As the 20th century commenced, the moral pulse of the country was strong - at least on the surface and in public behaviors for large parts of the national society. However, the carnal freedoms and presumed rights that were intrinsic to the new isms began to wear away at those moral foundations and even at the pretense of them. The world wars blew up much of what we determined to be moral, or at least altered that sense for a lot of society. If nothing else, they certainly confirmed for Christ followers the Bible's teaching that the god of this system was influencing the minds of persons towards physical and spiritual destruction as prophesied. Further, the fallout from those wars was a steady erosion of the sensibilities of moral good, serving to deeply shadow much of Biblical Christianity, and suffocate much of the established traditional Christianity with which the country had originally identified itself. America thereafter slowing began creeping towards becoming a pluralistic society.
Following the world wars - especially World War II, during the late 1950s and the 1960s, a new mindset was descending, and the concept of a nation under an Almighty Holy God, especially among the younger generation, was being seen as the equivalent of a hoax, or at the minimum - part of the framework of society that needed to be changed. The pluralism - the multiple gods and belief systems, subtle at first, had begun to influence how society generally perceived itself, its environs, relationships, and future. The ubiquity of that influence was even more deceptive, produced an amoralistic culture that set its on floating right and wrong standards, and which is carnal and narcissistic. The backlash of this free thinking, free acting cultural changes hit the Church. Churches began to cease being the center of activity for many communities, and one of the more influential and wealthy established churches in America - the Protestant Episcopal Church - began to lose its long-held influence over society and politics, membership, and subsequently, its wealthy stalwarts.
Society has so moved away from the tenets of Biblical Christianity that it is politically improper to refer to our country as one nation under God in the 21st century. Legal movements have already discarded the Bible from public schools, along with public prayer. It is hard to believe now that there was a time even in the 20th century when many public school classrooms began each day with the pledge of allegiance and the reading of a passage from the Bible book of Psalms. The liberal free-thinking promoted by the well-entrenched isms has emboldened many 'good citizens' to demonstrate and call for elimination of any mention of Christ, corporate or public prayer, or to point to Christianity as a dominant faith or belief system except to include it in a laundry list of societal dependencies or other traditional belief systems within the polyglot of religious identities now teeming in the nation. The modern high school student can read all about it in social studies, right after a session in the science classroom on how life evolved from simple celled creatures. Some so-called Christian churches, including traditional Protestant and evangelical churches, in order to keep up with the new wave of belief-isms, and to refill pews, are teaching that when Jesus said that He alone was The Way, The Truth, and The Life that he was talking only to Christians or persons who wanted to identify with Jesus, and that there is
another way and opportunities for obtaining salvation and finding the truth within other religious systems and programs. They advocate interfaith worship activity to help foster unity through 'diversity,' (breaking the greatest commandment) and openly support as righteous behaviors that Holy God has long ago declared sinful and requiring repentance - not reward (breaking the second great commandment)(Matthew 22:35-41).
Thus, the
national agenda has succeeded in redefining life apart from God and His Word, which Word says that God forms life in the womb (Psalm 139), so that now it is legal to kill that life in the womb by calling it a nonviable fetus and inconvenience. There is movement afoot to expand on the ability to abort life from the womb at later stages of pregnancy when the 'fetus' becomes viable. The agenda has provided the schools the leeway to teach solidly that the Bible's teaching of creation is impractical, nonsensical, and unproven, so that schools can point to other theoretical beginnings stemming from various evolutionary beliefs. It took more than 100 years following the Emancipation Proclamation to legally make aspects of civil and political society open to persons of non-Caucasian skin color - to legalize persons of color, and this despite the 'higher thinking' of the culture's isms. Unfortunately, the law can only regulate certain behaviors but not the degenerative thoughts and internal beliefs of individuals, which the higher thinkers will consider an infringement. The evil nature of sin that permeates the society and has rampaged shockingly in the last fifty-plus years has exalted greed, self-pleasure and fulfillment in every aspect of human existence to a god-level which dominates and influences the movement of today's national agenda.
Most recently, the deception that the immoral acts of a person should be legitimized and protected legally as a
civil right has been one of the offshoots of the deep-rooted sinful condition of our society in this country and another nail in the coffin of a demoralized nation. These are the same thought processes that legitimized slavery as a civil right of landowners and caucasians. It bears no resemblance to the establishment of legal rights of persons of color; their legal rights were deserved not based on behaviors they chose to act out, but on the fact that they are human. The law had previously declared them not human, but property. The turning over of the slave and accommodations laws that denied people equal rights under law was among the last few acts of a Christian conscience. The culture of the 21st century would have its way to declare homosexuality and the practice of it as a holy act, one protected by the Constitution - which is far distances from where the original writers of the laws of the land fell. The influence is so keen that the delineation between moral and immoral within our society has become illegible in parts and transient in other parts. It makes one wonder, doesn't it, why folks get in such an uproar when prominent citizens commit adultery and fornication - why aren't those behaviors sanctioned as well? Aren't they just as holy as homosexual coupling if they are done 'in love'? What else will our society in its free thinking and free acting declare as holy, or at the least, acceptable, in the future?
We as a people believe we are right in owning ourselves as masters of our fates, as the supreme judge of our behaviors and beliefs - which always leans towards what makes us feel good or seem to feel right, and that those rights are inalienable and deserved by virtue of being an American. Many churches feeling the pressure to conform have made their congregations places where the new American attitude rules, as long as it is sprayed with a cheap Christian perfume - which scent lasts all of 45 minutes if that long on a Sunday. Some churches/denominations or representatives of those churches and denominations (including Protestant Episcopal, Presbyterian, ECLA, and other evangelical institutions) have led the rally away from a Holy Almighty God of the Bible to a weak, inopportuned, and compromised god of their own creation which bows to the will of the people. The new ruling by the Supreme Court of sanctioning same sex marriage has been blatantly hailed as righteous by both traditional and evangelical religious leaders, who are offering to open their doors to welcome wedding ceremonies to sanction the new 'civil right.'
A nation's destiny: The moral condition and place where we find our own country are the same conditions and status that brought God's wrath on the nations of Israel, Judah, and even their enemies round about them. (The Bible prophets Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Micah, Habakkuk - to name a few were burdened to declare the destruction of the nations - to prophesy of their destiny, because of their choice to live independent of God in their own demoralized cultures.) These same conditions and status will receive the final outpouring of God's wrath as foretold in the letter of Revelation. That is not an ism, it is not some church fairy tale to make people behave. It is historical truth and solid prophecy.
The above statements lead to the questions, Is the God of the Bible as detached as many would like to believe? Does the depiction of the 'god of love' that is mouthed by those self-satisfied religious leaders really describe the Bible's God and Creator of heaven and earth? Isn't belief in a moralistic god and an ancient book called the Bible an old-fashioned perspective, so that a person believing in such things is out of step with the times and a fool to accept those things? Surely, no one with any sense, or a college degree, can bow down to such nonsense? If, then, modern society
is right, then the God of the Bible in whom many still believe is foolish, and we are fools to worship and serve Him. That was the apostle Paul's conclusion as he discussed God's salvation plan. His premise - outlined in 1 Corinthians 15 - was that if any of what God's Word says is true, is somehow not so, then we are to be most pitied. In that chapter he deliberates on the Gospel of the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ - the foundational doctrine of Christianity. This is a basic tenet of Christianity: that because we are helpless and hopeless because of our sinful condition, that there is no innate goodness by which we can save or elevate ourselves, that God the Righteous Judge must intervene in order for us to become restored to life and to God. Therefore, it was God's plan to sacrifice His Son on our behalf to have our sins atoned for so as to satisfy His righteous standard, and to make The Way possible or available for all. The holiness of God - something incomprehensible to nonbelievers - is such that He cannot abide or have community with a sinful people - by their unregenerated nature they are spiritually dead to Him. His holiness demands a righteousness that we ourselves cannot impart to ourselves. His holiness demands that we deserve death - in fact it is the wrath of God that we deserve because our sins separate us from God. Hence, the need for a savior, even though it was humankind who revolted against God. He still loves His creation, and determined a redemption plan to restore the original design for living under His kingdom.
Modern churchgoers bathed in the new postmodern Christianity inundating the Church find this basic Bible truth highly offensive. It goes against every fiber of their self-idolatry. If it is not true, if the way God describes and reveals Himself to us is not true, if indeed He is not holy or has changed from a holy God to a weak and bullied cosmic Santa Claus or slot machine who means no more than good feelings and being nice then we, too, are fools along with God. If it is not true, then what hope do we have? What then is the purpose of this life? How do you explain so many religions and belief systems? What is truth? What is your answer?
