America turned away from God
Once upon a time there was a shining city on a hill called America. The nation’s laws and moral and social values were based on the seven principles of the Judeo Christian ethic: The dignity of human life, the traditional monogamous family, a national work ethic, the right to a God-centered education, the Abrahamic Covenant, common decency and our personal accountability to God.
The nation’s founders stressed the relationship between education based on biblical absolutes and the future of the nation, taking their cue from Proverbs 1:7 “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”
The strength of the republic depended on the morality of its people; religion, being the foundation of morality and education of young minds at the heart of this fundamental truth.
As America expanded, churches sprung up from sea to shining sea. Sunday schools were established in every new community. One missionary enterprise, the Mississippi Valley Enterprise, established 61,000 Sunday schools and enrolled 2,650,000 pupils in 50 years.
God shed his grace on America because the people worshipped Him, in public and in private, and they followed Jesus’ command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” Matthew 22:37.
Meanwhile, Satan was waiting in the wings. He despised this great nation, and wanted to destroy it. But with spiritual forces for good fiercely guarding America, there was no portal for him to enter and attack.
Then one day, the ACLU took up the cause of a handful of hostile upstarts who were too cool for prayer in school. And then, the high court ruled that simply displaying God’s commands was out of legal bounds. How pitifully ironic that the Supreme Court, sitting in a courtroom with a painting of Moses and the Ten Commandments, held it an unconstitutional establishment of religion for a high school to have a copy of the Ten Commandments on a wall.
It was a sad day and a foreshadowing of ill winds to come when God was quietly escorted out of public schools and the public square.
Rejecting Godly ideas, intellectual elites suggested that superior minds look to secular humanism, rational thought and post-modernism as philosophical alternatives to moral imperatives.
Religious worship quickly eroded. Studies show that church attendance and prayer dropped off radically beginning in the 1960s, and the number of people with no religion continued to grow. Fewer people said that religion was an important part of their lives. Less than 20 percent of Americans regularly attended church.
The people, unmoored from Godly principles, no longer depended on divine providence to guide their lives. They had removed the protective armor of God’s word, and in doing so, had lost their ability to discern truth from lies and good from evil.
The governing elite failed to heed the many warnings of earlier statesmen, scholars and patriots, including President George Washington, who said, “It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.”
Finally, the environment was conducive for Satan to make his big debut. A master of deceit, the devil expertly twisted the truth. “Compassion” allowed mothers to murder their children in the womb. “Kindness” meant destroying the sanctity of marriage and sanctioning gay marriage. “Equality” translated into punishing the industrious and over-taxing and regulating businesses and hard-working citizens and rewarding those on the take. In the name of “fairness,” the greatest health care system in the world was destroyed, and the nation teetered on bankruptcy with a debt that grew to $19 trillion.
Those elected to office betrayed their constituents and also disavowed their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution. As global threats increased, they made no effort to perform the government’s most basic and important function: protecting national security.
They failed to enforce immigration laws, to protect the coun- try from enemies and invaders or to consider Ezekiel 38:11 “… I will invade a land of unwalled villages; I will attack a peaceful and unsuspecting people—all of them living without walls and without gates and bars.”
Then came the day when Christians in America were not only disrespected by the culture, schools and politicians, but openly discriminated against. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a Christian, a gentleman and a brilliant U.S. Constitutional scholar, who had fought against the powers that be, said “… this administration’s animosity to religious liberty and, in fact, antagonism to Christians, has been one of the most troubling aspects of the Obama administration.”
The epic American saga continues. The nation’s future hangs in the balance. Will the people gain enough wisdom to understand that their nation cannot ever be great again unless, first and foremost, it becomes fundamentally good again? The answer remains to be seen.
Bernadette Smith, Welcome