In the beginning, America was dedicated to God. We followed godly principles – and we prospered. But we have left our first love. America and the West has abandoned their Judeo-Christian foundations and replaced them with Humanism. In the process we’ve adopted a post-modern mindset with its accompanying personal morality. TRUTH, in that bizzaro world – is what each individual believes it is. It is a recipe for chaos…and chaos is what we have achieved.
PART I – AMERICA’S CHOOSING
“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25) (NASB)
Just as individuals make choices that affect their present and their destiny, so too, do nations. America’s fate may not be written in stone, but we have walked far down the road we have chosen and it has taken us far from our founding principles. We see this in our domestic policies and our national policies. And now, with our increasing tendency to try to shoe-horn a Two State Solution and force the formation of a new – and never-before-existent Palestinian State, the United States has become a willing participant in that Last Days Falling Away. A blinded nation is losing its way as our Christian foundation crumbles. And despite claims to the contrary, this country was founded on Biblical principles and dedicated to the purposes of God! This is a nation that has since lost its way. We have wandered far from the path set forth by our founders. And it is not just secularized America that has faltered. With pockets of exception, the Church too, has failed to maintain a living relationship with the God of the Bible. We – America, the Church, the West – have lost sight of the goal; the very purpose for our existence. We are undermining the foundations of our own culture. And now we are about to pay the price.
We can actually track how we have fallen. In 2020, Pew Research found that 64% of Americans identified as Christians. A healthy majority, but 50 years ago it was 90%.[i] Barack Obama had it right when in 2009 he declared, “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.” A 2020 study by George Barna found that just 6% of Americans had a “Biblical World View.” By 2023 that number was 4%. That 2/3 drop occurred during the Covid Pandemic, (coincidentally??) when so many people stopped attending church.[ii] Barna identifies a second group that displays “a substantial number of beliefs and behaviors consistent with biblical principles.” That group also shrunk in that 3-year period from 25% to 14%. Barna: “The bulk of the American adult population—82%—falls into the ‘World Citizen’ category, described as people ‘who may embrace a few biblical principles but generally believe and behave in ways that are distinct from biblical teaching.’” It was at 69% in 2020. We are fast falling away.
This, of course, has filtered down to the social issues. Americans solidly oppose the overturn of Roe-v-Wade by the Dobbs decision. A CNN poll found: “About two-thirds (65%) oppose the 2022 Supreme Court decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and 34% approve, numbers that have remained effectively unchanged in CNN’s polling across the nearly two years since the ruling. Those who strongly disapprove of the decision continue to outnumber those who strongly approve by a more than 2-to-1 margin.”[iii]
That same trend shows up in American’s views of the other great social issue. In 1996 about 69% of Americans were opposed to Gay Marriage. Today, 71% approve.[iv] Each younger generation is identifying significantly more with the LGBTQ lifestyle. The Gen-Z birth years go from 1997 to 2012. 22.3% of Gen-Z folks identify as LGBTQ. It’s all part of a slow but long term trend. From Gallup: “Overall, each younger generation is about twice as likely as the generation that preceded it to identify as LGBTQ+. More than one in five Gen Z adults, ranging in age from 18 to 26 in 2023, identify as LGBTQ+, as do nearly one in 10 millennials (aged 27 to 42). The percentage drops to less than 5% of Generation X, 2% of baby boomers and 1% of the Silent Generation. Overall, LGBTQ identification stands at 7.6%[v] Jesus said, “For every tree is known by its own fruit.” (Matthew 6:44) Michael Snyder, who provided most of the roadmap for this section of the article commented, “Most of the fruit that America is producing is the kind of fruit that we would expect from an anti-Christ nation.” And so that, it seems, we may have become.
There is a solemn principle found in God’s Word. It is the same for individuals as well as nations. God holds us responsible for our actions. If we fail to follow the precepts and laws he lays down for us: We will face judgment. In the 9th chapter of the Book of Ezekiel we see God speaking to Israel through the prophet in a time when Israel was straying badly. Ezekiel 9:9-10 says this: “The iniquity of the house of Israel and Judah is exceedingly great, and the land is full of bloodshed, and the city full of perversity; for they say, ‘The Lord has forsaken the land, and the Lord does not see!’ And as for Me also, My eye will neither spare, nor will I have pity, but I will recompense their deeds on their own head.” The next chapter records the consequences of Israel’s cumulative apostasy. Both the people and their leaders had fallen into the worship of foreign, pagan gods. As a result of this, God removed His very presence from the Temple of God. “Then the glory of the Lord departed from the threshold of the temple and stood over the cherubim.” (Ezekiel 10:18) If Israel would not listen to His voice; God would remove that voice.
It is in chapter ten that God pronounces judgment on even the religious leadership of the nation. “And I will bring you out of its midst, and deliver you into the hands of strangers, and execute judgments on you. You shall fall by the sword. I will judge you at the border of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord….. And you shall know that I am the Lord; for you have not walked in My statutes nor executed My judgments, but have done according to the customs of the Gentiles which are all around you.” (Ezekiel 10:9-12) Judgment fell, even on God’s people. Israel began as a nation founded and dedicated to God’s purposes. And then they wandered. Judgment followed.
America too began as a nation established on Biblical principles for God’s purposes. Take for example of the Mayflower Compact of 1620. What we colloquially call the Pilgrims, were called Separatists or Puritans. They had left England, separating themselves from the Church of England. They sought to worship God according to what they saw as the purer principles of their faith. So, sitting in the waters off Plymouth, they established a document that would serve as the basis for the government of the new colony. Here’s how they began. “In the name of God, Amen. ….Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic.” They were establishing a Government based on God & the Advancement of Christianity. Our Founding Fathers, whether believers or not – accepted the Judeo / Christian Tradition. That tradition continued through the British colonial period up to and including the Revolutionary years. Many of our earliest statesmen affirmed this connection between Biblical principle and practical government. John Adams wrote: “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.”[vi] And Patrick Henry explained it plainly. “Righteousness alone can exalt America as a nation.”[vii]
But perhaps it was Lincoln who expressed it best. In an 1863 address calling for America to fast and repent – (of all things) – he called a nation rent by civil war into the very mode of repentance which closely mirrored that famous passage on national contrition and national restoration found in 2Chronicles 7. His words are today worth detailed study. “It is the duty of nations as well as of men to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God; to confess their sins and transgressions in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations are blessed whose God is the Lord. We know that by His divine law, nations, like individuals, are subjected to punishments and chastisements in this world. May we not justly fear that the awful calamity of civil war which now desolates the land may be a punishment inflicted upon us for our presumptuous sins, to the needful end of our national reformation as a whole people? But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us.”[viii] Lincoln’s words from long ago, pronounced the indictment on today’s America.
For now we have come to the cusp of the End of the Age and the culmination of the War between Good and Evil. And one phrase from Lincoln’s words plays true over and over again in light of today’s culture. “But we have forgotten God.” All of Western thought has changed. We have moved from basing our culture on the Judeo-Christian Worldview to embracing a Humanistic Worldview; and it makes all the difference. We have moved from the realization that the ultimate reality rested in an Infinite Creator God – and replaced that notion with the silly idea that Man is the measure of all things. You see, America was birthed in the notion of freedom; an idea that was nurtured and grown in the climate of the Judeo-Christian Worldview. That view took hold during the Reformation. Prior to that period, Ultimate Authority was shared by the Church, the State and the Scriptures. The Reformation wrested that control out of the hands of men – (the Church & the State) – and theoretically at least, placed it back where it belonged – in Scripture alone – (Sola Scriptura). And because there was a Creator God / Lawgiver at the top – and because that God created Man in His own image – the rights of Man were….inalienable. No government could bestow those rights….and none could take it away. That’s why the Declaration of Independence reads: “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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And from that lofty sentiment flows the understanding that has acted as the glue of our body politic for over 200 years. That statement has stood as the basis for the Bill of Rights, our property rights, our freedom to worship and assemble and speak on things political. But much has changed as of late.
This comes at a times when DHS routinely identifies Evangelical Christians and Constitutionalists as an emerging terror threat to the nation. Humanism is now in the ascendancy and Man is the center of all. And as we have raised up several generations now in this lie – that foolish idea has begun to take hold. Humanism gave birth to Materialism – the idea that nothing exists except matter itself. Thus Chance has become our creator. Without a Law Giver from above – the Moral Law is self-invented. [Yes, and make no mistake, power makes right in that world.] In the Unholy Trinity of this World System: ENERGY is the Father // CHANCE is our Creative Agent (analogous to the Son)….and SELF-WILL is the Spirit which gives Meaning to Life. And because each of us serves as our own Law Giver and Judge – our culture MUST descend into a state of Moral Chaos. In this system of individual morality, the murder of unborn children in the womb CANNOT be wrong. It is logically consistent with its premises. In this system Homosexuality and Gay Marriage and sundry perversities MUST be accepted. That too is logically consistent. So too is the oppression that is being foisted upon the American people. If we have no rights as the children of the Creator – because there is no Creator – then rights come from government. So the Government giveth and the Government taketh away. As Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer put back in the 1980’s: All of this is but “….automatic, the mechanical certainty that comes from having this other world view of the final reality only being material or energy shaped by pure chance.”[ix] Thus is the consequence of our beliefs. It is what happens, when we ignore and hide from and suppress the TRUTH of God’s Word….when His words become muddled and distant….when the Glory of the Lord departs from the Temple….We shall continue.
[i] Predictions about the decline of Christianity in America may be premature, CNN, April 29, 2023
[ii] Biblical Worldview Among U.S. Adults Drops 33% Since Start of COVID-19 Pandemic, American Worldview Inventory, CRC,
George Barna, February 28, 2023
[iii] CNN Poll: Americans still broadly oppose overturning Roe, CNN, May 1, 2024
[iv] LGBTQ+ Rights, Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/1651/gay-lesbian-rights.aspx – viewed June 3, 2024
[v] LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Now at 7.6%, Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/611864/lgbtq-identification.aspx,
viewed June 3, 2024
[vi] The Adams quote found in: Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington D. C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Association, 1904), Vol. XIII, p. 292-294. In a letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson on June 28, 1813.
[vii] Patrick Henry, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches, William Wirt Henry, editor (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1891), Vol. II, p. 592, to Archibald Blair on January 8, 1799
[viii] Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation Appointing a National Fast Day, March 30, 2013
[ix] Dr Francis A Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto, talk given at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church, Ft Lauderdale, FL, 1982
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