America and the Slow Death of Godless Democracy
Watching our nation is like watching a car crash in slow motion.
I know it’s coming. It’s horrific. I can’t look away.
Seemingly every week, someone guns down a group of people in cold blood: family members, office workers, school children, disabled American veterans, mentally challenged adults. Whatever. I don’t even notice anymore.
Every week we slaughter another 10 to 12 thousand children in the womb. No big deal. And just when we think the insanity must end, someone invents a new pronoun or a new gender term amidst the prevailing gender insanity gripping the country. I’m pretty sure that heterosexuality itself might be on the Congressional chopping block at some point.
The Equality Act will inevitably pass rendering the sermon I preached just a few weeks ago illegal. The national debt is on the order of magnitude of trillions, but we don’t really care. I’m sure our grandkids will figure it out.
And it looks like the next election will possibly offer us voters the riveting choice between…Biden and Trump.
Like the little old lady that rear-ended me on Madison Street a couple of years ago, many Americans find themselves looking around, mouth agape, wondering just what happened. Where did it all go wrong?
Constitutional Context
Where Christ is preached, things are just better. That is a fact.
I spent an unfortunate amount of time in Iraq in days past, most of it in the largely Islamic majority and controlled areas. It was unpleasant.
Not only was it routinely 9000 degrees in the shades, but garbage littered the streets, puddles of raw sewage, swarms of filthy kids. Destroyed buildings remained destroyed, and you couldn’t go anywhere without an armored convoy because some ISIS psychopath(s) might just try to cut off your head or blow you up. Like I said, not pleasant. There were no Christians. None.
My very last trip to Iraq was to the northern city of Erbil with a sizeable Christian minority. You can imagine my surprise on my first day there when they took me out to eat, at a restaurant. No one tried to kill us! The streets were swept and clean for the most part. Whereas in the rest of the country, death prevailed. Here, life prevailed.
Where the Gospel is preached, things are just better. This is part of the common grace of God. The Constitution was written in the context of the Gospel.
Now, I’m not foolish enough to think the Founding Fathers were all Christians or really, that our nation was ever a Christian nation, whatever that even means. However, the Gospel was widely preached. Church was largely attended—at the center of every town was the City Hall and the local church. Everyone went and everyone heard the Gospel, and everyone understood basic Christian concepts and Christian morality and things were just…better.
This was the context of the framing of the Constitution. The framers likely never envisioned the colossal dechurching of the nation and the ensuing Constitutional chaos.
A Youthful Analogy
My first car was a little black 1991 Ford Escort. My parents handed me the keys trusting that I would remember my upbringing and not get into too much trouble. They had drilled into me, from my earliest days, their strict, conservative values, Christian values, just without Christ. My father was a strict disciplinarian and that resonated in my life, my conduct, certainly my behavior behind the wheel.
I never did anything that I thought might get me into trouble.
I drank underage at whoever’s house was foolish enough to go out of town for the weekend and leave their teenagers home alone. I smoked cigarettes sometimes, thinking I was cool, and routinely dipped snuff. But, I didn’t drink and drive. I certainly never did illegal drugs. I never snuck out of the house at night, or snuck girls into my home, as I was terrified of the opposite sex as it were.
I was a good kid for the most part, got good grades, and was responsible behind the wheel, all a function of the context of my upbringing. Call it common grace.
An American Analogy
America today is a juvenile delinquent with the keys to a supercharged Shelby Cobra. Before the sun sets, he’s got a case of Milwaukee’s Best in the trunk, a bag of weed in the glovebox, and his arm around the local floozy on his way to the street races down on Ward’s Road.
His morality is instant gratification, do what feels good now, and let’s not worry about the consequences shall we. If he doesn’t wrap his Mustang around a telephone pole, he’ll knock up his girlfriend, lose his license, maybe spend some time in the can before graduating to weapons charges or assault or something a little meatier.
It’s what he was taught, what was modeled for him, what he learned from a father in absentia and at the end of the day, the outcome is practically inevitable.
This is America today, absent the common grace of the preaching of the Gospel.
What does it all mean?
Maybe freedom without Christ doesn’t work. Maybe liberty without Christ can only lead to licentiousness. Maybe it’s just too much for us to handle.
Let’s briefly look at guns.
Okay, before you go all cold-dead-hands on me, I love guns as much as the next guy. I own a gun. I love the idea of the 2nd amendment and my ability to defend myself and my family. Yet, 2nd amendment advocates find themselves backed into an increasingly tighter corner by the ever-increasing gun violence. Yes, it is the person that kills, not the gun itself. Yes, Cain killed Abel with a rock. These are the facts.
Yet, maybe—scrunching up face, preparing for backlash—maybe we’ve lost the ability to handle the right to bear arms, at least as it currently exists, as a function of the prevailing godlessness of our nation. We’ve become like the kid with no moral compass handed the keys to a muscle car.
Never forget the language of the framers. They sought, with the Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” and we’ve done exactly that, for a time. Who cannot look at the American experiment and see the stunning success of the Constitutional Republic, the rise of the most powerful nation-state ever imagined, and the long slow descent into chaos and disorder, as ushered in by the dechurching of our nation.
Maybe what we are seeing is the inevitable failing of a nation founded in the context of the Gospel, as it has abandoned the Gospel.
I have no answer. I see hope in the increasing ranks of homeschool kids who may one day lead a revival in our nation. I see hope in the purification of the persecuted church. The harder the church is pressed, the more it prospers. I dare you, Congress, to pass the legislation. But, I have no answers.
Jesus, the Gospel and its proclamation, that’s it and really, that’s all we need.
I love this country, well, what it used to be anyway. Yet, I ultimately find comfort in the firm knowledge that this nation will one day be little more than a footnote in the salvation history of man, Constitution and all.
