How Did America Reach This New Level of Moral Decay?

“When God afflicts a people, be it a church or a nation, it is because He has a controversy with them,” says A.W. Pink in his book Gleanings From Elisha, His Life and Miracles. “If they refuse to put right what is wrong, He chastises them.”

This may explain the predicament of modern America—a nation “founded for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith” (as it says in the Mayflower Compact) that now finds itself under the thumb of the joined forces of secularism, multiculturalism and political correctness, each an outgrowth of Marxist ideologies. In order to counteract or neutralize such forces, they must be challenged and opposed, says William S. Lind. Good ways to achieve this are to “use words it forbids and refuse to use words it mandates” as well as to return to behaving “according to the old rules of our culture,” says William S. Lind in Political Correctness: A Deceptive and Dangerous Worldview.

Could the spiritual poverty of today’s culture be a chastisement by the Lord for refusing to put right spiritually what is wrong culturally, which negatively impacts America politically? Or is the crisis merely a consequence of the fainthearted 20th century’s “Sunday ‘go-to-meeting’ Christianity”—as P. Andrew Sandlin says in his foreword to The Mission of God—which made no demands on the culture, and faded into the haze of “hermeneutical nihilism and pietistic retreatism”?

Lady Wisdom delivers her message where competition is fiercest, right in the heart of the public square, according to distinguished biblical scholar William McKane [1921-2004] in his book Proverbs: A New Approach. Bearing resemblance to Jesus’ instruction of the ekklesia in Matthew 16:18, it is specifically in the public square where wisdom “mixes with men in the most busy and public places in town, as she does not recoil from the rough and tumble of the market-place with its busyness and noise.” Wisdom “operates where competition is fiercest.”

Thirty-one innocent people were in early August 2019 massacred in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Add to that “the slaughter of 20 precious kindergartners and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or the killing of 12 teenagers and one faculty member at Columbine High School, [and the] brutal bloodbath of 14 students and three teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and a Sunday-morning mass murder of worshipers at a Baptist church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Twenty-six churchgoers died there. Another assault occurred in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where 11 Jewish men and women were mowed down. Then, there was the vicious attack by a shooter standing in a hotel window in Las Vegas, Nevada, where 58 people lost their lives in a barrage of gunfire.”

How did America get here?

The answer strikes one as being self-evident. The blatant disavowal and renunciation of God in America, along with last century’s exodus of Christians from the public square, provide the key to explaining America’s frenzied headlong plunge into cultural depravation. Those in rebellion against God plundered the culture and abolished the Founding Fathers’ biblically based laws, customs and early education models. This created a void that was then filled by an “alien system of beliefs, attitudes and values that has come to be known as ‘political correctness.'”

Created by Hungarian Marxist philosopher Gyogy [Georg] Lukacs [1885-1971], this “alien system” became known in 1919 as “Cultural Terrorism.” As Raymond V. Raehn explains: “As part of this terrorism [Lukacs] instituted a radical sex education program in Hungarian schools. Hungarian children were instructed in free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family codes, the out-datedness of monogamy, and the irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. Lukacs’ campaign of ‘cultural terrorism’ was a precursor to what political correctness would later bring to American schools.”

Today’s crisis of the sexularization of public education represents a direct assault on Christianity by the unforbearing religion of political correctness. Its most notable special feature is intolerance for any viewpoint other than its own.

Secularism’s “observances and devotions” are carried out today in secular government-run “houses of worship,” better known as public school classrooms. The now-inseparable link between militant secularism and cultural Marxism bodes disaster for America as the impending alpha generation is indoctrinated “with theories to be used to overthrow the prevailing social order and usher in social revolution.”

The point we are leading up to is this: Secularism’s long march through America’s once-Christian institutions, public schools, universities, press and media, and entertainment must be curbed if America is to survive. To repeat William Lind’s counsel: “Those who would defeat cultural Marxism must defy it. They must use words it forbids and refuse to use words it mandates.”

To survive, America must act.

Pastor-led prayer must be restored in churches. The Lord has heard the voice of my weeping, as it says in Psalm 6:8, because, in the words of Samuel Rutherford “Tears have a tongue, and grammar, and language, that our Father knoweth. Babes have no prayer for the breast, but weeping: the mother can read hunger in weeping.”

Christians should without delay leave public education, publicly “contradicting, denouncing and protesting in the name of God,” to paraphrase A.W. Tozer, to what is being done to America’s children by government-run education bureaucrats.

We close with A.W. Pink’s spiritual appraisal of apostate ancient Israel in 2 Kings 6:

“While a nation tramples upon the divine commandments, neither prayer and fasting nor any other religious performances are of any avail with Him who says, ‘Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice’ (1 Sam. 15:22). There must be a turning away from sin before there can be any real turning unto God.”

Still, there is good news: “A small cloud as small as a man’s hand is rising [in America] out of the sea” (1 Kings 18:44b, MEV). To which we say: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God all-powerful.”

Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand. As A.W. Tozer says in Of God and Men, they’ll bear witness of their love for “Christ and the souls of men to the point of willingness to die for the glory of the One and the salvation of the other. But [they] will fear nothing that breathes with mortal breath.” {eoa}