How Ignorance and Negligence Sparked the Collapse of America’s Biblical Culture

At some time in the late 19th century, the American culture was hijacked by atheistic secularism. The “One Nation under God” that the Founding Fathers cultivated throughout the 17th and 18th centuries had been designed to develop and evolve liberty under Biblically based conditions.

The prevailing attitudes, standards and “environmental” conditions were to be guided and guarded by virtue, the key component of liberty, embedded by the founders in the woof and warp of the Judeo-Christian culture.

Atheists and naysayers like to raise the obtuse question that if America’s founders really wanted to establish a Christian nation, why didn’t they just make that clear. “They did,” answers Christian historian William J. Federer, “simply read the charters and constitutions of the original 13 colonies.”

Ignorance, negligence and disregard of the care and safeguards put into place by the founders during the country’s initial 170 years or so has predictably resulted in the collapse of the biblically based culture. Due to the neglect and abandonment of the principle that “righteousness exalts a nation,” America has gone from being extraordinary and exceptional—like no other—to being ordinary and mundane—like any other.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s warning last week of “vandals and barbarians” getting away with impunity with destroying public statues … will result in “the end of civilization as we’ve known it.”

The end of civilization as we’ve known it. Try to imagine that. And all of this because of the “shocking failure of nerve by almost everybody in a position of authority—from politicians, the police, our religious leaders and broadcast media.”

The infernal and life-threatening organizations antifa and Black Lives Matter espouse Marxism, destruction of the nuclear family, abortion, transgenderism, Queer Nation, homosexuality and so forth.

Wholly in the spirit of the serpent and unopposed, both organizations work together in pillaging and marauding targeted cities of America. In their duplicity and subterfuge, they come close to or may even top the heinous terror outfit ISIS, which ransacked northern Iraq’s historic Christian and Muslim shrines.

Dr. Peter Leithart’s spiritual insight in relation to serpents menacing and terrorizing America is instructive: “Goliath’s armor is given unusually detailed attention. We never learn anything about David’s armor after he became king. 1 Samuel 17:5 says that the Philistine giant was wearing ‘scale armor,’ and the Hebrew word simply means ‘scales.’ This sort of armor is attested throughout the ancient Near East, but the fact that he is described as wearing ‘scales’ indicates that Goliath was a serpent.”

Antifa and Black Lives Matter are serpents envenoming America and defiling its cities, arranging and coordinating the complete overthrow of its government.

Camouflaged under the guise of “neutrality,” late 19th-century atheistic secularists managed to impose their pagan will and credo on America. Let there be no mistake about the fact that unbelief in the biblical God Jehovah is just as much a religious belief as is belief in Jehovah. American Christendom let itself be deceived by the false claim of “neutrality.”

From its inception, instruction of America’s youth began with the theological and epistemological foundation of instruction in Proverbs 1:7a that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning [Heb. ‘the starting point’] of knowledge.” Excellence in education, arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, attention and activity, which shaped the heart and character of the American people, were patently Christian elements.

Wisdom (hok’ma in Old Testament Hebrew) cannot be separated from knowledge (da’at in Old Testament Hebrew).

The Wall Street Journal recognized the 1962-1963 radical Warren Court’s sleight of hand, conceding that the devotion of secularists to their religion was “the one belief to which the state’s power will extend its protection.”

Fast forward to the looting, trashing and burning of American cities by such unapologetic lackeys of Karl Marx as antifa and Black Lives Matter. Their behavior shows that what’s happening in America and around the world is spiritual: There is a devil.

Required reading for these turbulent times is A.W. Pink’s Gleanings From Joshua: “It would indeed be strange if we apprehended how that on the one hand Canaan was a free gift unto Israel, which they entered by grace alone; and on the other that they had to fight for every inch of it!

God has nowhere declared that He will preserve the reckless and presumptuous. He preserves in faith and holiness, and not in carnality and worldliness.

God is jealous of His honor and will not share it with another. It pleases Him, as a general rule, to select for His instruments those who have no glittering accomplishments: rather, plain, simple, homely men. It is not silver-tongued orators through whom He most shows forth His praises, but by those who have nothing more, naturally, to commend them unto their hearers than that which resembles the “rams’ horns”! His most eminent servants have not been those of royal blood, noble birth, or high station, but taken from the lower walks of life. Spurgeon had neither university nor college training, nor was he a graduate of any seminary! Though after God’s call to the ministry, [he] studied hard and long to improve himself! In proportion as the churches have made an idol of education and theological learning in their ministers, has their spirituality waned: that is a fact, however unpalatable it may be.

Nowhere in the Epistles is there a single exhortation for the saints as such to engage in public evangelism, nor even to do ‘personal work’ and seek to be “soul winners.” Rather are they required to “witness for Christ” by their daily conduct in business and in the home. They are to “show forth” God’s praises, rather than tell them forth. They are to let their light shine. The testimony of the life is far more effectual than glib utterances of the lips. Actions speak louder than words.

American Christendom has to get back to the fundamentals of Jesus’ kingdom assignment found in Matthew 16:18, His ekklesia, where “the gates of Hades will not prevail.” The quasi-biblical model adopted over the last century—a church sheltered and hidden from view behind the four walls of the building—has been a fatal and mournful debacle.

Praise be to God that Gideons and Rahabs are beginning to stand. {eoa}

David Lane is the founder of the American Renewal Project.