0611 The Soul of America
The soul of a nation rests in the souls of its people. If the people are self-absorbed, sensuous, materialistic, or undisciplined, they will allow or prefer overlords of the same bent. If on the other hand they treasure service, piety and self-discipline, the life of the nation will also flow into those higher ideals and nothing less will be demanded of their leadership. For more than 160 years our nation’s soul was nurtured through educational practices, law structures, and judicial opinions which honored that Judeo-Christian value system. There was a residing wisdom which recognized the sacred nature of marriage and family as the purveyor of those values.
The deteriorating of our national soul began with small infections. Evolution’s miracle claims and patchwork logic gave secularists and weak-kneed theologians a perfect opportunity to enthrone themselves in God’s place as determiners of truth for science, psychology, history, and even the text of the Bible. With the Great Depression came government’s opportunity to deify itself and infiltrate family life. Rather than solve problems and afterwards relinquish its role as the great healer, it increased its dominion by promising its subjects everything that otherwise required hard work and self-sacrifice.
Most Americans now succumb to the deception of themselves as supremely developed animals. Too many have therefore taught their children, or handed them over to others to be taught, that ignoring their Creator gives them the power to make themselves the measure of all things. As a result, God, family, and country drop behind self-gratification. Rather than embracing the wisdom of the past, they smugly ignore it and commission ones like themselves as shepherds, hoping to legitimize their moral wonderings. As new generations emerge, they are being taught to measure life by themselves and are finding new ways to surrender to all that physically and emotionally glitters.
It is a tragic eventuality that where Heaven’s expectations are marginalized, the resulting emptiness demands satisfaction at the expense of others. While all this plays out in abortions, violence, abuses of every sort, broken families and more; we attack the symptoms rather than the disease, the instruments used rather than the evil that employs them.
The Clintons and Foleys of the world are not the core problem any more than casinos, Hollywood, pornography, or porous national borders — they are the product of a dying national soul. The cure is difficult but within reach. It begins with parents who discipline themselves and train their children in an unconditional commitment to the sacredness of marriage and family. Meaning and purpose of life must rest in God and His principles of righteousness, selflessness, honesty, justice (not fairness), and properly understood love.
In the public setting, those same families must work to bring America back to the principles of her birth. The diseased concept of church-state separation must be reigned in. Its present form is an affront to the Declaration of Independence and to the First Amendment. Diversity needs to be exposed for what it has mutated into, an excuse for everything from affirmative action racism to homosexual immorality to U.S. border insecurity. The secularism and liberal indoctrination in public education must stop.
None of this will happen if citizens do not exercise two liberties. At the ballot box men and women have the power to recall morally flawed leaders. Our government was designed to function with citizen-leaders who were above reproach in every way, not careerists who manage to maintain power by bribing their constituents with promises of health and wealth. A person’s heart drives all other choices when exercising authority. The only way to glimpse their hearts is through their voting record and their answers to questions of conscience.
A second liberty is at the cash register.Americacannot survive if immorality is allowed to conquerMain Streetand the shopping mall. For example, when corporations such as Ford, Disney and Wal-Mart cave in to homosexual activists, they should be forced to live off that favored customer base. There is no justification for conservatives to voluntarily feed destructive liberal causes. More specifically, there is no justification for Christians to give of financial resources which they consider to be gracious gifts from God to God-dishonoring businesses.
Americans have the rare privilege of actively redeeming their country. To do so, we must jealously defend our homes, schools and government. We must hold ourselves, our institutions and, yes, politicians to sterling moral standards. Without purity of character, power enslaves and comfort becomes addictive.