We are constantly being told that the United States was
built on the idea of secularism, that is, that religion is something that can
and should exist entirely separate from government and public life, that
religion is something private and personal, like your taste in music and your
taste in clothes.
The obvious problem with this thinking is that it has only
been the last generation or so that this principle has been identified and
applied to our public life. It was only
in 1947, 170 years after our nation’s founding, that we were told by the court
called supreme that government cannot aid religion or have anything to do with
religion. Since that time that court has
expanded on that ruling to apply it to such things as the use of the Bible in
public schools, public prayer, Ten Commandment displays, and any other mention
of God in public and by government and its representatives, like public
schools.
Some public mentions of God have remained, for now, like
having ‘In God We Trust’ on our money, ‘under God’ in our Pledge of Allegiance,
and retaining Christmas as a national holiday.
That only remains for later versions of that court and further
challenges before those disappear as well.
So exactly how will this secularism destroy our country and Western Civilization?
We first need to ask what a religion really is. We are told that it is our beliefs about God
and our duties to Him. True, but that is
only part of it. A religion is a
worldview. It encompasses all of life
and answers life’s biggest questions, like what is the meaning of life, what
are the rules, are there any rules, what is right and what is wrong.
Secularism is also a worldview, and it also has answers for
life’s biggest questions. Where Christianity
teaches that we are accountable to God, secularism teaches that man is the
highest being. There are no rules but
what we decide for ourselves or as a society.
Some recent examples of how this can go are Germany, Russia, and China,
where millions of people were killed in the attempt to create a perfect
society.
Christianity taught us to love our neighbors. Now we are taught to tolerate them. The first requires an active caring for them,
helping them in need. The second simply
means to ignore them.
Christianity taught us to set aside a day of rest to honor
God and to, well, rest. Now society is
all 24/7, and people don’t have time or opportunity to think and reflect to
maintain balance and perspective. This
makes a people less aware of the bigger picture and more easily swayed and
manipulated by media and government.
Christianity taught us not to steal or to covet. This was the basis for the idea of property
rights. Now we feel that the government
has the right to appropriate as much of that as it wants and give it to whoever
it deems worthy. Nobody has the right to
own any more than anyone else.
Speaking of the poor, Christianity taught us to care for the
poor. And in the past, millions of
Christians volunteered and generously gave their time and money to help people
in need. Now the government has assumed
most of the responsibility for this, but at a much higher cost. And instead of voluntary contributions, they
take and borrow whatever they want to give to those most likely to vote for
them to keep the benefits coming.
Christianity taught us that God is our security. Absent God in public life and government, government
now feels responsible to be our benefactor and security. We have traded our prosperity for our security. Where the American Dream was that our
children would have better lives than we and that there is no limit to one’s
success, now government takes whatever money it can from those who have it to
give it to those who have less. Better
that nobody be rich than anybody be poor.
Christianity taught
us not to go into debt. Now everything
is run with borrowed money, including our government. Borrowed money always costs more than it
would have otherwise, and we keep devaluing our money to hide the true cost of
this debt. Except that only increases borrowing. And the whole thing is due to collapse.
Our entire value system can now be described in four words: tolerance,
equality, fairness, and diversity. Our
only responsibility as a people is tolerance.
The rest is the responsibility of the government.
We already mentioned tolerance, which breaks down or
eliminates the bonds that hold us together as a society. We no longer have any responsibility to our
neighbors.
Equality means that we discourage high achievers. It is just as important to deter those with
the most potential as it is to help those with the least. Better to have everybody at the same level of
achievement than to have some more successful than others. We also need to lower our standards to ensure
that more people meet them.
Fairness applies equality to society, working to eliminate
anything in society that might seem to favor one group or individual over
another. If, for example, an industry,
field, town, occupation, school is perceived as having too many white males,
too many whites, or too many males, it is concluded that discrimination has to
be in play, so the government has to work to remedy this. If the remedy requires lowering standards,
reverse discrimination, or government subsidies to make it happen, the government
does what it has to do.
Diversity means that we encourage differences between people
so that there remains very little to unite us.
People generally make friends with people with whom they share common
interests. Now we want to have the
widest range of differences everywhere we can so that we no longer have a
united society, but only small clusters of different groups with nothing in
common with the others but their dependency on government It is a plus if all of your neighbors don’t
speak your language. You might actually
talk to them and develop attachments.
If our new enlightened society does not first collapse from
spending itself broke, it will collapse as people who do not share our values,
old or new, migrate here and try to create here the society they left, and we
feel powerless to stop them, because we feel we don’t have the right to or a
better alternative. We then become a
different nation very unlike the one we grew up in and the kind of nation our
founders fled from to start this one.
Many people are promoting the idea of a secular nation
mainly because of their dislike of the religion that was prominent in our country
for so long, Christianity. Often these
same people have a disregard for all religions, mainly because they reject the
concept of a Higher Power to which they are subject.
The irony here is that they have merely substituted one
religion for another, one that at least purports to have revelation from God as
to how life is supposed to work for another religion run entirely by human
beings who are still figuring out all the new rules that apply in a secular
state.
Nations have always had their gods. People in secular nations have the same need
for a higher power to protect, guide, and care for them. Government now assumes these roles. Those who seek to remove religion from
society have only changed religions but now with human beings like themselves
playing the role of the all-wise, all-knowing lawgiver and judge.
You would think that a religion in existence for thousands
of years would have all the kinks worked out by now, but now we have ventured
on a new path, making new rules with no hindsight to give us a clue if we are
on the right or even a viable path.
As a society, we no longer know what made Western
Civilization and the United States what they are. So when changes occur, we have no way to
judge whether they are improvements or not.
So we are in a mad rush to change our country according to the latest
cultural trends, like walking in the woods without a compass. We are lost, but we are enjoying the scenery.
If our economy doesn’t collapse first from the unsustainable
debt we have incurred trying to meet every need and protect against every
misfortune, we will find ourselves living in a country very unlike what it was
like or what it was intended to be like.
The tragedy is that most of us won’t even know that, because we have
accepted a much lower and different vision of how things should be.
We won’t hear on the evening news: “In national and
international news, Western Civilization collapsed today. Tomorrow officially the entire world will be
third world countries.”
The United States will still exist in name, but it will be
one where if our Founders were alive today, they would either look for another
country to flee to or there would be another revolution.
